A US Army all-source intelligence technician assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, assists the battalion intelligence officer, during Exercise ‘Allied Spirit X' in Germany. (US Army )
US Army officials have leveraged lessons learned from the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict to inform ongoing technology maturation on the service's new cloud-based intelligence management programme, according to the head of the Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors Directorate.
Over the last year, programme officials working on the Army Intelligence Data Platform (AIDP) have been “rapidly building out [the programme] to units in the priority theatres [of operations]” since its initial operating capability (IOC) in 2023, said Program Executive Officer for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors (PEO IEW&S) Brigadier General Ed Barker.
Based on Palantir's Foundry data integration tool and its Gotham artificial intelligence (AI) platform, the AIDP programme is essentially an “automated data fabric” to allow cloud-based management of the service's intelligence data enterprise, including data analytics and warehousing capabilities, Brig Gen Barker said during a 3 December briefing at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
The AIDP is also the first major service programme to be employed to the cloud via the US Army Military Intelligence Commercial Cloud Service Provider (AC2SP), the one-star general noted during the briefing.
“We realised that we had to do that [cloud migration]. We could not do the legacy approach of having data centres everywhere” to physically support the AIDP, from an operational standpoint, Brig Gen Barker said. From a budgetary perspective, migrating the AIDP to a cloud infrastructure has saved between USD120 million to USD130 million across the Pentagon's five-year defence spending forecast – known as the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP), he added.
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