Written by / Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
Production Tool Speeds GEOINT for CENTCOM
Geospatial Intelligence is a foundation for collaboration throughout the intelligence community as it supports the warfighter and the decision-makers. The NGA Support Team (NST) at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) gets it, as an innovative pilot program developed by the NST has proved.
Starting with GEOINT as the foundation upon which all other information sources are layered to develop actionable intelligence for the front line, the technical executive (TX) at the CENTCOM NST decided to marry GEOINT with information technology to get actionable GEOINT to the warfighter faster and smarter. The result was the Data Production Environment (DPE).
Timeliness, a fundamental element of NGA’s mission, was the focus of the DPE initiative. Why? The NST’s TX described the working environment this way: “Before we launched the DPE initiative, our analysts [civilian and military] had to log on to multiple systems to access the mountain of data they needed to do their jobs.”
There had to be a better way for NGA to maintain its record of effective collaboration in the face of the increasing volume of GEOINT. The TX and his team set out to find that better way.
The team identified three challenges. First, they had to develop a tool that would allow analysts to efficiently and effectively discover and capture information. Second, they needed to create products for GEOINT analysts (both NGA and military) and their mission partners to use in visualizing that information—to see a common operating picture. Third, they had to design a tool to disseminate those products in the fastest possible way to the command’s warfighters.
The NST’s technical team rolled out a twostage plan. First, they looked at all the tools available to the analysts, and then they studied the command’s existing GEOINT workflow to determine how to improve the effectiveness of those tools.
The team found that visualization was key. As the TX noted, “Visualization was the common thread in sharing GEOINT and in collaborating with NGA’s mission partners in GEOINT development and analysis.” Visualization is especially important for an NST supporting a combatant command because military imagery, geospatial and all-source analysts work side by side with their NGA counterparts.
NGA had already led the way in the use of commercial visualization technology—Google Earth—as a tool for GEOINT collaboration by the time DPE was initiated. It made sense, therefore, for Google Earth, already one of NGA’s enterprise services, to become the foundation for DPE.
Next, the team looked at how analysts did their work and what they needed to do it better. The team had to answer those two questions to design procedures that served not only the analyst’s workflow, but also the mission partner’s operational tempo.
The team determined to provide all CENTCOM directorates with a single interface to visualize GEOINT and all-source intelligence, to quickly produce it in a streamlined, automated fashion, and to deliver it where it’s needed, when it’s needed. In the words of the TX, “As our forces confront increasingly adaptive threats, the technology infrastructure must adjust rapidly or the technology will become a burden, not an advantage.” The team secured the services of two full-time, onsite developers from NGA’s GEOINT Visualization Services program office, who sat with analysts and studied their workflow. This allowed the developers to customize Google Earth to automate most of the analysts’ tasks.
Is it working? If the words of the analysts participating in this pilot project are any indication, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” As a CENTCOM target specialist stated, “Once we saw how quickly [the DPE developers] gave us exactly what we asked for, we started developing our own efficiencies. They started us thinking about seriously streamlining our workflow.”
One CENTCOM imagery analyst noted, “DPE is changing the culture from a Cold War intelligence mentality to a streamlined, modern process that makes collaboration work better and faster.” “With the DPE approach, gone are the days of too many mouse clicks and too little analysis,” another target analyst observed.
With this kind of success, DPE has grown beyond just CENTCOM. Because this tool is so effective, NGA is now shipping DPE to its IC mission partners around the world so that they can better support the men and women in harm’s way.
The TX summed it all up: “By marrying the business process and the information technology, DPE enhances our ability to quickly get the data from headquarters to the tip of the spear.” It’s all about fulfilling the mission in the most efficient, effective and timely way possible.
This article was written by Juanita Hartbarger, a public affairs officer with NGA’s Office of Corporate Communications. It appeared originally in the May/June 2009 issue of NGA’s Pathfinder magazine.
NGA’s New Campus East Advances
In a mid-July ceremony, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency cut the ribbon to its New Campus East (NCE) at Fort Belvoir North, formerly known as the Engineering Proving Ground, Fort Belvoir, Va.
The ceremony marked the turnover of the first two buildings of the campus, the Technical Center and Central Utilities Plant, by the Corps of Engineers to NGA for interior fit-out at the new NGA Headquarters complex.
The remaining buildings are scheduled to be completed and open by September 2011. NGA facilities in the greater Washington, D.C., area are consolidating to Fort Belvoir in compliance with the Base Realignment and Closure law. This ribbon cutting represented tangible progress toward the goal of a state-ofthe- art new home for GEOINT.
In an interview with GIF earlier this year, NGA Deputy Director Lloyd Rowland spoke of the benefits of the consolidated facility: “First and foremost, we’re going to be able to bring together all of our analysts from around the Washington area to one central location, where they’ll be able to work and collaborate together more easily. That’s a huge benefit—collaboration on high-profile intelligence issues will be much easier.”
ENFIRE Kits Support Engineer Deployment
The Army Geospatial Center is fielding 200 Instrument Set, Reconnaissance and Surveying (ENFIRE) tool kits to deploying engineer units, improving their ability to rapidly collect engineering data while minimizing their exposure to enemy observation. Distribution of the kits will continue through summer 2010, and full rate production and fielding is being planned through 2015. Current reconnaissance tools require soldiers to manually record measurements from on top of a target using pencil, paper, compass and tape measure. The recorded information and data must then either be physically transported to the tactical operations center (TOC) or transmitted to the TOC by multi-line voice radio reports.
ENFIRE was designed to modernize and expedite the collection and dissemination of reconnaissance, construction, facilities and related information. It provides the capability for engineer soldiers to conduct tactical data collection at offset locations using a standardized format. The ENFIRE system allows the user to digitally collect and auto-populate standard Army forms with bridge, road, hasty minefield, and other data, using customized commercial software, in conjunction with government off-theshelf hardware and software and integrated with a computerbased geographic information system.
ENFIRE’s components greatly improve interoperability with existing command and control systems, providing rapid transmission of information, safer and more accurate data collection, and enhanced situational awareness in the soldier’s dynamic operational environment. ENFIRE is an Army program of record and will provide comprehensive maintenance, training and sustainment support. ♦
