Lens

Created 2026-08-20

The coming unified or federated digital system of systems which will include many or all of the following: human- and machine-readable and -usable digital twin, common operating picture (COPCommon Operating Picture: a shared, realtime display of the battlespace.), sensor fusion, simulation, analysis, course of action suggestion, mission planning, mission control, drone programming, drone flight, meshing, secure messaging, training, wiki / lessons learned / after action reports, payments, R&D;, design, 3D printing, local offline use, cloud use, and more. The point isn’t that all of these features need to be actually instantiated on, say, a drone pilot’s field laptop, which would be prohibitively resource-intensive.

Rather, the skeleton only needs to be in place. The disparate parts simply need to be commonly accessible, seamlessly integrated, and so forth, which is why the creation of common open standards for hardware, software, and communications is so vital now. The idea here is that commanders, soldiers, analysts, political leaders, and military industrialists (both engineers and management) are all using the same system to do their jobs and all be part of one huge feedback loop (with whatever minimal compartmentalizing of information is needed); and also that AI is infused throughout the whole system locally and at scale, analyzing enormous amounts of data and suggesting improvements.

At present, there are existing platforms which each take on multiple features from the list above, and which if plugged in together with a common protocol could already encompass most of the listed features. Ukraine’s Delta platform is one, which focuses heavily on the COP side and is already a sort of software suite of suites. I’m aware of efforts to plug 3D military drone simulators into Mission Planner, an open source drone programming and drone control software suite that natively only renders in 2D. As these platforms continue to unify, we will approach the creation of the Lens. For the human user, 2D will give way to 3D, which will give way to VR, which will give way to AI VR- / world-generation-on-demand, which will eventually even give way to direct brain-machine interface like Neuralink.