The Commercially Observable Battlespace: What Force Protection Looks Like Now
By Chad Lawson, SVP of Revenue and Strategic Partnerships.
At SOF Week in Tampa, a question came up that I keep coming back to: When does force protection actually begin?
For a long time, the answer was dictated by physical barriers – it began at the gate, at the perimeter, at the moment of deployment. That answer is now dangerously out of date.
The modern battlespace, happening now, is commercially observable. Every deployment generates a digital footprint: device signatures, procurement patterns, training cycles, posts on social networks, logistical data. Adversaries don't need classified access or a mole. All they need is a smartphone, patience, and correlation over time – and they are very patient.
The problem is no longer whether adversaries can collect information. The problem is how quickly they can correlate it.
Before the Mission Begins
Most exposure today comes from accumulation, not from a leak.
A procurement order here. A shift in training tempo there. A cluster of social activity near a particular installation. Individually, each data point looks benign. Aggregated over time, however, they become a picture – of who is deploying, where they're going, and roughly when.
Adversaries are running open-source collection on our forces the same way our analysts run it on theirs. The commercially observable record is the record, and it starts building long before the first flight.
Real force protection starts left of launch – upstream, before the mission begins, not after a threat has already surfaced.
During Execution
When a mission is active, the information environment around it doesn't go quiet, it only gets louder. Chatter increases. Signals multiply. Every piece of mission-relevant context competes for attention from analysts already working in saturated environments.
The answer to sorting through this noise and enhancing threat protection is not more data. Alert fatigue is real, and systems that generate noise get ignored exactly when they matter most. You cannot dump raw data on operators and call it mission-relevant awareness.
What’s needed are indicators defined before deployment, not reactively assembled during it. This provides a narrower, more contextual signal picture that reduces surprise, clearly delineated exposure, and increases decision advantage without adding cognitive load.
After Redeployment
This is the part that doesn't get talked about enough.
Operational exposure does not end when a mission ends. Families, routines, social media activity, online behavior – these persist as threat surfaces long after redeployment. The mission may end, but the people who deployed - and the networks they belong to – remain connected and observable.
Exposure is no longer confined to the battlefield. Home station is part of the operational environment now. That requires persistent, lifecycle-based awareness built to flag elevated risk even in less traditionally high-risk areas.
What This Requires from the Community
The implication for partners and integrators is direct: the fusion layer needs to be built upstream, not assembled by the analyst.
The national security community has built remarkable individual capabilities. But tools that don't communicate leave the integration burden on the analyst – already making high-stakes decisions under time pressure with incomplete information and a highly-observable battlespace. That model doesn't scale to lifecycle-based force protection.
What scales is connected workflows, where PAI collection, enrichment, and context fusion happen before the information reaches the screen. Where the analyst gets a comprehensive picture early warning is structural, not dependent on someone catching the right signal at the right moment.
The force protection problem is understood. The next step is building the intelligence infrastructure to match it, with connected workflows that deliver fused intelligence rather than siloed tools. If you're a partner or integrator working toward that, we'd like to build it with you.