*** Here’s How the Pentagon Wants to Use Social Media On the Battlefield

BY PATRICK TUCKERREAD BIO

OCTOBER 28, 2016

Artificial intelligence will weave open-source and satellite data into useful intelligence in real time, the Pentagon’s No. 2 says.

It still takes the U.S. military too long to turn social media and other open-source information into something that operators in the field can use. Artificial intelligence is going to change that, and give U.S. troops a distinct battlefield edge, says U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work.

Take the 2014 downing of Malaysian flight MH17 over Ukraine. (A conventional investigation by a European Union Joint Investigation Team took more than a year to affix blame to pro-Russian separatists operating a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile.) To test the current state of machine learning applied to open source intelligence, the Pentagon hired a data integration and geospatial intelligence company called Orbital Insight, a big-data analytics company with a focus on satellite imagery and geospatial data. Most of their business is commercial — for example, they, analyze pictures of parking lots from space topredict holiday sales trends.

The company quickly scanned all available open-source media and assembled a picture of evidence, and did it instantly. He used slides to tell the story to an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “On the lower left is a Twitter shot ofMH17 taking off…The next one comes from ParisMatch.com. It is the picture of the Russian SA-11 launcher with a serial number on it, date and time stamped near the village where the shootdown occurred; then on Bellingcat.com, the exact sameSA-11, at the exact same location. Then there’s a Twitter shot of a contrail of a missile rising at the time of the shootdown. Then a rebel leader takes credit for the shoot down on VK.com. That was immediately taken down, by the way. Finally on YouTube, there’s a picture of the exact same SA-11 with a missile rail that is now mysteriously empty going back into Russia. Learning machines did this without any human interaction.”

That sort of rapid insight will be key to winning future conflicts where not all the players wear uniforms, like the masked “little green men” who invaded the Crimean peninsula in 2014. The United States and other international observers believed that Russian military officers were working with the separatists, a charge Russia at first denied. The ambiguity surrounding the identity of the invaders inhibited a coordinated international response.