The military’s premier intelligence-sharing program, the Distributed Common Ground Systems (DCGS) intelligence-sharing program, has performed admirably through the Afghanistan conflict, but Looking ahead, though, a re-envisioned protocol may be needed to achieve the same ends in a changing threat environment.
"Maybe tomorrow we will need a different set of partners, and we want to be sure that as those new partners are defined, they know how to interoperate with us," said Gerald Mamrol, director of Army strategic and tactical solutions for Lockheed Martin's Information and Global Solutions business unit.
In an exclusive interview with C4ISR & Networks at the Associated of the U.S. Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C.this week’s AUSA meeting, Mamrol said an evolved infrastructure built largely on open standards will help move DCGS into the future.,as tThe Army seeks to leverage existing capabilities without running duplicative systems.
DCGS allows operators to process, analyze and distribute intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data. Today’s DCGS can apply more than 60 analytic tools, managing data from over 700 data sources. Much of that capability has been directed toward the kind of quick response demanding by the Afghanistan war. Looking ahead, Mamrol said, Army will need to find new ways to engage these capabilities, to repurpose DCGS capabilities for whatever conflict might come next.
These new capabilities should emerge in Increment 2, for which Mamrol predicts a request for proposals in the first quarter of fiscal 2016, with an award by the end of that fiscal year. This comes after a year and a half dialogue between the military and industry.
The most significant change will be the embrace of open-standards based architecture. That will be a necessary shift to align today's set of useful, albeit disparate, tools. Open standards offer planners the opportunity to continue operating today's best of breed while merging them seamlessly into a more universally available infrastructure. While the tools may remain proprietary to an individual Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) provider, "at their edges they will all exchange data in an open way," Mamrol said.
In addition to a commitment to open standards, Increment 2 also should focus on visualization as a means to simplify the overall user experience. Shrinking budgets are reducing the pool of available experts, Mamrol said, so that solutions going forward will have to be as user-accessible as possible. "We can't have it designed for developers. It can't be an engineering tool. It has to be an operational tool," he said
The next DCGS iteration also should see improvements in what is effectively the backbone of the enterprise: That is, the ability to analyze data. Mamrol predicted the military will see a system that delivers enhanced sophisticated predictive analytics as a tool to more readily meet evolving threats.
