Where to process data, and how to add them up

“YOU COULD put forward a thesis that Afghanistan was the most densely surveilled battlespace in the history of humankind,” says Mick Ryan, until recently the head of Australia’s defence college. “And that didn’t seem to help us.” For an information advantage to change the course of a war you need more than just a cornucopia of sensors; you need ways to combine their data into information that can be acted on at speed.