ISR Interoperability Challenge
ISR INTEROPERABILITY CHALLENGE
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is co-leading an
exercise to improve interoperability through the ability to
transmit geospatial imagery and other types of intelligence.
By Michael Burnett
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is co-leading an
exercise to improve interoperability through the ability to
transmit geospatial imagery and other types of intelligence.
By Michael Burnett
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is co-leading an exercise this summer designed to improve interoperability between U.S. military services and coalition partners in their ability to transmit geospatial imagery and other types of intelligence.
The fifth version of the annual exercise, known as Empire Challenge, will take place July 7-August 1. Based at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, Calif., but reaching around the world, Empire Challenge provides military personnel with the opportunity to simulate the desert environments that U.S. forces currently face in the Middle East, explained Navy Commander Joseph Smith, deputy director of the NGA Airborne Integration Office and director of Empire Challenge.
“The primary objective is to look at interoperability between the services’ Distributed Common Ground Systems (DCGS) and to make sure the systems developed by the four services and Special Operations Command can exchange data and work together so that we can use our very limited intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets together more efficiently and effectively,” Smith said.
“We also conduct military operations with our most trusted partners. This also allows us to make sure the ground stations that we use in the United States to receive sensor data are interoperable with the sensors and the ground stations being used by our closest partners, like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia or other partners in NATO,” he added.
The DCGS architecture has been enabling the military services to share intelligence and strike capabilities within their own chains of command, but the development of the DCGS Integrated Backbone (DIB) has linked the disparate services together to collectively share those capabilities.
Smith recalled how Empire Challenge has fostered interoperability between joint and coalition forces in past years, testing the DIB and international technologies.
For joint interoperability, the Department of Defense has developed the Distributed Development Test Enterprise (DDTE), which permits forces to link up nodes of their specific integration labs together in a test network where they can run trials on their DCGS systems—either at China Lake or remotely from their default home locations.
By Empire Challenge 2006, NGA and its partners had developed network connections that allowed them to test ISR interoperability in near-real world scenarios. It wasn’t until Empire Challenge 2007, however, that DoD was able to connect participants in the exercise worldwide, bringing together more than 1,400 operators in six different countries through more than 20 nodes. Robust network connectivity allows DoD to fully test the DIB, which is still a relatively recent innovation.
“The DIB allows the systems used by the different services to communicate,” Smith said. “You could understand that a system that works for the Navy onboard ships wouldn’t work so well for the Marines, which has to move equipment around in Humvees and tracked vehicles, for the Air Force, which has very large bases, and for the Army, which has its equipment in larger and more mobile capabilities than the Marine Corps but smaller than the Air Force. Then our special operations forces need something that will fit in something the size of a Blackberry.”
So the DIB provides the means for sharing data and metadata between services, while they maintain their specialized ground station technologies. Testing the DIB’s capabilities is a key part of Empire Challenge.
Coalition Communication
While U.S. forces depend on the DIB for ISR interoperability, coalition forces use their own distinct systems. The United States and its allies are working together to develop standards that allow them to communicate through their own systems.
“Those standards allow us to make sure the information coming from our sensors is made to a precise standard so that the data can be understood in a variety of different services in one country and between countries that are operating together that adhere to those standards,” Smith said.
For example, Empire Challenge 2005 involved the participation of the United Kingdom and a sensor called the Raptor flown on its Tornado aircraft. The Raptor sensors could pass imagery to U.K. ground stations but not U.S. stations, which posed data-sharing obstacles between the two nations’ forces. NGA decided to tackle the problem the next year, implementing engineering modifications that enabled U.S. warfighters to see the Raptor data in the DCGS Imagery Testbed, a mockup of DCGS imagery components used in exercises.
“It far exceeded any of our expectations,” Smith stated. “In Empire Challenge 2007, we took those successes and brought an actual Marine Corps ground station, called Tactical Exploitation Group, and the Army’s version, which is called DCGS Army, to Empire Challenge. Then we flew the Tornado with the Raptor sensor on it. We were able to downlink to the testbed and also directly to the Army and the Marine Corps systems. So a British platform, flying a sensor, was able to send its data directly to the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army.”
Improving that capability to transfer information between American and British systems paves the way for the two nations to share critical intelligence in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where they often have been working together to secure different areas of those countries.
“This means that if you have a British platform flying, and he has critical information that could help our troops, he could get that information to them in real-time. He could beam it directly down to their ground stations. That amount of interoperability and the time that saves could make the difference in achieving your military objectives or protecting U.S., U.K. and other coalition troops from something that might be dangerous that the sensor picked up,” Smith noted.
2008 Goals
Building on past successes of Empire Challenge while pushing the envelope to incorporate increasingly ambitious goals is vital to each year’s exercise. This year, NGA will connect diverse ISR systems together over the DDTE to test five major joint mission threads: persistent surveillance, joint targeting, multi-domain awareness, non-traditional ISR and strike, and joint ISR management.
Empire Challenge participants will use the last week of the exercise to weave the joint mission threads together to demonstrate how to conduct an entire operation from end-to-end digitally with minimal human handling of information. Increased machine-to-machine interaction would free up human operators to analyze the data and make strategic judgments based on it instead of spending valuable time copying it or typing it into a terminal, Smith commented.
Empire Challenge 2008 also will devote considerable effort to coalition interoperability, specifically involving an advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD) with a system known as the Multi-sensor Aerospace/ground Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC). Nine NATO nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States—participate in MAJIIC, which is designed to make use of coalition standards to increase interoperability between the contributing members.
“MAJIIC has participated in previous Empire Challenges, but not to the level that it will this year,” Smith explained. “The key technology in the MAJIIC ACTD is something called the Coalition Shared Data Server (CSD). The CSD is a super-database that allows you to share still frame imagery, video, ground-moving target indicators, and other intelligence data between any nation that has the CSD and any other nation that is putting information into that database.”
Those capabilities would boost the effectiveness of NATO military operations and reaction forces. Operations in Afghanistan occur under the banner of NATO, Smith stressed, and improvements in ISR information sharing would provide tremendous support to warfighters there.
The CSD is designed to be interoperable with the U.S. DIB, Smith said, meaning that any improvements to the CSD would reap significant rewards for U.S. forces.
“The U.S. military, which is building the DCGS Integration Backbone, would now have a direct electronic way to send information to our coalition partners in NATO without having to go through any additional expense or development. They would have a cut-and-dry interoperability solution,” he observed.
Meanwhile, DoD will introduce a beta version of the DIB 1.3 this year, providing the means to test special new features such as establishing networks faster, sharing multiple types of data previously unavailable on the DIB, and using special security services to provide access to authorized personnel while safeguarding information from attacks.
Empire Challenge runs four weeks this year, as opposed to two weeks last year and six weeks in 2006. The exercises will incorporate 20 proposals received out of 77 from across joint and coalition forces. Between 1,000 and 1,400 operators will participate in Empire Challenge 2008 in Australia, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and various locations in the United States.
The primary co-leaders of Empire Challenge are NGA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Forces Command and the Joint Interoperability Test Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., along with 17 other stakeholders, operating under the sponsorship of the Acquisition, Resources and Technology Directorate within the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Standards Pilot
A key role also is reserved for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG), an international industry association working toward geospatial intelligence standards.
A total of 349 members belong to the Open Geospatial Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of open consensus industry standards to enable the use of geospatial data across various enterprises. Sam Bacharach, OGC outreach director, is serving as the program manager for the consortium’s Empire Challenge pilot project.
“A pilot for OGC is an activity where we are paid by a sponsor, in this case NGA, to test OGC interfaces in a real-world or near-real-world environment,” Bacharach said. “We have designed them, we have tested them internally, and we have run test beds to perfect them. The question is how useful are they, and how well do they fit in a specific environment?”
So OGC brings its members’ expertise to bear on the ISR environment to evaluate the utility of OGC interfaces, focusing on the introduction of service-oriented architecture into DCGS systems. OGC members include companies that are major players in geospatial information services, such as Microsoft, Google, ESRI and Intergraph, as well as major systems integrators such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems, along with major universities and U.S. government agencies.
“We believe that this open standard consensus process yields an answer that is not at the mercy of any individual organization, whether that’s a vendor or an integrator,” Bacharach remarked. “It opens the market to choice by the user. Today I am using a tool from company A. Tomorrow company B comes out with a tool that actually does one little piece of the puzzle much better than company A does. Today, I would have to buy the entire tool from company B and throw out the tool from company A. Why should that continue to be the case? Why can’t I assemble functional components from many different sources and getting the best answer for what I want to have?”
For Empire Challenge, OGC focuses on a concept that serves as a large piece of that puzzle. As Bacharach explained it, analysts who seek imagery on a specific area must place a request for that imagery about their specific areas. Should analysts seek information about a narrowly defined neighborhood, they are likely to receive more information than they actually require in the form of imagery stretching for miles into interconnected neighborhoods.
“The service system we have designed our interfaces to support would allow a vendor to write software, which they have done, that would let you put a box around the block you live on and then it would send you just the data for the area you really cared about,” instead of being forced to download a great deal of data useless to a specific analyst, Bacharach said.
“Because it’s only sending you a little bit of data compared to the other data, the transmission time is much faster and it’s much more responsive. You move over a block and it sends you more data as you go instead of sending you 100 blocks worth of data, hoping they got you where you really want to be,” he added.
The OGC service then would provide clipping of imagery to specifically target a desired location. Last year, OGC began assisting with the documentation of service-oriented architecture processes. Its target objectives for 2009 will depend on the results of
Empire Challenge this year.
“When you start dealing with operators, you can’t just walk up to them and say, ‘What would you do with my brand new toy if I gave it to you?’ because they have no clue what your toy does. That makes it very difficult for them to internalize it and figure out how they would use it,” Bacharach commented.
“That’s why we have the cycle of Empire Challenge: It’s to show new functionality proposed by the smart guys from the outside and how it might fit together and what you might want to do with it,” he added. ♦
