More Science, Less Art: Big Data, The Information Revolution and Decision-Making in the Royal Air Force

Abstract

The information revolution – the exponential increase in volume and detail of data on almost everything1 – is fundamentally re-shaping modern warfare, enabling the measurement of effect in war to be infinitely more empirical than ever before. For professional airmen and women, the rise of big data should be driving greater rigour into how decisions are made in organising for war, planning for war, and fighting wars. We are moving from a world in which decisions were made principally qualitatively, on human judgement and intuition, to one in which data science predominates.

Biography

Wing Commander Keith Dear is currently serving as SO1 Innovation in JFC’s Joint
Warfare. He is a CAS Fellow, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Changing Character of War Programme and Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) where he is also co-executive producer and expert consultant to RUSI’s Artificial Intelligence & the Future Programme. He holds a DPhil in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford. In 2011 he was awarded King’s College London’s O’Dwyer-Russell prize for his studies in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism.

He co-leads the Defence Entrepreneurs’ Forum (UK) and was founder and CEO of Airbridge Aviation, a not-for-profit start-up dedicated to delivering humanitarian aid by cargo drones.