Editor's Perspective

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GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 6 (November/December)

As anyone who attended the U.S. Geospatial Foundation’s GEOINT 2009 Symposium in San Antonio, Texas this fall can attest, full-motion video (FMV) analysis is one of the hottest and fastest-developing areas of geospatial and ISR technology. Major companies are creating a wide range of tools for this intensive form of surveillance, which is clearly playing a vital and growing role in support of operations in Afghanistan.

So it will be interesting to see what conclusions U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) draws when it issues its report sometime early next year on the 2009 edition of Empire Challenge, the joint and coalition ISR exercise in the summer in China Lake, Calif., and elsewhere. The exercise included a number of video-related systems among a total of 38 ISR capabilities assessed.

Initial public assessments have been positive. The director of the exercise, Air Force Colonel George Krakie, for example, has pointed to the success of a test involving High-Speed Guard, an existing system for the transfer of information between different levels of security classification. The system enabled the transfer of video information from the test site to imagery exploiters in the United Kingdom.

In another test cited by Krakie, full-motion video from a UAV was encrypted and transmitted to warfighters on the ground. Still, he has acknowledged that the tests showed that there was still work to be done in achieving interoperability with allies of video and other sensor data.

Of course, Empire Challenge covered many other systems as well, and the lessons of it are already starting to percolate through work on a variety of projects. The Air Force Electronic Systems Center, for example, is incorporating findings from the exercise into its work on the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) family of systems, and the future DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB), which will link the six DCGS systems operated by the services, special operations forces and the intelligence community.

Harrison Donnelly, Editor
Geospatial Intelligence Forum
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