Q&A: Robert W. Burkhardt

GEOSPATIAL INTEGRATOR:
Building a Geospatial Enterprise Across the Army



Robert W. Burkhardt
Army Geospatial Information Officer
Deputy Topographer of the Army
Director, Topographic Engineering Center

From 1996 to 1998, Burkhardt served as executive director of civil works for the Army Corps of Engineers. He retired at the rank of colonel after 26 years of active service. His previous positions included chief of staff of the Army Force Integration Support Agency, and chief of the Combat Maneuver Division, Force Development Directorate, Army deputy chief of staff for operations.

Burkhardt holds a Bachelor of Science in geology and a Master of Science in geodetic science from Ohio State University.

Burkhardt was interviewed by MGT Editor Harrison Donnelly.

Q: What is the mission of the Topographic Engineering Center?

A: We are in the midst of change. The Army is transforming the way it collects, shares and disseminates its geospatial and temporal data. TEC is right in the middle of this transformation. We are transforming into the Army Geospatial Center, focused not solely on research and development, but primarily on building a geospatial enterprise across the Army, from tactical backup to national organizations. Our mission has become the design, implementation and operations of that enterprise. We delivered some very successful research and development over the last few years that is the foundation of that change. We are now able to take enterprise geographic information systems and make them applicable to connect both intelligence and battle command systems into a single geospatial enterprise.

Q: How do you see your role as director of the center?

A: There are really several roles here. As director of TEC I am to deliver the best geospatial research and development technologies in conjunction with our academic, industry and other federal partners. As the director of the Army Geospatial Center, it is my role to pave the way to help PMs and PEOs successfully integrate the geospatial enterprise into their systems. We help the acquisition community, contractor community and field units with systemof- systems engineering, cost-effective programming/scheduling, introduction of technology, risk reduction and increasing combat effectiveness of their systems. I am charged to develop and publish the minimum set of geospatial enterprise standards and then certify that they have incorporated the minimum set of geospatial enterprise standards in their systems.

In both these director roles I’m fundamentally just inspiring people to put forth their best efforts to bring about this change. I am blessed with great people. We have some terrific challenges to overcome, so my role is enabling us to collectively do the best we can and keep our eyes focused on the goal.

Q: You became the Army’s first geospatial information officer this year. What is your role there, and what issues have you been involved with as a result?

A: My role as GIO is to be a very effective advocate for the geospatial enterprise across the Army at all levels. Essentially we are trying to incorporate GIS enterprise technology into Army battle command systems and processes to improve interoperability and situational awareness across the Army. The technology is available today to implement an enterprise and gain efficiencies very similar to what you can see in a well-executed GIS enterprise at the county or state levels of our government. The challenge is to educate the Army in this technology and change the way in which we develop Army systems. We have stovepipes of processes and silos of data and information.

Today we are hindered in sharing the common operating picture and making combat-effective transfers of authority between units. Almost every stovepipe that we have in the Army has some geospatial or temporal data associated with it. Many of them use different data models and different tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination schemes. Getting them all together so that we can use the geospatial data collected in any one of the stovepipes across the others is key to increasing the Army’s combat effectiveness. My job is to establish the governance, policies, resources, plans and priorities necessary to drive this change. I must ensure it’s understood by all that it’s a team sport. It’s not something that we’re going to accomplish acting alone. Establishing a geospatial enterprise is not something that’s being done only by all the Army processes and system owners, but also by NGA, Marine Corps and special operations forces. We’re not going to succeed if we’re doing it in isolation.

The key point here is that we’ve just stood up, and have been active for only a few months. The first thing we had to do was establish governance. We did that in the form of the Geospatial Governance Board [GGB]. That governing piece is really the biggest issue we’ve been working with—standing it up and getting the staff together. It takes time in a bureaucracy to bring on a new organization. We’ve been focused on bringing that together, making sure everyone understands our lane in the road, what we’re trying to do and how that intersects with everyone else’s lane in the road, and gather the necessary resources to put that in place.

Our significant challenge with minimal staff is to try and keep up all the activities the Army is doing to win the global war on terrorism and transform in the midst. Introducing a new piece into the puzzle is not easy. Establishing the overarching strategy, architecture, initial goals and realistic taskers has been consuming to say the least.

Q: What is the Geospatial Governance Board [GGB], previously known as the Geospatial General Officer Steering Committee, and what are some of the key issues before it?

A: The Army Geospatial Governance Board is seven three-stars [G2, G3, G6, G8, Chief of Engineers, Military Deputy Acquisition, ARCIC CG] as voting members and invited guests [director NGA, USMC G2, Army G4, ACSIM, SOCOM and others], many of whom have now become significant partners. The GGB is the body that gives me my marching orders while establishing a strategy and goals and resolves issues we cannot resolve within a process owner’s domain or at the working levels of the Governance Board.

They will approve the policies and work to deconflict issues with other Army decision forums. Their key issues are the same ones I have been dealing with as the GIO: standards, GIO standup and initial goals, operating procedures, setting the vision, setting the strategy, and requirements validation.

They’re dealing with the idea of having a new staff and staff function for the Army, which has not had a geospatial information office before. It’s like when we introduced a chief information officer. Now you have a new player, and the question is how do you act with that new player. What role do they have, and when should they insert themselves, and when should we tell them to be quiet? It’s dealing with those types of things. Since we have the Marine Corps, special operations and the NGA/National System for Geospatial-Intelligence [NSG] all present in the same body, the issue is how do we do this together? We’ve formed an Army governing board, and the Marines would like to make that an Army-Marine Corps governing board, but how do we do that? NGA would like that to be wrapped into the NSG governance structure. How do we do that? There are a lot of good issues in dealing with how to bring this team together, and act not just as an Army enterprise, but as a national enterprise for geospatial.

The organizational issues of the command and control of the geospatial and topographic units are critical. It doesn’t exist today. All the individual formations at brigade, division, corps and above don’t have someone that provides them guidance, keeps them focused on the right things, advocates for them, gets them trained and keeps them tuned to standards. So there’s a command and control issue.

In addition, there are the POM and the “supp” realities. We have a lot of good ideas, and the supp has generated a lot of good capabilities. The Army G-3 has said that we have 60 battlecommand- related systems and are going to 80. We really need to get to the point where we can use all of these in harmony together. By incorporating GIS enterprise technology and making our systems more interoperable and eliminating those stovepipe databases, I believe we will be able to reduce the number of systems required, improve situational awareness across the Army and gain efficiencies in executing plans and operations. Because the supplemental funding bills allowed us to bring capabilities to the fight fast, we now have to adjust those as well as systems coming from our programs of record to conform to geospatial enterprise standards if we want to maximize our combat capability. How do we do that?

Then there is the non-traditional mission space for the topographic community. We found ourselves over the last 30 to 75 years not really dealing with a lot of the issues on how data is transferred. We had figured it out, and it was a map, so we went through and did it. Then people put overlays together over top of that foundation. Now we’ve got a different set of technologies in GIS, so how does that impact all the command and control and intel systems? It’s back to what we needed to do when we first started to use computers, but didn’t have the tools to do it. We also must get our arms around all of the Joint Capability Technical Demonstrations [JCTDs] and Quick Response Capabilities [QRCs], things that industry, DARPA and DoD are doing. They need to understand what this geospatial enterprise is, so that they can design and build to it, and don’t have to duplicate efforts and try to do something unique.

The last thing that the governing board has to deal with is how it connects to other Army governing boards. It’s the same thing with the four-star decision processes in the Pentagon and OSD. How do we connect with those other ways of deciding things? We have to figure out how to do that.

Q: What can geospatial intelligence do to improve military battle planning systems? What is TEC doing to enhance capabilities in this area?

A: If you look at what we’ve been focused on at TEC over the last few years, it’s really a niche of super-high-fidelity data sets that allow us to fight in urban and complex terrains. We’re helping to transform planning and execution systems, showing how enterprise GIS technologies apply to those planning systems using high-fidelity and high-resolution data and information. We’ve been engaged in making sure people can layer their data and expose it to one another. A lot of the early work on Distributed Common Ground Station Army [DCGS-A] with the Joint Intelligence Operations Center-Iraq [JIOC-I] was based on some of the technologies that we had put together and some of our experiments. We’ve also been driving ourselves to look at a functional data model that goes across each of these stovepipes and provides the planner the ability to use the data that’s collected by anyone, but in a fused form as opposed to one that has different geometries and data dictionaries associated with it. Being able to standardize among those areas has given us the key, and doing that not just as the Army, but also as part of the NSG, and working hand in glove with them.

We have a lot of disadvantaged users. Most soldiers and Marines don’t have great connectivity, especially during a battle, back to a network. Certainly, they don’t have the Internet and the things that we’ve grown to understand and appreciate here in the D.C. area with great bandwidth. To produce this digital enterprise, you have to experiment with the kinds of concepts of operation that allow you to pick up on that individual’s data and the things they know, but also help them by getting to them the things that the rest of the enterprise knows. That’s a challenge, and there’s no easy fix, but the synchronization of this enterprise is probably key to making that geospatial intelligence work better in the planning environment.

The other thing is the collapse of operations and intelligence. There’s not a lot of “delta” now between actionable intelligence and operations. In fact, they go hand in glove together, so why do you have separate back-office systems servicing them? We’re bringing those together and filling the technical and tactical gaps necessary to make that high-fidelity foundation a key component of the planning process. In the lexicon now of battle command systems, you have Battle Management Language and JC3IEDM, a data modeling effort. The connection back to the geospatial has previously not been strong, so we’ve been working very hard to connect the battle command language with GeoBML, so you have a direct connection between a type of activity that we describe in battle command language and terrain and geography that support that. So that connection is also something that we’re also working hard to do.

Q: What role is the BuckEye system currently playing in military operations?

A: Many of the things that TEC has been involved with over the years have been tactical capability gaps. BuckEye is a reflection of a gap that existed when we went into Iraq and Afghanistan. The BuckEye program produces very high-fidelity unclassified color imagery with precise geometry and high-fidelity elevation data. The life-and-death need for that information in the urban and complex terrain area is clear to those who have fought there. The gap is magnified by the fact that we are staying and fighting in this terrain all the time and weren’t moving on to new locations. It was more like the requirements a county police force has to understanding its operational space—a precise knowledge of road networks, where people live and the main activity centers within a community. That’s been the primary niche or gap that we have filled with BuckEye—being able to collect that and disseminate it in an unclassified mode to coalition partners and soldiers, many of whom don’t have security clearances.

You can take system after system—full motion video, command and control, and situational awareness. All of them require precise, high-fidelity views of the terrain and where they operate. That’s the niche that we’re able to provide. Color is an amazing additive, especially for ISR information, so that’s a big bonus for people who are trying to identify a specific house in a specific community, and have an informant for detainee to point out where they live or where perpetrators may live. The ability to quickly turn those into 3-D models is a bonus capability for combat operations. We have consistently moved to improve the system since we first deployed it. We’re trying to do as much of the processing in theater as we possibly can, since they are large data sets. We can quickly turn those back around to the units in theater and get them rather quickly into the fight.

BuckEye for us isn’t a particular sensor or platform, but is more of a concept. That concept is to fill the niche or gap of very high-fidelity, unclassified elevation data and imagery with precise geometry.

Q: TEC’s work is divided into the areas of research, systems and operations. What are some of your key initiatives in research?

A: The research over the years, and continuing until now, has really been focused at the exploitation of the geospatial data and turning that into information. The Battlespace Terrain Awareness [BTRA] program is an example of taking immense amounts of data and reducing it into small-bandwidth terrain-information networks that can be queried and analyzed at the platform, like having your own terrain team right there with you on the platform or in a small unit TOC. In the old days, a division commander was the only person who was able to have a terrain team. Now brigade combat teams have a terrain team, so they can do some analysis. If you’re not at that level, you still need the same kind of understanding of the terrain and its effects on you as well as your enemy. BTRA gives you that analysis capability to improve your combat effectiveness. A spin-off of this technology has been the ability to define GeoBML, which I referred to earlier.

BuckEye has been a research activity of continual improvement of the sensors, processing and collecting abilities. Some other sensors that we’ve been working on, we will deploy soon. Our working with national capabilities, and exploitation of national capabilities have also been key activities. Forensic use of fluorescence tagging, as well as fluorescence identification, is another key aspect of our research.

The hallmark of our research activity is the Joint Geospatial Enterprise Services research, which endeavors to put all this together into one enterprise environment where sharing peer to peer and echelon to echelon are the norm.

Q: What are some of the most important things TEC is doing within the systems arena?

A: One of the most exciting has been the integration of the Digital Topographic Support System and Imagery Work Station geospatial back offices. We did this with a minimum amount of money and on an accelerated time frame. The 1-25th SBCT just deployed with this capability, and two more units will follow soon. This demonstrates the cost effectiveness and increased combat effectiveness of a geospatial enterprise approach to system engineering. My systems division is an acquisition support group. They technically manage JCTDs and work as product directors for PEOs and PMs to acquire and sustain programs of record. We’ve been working with DCGS-A in two of its primary components: the Digital Topographic Support System and the Tactical Exploitation System. Tied into the whole idea of geospatial enterprise, we’ve been working on a number of JCTDs, including the Champion JCTD [HUMINT] and the Map HT JCTD [Socio-Cultural], and JADOCS [Target and Fires Coordination], now a program of record. JADOCS has a spin-off for national emergencies called DDAS, which helps military to civilian coordination of missions according to the national response plan.

We’ve deployed the Human Terrain System to the human terrain teams that have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and continue to support the HTS PM. The special operations community came to us early with a similar requirement, which we built, deployed and sustain as the Asymmetrical Software Kit. Like many folks, we’ve been doing a number of QRCs, as well as supporting traditional program managers in their acquisition of systems. Enterprise geospatial systems that support preconflict understanding and information sharing, such as PREACT and TISC, are also key spin-offs of our JGES research. They have turned out to fit nicely in the emerging OSD strategy for stability operations. We continue our support in some of our more traditional areas of tactical exploitation of national systems, along with the Army Space Program Office.

Q: What are the center’s chief accomplishments in the field of operations, and how are you working to improve capabilities in this area in the future?

A: BuckEye is a significant accomplishment and something that we’re looking to improve, with better sensors and other ways of producing the foundation necessary to do the kind of operations that our soldiers need. We continue to do that in the operations arena. Dissemination is a big piece of that, along with collection, which is an operations function. But as we go and look at the enterprise approach to geospatial data, many of the things that we used to produce as a product, we are turning into layers of information, so that they are continually updated, not just by ourselves, but also by others who are contributors to our particular function and need. We have had an Urban Tactical Planner, which we have produced for most of the interested global war on terror locations around the world. We’re turning that from a product into a layer.

The same thing goes for the country studies we have done. Traditionally we would call them a country study or engineer route study [ERS]. But ERS really was more than that. If you look at the NECC command and control requirements, our layers of data and information will provide that foundation level of data necessary to do war planning at a regional, countrywide scale. Again, turning that from a product into a layer is fundamentally what we’re doing. We’ve done that already with the Water Resources Database, which is a DoD mission that we have, to identify access to potable water for deploying forces—where they can find water and what kind it is, whether brackish or containing sulfur, and where they can dig wells. We’ve turned that into a data layer as well.

There’s also the socio-cultural piece. An interesting dilemma for our forces across the board has been what are the sociocultural boundaries. We’re trying to help data-model what are socio-cultural issues and how can you visualize them. What is the spatial-temporal nature of those, and how can you display them? It’s a layer to allow us to do that.

Q: What are your key goals for 2009?

A: I’m looking to deploy a new special sensor to Afghanistan. This will be very timely with our surge operations there. I want to make a decision on some of our change-detection capability, and make sure we understand where we’re headed and what we’re doing with that capability. Continue to accelerate geospatial enterprise solutions to DCGS-A like what we were able to do with the 1-25th SBCT DTSS/IWS integration. We can achieve significant program cost avoidance at the same time we give units greater combat capability.

As GIO I want to have a policy for the Army PEOs, PMs and the contractors that describes in detail what the minimum geospatial enterprise standard is and what the concept of operations is for implementation. I want to continue the momentum that we’ve gained with bringing out the enterprise, and being able to make the tough decisions that the Army is going to have to make in FY 09 on POM and schedule, and make those with the geospatial enterprise as a foundation piece to our intel and battle command systems. We think that that’s a place where the Army can save money and increase combat effectiveness. As we start to go through the POM cycle scrutinizing what we’re doing and what we should be doing, we think this plays very well in making those cost savings that we’re going to have to do, as well as increasing the effectiveness of our battle command and intel systems. The last thing on my scope is to continue to hire great people. We’ve got some great folks, but we’ll need some very key hires to continue to provide the best enterprise solutions.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to add?

A: I’m really proud of the team, and not just of the TEC team, although I’m very proud of what a small group of people dedicated to soldiers’ well-being has made. It’s also to the broader team—not only the contractors who have worked very hard on the idea of the geospatial enterprise for the Army, but also Army staff and Army organizations, NGA, other intel agencies and all of our partners, which have also worked very hard. It’s hard to turn a giant enterprise like this, but we’ll succeed as a team. ♦

Back to Top