Army experimenting with what the ‘edge’ is for cloud computing capabilities
The Army is conducting experiments to determine what its edge is at echelon and what tools those forces will require.
One such capability is edge computing and cloud. Once a prominent fixture for buzzword bingo, where government and industry types opined on deploying, the service is beginning to take a slightly different view on who will need these technologies and how feasible it will be to deliver them given the speed of war in the future.
“Somebody asked me the other day about ‘we need to scale this cloud thing all the way at the tactical edge.’ I was like, ‘to do what?’ … That’s not how the Army fights,” Leonel Garciga, Army chief information officer, said Friday at AFCEA’s Northern Virginia Chapter Army IT Day. “If we’re learning anything in Ukraine is these micro things that are happening, you’re not going to be doing that in the cloud, you’re not going to be scaling all these services. I think we really need to start focusing on building that [concept of operation] of how we’ve got to fight, so it can drive the right capabilities at echelon.”
Garciga added that the Defense Department needs to understand how it’s going to fight in the future and build capabilities that are needed at echelon and at the tactical edge. That also means determining what the edge is, which will vary across theaters, units, services and agencies.
“Broader, across the department, the Navy is going to look a little different, that’s a thing. Air Force is going to look a little different. Combat support agencies [are] going to look a little different. I think at echelon, what we call ‘edge’ matters,” he said.
Using the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as an example of a combat support agency, Garciga noted that NGA’s edge is a region.
The Army has been trying to simplify its network and remove complexity from smaller units so they can be unburdened to focus on fighting rather than running the network.
Saddling them with more edge capabilities could run counter to that initiative.
“We need to be very, very, very careful in this space to not do the opposite of what we’re trying to do as an Army, which is reduce complexity at the tactical” level, Garciga said. “It’s like somebody came here, they said, ‘oh we got to do this at BCT, or we got to push this data all the way down to the platoon.’ I’m like, ‘isn’t that the opposite of where we’re going as an Army?’ We have made a conscious decision to reduce complexity, why are we bringing complexity back down?”
Other officials explained how the Army is working to define what the edge is, who needs what capabilities, and what their roles are.
“I think it depends on your role. Like maybe future ops, current ops in the brigade or in a company, if that’s their role, maybe they need edge compute. We’ve got to stop thinking of the Army as everybody has. It’s what is your role — and then you get that on-demand capability. I think that’s what we’ve got to experiment with,” Mark Kitz, program executive officer for command, control, communications and network, told DefenseScoop on the sidelines of the event. “If you’re a battalion commander and you have a company of small form factor [unmanned aerial systems] that’s collecting data, they may need edge compute in order to collect and process that data — whereas the other companies may be running patrol or perimeter security, they may not necessarily need edge compute. Thinking about roles in a tactical formation may help us get to some of these decisions about edge compute and what the edge compute means operationally.”
Kitz said the Army will be experimenting with what edge compute could look like at the Project Convergence Capstone 5 event later this year. Questions officials will be seeking to answer include: what data would soldiers have access to and how is it secured it?
Those questions and answers will factor into the ongoing development of one of the service’s top initiatives, Next Generation Command and Control, a completely new approach to how the Army plans to operate on the battlefield that aims to provide commanders and units with a better path to information, data and command and control through agile and software-based architectures.
According to Kitz, as that effort rolls out, the next questions will be: what can the Army put at the platoon level or the company level and beyond, to determine at what echelons would small form factor compute look like and what transport can be taken advantage of?
Officials conducting NGC2 experimentation efforts have stated that they are defining the platoon level as the tactical edge.
“We can’t go back to the cloud for everything that we’re going to do. It won’t be available. We started thinking through all right, what are we going to need to be able to process at the tactical edge, once again, defining the platoon as that tactical edge?” Col. Mike Kaloostian, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at Army Futures Command, said at the Army’s Technical Exchange Meeting last month. “What can we do? What new edge compute capabilities, what low [size, weight and power], high-capacity edge compute capabilities exist so we can experiment and just learn from right now, and we can deploy those micro services to the edge? We can host and process certain data flows and data sets at the edge and see, and just ensure that we are not always going back to the cloud for everything and further driving down the latency.”
As part of the experimentation efforts, Kitz reiterated that the Army will embark upon exploring what the edge looks like, because “I don’t know that we know the answer to that.”
