Battle Command Alliance

ARMY, ESRI COMBINE TO DEVELOP NEW WAYS TO
INTEGRATE GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGY MORE
CLOSELY INTO C2 PROCESSES.

BY ERIN FLYNN JAY
MGT CORRESPONDENT

Anticipated benefits to military operations include integrating geospatial information more closely in battle command processes. Technology is already finding its way to the warfighter under the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit (CJMTK). According to TEC, a concept and capability for geo-enabled battle command will be provisioned to the force by 2011.

This core research will influence the use of geospatial technology in combat systems throughout the Department of Defense and will significantly contribute to the design of the next generation of geospatial capability in command and control applications, participants say. The pact represents a continuation of cooperation between TEC, which researches how geospatial technology improves decision-making support throughout the DoD command and control systems, and ESRI, an industry leader in GIS software, geospatial modeling and analysis, and service-oriented architecture for spatially enabled applications.

“ESRI has enjoyed many years of successful collaboration with TEC,” said Jack Dangermond, ESRI president. “We look forward to working with TEC to design these pioneering prototypes that will support a new generation of defense geospatial capability.”

TEC’s ability to provide the warfighter with a superior knowledge of today’s complex and ever-changing operational environment depends on a productive marriage of TEC’s geospatial tools, talent and military geospatial business logic with complementary commercial geospatial information technology. TEC’s partnership with ESRI allows TEC access to powerful software, database, systems and architectural concepts critical to its continued success as an Army geospatial knowledge center.

PROTOTYPE TOOLS

TEC and ESRI are combining their skills and resources to design and develop prototypes of new battle command data management and decision support tools. Specifically, ESRI will help TEC identify and incorporate key technologies for the architecture and design of prototypes. These prototypes will serve as reference implementations or model applications that demonstrate improved geospatial capability in battlespace management.

The agreement calls for the two organizations to:

• Design mobile geospatial applications that take advantage of server technology for data updates and synchronization when connected and operate as independent, stand-alone units when disconnected.
• Prepare image services that exploit BuckEye imagery, a combination of high-resolution color images and LIDAR data that supports intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and tactical operations. BuckEye imagery is a proven important geospatial resource used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Design and create several advanced technology defense prototypes that improve the ability of command and control systems to operate with geospatially aware battlefield objects, server technology that provides tactical situational awareness, and geospatial technology to analyze human intelligence.

ESRI and TEC officials are jointly attending technical workgroups and meeting with other defense and intelligence agencies to share the results of the research and engineering of the battle command geospatial technology developed under the agreement. The CRADA was signed this past summer at the ESRI International User Conference. However, the ESRI/TEC partnership in support of battle command objectives has been evolving for several years, and the CRADA is merely the next stage in the partnership.

The CRADA will engage senior staff at TEC and ESRI in a formal dialog to share information and establish priorities. “ESRI relies heavily on key customers such as Army TEC to drive requirements for both ESRI Core and Solutions products,” said Brian T. Lehman, account manager, Army TEC, at ESRI.

“Under the CRADA, Army TEC now has a powerful mechanism through which they can engage ESRI to support full consideration of Army requirements and discuss R&D in both general terms and in response to specific objectives,” Lehman said. “At all levels, ESRI is fully committed to supporting Army TEC in delivering innovative battle command capabilities to the warfighter.”

SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY

Progress is active on several key fronts surrounding a concept of geo-enabled battle command, according to Michael Powers, technical director, geospatial research and engineering at TEC.

“A central tenet capability focuses on creating a basis of semantic interoperability, which unifies actionable geospatial information and data with the military decision-making process [MDMP] used in battle command processes,” said Powers. “This semantic mapping occurs at the mission/task level. In doing this, it allows the non-geospatial expert to create, access or discover relevant information in support of the decisions surrounding their tasks and actions.”

A second critical area of advance is in the synchronization and replication of geospatial data across the force, both vertically and horizontally. “As we advance the number, types and methods of capturing geospatial data and information, there is a near-term need to achieve this type of data integrity and consistency of view and use,” said Powers.

“ESRI’s commercial capability has been applied in two TEC-based experiments, which have led to the adjustment of emerging concepts of operation by Army Training and Doctrine Command schools,” he added.

TEC will address four other prototypes or reference implementations of software best practices in FY 2009. These will address concepts necessary to achieve a more comprehensive insight toward GIS capabilities and a concept of geo-enabled battle command.

Specifically, Powers said, these efforts will address: dismounted operations; a tactical situational awareness server predicated on the geodatabase; the image server and services; and a range of decision tools that integrate ground and air operations and address the MDMP.

TEC expects to face technology challenges or issues. “Collectively, we see issues of GIS scalability, synchronization or replication, and enterprise definition within a tactical context,” Powers said. “But this again addresses the power of the partnership. ESRI seeks to understand and respond to the operational needs of the tactical force. TEC represents a link to geo-tactical subject matter experts, validated use cases and an experimental charter to advance military geospatial sciences.”

These challenges do not reflect on ESRI capability, Powers made clear. “Rather they reflect a growing recognition of the value of geospatial information as part of the warfighter’s critical information requirements. This realization, coupled with a changing threat environment of ‘irregular operations’ in complex geographies creates a density of spatial information and a need for high-fidelity data collection, attribution and relationships.” From an enterprise standpoint, the distribution and provisioning of data and information on the tactical network, coupled with where in the force decisions will be made, drive design issues of process separation, thick or thin clients, and business logic.

Warfighter benefits occur in three ways. First, it will bring a more intimate integration of geospatial information within battle command processes. This will result in a radically richer interaction than that of terrain as merely the “wallpaper” of the common operating picture.

“Second, we feel that interoperability, particularly horizontal and peer-to-peer interoperability solutions, are more likely to emerge from the commercial computing sector than that of DoD,” Powers said. “Commercial software firms make their living connecting and empowering people. Consequently, we believe this sector will be the richest source for that technology.”

TEC’s job in this partnership is to focus solutions on the unique challenges of tactical operations. The third is the life cycle cost savings to the force if TEC capabilities manifest themselves within a future ESRI offering. Technology is already finding its way to the warfighter under NGA’s CJMTK. There will be spinouts along the way. Powers said he believes a concept and capability for geoenabled battle command will be provisioned to the force by early in the next decade.

INTEGRATED GIS

Across government, agencies are integrating ESRI software solutions as a central component in building a strong GIS. By integrating GIS with government processes, staff can create an information base that shares information resources, reduces data redundancy and increases data accuracy; performs joint project analysis; provides decision support; and streamlines processes to increase efficiency, automate tasks, and save time and money. Geography is a framework for organizing global knowledge, and GIS is a technology for being able to create, manage, publish and disseminate this knowledge for all of society.

GIS plays a critical role within the defense community. Applications for defense and intelligence include command and control, defense mapping organizations, base operations and facility management, force protection and security, environmental security and resource management, health and hygiene, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, logistics, military engineering, mine clearance and mapping, mission planning, and peacekeeping operations. The C4I domain supports timelier and better decisions by using a variety of tools to analyze, assess and plan actions. ArcGIS bolsters C4I capabilities by providing a common spatial context and the tools to provide decision-makers, commanders, and warfighters with a distributed, scalable, decision support environment.

Precision engagement includes the coordination of strike assets in time and space to achieve the commander’s desired effect. ArcGIS provides the information framework and tools to understand time and space activities and constraints, then assists in passing precise information to the engagement systems.

ArcGIS also provides a critical information structure that connects the concepts of network-centric operations (NCO). This common foundation permits the spatial context of data to flow as information for ISR to C4I and as actions from C4I to PE. ArcGIS provides the framework for storage, dissemination and exploitation of battlespace knowledge throughout the defense and intelligence infrastructure.

The ArcGIS platform is an enterprise information technology infrastructure that aligns well with the concepts of NCO—using a network to connect decision-making across multiple defense domains. NCO connects warfighting to strategic intelligence to installation management, and is able to seamlessly integrate homeland defense with other internal security activities.

As a defensewide infrastructure, ArcGIS is simultaneously able to support a variety of warfighting missions, including command and control, business missions such as installation management, and strategic intelligence missions such as spatial data production. The re-use of spatial data across a common spatial information infrastructure offers immediate cost savings in addition to important new capabilities. ♦