WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps is developing an intelligence tool to analyze online public information about threats and asked industry to help pinpoint the right technology for these increasingly important open source reviews.
The Corps seeks to identify companies that provide the capability and discover if existing contacts or partnerships could streamline delivery of a system, according to a “sources sought” notice on a federal contracting website Feb. 8. The service wants to determine if its requirements are in line with best available commercial technology.
The Corps is modernizing its forces and formations to better posture itself to fight in the information sphere, trying to keep pace with adversaries that use the burgeoning amount of publicly shared information to their advantage for intelligence collection, information operations and cyber operations, the notice from the Corps stated.
With the proliferation of information available online, the military is trying to exploit open source intelligence more for what the Marine Corps calls operations in the information environment.
Currently, the Corps uses a system called Integrated Intelligence Platform, which provides an open source intelligence and a cyber common operational picture by rapidly surveying datasets, identifying hidden trends and producing intelligence.
The Marines are looking more holistically at the information environment through the lens of the Information Environment Enterprise, its blueprint for information environment. As the Corps reviewed needed modernizations, it realized that subordinate units such as Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command lack an agile, user-friendly platform to provide accurate, timely, cost-effective interoperability with joint forces ― to include the Integrated Intelligence Platform.
Now, the Corps is reaching out to industry for assistance.
The service wants the new system ― dubbed with the slightly different name of the Integrated Information Intelligence Platform ― to handle planning and direction, collection and processing, production and dissemination of publicly available information, and open source intelligence, according to the request to industry.
Specific desired capabilities for the platform include, attribution, edge analytics, commercial threat intelligence, geospatial selector discovery, graph analytics, dark web monitoring, social/media analytics, intelligence orchestration and dissemination, publicly available information data mining, and battlespace awareness and deployable functionality.
The platform isn’t intended to directly counter these capabilities, documents suggest, but will provide analytics and intelligence that in aggregate will help prevent effectiveness of adversary actions.
The system must also adhere to U.S. Cyber Command’s Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture, which guides how the command develops its capabilities. Given that Cyber Command employs joint teams that conduct operations and intelligence within the larger information environment, the Corps stated the platform must be compatible with the command’s systems.
Responses to the request for information are due Feb. 19, with an in-person industry day at Quantico planned for Feb. 23.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
