Big Data at War: Special Operations Forces, Project Maven, and Twenty-First-Century Warfare
Richard H. Shultz and Gen. Richard D. Clarke | August 25, 2020
During the Iraq war America’s special operations forces (SOF) demonstrated a remarkable capacity to innovate to accomplish a mission for which they were not prepared—finding and dismantling al-Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) network of secret cells, which served as the backbone of the insurgency. It did so by developing new operational methods to uncover and eradicate a critical mass of AQI’s mid-level commanders and managers, the linchpins of those secret networks.
In Iraq, SOF Task Force 714 was able to adapt to this unexpected mission through organizational transformation, interagency collaboration, and the adoption of cutting-edge software applications. This turned Task Force 714 into an intelligence-driven organization capable of analyzing and exploiting “big data†through state-of-the-art data integration tools.
Since the United States withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has continued to innovate, adapting to an ever-changing war zone in the second decade of this century. And, most recently, USSOCOM and its subordinate commands have played important roles in the Department of Defense pathfinder effort to employ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the fight against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their geographically dispersed proxies.
https://mwi.usma.edu/big-data-at-war-special-operations-forces-project-maven-and-twenty-first-century-warfare/
