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U.S. Army researchers joined other Defense Department agencies,
Army contractors and coalition partners to further develop,
integrate and test architectures and technologies for intelligence
systems throughout July 2015 at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
The
Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, or ICoE, hosted its annual Enterprise Challenge, or
EC-15, to address how Soldiers can collect intelligence information
and get it to the tactical edge.
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July 22, 2015 - Sgt. 1st Class Ian Watterson and Spc. Tyler Carrin, both with the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade, operate WASP and FMV from the Enterprise Challenge's Forward Operating Base during exercise at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in July. The Army Intelligence Center of Excellence hosted its annual event to address how Soldiers collect intelligence information and get it to the tactical edge. (U.S. Army photo by Kristen Kushiyama)
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EC-15 satisfied enterprise objectives such as emerging
sensors interoperability, enhancing international partners'
interoperability, advancing DOD's cloud computing strategy,
supporting the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise,
and conducting Distributed Common Ground System-Army, or
DCGS-A, enterprise interoperability assessments.
The
U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development
and Engineering Center, or CERDEC, is the Army's lead for
the research and development of intelligence systems.
“CERDEC maintains close ties to the U.S. Army Training
and Doctrine Command's centers of excellence -- to include
the Intelligence Center of Excellence and operational units
to stay in touch with the evolving realities of the Soldier
environment, anticipate challenges, refine requirements and
inform operational tactics, techniques and procedures.
Enterprise Challenge provides an operationally realistic
environment for these capabilities to be assessed,” said
Gene Frantz, CERDEC Intelligence and Information Warfare
Directorate liaison officer to ICoE.
CERDEC
participates in events like the Enterprise Challenge as a
way of helping to inform military requirements to include
the need to move to smaller, multi-mission,
multi-application enabled systems.
“Events like EC-15
allow us to develop, test and demonstrate systems that are
intuitive for our younger Soldiers who grew up in the era of
video games and smartphones,” said Dr. Paul Zablocky, CERDEC
I2WD director. “They expect that ease of use and systems
that are capable of handling more than one application at a
time.”
Military, civilian and contract personnel
recreated multiple scenarios that a Soldier might see in an
area of operation, allowing Soldiers to test intelligence
systems in a similar manner to how they could be used in the
field.
“With these systems, we can train Soldiers as
if they were at war, but there aren't any of the threats
associated with war. Training the tactics, techniques and
procedures greatly reduces their learning on the fly,” said
Tom Somers, I2WD TROJAN branch chief.
CERDEC I2WD
oversaw a variety of intelligence technologies at EC-15 and
brought their command and control trailer to Fort Huachuca
to support the event.
The C2 trailer allowed CERDEC
I2WD to see essential data being transmitted throughout the
exercises, allowing engineers to trouble shoot remotely if
they saw problems such as a loss of radio frequency data.
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July 22, 2015 - The Army Intelligence Center of Excellence hosted its annual Enterprise Challenge event to further develop, integrate and test architectures and technologies for intelligence systems throughout July at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. The event addressed how Soldiers collect intelligence information and get it to the tactical edge. (U.S. Army photo by Kristen Kushiyama)
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“This trailer reduces the time it takes to troubleshoot,
it is more repeatable than a set-up in the field, helps with
lessons learned, and better allows Soldiers to train on the
systems before being sent to hostile environments,” Somers
said.
One scenario included Soldiers at a Forward
Operating Base using the mobile, tactical-sized Winch
Aerostat Small Platform, or WASP, and Full Motion Video, or
FMV, to conduct video surveillance and provide reports to
their teammates on patrol.
If information or a person
of interest came about, the WASP team could direct the
ground team to a specific location so they could address the
situation, whether it be biometric data collection, media
forensics, document exploitation, or mission over watch and
route reconnaissance.
“We were trying to get
different information to one location so the analysts have a
better chance of being able to use it - making it
actionable,” said Sgt. 1st Class Ian Watterson, a Soldier
with the 111th MI Brigade under 305th MI Battalion who was
operating WASP and FMV from the scenario's Forward Operating
Base.
“In particular to this type of system, I think
the biggest thing is simplicity. They want to use MI
Soldiers, but realistically when this gets pushed out to the
force, it could come down to anybody, any Soldier. They
wanted to have it as a simple as possible, easy to pick up,”
Watterson said. “The controller is something you can find
with computer games. Anyone can really pick it up, kind of
play with it and use it effectively.”
CERDEC has
emphasized developing functional technologies and systems,
such as the controllers used by the Soldiers at EC-15, to
decrease the time it takes to train Soldiers on specific
systems.
“We are moving towards equipment and systems
that are smaller for Soldiers to use. They're used to
smaller, hand-held device, and that's what we are moving
to,” Somers said.
The Army intends to move forward
with its interoperability in subsequent years.
“ICoE
may work towards continuing efforts to inform the SENSOR-CE
[Sensor Computing Environment] CDD [Capability Development
Document]. There may be more collaboration on risk reduction
mission threads with PM DCGS-A,” said Marnie Vance, ICoE's
Intelligence Experimentation Analysis Element Modeling and
Simulation branch chief.
ICoE is also considering
introducing the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or
WIN-T, into next year's Enterprise Challenge digital
architecture since it is representative of the Brigade
Combat Team tactical network, Vance said.
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CERDEC is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and
Engineering Command, which has the mission to ensure
decisive overmatch for unified land operations to empower
the Army, the joint warfighter and our nation. RDECOM is a
major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
By U.S. Army Kristen Kushiyama
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2015
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