Less Kit with More Hit

Background

The reason I decided to write this personal viewpoint is one of frustration I think more than anything else. I have worked in the defence technology sector ever since leaving the Army back in 2000 and over that time the MOD has become vastly more technology focused but still in my opinion operates within old boundaries.

A while ago I attended a TechUK Drone session and I was blown away with the content, but despite all the amazing technology we have in this arena and having spoken to some of the SME’s about the incredible work they do there was one nagging thought I couldn’t shake off.

Why do we have people jumping out of planes or driving vehicles or maybe even tabbing into locations with all manner of Black Boxes that when broken are rendered completely useless.

The Solution As I See It

Now this is where I am prepared to be schooled but this type of scenario is one that has been common across the IT world for decades. You have a number of high quality solutions be that applications or hardware and they come with their own black box. Now 9 times out of 10 the only thing that box is doing is hosting some sort of X86 compute in order to run the software needed for the solution (You see where I’m going with this). I’ve seen this in industry numerous times in the past and specifically in the world of Telco. The majority of their solutions came from 3rd party vendors who would just install a black box in a rack in order to expand their capabilities. At some point they would reach a physical capacity limit and then need to stand up a whole new datacentre (Crazy). That was until one of them decided to truly embrace technology and take full advantage of Virtualisation. They decided that going forward they wanted the solutions in a virtual format that would allow them to run more than one solution on a single box and enable them to massively reduce their datacentre requirements. Now in order for them to be able to achieve this they needed to mandate an Architectural Framework for the vendors to adhere to. This meant they could use common interfaces and protocols with no propriety connectors etc and be able to host all of their solutions on a common platform.

This is where I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the MOD took the same approach”. If a serviceman was able to deploy with a small form factor portable device capable of hosting some virtual machines (Laptop maybe) and utilise its common interfaces to plugin all manner of operational devices (Drone controller, Antenna’s etc) then he would only need this one platform to potentially deploy and control every model of Drone (Read anything else in here you can think of) he needed for that operational need. Now this will only work if a Framework is put in place to ensure all future capability is designed for this approach. As the Telco’s found out this will be immediately pushed back upon by the suppliers, but it only took one to sign up to it and all the rest followed because they didn’t want to be out of business and low and behold they are now 100% virtualised and using half of the infrastructure they had before and it actually runs faster than ever!

I appreciate that there would still need to be a Black box of some description to house the Drone, Antenna, controller etc but this would be all that was required regardless of the different capability they deployed with. There would be a single laptop (or maybe more as a man on the ground can easily carry a laptop) that could connect to a common antenna and controller that would be the same antenna and controller for any model of drone he needed to use. The only moving part would be the Drone itself that would vary dependant upon mission. The operator could load up the unique virtual machine for that supplier (stored on the laptop or issued as a USB maybe) and he immediately has access to use any capability he needs. I’ve used Drones throughout this as my example as I was amazed at the kit our operators deploy with for each type of drone they need but this could be replaced by anything you can think of in the field.