On a great new podcast, Commercial Innovation for Defense, Mark Goode asks blockchain entrepreneur Michael Lewellen about the military’s work on bringing together a common operational picture of the battle network:
Before blockchain was a possibility, you had two solutions. You could have every entity in this whole command structure manage their own database with the data they collected. Then if I want to figure out what your data is, I can talk to your API. Then I have to talk to this other services’ API. This is where you potentially have all this data spread out. If you want to get a clear picture of what it all means you have to talk to all the different APIs. That would be a mess.
The other option you have is build a central repository. All the data flows into one place. Then you have issues of that central data being out of sync with the data out there on the ground. If that data becomes inaccessible, or something happens, then you’re suddenly blind.
The third scenarios is a shared database that is backed by a blockchain protocol. That can allow everyone to get information from each other that is authenticated. Even if one of those parties gets hacked and someone who is malicious is trying to modify the data. They could report false results themselves. But they couldn’t stop anyone else from reporting results. They couldn’t interrupt traffic. Most importantly, they could override existing data that was out there. They couldn’t wipe it. The worst they could do is lie themselves. If what they’re reporting conflicts with what someone else is reporting, then you know there’s a problem. So it’s a lot harder to get away with.
AFWERX has contracted with 24 companies that had blockchain or distributed ledger technologies somewhere in their keywords totaling $2.3 million. Most of those were $50,000 SBIR Phase I awards. Two were $150,000 in STTR, and one was a $900,000 SBIR Phase II to SafeFlights Inc. for end-to-end visibility of supply chains. See more about that data here.
SIMBA Chain recently received gold medal at the US Air Force advanced manufacturing olympics:
All of the Supply Chain Marathon competitors were given the same scenario: a fictional island called Elfmore was under siege. How could additive manufacturing be deployed to keep aircraft, weaponry, field hospitals and infrastructure operational? SIMBA Chain’s winning response combined portable, self-contained Rapid Additive Manufacturing Labs capable of printing metal, plastic, and composite parts on demand with the interconnectivity and cyber security of blockchain to deliver unprecedented additive manufacturing capabilities to forward-deployed military units, front-line medical staff and relief organizations.
“The key component of any supply chain is security and particularly critical to fast-changing military operations,” Neidig explains. “Including blockchain in our strategy set SIMBA Chain apart as our additive manufacturing labs were digitally and securely interconnected with one another and with military command This ensured the integrity of communications and that whatever was needed could be built to military specifications without compromise from external forces. This strategy resonated with the judges.”
I wonder how hard it would be to turn ABMS onto a blockchain? I figure something like that needs to be architected from the start. Perhaps the Navy, which shelled out $9.5 million contract to SIMBA Chain, will end up architecting the more resilient system for the services.
Leave a Reply