Power GRIDS
ARMY SUPPORT CONTRACT COMBINES GEOINT WITH DATA COLLECTED BY TACTICAL GROUND AND AIR FORCES TO IMPROVE THE QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF INFORMATION.
An industry team is moving ahead on a new contract to develop enhanced geospatial capabilities and related intelligence and command and control capabilities to provide the Army with faster access to relevant geospatial information and geospatially enabled improvements to actionable intelligence.
The Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), Topographic Engineering Center (TEC), last fall issued the Geospatial Research, Integration, Development and Support (GRIDS) contract to prime contractor SAIC, which is joined by principal subcontractor BAE Systems.
GRIDS is an indefinite-delivery/indefinite- quantity contract, with a one-year base period of performance and four oneyear options, with a total ceiling value of $250 million if the customer exercises all options. GRIDS will provide the Army with faster access to relevant geospatial information, and in turn support improvements in actionable intelligence.
The SAIC GRIDS team will provide a broad range of services, including support of geospatial systems; related sensor research and development; verification and validation, integration, and testing; systems engineering; demonstrations and experimentation, including advanced concept technology demonstrations (ACTD) and joint capability technology demonstrations (JCTD); and operational support across domains, including topographic engineering, image processing, military intelligence, battle command, modeling and simulation, and other operations.
“GRIDS is a great opportunity for SAIC and its teammates to deliver transformational capabilities to troops in combat,” said Jurgen Gobien, SAIC senior vice president and a general manager in the Intelligence, Security and Technology Group. “We will develop, demonstrate and deploy innovative products to empower the warfighter at all levels through timely information and knowledge management for operational decision support.”
“Access to intelligence from multiple sources should dramatically increase the speed of command by collapsing the decision cycle,” said John Osterholz, BAE Systems vice president and general manager for integrated C4ISR systems. “GRIDS will enable analysts to rapidly collect, analyze and manage information from multiple sources to significantly enhance warfighter combat situational awareness.”
BAE Systems will perform engineering tasks across a range of activities that include geospatial and human intelligence research and development, precision electro-optics sensors development, concept demonstration, experimentation, systems engineering, integration and operations support.
“BAE Systems over the past year and a half or so has invested a lot of research in trying to enhance what we call enabling information to and from the edge, where the soldier is on the ground,” said David Berns, the company’s program director of close-in C4ISR. “At the same time, we’re bringing the information from that point back to higher sources, where it can be utilized for more in-depth analysis. We feel we’re very strong in enhancing the capability benefiting the movement of important data around the battlefield, to where it can have an impact in near real time.”
DEMONSTRATION VEHICLE
Andrew McHugh, chief of the Force Projection Branch at TEC, explained the program this way: “The GRIDS program is a contract vehicle, with a prime contractor, that we can use to do demonstrations— taking mature technologies, integrating them together, doing prototype developments and limited production. We’re not doing the basic research, but the next step. That’s the purpose of GRIDS. It is primarily geospatial in nature, but we do other things, such as supporting the battle command community, intelligence community and terrain teams on the topographic side. GRIDS brings all these capabilities that we have in-house, and have a prime contractor that can support doing those things for our customers and ourselves.
“The contract is very broad, dealing with C4ISR, rapid prototyping using GIS tools, developing databases, processes, modeling and simulation as required. It’s not a set program per se, but a vehicle that enables us to get things done,” McHugh continued.
The purpose of GRIDS is not to implement any particular program or functionality in the field. Rather, it is to provide quick-turnaround support for TEC activities as the agency receives orders for reimbursable projects funded by other organizations.
As an example of a program supported, McHugh pointed to the Army BuckEye system, which is a remote sensing digital camera that helps defeat tactical threats and bolsters ISR and urban mapping efforts. “We have geospatial mapping capabilities in-house, with a system called BuckEye. The mission of BuckEye is to do mapping. The contract supports those mapping functions with BuckEye.”
“We do limited development— we’re not going to develop sensors from scratch. We deal with mature technologies. It’s integration of all COTS products into a sensor package, integrated into an air platform, and then running missions,” he added.
Another initiative that could be facilitated by GRIDS is Joint Geospatial Enterprise Services Science and Technology (JGES S&T), a research program in TEC, one of whose missions is to explore geospatial capabilities in the enterprise architecture. “It’s looking at the various echelons where you place your geospatial services,” McHugh said. “For example, if you want to do a certain type of processing for line of sight, or to use other types of geospatial tools, where do you place it in the correct echelon? If it’s a wide area of search, and you’re doing certain visibility linkages, you may want to put it at brigade level, depending on the complexity.”
“GRIDS is an opportunity to expand upon past work in collecting and producing tactically relevant geospatial information, focusing on operationalizing very high resolution data from Buckeye E-O and Lidar sensors,” said James Cantor, SAIC vice president and an operations manager in the Intelligence, Security and Technology Group.
“GRIDS will expand and enhance TEC’s distinctive position within the Army to conduct next-generation R&D such as JGES, transition maturing technologies to the Army acquisition community from ACTDs and JCTDs, provide next-generation Land Warfare operational intelligence systems such as CHAMPION, and also support current operational requirements,” said SAIC’s assistant vice president and division manager for the Operations, Intelligence and Security Business Unit, Peter Frank. “The SAIC team’s passion for developing, integrating, and deploying leading edge technology for battlefield dominance has resulted in unparalleled experience with all critical elements of the enterprise.”
CHAMPION TASKS
The SAIC-led CHAMPION program, which is the first funded effort under the GRIDS contract, aims to leverage existing technologies to get near-term enhancements into the human intelligence network, translating into speed of command and better situational awareness for unit commanders.
CHAMPION is a JCTD focused on optimizing the reporting and visualization of counterintelligence, human domain mission planning, asset and source management, and human intelligence-related data, and improving analysts’ link to intelligence collection from the tactical to the national level. The JCTD will incorporate tools for collection, mission and asset management, integrate geospatial and biometric capabilities, and transition to the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) to support an agile joint collection, collaboration and dissemination capability for counterintelligence, human intelligence and special operation forces.
The CHAMPION team, which is composed of SAIC, BAE Systems, Next Century Corp., LGB & Associates, K3 Enterprises, Kinex., TCG, and Harding Security Associates, will perform engineering and development tasks across a range of activities that include geospatial and human intelligence research and development, precision electro-optics sensors development, concept demonstration, experimentation, systems engineering, integration and operations support. ♦
