GoKawiilProcessed and matched against records of what its operator was doing, that data turns operational records into training sets. Combat becomes a commercial asset.
Many conflicts have already seen this training loop happen as drone footage feeds subsequent generations of military technology, and the market is set to grow. Enabled Intelligence, an American company that specializes in processing data to become usable in AI training, says it has already made more than half a million hours of Ukrainian drone footage available to feed into the next round of models, advertising possible uses in both military and commercial systems.
Closing the data loop
Many of the drones that now define our modern age of warfare began as civilian technology. But they’ve recently been turbocharged by new, commercially available AI systems, which allow cheap machines to operate autonomously—either individually or as a flock—as the environment changes around them. Each flight then creates a record of what the system encountered.
The resulting data is critical. The controlled lab environments usually developed to train these autonomous systems can approximate failure but are no match for the live conditions of a battlefield with very real risks. Military intelligence programs have held data generated by sensor-heavy systems like Predator and Reaper drones for nearly a decade through programs like Project Maven, but access remained entirely within the defense world. The data generated was available only through restricted, classified channels for the sole purpose of developing new weapons systems that would feed back into the same military that produced the data in the first place. That experience is now being shared to a much broader development network.
The loop now closes. Commercial technologies adapted for the battlefield are generating data that can flow back into the industries from which they came, becoming part of the data infrastructure relied on by governments and the private sector alike.
Drones that were trained in the signal-jammed airspace over Ukraine are now being deployed in the agricultural sector to help farmers map and survey their fields in places lacking the cell signal necessary for previous generations of technology.
Other countries are likely to follow Ukraine in selling their battlefield data, and we are not ready for the new marketplace this will create.