Publications

Version: 1.0 Approved

LDO-ID 2021-02-19-01

Title Digital Continuum for Defence, a novel approach to be applied in the NATO Alliance context

Abstract

As described by the latest NATO Strategic Foresight Analysis report, the current and foreseeable security environment of the Alliance is dynamic, ambiguous and uncertain. Modern military operations are conducted in a complex, multidimensional, highly dynamic and disruptive environment. Militaries have even shorter times to obtain an accurate assessment of the situation and to make decisions. In addition, they must draw on all possible sources of information to ensure that they can create the most complete and relevant picture of the situation, near / real time, and understand the implications of their decisions. The future of military combat is going even more high-tech and Industry is developing an Internet of “Military” Things (IoMT) based solutions across the air, land, space and sea domains to help militaries identify the enemy, achieve better battle performance, using fast edge computing. Driving factors are a continuously changing character of warfare, a growing pace of technological innovation and a pervasive compute capacity to enhance the capability of devices of any kind. As in civil applications Internet of Things (IoT) is the evolution of the Internet of People (IoP), with a much higher complexity (If for the Internet of People we are speaking of billions of nodes in the network, for the Internet of Things we should consider trillions of nodes). This complexity will trigger a new paradigm to manage it, which include at least three level: device nodes, edge-computing nodes, and large computing facility nodes (e.g. Cloud/HPC). Moreover, defence industries will be challenged to provide solutions with sufficient agility to cope with a fast-changing scenario and ability to fulfil the dynamic set of capabilities requested by NATO. Finally, NATO and national defence organizations have to adapt the procurement policies and best practices to a variety of emerging threat most of them having a hybrid nature in their essence.

Authors Cavazzoni Carlo, Ghezzi Daniela, Gulienetti Giorgio, Leone Cristina, Longo Antonino, Massa Alessandro, Proietti Paolo

Type Paper for Seminar/Symposium/Conference

Media NIF21 - NATO Industry Forum (11 March 2021, Online Only)

Web site

Anno 2021