Geospatial Edge for the Warfighter
Written by Jamal B. Beck and Dan Visone
JOINT-GEOSPATIAL ENTERPRISE SERVICES PROGRAM BUILDS A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE WARFIGHTER, COMMAND CENTER AND NATIONAL LEVEL.
Deciding which of the many commercial- and governmentoff- the-shelf GIS solutions best fit the specialized needs of the warfighter is a daunting task, especially as adversaries adapt to the Army’s combat tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). Today’s solutions may not solve tomorrow’s problems. The soldier must remain two steps ahead by improving current tactics and equipment or developing new tools and procedures.
To better enable our warfighters to navigate today’s complex operational environment, the Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) developed the Joint-Geospatial Enterprise Services program (J-GES) to build a bridge among the warfighter, the command center and the national level of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. J-GES enables every soldier to serve as a sensor by providing each with the ability to evaluate and implement COTS and GOTS technology to collect, update, maintain, visualize and share their own geospatial information quickly, easily and accurately. This approach improves the soldier’s situational awareness and probability of mission success.
“The goal of J-GES is to migrate geospatial information and services to a net-centric environment, enabling technologies and standards to support horizontal, vertical and peer-to-peer interoperability from national to tactical,” according to Dan Visone, J-GES program manager.
Specific goals of the J-GES program include:
• Facilitating the early transition of emerging technologies and net-centric C4ISR geospatial services
• Partnering with industry to enhance commercial GIS technology to support complex J-GES needs
• joint network architectures and C4ISR services
• Providing a transition pathway for basic and applied research to the warfighter
• Developing geospatial policies and procedures, including military TTPs
• Serving as geospatial validation/verification facility for the Army’s geospatial information officer.
SUPPORTING TOOLS
To support the J-GES program, TEC constructed a laboratory consisting of five reconfigurable enclaves that support netcentric geospatial experiments. Enclaves can be “mixed and matched” to support a variety of customers and experiments, from counterintelligence/human intelligence to human terrain (cultural) to current programs of record like the Digital Topographic Support System. The J-GES laboratory can provide state-of-the-art support to identify operational and technical gaps and solutions with respect to the collection, synchronization, management, dissemination and exploitation of geospatial data and geoprocessing services.
To facilitate experiments with soldiers using a surrogate command and control application, J-GES leverages the Commander’s Support Environment (CSE), a state-of-the-art system designed to monitor and control forward elements of the Objective Force, resulting in reduced staffing requirements.
The CSE supports cross-functional, collaborative mission planning and execution, providing a common operating picture for enhanced, real-time situational awareness in a netenabled environment. Users have the ability to determine how their products might work in a command and control environment that demonstrates the various areas of the intelligence preparation of the battlefield process: intelligence, command, fires and battlespace manager (maneuver).
Network issues are especially critical on the battlefield, where the balance between volumes of geospatial data and limited bandwidth is a constant challenge. Throughput directly impacts the soldier’s ability to access and share geospatial information. The use of network analysis software that emulates the networks and performs network analysis will answer key questions of network-related application performance.
Shunra is a commercial software package that emulates networks by simulating packet loss, latency and bandwidth. Once the software is activated, information may be passed from system to system virtually through the emulated network.
Silk Performer, from Borland, complements the Shunra software and provides extended analysis information on the performance of application in a net-centric environment. With Silk Performer, scripts simulate the use of an application with multiple virtual users. The virtual users can be added “dynamically,” in “steady state,” or “all day” options.
The Shunra and Silk Performer software packages provide statistics on how an application or Web server may perform in the field. The report gives information such as response time per transaction time or per number of users. Users may experience simulated field performance before deploying the application to the field. Using network diagrams and parameters for Stryker Division, Brigade and Battalion, transaction times and responses can be generated using Shunra.
PROGRAM SPIRALS
To date, the J-GES program has been executed in three spirals. Through the use of five operational vignettes, the first two spirals demonstrated the need for net-centric geospatial services, or the “art of the possible” for current and future battle command systems. High-level military decisionmakers have seen the potential benefits of the collection of data to support many applications, the value of data discovery for the unanticipated user, and the role of dynamic geoprocessing services. The initial technology focus areas of spirals one and two leveraged COTS and GOTS technology to design, test and evaluate:
• Soldier as sensor using mobile GIS technology
• Discovery services using metadata portal concepts
• High-resolution sensor exploitation
• Geo-database synchronization
• Spatially and temporally explicit link analysis
• Terrain reasoning services
• 3-D terrain visualization
The third spiral is focusing on experiments that fall into three general areas:
• Value—the usefulness of geospatial information to the commander in support of the military decision-making process
• Commercial technology—the operational utility of COTS technology to support the warfighter’s military business logic
• Architecture—understanding how and where to provision geospatial information and applications based on existing and future architectures and corresponding network topologies.
J-GES experiments quantify the value of geospatial information, work with industry to ensure products meet the warfighter’s requirements, and model the movement of geospatial information on the battlefield.
“If the information has no value to the commander and makes no difference, why provide it?” said Visone. “We have also provided invaluable feedback to industry on the utility of their products for military applications. Our hope is that industry sees value in our experiments and uses our results to make their products responsive to Army requirements.”
VALUE EXPERIMENT
The J-GES program successfully executed a value experiment on site with soldiers at Fort Lewis, Wash., and Fort Benning, Ga., in late November 2008. The experiment assessed the military planning value of high-resolution imagery and elevation data. Specifically, data collected by TEC’s BuckEye was compared to conventional NGA products as the soldiers were tasked to set up hasty vehicle control points in different parts of Iraq.
This experiment evaluated the effect of better data (tool set remaining constant) instead of evaluating a tool set (data remaining constant). The results are currently being evaluated by experimentation subject-matter experts from George Mason University’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence Center in Fairfax, Va., and will be published next quarter at www.tec.army.mil/JGES/gazette.html.
The GMU C4I Center has also been conducting architectural experiments focused on using advanced geospatial terrain reasoning products from the Battlespace Terrain Reasoning and Awareness-Battle Command (BTRA-BC) program in a networked environment. There is concern that tools such as BTRA-BC might demand more capacity than Army tactical networks have available in specific situations. GMU is working to characterize BTRA-BC tools in the distributed battlefield environment to configure the software for most effective use.
These measurements enable quantitative characterization of the fundamental BTRA-BC computing and network requirements. GMU is using this data to construct an architectural model that will enable prediction of BTRA-BC requirements over a wide range of conditions.
GMU has developed a family of software models that can predict performance of tools such as BTRA-BC at specific levels of computational power and network capacity. These models are expected to be essential when requirements of operating the BTRA-BC services over tactical networks are explored. The end product will be a system that can support the warfighter most effectively while making supportable demands on networks and computers in the tactical environment.
The J-GES program has also executed a series of replication/ synchronization experiments evaluating ESRI’s 9.2 synchronization capabilities against a series of use cases provided by the Maneuver Support Center at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. The primary goal was to understand whether this COTS technology supported the concept of operations for data collection, generation and update of the Army’s Theater Geospatial Database in the field.
A secondary goal was to understand the doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities issues associated with fielding this technology to the soldier. This is critical to understanding the overall impact to the warfighter as new technologies are evaluated. Initial findings in this series of experiments are that the technology works but will need customization to make it usable by the soldier in the field.
The J-GES program’s ability to speed technology transition to the battlespace, assess the value of information, evaluate intelligence and geospatial information-sharing architectures, and develop geospatial policies and procedures will accelerate the fielding of select future force capabilities. J-GES also leverages and enables interdependent, network-centric warfare— ensuring that warfighters collect, exploit and share up-to-date geospatial information to gain competitive advantage in the operational environment.
More information on these experiments and other ongoing experiments can be found at www.tec.army.mil/JGES/index. html. ♦
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Jamal B. Beck is the public affairs specialist, and Dan Visone is the J-GES program manager, for the Engineer Research and Development Center-Topographic Engineering Center.
