Defence lagging pace of consumer tech

Consumer technology is advancing at such a fast rate that defence innovations aren't keeping up - but opposition groups and terrorists have full access to the former, speakers at a defence conference said this week.

Speaking this week at the Global Defence Conference, part of the controversial Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition in London, Colonel Hugh Eaton, the UK defence and intelligence director for Cisco told attendees that defence needs to keep up with consumer innovations and communications. "Good guys have access to that sort of technology, but also the opposition," he said. "It's a new asymmetry... before we had big tanks and airplanes, jazzy ships... now we are actually getting behind the curve."

Dr Phil White, head of wireless at PA Consulting agreed. "Technology has generally been the preserve of high-tech nations, but now it's for consumers... It's changing how we need to behave," he said.

"There's a gap in technical ability between consumers and defence - and terrorists have access to consumer technology," White added.

Despite communications being readily available, technology still isn't working well enough to protect soldiers. Eaton described a scenario in Iraq in 2003, at Majar Al Kabir. A group of paratroopers were battling "the baddies", while unbeknownst to them Royal Miltary Police were just 350 metres away. The paratroopers pushed their opposition back toward the RMP, leading to the deaths of six. "We're not talking satellite latency, interoperability, data merge - just 350 meters," Eaton said. "There's nobody thinking we've nailed this down."

"The defence industry doesn't always want to admit it, but lives are at risk when you get it wrong," Eaton said.

Indeed, soldiers and other defence personnel are going to start demanding technology on par with what they have at home. "You've got a very demanding consumer soldier, sailor, airman or marine, who is not going to put up going to work where technology is rubbish compared to what he has at home," Eaton said. "Go to work at office or operations, and find network is not supporting them the way it is when at home, that's a big disappointment."

Eaton said defence industry should take its cues from consumer web technologies, by making it as easy and intuitive as booking a trip online. "When an individual is in a crisis and decision making ability is reduced, technology needs to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible."

He also stressed the importance of reusing technology, instead of always creating bespoke solutions. "If it worked before, why are you giving us something else?" Eaton asked.

Because of the continuing reliability of Moore's Law - that technology improves by twice as much every 18 months - any devices and services planned to be in use in 2020 need to be a hundred times as good as standards are now, White said. But he said new ways of applying current technologies were more likely to make a difference than creating new innovations.

The key is tying together communications through collaboration. "It just seems extraordinarily slow," Eaton said. "The defence industry needs to be more agile and often that means more collaboration." As Eaton noted, the technology behind most of the hundreds of stands in the exhibition is from Cisco.

It's not about innovations, but about tying together technology that's already available, he said. "From a defence industry perspective, there's nothing about to cataclysmically change and improve," Eaton said. "Every time we talk to a partner, there's always one phrase - we didn't know you did that."

White stressed that there's no room for competing standards, inside the defence community or with the larger technology market. "The defence community is not big enough to drive the market," White said. "If it [the technology market] decides it wants something else, we'll find we don't match up."

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