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This essay details the problem of data overload in the United States Military. Through my own military experience and research ranging from academic journals to an interview with a Sgt stationed in Germany, I concluded that Artificial Intelligence might be the answer before experience. But the Department of Defense is yet to give information about a new AI program that might benefit our troops.

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The Marine Security Guards in Frankfurt, Germany

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The Marine Security Guards in Frankfurt, Germany

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Marine Combat and Operational Stress Control

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Marine Combat and Operational Stress Control

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This is an image of a Navy Corpsman going over the Combat and Operational Stress Control Chart. Green means that you are mentally healthy while red you must be taken to MHU to be evaluated by a medical professional.

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In my personal interview with Sgt Nemkov, he stated that he felt data overload when he was a junior Marine. He insisted that "experience is the number one teacher" which to some extent I do agree. Tasks that took him a long time to figure out as a Junior Marine can be done in a short amount of time as a Sergeant with almost 7 years in. Pulido, B. V., Personal interview with Sgt Georgiy Nemkov, 12 April 2019

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"If Fussell was supposed to be an 'information pump,' though, he felt like a jammed one—he realized that he’d become more of a bottleneck to his team than much else. But then he realized it wasn’t completely his fault."

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This periodical article from the Army A&T explains the Army's effort in testing an AI program called TITAN and how this is the stepping stone to official AI programs that would be used throughout the military. TITAN streamlines information to troops and declutters unnecessary information already for commanders.

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This academic journal article by Steve Jex emphasizes on the importance of self-efficacy in coping with stress. Stress due to data overload or even with military duties in general can result in unhealthy ways of coping, like smoking or overeating. Their study concluded that to deal with stress in the military in a healthy way, the  servicemember must have belief in themselves or self-efficacy. Jex, Steve M., et al. “The Impact of Self-Efficacy on Stressor–strain Relations: Coping Style as an Explanatory Mechanism.” Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 86, no. 3, June 2001, pp. 401–409.

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This academic journal article by Aria Day and Holly Livingstone emphasizes on how junior servicemembers are most likely to be stressed with data overload. In their experiment, they conclude that those with more time in service were less stressed than their junior members. Day, A. L., and H. A. Livingstone. “Chronic and Acute Stressors among Military Personnel: Do Coping Styles Buffer Their Negative Impact on Health?” Journal Of Occupational Health Psychology, vol. 6, no. 4, Oct. 2001, pp. 348–360.

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This news article by Dan Robitzski sheds light on the basic problem of data overload and how to combat it with Artificial Intelligence. The author gives the solution as "... let the AI handle all the data, leaving humans focused to handle the critical and creative thinking." but does not state any programs that have started in any of the military branches.

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Sometimes there's just too much going on for your brain to handle. Like: when you're zooming down the highway, trying to find your exit, and your friend in the passenger seat is telling a story about this total dick at work. Are you just giving the appropriate amount of nods and affirmative grunts? Probably the latter, because there's too much else going on for you to care about how many times your friend's lunch was stolen out of the company fridge (at a more focused moment, you probably would have said something appropriate, like: "reallyyyy tho who does that?").

The same thing happens to soldiers - or, at least, it could. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory, in concert with several artificial intelligence and neuroscience experts, is hoping to use artificial intelligence to control the flow of information to soldiers or pilots in stressful combat-related scenarios. The goal? Let the AI handle all the data, leaving humans focused to handle the critical and creative thinking.

"Humans simply cannot process the amount of information that is potentially available," said Jonathan Touryan, a neuroscience who conducts military research, in a press release. "Yet, humans remain unmatched in their ability to adapt in complex and dynamic situation, such as a battlefield environment. We need a greater capability to be able to estimate and predict human variability, behavior and intent across different contexts."

Specific applications for this logistics-managing AI are still unclear - the researchers are focusing their attention on the basic science side. That is, they're dedicating their energy towards understanding the science and engineering needed for a product that achieves this goal. The specific uses will come later.

But we do know that these tools will be necessary. For several years, the military has been working towards a Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, a real-time network of logistical information about each soldier in an area. For someone trying to do a high-stakes job, that's a lot of information to be sorting through.

Recently, the researchers ran trials in which they measured a driver's heart rate and brain activity as they drove down a busy highway (don't worry, it was in a virtual reality simulation). The researchers wanted to know how well people would hold onto distracting information while dealing with a stressful scenario, like another car pulling quickly in front of theirs, or having to switching lanes on a busy road.

All the while, the researchers were projecting the participants' brain activity onto a screen using a new tool developed by the army called CLIVE, the Customizable Lighting Interface for the Visualization of EEGs. They wanted to see if the ability to learn new information was related to how well the brain waves aligned between the driver and passenger, a metric called synchrony. In some studies, higher levels of synchrony have been connected to better communication and understanding - literally jiving with someone, though the science has been called into question.

Ultimately, the Army wants to learn when, and how, soldiers fall into sensory overload so that they can design artificial intelligence algorithms that can deliver relevant information at the right times. This isn't giving AI the keys to military operations- its more like strategically using computers to do what humans sometimes find themselves too overwhelmed to do.

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AI could shield soldiers from information overload.

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Sometimes there's just too much going on for your brain to handle. Like: when you're zooming down the highway, trying to find your exit, and your friend in the passenger seat is telling a story about this total dick at work. Are you just giving the appropriate amount of nods and affirmative grunts?

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A section of the book called "Artificial Intelligence" goes into the faultiness of AI with the introduction of iCub, a humanoid robot. iCub "... often gets things wrong. If you present and name several objects and push iCub to name them all, you'll get several mistakes and a large number of 'I don't know' responses." This just goes to show the amount of time until the military has a foolproof AI program to alleviate data overload for the troops.

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Read 1,725 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narrative...

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This news article by Pavithra Mohan observes Chris Fussell, a former Navy SEAL, and how he tackles data overload. A lot of what Fussell has gone through, such as feeling like a bottleneck of information to his team, I've experienced when I was in the service. Strategies that he has learned to tackle data overload is now used at the McChrystal Group, which now he is a partner in.

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During his 15-year tenure in the U.S. Navy, former SEAL Chris Fussell found that the higher his rank, the more sidelined he felt. "As you move up a traditional, sort of bureaucratic structure, there's a certain point at which you realize, well, I'm not really on the implementation or execution side-I'm not on the battlefield. I'm an operations person who's overseeing multiple units that are out on the ground doing the job," Fussell recently told Fast Company.

This type of movement away from the action is pretty common in civilian workplaces, too. With each promotion, you tend to get further removed from the day-to-day goings-on of your organization. As Fussell writes in his new book, One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams, "bureaucratic advancement means fewer peers, more span of control, generally an increasing information-pump function, and increased distance from the actual implementation of whatever it is the organization does."

If Fussell was supposed to be an "information pump," though, he felt like a jammed one-he realized that he'd become more of a bottleneck to his team than much else. But then he realized it wasn't completely his fault.

Related: Chris Fussell On How To Spot The Hidden Influencers On Every Team

Moving Faster Amid Information Overload

It was an organizational problem. "The reality, as the battlefield taught us," Fussell writes, "is that a 20th-century organizational system is simply insufficient for the speed of the information age."

This was a lesson the military learned firsthand after the start of the so-called "War on Terror" in 2001. Early on, Fussell says, senior leadership began grappling with how to make the armed forced more agile and adaptable when faced with a decentralized adversary and a glut of data. Too much information was being disseminated too slowly, which meant changes in strategy trickled down too slowly, too. Eventually, Fussell recalls, his team was was holding all-hands videoconference meetings on a daily basis, trying to keep up to speed.

Now a partner at the McChrystal Group, founded by Stanley McChrystal (Fussell's lieutenant general when he entered the Joint Task Force) [he was also McChrystal's aide de camp in 2007 and 2008] , Fussell now helms the organization's Leadership Institute, where he finds companies facing similar problems as he did with the SEALs. One "core question" he says many still struggle with is, "How often are you really realigning yourselves on strategy? And does it need to be faster, based on how quickly your market actually changes? The answer is usually yes."

But adapting faster in a data-saturated environment is hard. It often means regular strategic discussions, more transparency, and changing how information gets funneled through an organization-to prevent clogged information pumps and shield leadership from gobs of useless data. With these complicated challenges in mind, and drawing on his Navy experience, Fussell wrote One Mission to be as "as close to a practical guide to this sort of change process as possible."

Helping Big Companies Stay Nimble

Fussell's book includes case studies on various companies the McChrystal Group has worked with, from financial software firm Intuit to apparel giant Under Armour.

For Intuit, which owns tax-prep software TurboTax and personal finance app Mint, Fussell says the challenge was to consolidate the company's various business units over the course of 2014 so it could unify as "one Intuit." The company was worried about upstarts that were quicker on their feet. "For Intuit and these 'legacies'-once insurgents in their own right-it was now a question of, 'How do you take a company at scale and recreate the adaptability and intimacy of a startup?'" Fussell writes in his case study.

In the case of Under Armour, which Fussell and his team consulted with for a year starting in September 2014, the McChrystal Group helped streamline communications around the company's supply chain. While the company's supply-chain division may have felt like "the materials are on the boat," Fussell explained, by way of example, "R&D realized that they want to make a change, and marketing finds out that the color scheme should be completely different, so the boat has to turn around."

But once those parties started communicating more frequently, Fussell says, "they could see problems coming six months down the road and solve for them before it was too late." In other words, the whole organization needs to pump information, not just a few key influencers.

Fussell says he usually works with companies that fall broadly into one of two categories. The first includes big enterprises like the military that have been around for years and want to "reverse engineer" themselves to recapture a startup-like energy. You could count General Motors in this camp; under CEO Mary Barra, the automaker has been trying to shake up its culture in order to lure top tech talent from the startup world. And then there are small organizations at "the tipping point," says Fussell, who are often asking, "How do we maintain this culture as we scale up?" This has been a key priority for Facebook over recent years.

For companies small and large, old and new, the through-line as Fussell sees it is transparency-either introducing it into existing corporate structures or preserving it when a scrappy startup grows up.

It's The Same Goal Everywhere: Win

Fussell says people often mistakenly think of the military as fundamentally different from other organizations, because the stakes are much higher when it's a matter of life or death.

But in his experience, "That's not really what most people wake up thinking about. The idea of losing is a huge negative, but not getting shot at or loss of life-that's just a reality of the battlefield," Fussell says. "Not to say that it isn't important-it's just not top of mind every single day with most of the thinkers inside the service."

Instead, he says he's seen more similarities between civilian and military organizations than differences, particularly when it comes to the challenges their leaders face. "What they're thinking is, 'I don't want to lose,'" he says of senior military officers. "And that mind-set is very similar to industry, which is, 'Hey, we've got a good organization here, and we want to win. We want to come out on top.'"

As Fussell points out, winning demands agility and adaptability, regardless of industry. It's less about individuals' own abilities than whether those individuals can come together and communicate with each other-and get better and faster at it all the time.

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How This Former Navy SEAL Tackles Information Overload-On And Off The Battlefield

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During his 15-year tenure in the U.S. Navy, former SEAL Chris Fussell found that the higher his rank, the more sidelined he felt. "As you move up a traditional, sort of bureaucratic structure, there's a certain point at which you realize, well, I'm not really on the implementation or execution side-I'm not on the battlefield.

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This TEDTalk introduces Dr. Jannell MacAulay, a combat pilot, who suffered from stress from her job, raising her 2-year-old daughter and her husband being deployed in the Middle East. Dr. MacAulay's struggle of trying to be the best mother, pilot and spouse led her to the answer of mindfulness, the practice of being aware of the present.

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How to achieve high performance under stress | Jannell MacAulay | TEDxABQ

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This article gives insight on how data overload can be deadly giving examples such as 23 innocent Afghan civilians killed in a combat zone because a Predator drone operator forgot to pass information about that village. The article to me was a big wakeup call to what hurt servicemembers today.

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Data is among the most potent weapons of the 21st century. Unprecedented amounts of raw information help the military determine what targets to hit and what to avoid. And drone-based sensors have given rise to a new class of wired warriors who must filter the information sea. But sometimes they are drowning.

Research shows that the kind of intense multitasking required in such situations can make it hard to tell good information from bad. The military faces a balancing act: how to help soldiers exploit masses of data without succumbing to overload.

Across the military, the data flow has surged; since the attacks of 9/11, the amount of intelligence gathered by remotely piloted drones and other surveillance technologies has risen 1,600 percent. On the ground, troops increasingly use hand-held devices to communicate, get directions and set bombing coordinates. And the screens in jets can be so packed with data that some pilots call them "drool buckets" because, they say, they can get lost staring into them.

"There is information overload at every level of the military - from the general to the soldier on the ground," said Art Kramer, a neuroscientist and director of the Beckman Institute, a research lab at the University of Illinois.

The military has engaged researchers like Mr. Kramer to help it understand the brain's limits and potential. Just as the military has long pushed technology forward, it is now at the forefront in figuring out how humans can cope with technology without being overwhelmed by it.

At George Mason University in Virginia, researchers measure the brain waves of study subjects as they use a simulation of the work done at the Nevada Air Force base.

On a computer screen, the subjects see a video feed from one drone and the locations of others, along with instructions on where to direct them. The subjects wear a cap with electrodes attached, measuring brain waves. As the number of drones and the pace of instructions increases, the brain shows sharp spikes in a kind of electrical activity called theta - cause for concern among the researchers.

"It's usually an index of extreme overload," said Raja Parasuraman, a director of the university's human factors and applied cognition program.

As the technology allows soldiers to pull in more information, it strains their brains. And military researchers say the stress of combat makes matters worse. Some research even suggests that younger people wind up having more trouble focusing because they have grown up constantly switching their attention.

For the soldier who has been using computers and phones all his life, "multitasking might actually have negative effects," said Michael Barnes, research psychologist at the Army Research Lab at Aberdeen, Md., citing several university studies on the subject.

In tests at a base in Orlando, Mr. Barnes's group has found that when soldiers operate a tank while monitoring remote video feeds, they often fail to see targets right around them.

Mr. Barnes said soldiers could be trained to use new technology, "but we're not going to improve the neurological capability."

On the other hand, he said, the military should not shy away from improving the flow of data in combat. "It would be like saying we shouldn't have automobiles because we have 40,000 people die on the roads each year," he said. "The pluses of technology are too great."

The military is trying novel approaches to helping soldiers focus. At an Army base on Oahu, Hawaii, researchers are training soldiers' brains with a program called "mindfulness-based mind fitness training." It asks soldiers to concentrate on a part of their body, the feeling of a foot on the floor or of sitting on a chair, and then move to another focus, like listening to the hum of the air-conditioner or passing cars.

"The whole question we're asking is whether we can rewire the functioning of the attention system through mindfulness," said one of the researchers, Elizabeth A. Stanley, an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Recently she received financing to bring the training to a Marine base, and preliminary results from a related pilot study she did with Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami, found that it helped Marines to focus.

Even as it worries about digital overload, the Army is acknowledging that technology may be the best way to teach this new generation of soldiers - in particular, a technology that is already in their pockets. In Army basic training, new recruits can get instruction from iPhone apps on subjects as varied as first aid and military values.

As part of the updated basic training regimen, recruits are actually forced into information overload - for example, testing first aid skills while running an obstacle course.

"It's the way this generation learns," said Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, who oversees initial training for every soldier. "It's a multitasking generation. So if they're multitasking and combining things, that's the way we should be training."

The intensity of warfare in the computer age is on display at a secret intelligence and surveillance installation at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, a massive, heavily air-conditioned warehouse where hundreds of TVs hang from black rafters. Every day across the Air Force's $5 billion global surveillance network, cubicle warriors review 1,000 hours of video, 1,000 high-altitude spy photos and hundreds of hours of "signals intelligence" - usually cellphone calls.

At the Langley center, officially called Distributed Common Ground System-1, heavy multitasking is a daily routine for people like Josh, a 25-year-old first lieutenant (for security reasons, the Air Force would not release his full name). For 12 hours a day, he monitors an avalanche of images on 10 overhead television screens. They deliver what Josh and his colleagues have nicknamed "Death TV" - live video streams from drones above Afghanistan showing Taliban movements, suspected insurgent safehouses and American combat units headed into battle.

As he watches, Josh uses a classified instant-messaging system showing as many as 30 different chats with commanders at the front, troops in combat and headquarters at the rear. And he is hearing the voice of a pilot at the controls of a U-2 spy plane high in the stratosphere.

"I'll have a phone in one ear, talking to a pilot on the headset in the other ear, typing in chat at the same time and watching screens," Josh says. "It's intense."

The stress lingers when the shift is over. Josh works alongside Anthony, 23, an airman first class who says his brain hurts each night, the way feet ache after a long march.

"You have so much information coming in that when you go home - how do you take that away? Sometimes I work out," Anthony said. "Actually, one of my things is just being able to enjoy a nice bowl of cereal with almond milk. I feel the tension is just gone and I can go back again."

Video games don't do the trick. "I need something real," he said.

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Military Struggles to Harness a Flood of Data

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Data is among the most potent weapons of the 21st century. Unprecedented amounts of raw information help the military determine what targets to hit and what to avoid. And drone-based sensors have given rise to a new class of wired warriors who must filter the information sea. But sometimes they are drowning.