Notes from MILCOM: How Disruption is Creating a New Warfighter

9 December 2013
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I recently attended this year's MILCOM Conference in San Diego. The theme, "Balancing Commercial and Defense Technologies," was timely—given today's fiscal and technological landscape. There were some excellent presentations from industry and military leaders, highlighting key trends and challenges. In the next two posts, I’ll share my own insights and observations.

"Gentlemen, we have run out of money; now we have to think." attributed to Winston Churchill

I actually saw a little of Churchill's sentiment on display at MILCOM. I don't think you can attend any event in our industry without the subject of sequestration and budget cuts emerging. But just like any other event, MILCOM did not reveal anything new. The military leaders in attendance expressed how devastating the full sequestration impact would be to U.S. military capabilities and preparedness. Many of the government speakers, constrained by travel budget, could not physically attend. Instead, they sat on panels and gave technical presentations virtually via teleconference. (Kudos to the conference organizers who managed to blend the virtual attendees with those physically on stage in a way that did not detract from the conference experience!)

Industry leaders expressed concern about what it means to their businesses. Everyone seemed to have a picture of the business climate for 2014, but they knew that 2015 could see some big changes.

Not everyone spoke of doom and gloom, however, and some brave speakers actually hinted that our budget challenges might actually be a good thing for the military communications market. I tend to agree with this line of thinking. I've attended enough of these conferences over the years to see a number of good technologies and ideas discussed with enthusiasm and then ignored. There simply has been no compelling reason for change—no disruption. If budget cuts are enacted to their full effect, there will be a lot of disruption in the industry, and I think this will force the armed forces to change and adopt some new promising technologies faster than ever before.

One such area of new technology is the Internet of Things.

Internet of Everything

Larry Payne, Cisco's area vice president of U.S. federal sales, gave a very interesting and entertaining keynote speech on Cisco's concept of the Internet of Things. He actually took it one step further and defined the “Internet of Everything.” According to Payne, if the Internet of Things focuses on the "things," then the Internet of Everything expands the concept to include people, processes, policies and data. His presentation looked similar to a deck that we at GE use to explain our Industrial Internet—which should be no surprise since GE has been working closely with Cisco in this regard.

Payne gave an example of how sensors are installed in NFL helmets to collect data that can be used in understanding the high incidence of concussions. He brought a colleague onto the stage to show how a similar system might be installed into a warfighter's helmet and collect real-time health data. Not only that, but this warfighter also wore a camera on his chest that could stream real-time video to a command stations many miles away. Payne explained that there are even sensors small enough for a warfighter to swallow a pill that collects valuable health statistics in real time. (This last one caused a significant amount of discussion among the young Marines sitting next to me.) And of course, our MILCOM warfighter would not be complete without a rugged tablet providing him valuable situational awareness data.

So why is Cisco involved in all this? Quite simply, as Mr. Payne explained, because everything in the battlefield is now a router—and so Cisco, the world's largest router manufacturer, wants to be involved. To this point, housed in the backpack of Payne's warfighter was a small computer connected to an IP radio providing connectivity to a battlefield wireless mobile ad hoc network (MANET). This small computer ran a software router providing a transport mechanism for all the sensors, the video camera and the warfighter's tablet. The warfighter had become a mobile router at the very edge of the "Internet of the Battlefield."

Note: This is the first post of a two-part series exploring the key trends and challenges highlighted at this year’s MILCOM Conference. Click here to read part two, Changing the Battlefield.

Rubin Dhillon

Rubin has spent over 20 years in the embedded computing world, in roles ranging from support to sales to product management and even garbage collector. He experienced the huge growth (and crash) of the telecom industry, and he's spent time dabbling in medical, industrial, transportation and military applications. Rubin figured he has so many stories to tell, he should get into marketing and so he is now our VP of Marketing. Connect with Rubin on LinkedIn and he'll explain the "garbage collector" story…