The ability to master and manage it is now a decisive factor in military victory or defeat. Few people know that better than Jean Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, assistant secretary general for cyber and digital transformation at NATO. In a recent interview preceding NATO Edge 26, the Alliance’s annual defense innovation show, Ellermann-Kingombe is very clear on the kind of digital transformation effort it takes to get the right data into the hands of military leaders operating in high-pressure situations, at exactly the time and place they need it.
Data-sharing must be a core design principle, he says: “The bottleneck is often not technology, but permission: classification boundaries, national rules and trust decisions.” Once data is well managed, an even bigger opportunity arises to use AI as “an enabler of military effectiveness,” he says, assisting commanders and operators further. He adds: “For NATO, the biggest difference AI can make is in decision advantage. Modern operations generate volumes of data that no human organisation can process unaided at the speed required.
AI can help fuse information, detect patterns, support planning, prioritise scarce resources and accelerate staff processes, providing commanders with better insight, earlier warnings and more resilient options.” As powerful as it is, AI can only reliably accelerate defense mission outcomes if it is built on vast, relevant and quality data. Data is the fuel that will power the shift to software-defined defense, an approach that delivers military capability through flexible, modular software rather than rigid, hardware-bound platforms. Software-defined defense, AI and the challenge of mastering the data that powers both, will be hot topics for attendees at NATO Edge 26, due to be held in Izmir, Türkiye, in November and expected to attract over 3,000 participants and more than 270 technology partners, including Elastic.
We will be there because we know that many attendees will be looking to better understand what software-defined defense will demand of them in data management terms. Bringing data together from many intelligent systems and smart devices demands real rigor. After all, in order to make critical operational decisions, military personnel need to be able to see the big picture, quickly searching for information in both structured and unstructured data formats across a vast array of different systems.
Defense data naturally lives wherever operations happen — across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains — and is stored in different formats like images, audio transcripts, documents and geospatial, reaching across thousands of different mission systems. These can include communications systems that keep troops connected in the field; systems used to manage artillery devices; reconnaissance systems; radar stations; and geographical information systems that support military leaders in tracking assets, planning missions and routes, and analyzing risks and threats, including potential ambush sites and minefields. In order to make critical operational decisions, military personnel need to be able to see the big picture, quickly searching for information in both structured and unstructured data formats across a vast array of different systems.
On top of all this, organizations like NATO face an additional layer of complexity. Building a common operational picture across the digital environments of 32 member nations requires multi-intelligence fusion of massive volumes of data held in disparate systems, from legacy databases and classified networks to cloud platforms and security tools. Addressing these challenges means turning all this data into operational advantage and mission readiness, accelerating the ability of armed forces to respond to situations by increasing their situational awareness and decision speed.
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