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Developed by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Innovate UK, SAPIENT is an open software architecture that helps different sensors, interfaces and decision-making modules work together, making it particularly useful in C-UAS missions. Andrea Valentino catches up with Professor Paul Thomas, a Dstl fellow, to understand the drawbacks of traditional technologies, how SAPIENT exploits AI and automation to improve on what came before – and how this most revolutionary of platforms is now supporting Nato operations.
hortly before his death, looking back on a career that swept him from the battlefield to Downing Street to a seat in the House of Lords, the Duke of Wellington presented a final maxim for his successors to follow. “All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life,” he said, “is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know from what you do – that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill’.” When the Duke made this statement in 1852 and decades after his famous victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, the tools available to generals were clearly rather limited. Hussars could scout for enemy positions, their horses sometimes shadowed by observation balloons. Spies could snatch documents, and sentries could be captured and interrogated.
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But often, intelligence gathering was really about guesswork, about putting a plan into action and hoping it worked. Now, of course, everything is different. Buoyed by satellites and drones, today’s warfighters are increasingly able to understand the precise layout of the battlefield in an instant, spotting friends and foes, whatever the terrain. As Professor Paul Thomas puts it: “Modern operations, while raising the tempo of this demand to the extreme, are enabled by modern sensing technology, which can detect stealthy and manoeuvring targets at impressive ranges.” However, as a fellow at UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) continues, contemporary situational awareness has issues all its own – especially in the complex field
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