On Tuesday at the 40th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Aerospace Executive VP Tanya Pemberton hosted a discussion with defense and intelligence leadership on the importance (and challenge) of sharing data between their services.

Pemberton was joined by Gen. Michael A. Guetlein of the U.S. Space Force, and Vice Admiral Frank “Trey" Whitworth — two men who have led the adoption of advanced technology in their fields and commands for decades.

The panel touched on many topics, and you'll be able to watch it in full soon. But for now, here's a brief snippet of the conversation:

Pemberton: Through my decades working in the intelligence community, I learned very early on it is all about the data. It's about data collections, about data integration, it’s about data dissemination. I would like to hear a little bit more about the challenges that you face in the movement of data from all of the various sources that we deal with to actionable intelligence that actually gets out to the warfighters in the field.

Gen. Gutlein: I think if you look at the future fight, it's going to be about information warfare. And access to data is going to be absolutely critical all the way to the tactical edge. The new model going forward is going to be through a mesh network across all of our regimes, to include terrestrial undersea cables in a mesh, resilient architecture. So that no matter what happens, the matter what conflict we find ourselves in, or what bad day, we can get that data from the sensor to the shooter.

But we are drowning in data, which means we have to make sense of that data at the point of collection. That needs to be rapid, but it's generally going to be be very low data rates, which means we've got to spend a lot of time processing the data at the edge.

Pemberton: You have a lot of industry partners here, and on this topic of data, how can industry best help? What are the key challenges that you would look to industry and, if you could, say I really want help here?

VADM Whitworth: I think for us, we want your innovation. I cannot hire enough cyber experts, network experts, data experts, IT experts to solve my problems. I need to really rely on the innovation coming out of industry — and the good thing is, there's more innovation coming out today than there ever has been, I think, in the history of the US, including the push to the Moon.

Gen. Gutlein also had some final remarks on innovation that were too good to pass up including here:

I think what you're going to see is not 5 to 10 years from now, I think it's 2 to 3 years from now, as a seamless integration of Title 10 and Title 50. A sharing of data like we've never seen before, a common operating picture that we've been trying to chase my entire career. We've been looking for that perfect picture that, you know, everybody knows everything about everything that's going on out there. We are on the cusp of that because of the innovation coming out of industry. Artificial intelligence is is growing leaps and bounds by the day. It's not going to take us 5 to 10 years; we are going to be there, I predict, in the next 2 to 3 years — and it is going to be a completely different way of looking at the battlefield, a completely different way of fighting and it is really going to be our competitive advantage against our adversaries.

Keep an eye on Kickstage's media and events category for more from Space Symposium.