Taking the Tactical Cloud with You

Small Form Factor, Modular Data Centers at the Edge of the Battlefield

In order to achieve and maintain warfighting overmatch, coordinate deployed forces and enable new capabilities, the US Army, Air Force, and Navy are actively looking to new programs such as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) to ensure warfighters have maximum situational awareness. These programs will deliver a variety of compute and bandwidth intensive technologies, increasing the use of big data analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and video for example, using common technical standards, APIs and data formats to deliver the command and control information that warfighters need to coordinate their activities.

The software needed to run these new capabilities is increasingly being developed to rely on the cloud, which itself might reside in a variety of data centers, ranging from large commercial services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud and Microsoft Azure Government, to the DoD's Regional Hub Nodes (RHN), which are located in five separate strategic regions and used by deployed Marine Corps and Army units to access transport information from theater tactical networks around the world.