How Blockchain Technology Can Increase a Military Force’s Power

Military forces have always been at the forefront when it comes to employing emerging technologies, so it comes as no surprise that some countries are looking to integrate blockchain into their forces. There are multiple applications of this innovation in the armed forces, but for the sake of succinctness, we’re only going to talk about two.

The first one is the application of blockchain in militarized drones, particularly in the documentation of data that drones gather when deployed. It is common knowledge today that drones can be operated by artificial intelligence, with them flying over dangerous areas to survey landscapes where insurgents might have camped.

Footage taken by drones can be stored on the immutable ledger of a blockchain, and so can the flight patterns and other actions they perform during reconnaissance, according to Coincentral. If a drone is destroyed during its flight, the data collected can still be retrieved through the blockchain. And because it’s a decentralized network, the probability of the data getting destroyed, corrupted, or tampered with is little.

Another application is the use of blockchain in naval fleets. There are multiple countries today that use the same naval platform to govern a battleship’s arsenal control, a platform called the Aegis Combat System.

This system has been so effective that it’s been the top choice for naval operations for the last 50 years, with continuous improvements, of course. It employs a sophisticated radar network and a state-of-the-art guidance system enabling warships to respond to external threats within a split second.

But one of its major weaknesses is that it’s a centralized network. A successful cyber attack could compromise an entire naval fleet, rendering it vulnerable to bombardment. But placing the system in a decentralized network can potentially deal with this vulnerability as there will be multiple nodes to support the system.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the Aegis Combat System, is the first security supplier to adopt blockchain. The company is already working on integrating blockchain into its supply chain risk management, systems engineering, and software advancement, among other things.

These are but two of the possible uses of blockchain in the military sector. Cybersecurity, resilient communication capabilities, logistics support, and several more can drastically increase a country’s defensive capacity against threats to its sovereignty.