DARPA's Big Data Project

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. DARPA is well known for the very first developments of new technologies, such as the hypertext system and GPS. 
This agency has a new project called XDATA in March, 2012 as part of President Obama's "Big Data Initiatives." The focus of this project is to develop computational techniques and software tools for processing and analyzing large volumes of mission-oriented data collected by federal agencies.
XDATA aims to build scalable algorithms that process and visualize imperfect and incomplete data spewing from DoD supercomputers. There is an other project called Mind's Eye, which concentrate on breakthrough algorithms that automate the recognition and description of human activities, real movement.
The data from battle fields is collected by many sensors equipped on the vehicle like the Army's ARGUS or the Air Force's Gorgon Stare. These vehicles create around several petabytes, the unit of which is 1 million Gigabytes, of video a day.That means DoD should pull out the real time intel from the immense data. XDATA and Mind's Eye are still on-going projects to build models for each purpose.

References:
1. http://www.patexia.com/feed/darpa-is-pushing-big-data-on-the-military-20120610
2. http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2012/03/12/military-intelligence-redefined-big-data-in-the-battlefield/