Future war patterns will change the military big data decide the initiative

Information warfare is the battle of the stream. From the transformation of the entire flow of information, who controls the most authentic flow of information, who controls the dominance of the war. Seizing the information right has become the precondition of seizing the power of air and sea, and is the decisive factor of the victory and defeat of the future war.

With the continuous development of information, human society has entered a "big Data age". Every day, sensors, mobile devices, social networks and online trading platforms around the world generate millions of megabytes of data. The Obama administration has even called the Big Data "the new oil of the future", and who controls the data stream will dominate the world of the future. As we all know, the military field has always been the most advanced science and technology laboratories, large data will undoubtedly bring about a great change in the future war patterns.

Where is the big data "big"?

The McKinsey Global Institute defines large data as a data collection (datasets) that is large in size to capture, store, manage, and analyze far beyond the capabilities of traditional database software tools.

Wang Weiping, a researcher at the Computer Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the China Science news reporter that big data is "big", and that the first point is that the volume of data is unprecedented, far exceeding the level of the traditional computer processing data.

With the rapid development of computer network technology and the high-speed popularization of Internet, information data has been increased from TB (1TB=1024GB) to PB (1PB=1024TB), EB (1EB=1024PB), ZB (1ZB=1024EB) level, and is still exploding. It is reported that the world officially entered the ZB ERA in 2010, the 2012 global data volume reached 5.2ZB, is expected to 2020, the world will have a total of 35ZB of data volume. An image metaphor can help people understand the size of the data. If you burn all 35ZB of data to a disc with a capacity of 9GB, the stack will reach 2.33 million kilometers, equivalent to three trips between the Earth and the moon.

Second, Wang Weiping says, "Big" is also reflected in the diversity of data types being processed, far beyond the scope that traditional data formats and analytical tools can handle.

In the past, most of the data were presented in two-dimensional structure, but with the rapid development and popularization of the Internet and multimedia technology, the unstructured data produced by video, audio, image, mail, HTML, RFID, GPS and sensors grew at a rate of 60% each year. It is expected that unstructured data will account for more than 80% of the total data.

In addition, he believes that large data also require the real-time nature of data processing. The data flow of large data is high speed real-time data stream, and it often needs fast and continuous real-time processing, and can catch the information of important events in the first time.

If from the military field, the command and control system, space-based support system, information processing system, a variety of reconnaissance, surveillance, detection system, the information is more and more large, large data in the command structure of the management has become unprecedented important and complex. How to carry on the storage and the depth analysis to the massive battlefield data, how to discriminate the data authenticity, the data source reliability, guarantees the data transmission security, is the future war both sides faces the question.

The requirement of information warfare on large data

Military theorists generally believe that as early as the 90 's, the information war began to rise. It is a kind of combat style which can influence information and information system of enemy by using information warfare weapon, protect its information and information system, and gain battlefield information advantage. It is essentially through information warfare means, to "flow" control of "energy flow" and "material flow", depriving the enemy of information superiority, to maintain their own information advantages, thus capturing the battlefield information right.

Song Jongping, a military commentator, explained to the Chinese science Daily that the traditional information warfare consisted of cyber attack and defense warfare, interference and interference in conventional warfare, and detection and counter detection under the criminal investigation system. "Information warfare is the war that flows through the stream." From the transformation of the entire flow of information, who controls the most authentic flow of information, who controls the dominance of the war. Song Jongping said, "The seizure of information power has become a prerequisite for capturing the supremacy of the air and the sea, is the decisive factor in the future war." ”

But he also said the traditional information warfare has encountered challenges in dealing with information and data. The first is that the traditional information channel is limited and cannot get a large amount of information at once. At the same time, not only the data volume increases dramatically, the data form includes the battlefield perception data, the image, the video intelligence and so on various types, only relies on the existing information technology, cannot analyze and process the data in time and efficiently.

It was reported that on the day of the war in Iraq, the forward command post in Qatar and Kuwait had to shut down the equipment because it could not handle the massive data provided by the security agencies, which caused the communication between command post and part of the assault direction to be almost interrupted.

In addition, Song Jongping points out that traditional information systems have weaker data-sharing capabilities. "Traditional warfare is an off-line mode of operation, the superior to assign tasks to subordinates, and in the offline state, and finally report a victory to the superior." And orders are usually only a division of the army, because they are often as an independent unit of combat. This has also led to the relative departments often their own battalions, affecting the efficiency of cooperative operations. ”

Under such background, the information warfare has produced special requirements for large data transmission, storage and analysis.

The first is the real-time requirement of data processing. The massive data produced in the information warfare will eventually be brought to the command center and the processing center, which will be collected from all kinds of sensors, intelligence agencies and information center to deal with the data in real time. Song Jongping that all information on the battlefield, even a single soldier, needs to be transmitted to the command and control center through large data to understand the frontline and, in particular, to give orders for a soldier's equipment. Because, he may be in the most advantageous terrain, can get the biggest advantage.

The second is data fusion. Song Jongping put forward, by making the link of the data chain short, before the need for four to five levels of management to give orders, the future may only need three levels of management to complete, so as to facilitate the integration of combat, rather than each arms alone, adjust combat command anytime, anywhere.

In addition, in his view, the large data age, information defense is particularly difficult, for data security requirements higher. Generally speaking, the information security requirements for data transmission in the information warfare are mainly embodied in the problem of preventing eavesdropping, anti-jamming and false information deception. The future may require a new set of defensive mechanisms to ensure information security.

Thus, in the era of information warfare in the large data age, the confrontation of military systems in various countries will rely on military information systems, software and data to a greater extent, and provide correct information for correct decision-making, command and control at the right time and in the right place. The prerequisite for the rapid and reasonable distribution of information is to have a unified scheduling and management of data, so that the most immediate battlefield information can be transmitted to the most urgent needs of the department. With the increase of battlefield data, efficient storage and analysis of massive data, from the data to explore the changes in the situation of the enemy, to predict the most reasonable combat plan, so that massive data to better serve the information war is the target of military data processing.

Military data mining faces challenges

However, Wang Weiping points out that one of the big challenges facing the big data age is the low value of information. Both analysts and intelligent systems need to "haystack" to find useful information from massive amounts of data. This also fully embodies the importance of data mining. "He stressed.

Data mining is a process of using various analytical tools to discover the relationship between model and data in massive data. It can help decision-makers to find some potential correlation between data, by discovering hidden and neglected factors, it can excavate important intelligence information in the process of data storage and management, as the basis of decision and action.

According to Song Jongping, in the "events" before the incident, intelligence judges are master of a large number of data, but ignored the valuable information.

Therefore, after the "events" incident, the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Project Research in the next year's annual technical meeting, explained how to apply data mining technology in a unified integrated database.

The so-called new data resources are "trading space". If terrorists want to plan and execute a terrorist activity, they will leave some kind of "data footprint" in the information space. In other words, they need to "trade". The data records of such transactions can be communications, finance, education, medical care, travel, transportation, immigration, housing, and other data records. It is in the "transaction" space that the United States applies data mining technology to detect and track terrorists.

It is understood that, in 2002, as the drug lords in Afghanistan prepare to fund terrorists such as al-Qaida, U.S. intelligence analysts are using data mining to link the data in the battle plan database with the data in the base organization database in real time and independently, thus directing the U.S. military to take action first.

So, how to improve the ability of data mining from the technical. Wang Weiping told the China Science News reporter, at the entrance of the data quality control is very critical. In other words, data preparation is an important prerequisite of data mining, because it directly affects the efficiency and accuracy of data mining. "If the quality of the data is mixed into the channel, it is difficult to deal with the quality of the data is not high, they will be useful information caused serious interference." ”

In short, in the data preparation phase, the data needs to be cleaned, secondly, the data needs to be analyzed to reduce the scope of processing. In the data preprocessing phase, it includes eliminating duplicate data, eliminating noise, omitting data processing, and transforming the type, so as to make the data processing suitable to the form of the mining data, and to make further reduction on the data mining based on the selection, reduce the memory resources and processing time, and make the mining more effective.