Tool of Two Tradecrafts
INTEGRATED EXPLOITATION CAPABILITY BRINGS IMAGERY AND GEOSPATIAL ANALYSIS TOGETHER TO CREATE BETTER ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is continuing to update and improve a popular tool that is already providing integrated imagery and geospatial analysis at 3,000 military and intelligence community workstations around the world.
The Integrated Exploitation Capability (IEC), an interoperable suite of some 280 commercial hardware and software products, represents a major success story for NGA, according to James Sapcoe, the agency’s IEC program manager.
The nine-year-old program, which won the Top 5 DoD award for systems engineering and integration from the National Defense Industrial Association last fall, is making crossagency fusion a reality for users at 100 locations, including every unified combatant command, as well as service centers, NGA sites and intelligence community sites.
To enhance the program’s effectiveness and accessibility, NGA officials and contractor Lockheed Martin are exploring a number of new approaches, including moving to an enterprise perspective and distributing a set of compact disks containing key elements of IEC software.
DESKTOP SOLUTION
The program and its ongoing enhancements are focused on a central goal—providing a pathway to move from stovepiped and custom hard-copy film-based mapping production tools to a totally digital desktop solution using COTs hardware and software.
“The key is that they are all integrated together,” Sapcoe explained. “A lot of times, the software is dependent on the hardware and the hardware is dependent on the operating system, and there are many different modules that interact with the COTS packages. So we want to be sure that, when we bring in an upgrade to one of those software packages, or add something new, we don’t break the system. That’s the key part of this whole program—being sure that we can integrate from end to end and have mission assurance when it’s out in the field that it’s reliable.
“We’ve been replacing a lot of the legacy systems with this integrated suite of COTS, combining common tools between two tradecrafts— the imagery analyst and the geospatial analyst. We’re bringing those tools together to enable them to create better actionable intelligence for the warfighter and decision-maker,” he added.
A configurable system comprising COTS software and hardware to manage and exploit soft-copy imagery from national, commercial and airborne platforms, IEC is a critical tool for such military operations as targeting, battle damage assessment and mission planning. It is also used for safety and navigation for nautical and aeronautical charts, national special security events such as sporting events and political conventions, and natural disasters.
Depending on their mission, IEC users may have two monitors, enabling both stereo and mono analysis. They may also have three monitors, and in the case of doing broad area search, they may have a fourth monitor up on the wall, a work-group monitor with a huge plasma screen. It is tailorable to meet the user’s mission, but all runs on a single software baseline.
Key to the success of the program, Sapcoe said, is teamwork and a common sense of mission among NGA, contractors, stakeholders and customers. “We have a tight working relationship through collaboration and open, honest communications on a daily basis,” he said. “We’re all working on the same team, and it’s hard to separate between the government and contractors, because we’re working toward the same strategic objective.”
ARCHITECTURAL CHANGES
IEC is continuously changing and adapting, Sapcoe noted, in line with strategic goals spelled out in the National System for Geospatial Intelligence strategic intent document.
To meet emergency needs, for example, the agency has established a workstation pool, which is pre-staged and ready to go in the event of a crisis. As a result, deployments have been made within as few as three days.
In the technical realm, IEC improvements have included standard upgrades to the latest commercial technology of operating systems and hardware platforms, as well as integrating new commercial software packages that expand the user’s ability to provide creative and innovative solutions to their problem sets.
“The architectural changes that we’ve been working on include moving a lot of the software off the desktop, and making it corporately available on the enterprise application server,” Sapcoe explained. “By moving it from a systems perspective to an enterprise perspective, more users have access to those capabilities and tools, not just on an IEC system, but across the enterprise. This also allows them to better manage from a change management perspective, as well as to more cost-effectively manage the number of licenses that are actually required. It’s moving from a system to more of an enterprise workstation.”
Another change involves the Platform Independent Soft-Copy Exploitation Solution (PISCES), which provides a software baseline to users, both internally and externally, without having to procure the whole system. “It’s like Microsoft Outlook, which you can buy in a box and, with adequate knowledge, install it and bring up an operational system. You can take PISCES and load it on a single workstation or an entire site. It allows users or sites to procure their own hardware or take our solution and integrate it into their host network. It’s also more flexible for upgrading,” he said.
In addition, program managers are looking at new technologies such as Wide Area File Transfer, which allows an increase in performance in data transfer from point to point. “Although it’s not directly related to exploitation, it is an enabler that allows the users to get their data more quickly. So we’re looking from a system perspective out toward a more enterprise view,” Sapcoe said.
“We are taking a lot of our geospatial holdings and data sets and making them more accessible to users by managing the way we format them, so that if the users want to go back to look at current holdings of NGA data while they’re doing their analysis, they can bring that up seamlessly and quickly, and integrate that into the analysis they are performing.”
Summing up IEC, Sapcoe pointed out that its cost, schedule and performance have been outstanding for such a large acquisition program. More importantly, he said, “We’ve also satisfied the need that’s out there across the community, by providing a single platform that allows a community to perform its mission with a standard configuration.” ♦
