The Joint Readiness Training Center is pleased to present the fifty-third episode to air on ‘The Crucible - The JRTC Experience.’ Hosted by the Commander of Ops Group (COG), COL Matthew Hardman. Today’s guest is Director of Operations Research Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, LTC David Beskow, PhD. He has a PhD in Societal Computing from Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and serves in the Department of Systems Engineering.

The Operations Research Center (ORCEN) provides a dedicated analytical capability that engages problems of national significance for the purpose of enriching cadet education, enhancing the professional development of Operations Research Systems Analysis Officer Faculty, integrating emerging technologies and analytical tools into the Academic Program, and sustaining ties between the Academy, the Army, and the Department of Defense (DoD). The United States Military Academy (USMA) is a United States service academy in West Point, New York. It was originally established as a fort during the Revolutionary War, as it sits on strategic high ground overlooking the Hudson River 50 miles (80 km) north of New York City. It is the oldest of the five American service academies and educates cadets for commissioning into the United States Army.

In this episode we continue to discuss warfighting on the modern battlefield, the incorporation of technology as a combat multiplier, and preparing the force for AI centric warfare of the future. Specifically, we discuss using data to feed intelligence and the operations process as well as how the Army is planning to incorporate emerging technologies into its formations on the modern battlefield. We also look at the application of machine learning to sift through massive amounts of data to find the nuggets of key information, classify it, and then start to do predictive analysis. LTC Beskow’s department has been tasked to look at:

• How do we become more data enabled as a fighting formation?
• How can we better utilize technology, especially ML/AI?
• Do we have the right systems in place to collect the data to feed ML/AI? If not, what methodology would you recommend?

For the CTCs like JRTC, his team is looking at:

• What data do the CTCs produce that the Army could leverage?
• What changes to the collection requirements would you recommend that would be least impactful from a collection process but be massively impactful to the Army at large?
• How can we better use the data? Understanding human performance, streamlining our acquisitions, better utilization of ML/AI, etc.

Part of S01 “The Leader’s Laboratory” series.

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“The Crucible – The JRTC Experience” is a product of the Joint Readiness Training Center.