Capability gap

Effective training data exploitation strategies and approaches

First-class militaries the world over are recognizing the need to make better use of the vast amounts of data that underpin all training activity. Yet many of these militaries are struggling to implement, or find tools to support, effective training data exploitation strategies and approaches.

In battle, competitive superiority is derived from an ability to secure and exploit information advantage. Preparing for battle should be no different. Recent military thinking has identified that armies should be making much better use of training information to secure the advantage. Many other nations recognize the same issues, understand the importance of better exploiting valuable training data and seek to capitalize upon it to optimize performance and achieve success on operations.

Yet, despite acknowledging this critical capability gap, many first-class armies are still struggling to put in place effective strategies and approaches to truly harness the power of their training data. For some, this is the result of limited resources. But it is also partly to do with the maturity of associated technologies and, possibly, because of institutional beliefs that existing approaches to both individual and collective training are already sufficient.

This requirement is not unique to the military domain. Within the past 10 years, the commercial field of data analytics has emerged as a synthesis of computer science and statistics, both now necessary for dealing with complex, data-intensive challenges.

Big Data – the term commonly used to describe this contemporary use of powerful processing techniques and artificial intelligence to derive value from large-scale, diverse datasets – has begun a transformational shift in modern society that has changed how businesses, governments, and even sports teams evaluate their performance to secure an advantage. Exponential increases in processing power and data availability continue to drive the creation of new analytical methods, tools, and techniques that have transformative implications for learning research and practices.

Several first-class armies now recognize the need to make the same step-change. They recognize the potential for data to vastly improve not only training but also force development, experimentation, operational analysis, research and both the acquisition and in-service support of capabilities.