Frontline Geek Squads: SOCOM’s Secret Weapon

[rangerrebew]

 Frontline Geek Squads: SOCOM’s Secret Weapon

Deploying data scientists alongside special ops troops lets them solve intelligence-sharing problems “in minutes or hours,” said Special Operations Command’s first-ever CTO.
By   Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 08, 2021 at 11:47 AM
 

A soldier from the Army’s offensive cyber brigade during an exercise at Fort Lewis, Washington.

WASHINGTON: “Why are all these nerds taking up bunk space downrange?” one special ops sergeant major grumbled. But, boasted SOCOM chief technology officer Snehal Antani, “about three months later that same sergeant major came back and said, ‘I have found religion. We’re solving problems in days that should have taken us months or years’.”

Just a year ago, SOCOM — widely considered one of the most forward-leaning commands on AI and data — still solved some intelligence-sharing problems by burning DVDs in the US and flying them to operators overseas, said Antani, the command’s first CTO. Now that the increasingly tech-savvy Special Operations Command is deploying data scientists to the front, he said, there are cases where “they could solve problems in minutes or hours” that normally took “weeks, months, or years.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/03/frontline-geek-squads-socoms-secret-weapon/

[sneakypete]

Nothing really new about this,other than it being accepted as standard by the more or less conventional army.
By that,I mean SF A-teams,who perform the traditional SF missions of living with,training with,and fighting with the locals to reduce the number of US forces needed.

Special Operations is NOT Special Forces,even though it is mostly populated by SF soldiers. Unique missions with unique needs.