The US military command, NORAD, which is charged with watching and protecting the North American airspace, over the US and Canada, has implemented artificial intelligence (AI) to detect threats that previously would have slipped to be noticed. 

The new AI algorithm called the Pathfinder, cojoins data from military, commercial and government sensors and goes to create overall, common imagery of the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command.

“It essentially takes and ingests — aggregates — data from multiple systems, data that would in the past have been ... left on the cutting room floor and not analyzed or assessed in a timely manner,” said Gen. Glen VanHerck, who commands NORAD and USNORTHCOM, while speaking at the Air Force Association’s virtual Air Warfare Symposium last week. “The Pathfinder program uses machine learning to help us analyze that data from multiple systems — not only military systems but commercial systems, other government agency systems.”

What Pathfinder is basically doing is to bring data from different systems into a consolidated form, helping NORAD see an overall picture, that it previously didn't have and because of that, several threats would 'go under the radar' per se. Gen VanHerck referred to an example from 2015 when a gyrocopter had managed to land in the White House lawn completely undetected, which demonstrated the overlook on NORAD's part. 

“When you go back and look at that scenario when you look at those systems that monitor the national Capitol region individually, no single system had full awareness or saw that gyrocopter,” he explained.

The Pathfinder was created in collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon organisation that has a specialisation in using commercial technologies for defence purposes.