ESC exhibits capabilities during Empire Challenge

  • Published
  • By Patty Welsh
  • 66th Air Base Group Public Affairs
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. --  The Electronic Systems Center displayed a number of capabilities during the U.S. Joint Forces Command-led Empire Challenge '10 demonstration that was held recently at more than 20 U.S. and worldwide sites.

Empire Challenge is an annual joint and coalition intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance interoperability demonstration that showcases emerging ISR capabilities and provides lessons learned to improve joint and combined ISR interoperability.

As one of the main goals of the demonstration was to "demonstrate and assess interoperability of the DCGS enterprise," ESC's Distributed Common Ground Systems Multi-Service Execution Team Office (DMO) played a key role.

DMO personnel worked to get the DCGS infrastructure up and running and facilitated the operations of the enterprise. They had to ensure interoperability not only between the U.S. DCGS programs of record, but also with coalition partners.

"The DCGS Enterprise facilitated data sharing between 26 ISR DCGS integration backbone nodes across five different networks," said Lt. Col. Tom Tschuor, DMO director. "This allowed for seamless automated ISR data sharing for properly marked data with all coalition members."

The U.S. DCGS programs of record are Air Force-DCGS, DCGS-Army, DCGS-Navy, DCGS-Marine Corps, DCGS-Special Operations Forces, DCGS-Intelligence Community and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's National System for Geospatial Intelligence Expeditionary Architecture.

During the demonstration, the DCGS Enterprise federated information from 19 sensors and streamed 23 motion imagery feeds to all part of the enterprise, including the coalition partners.

"Australia and NATO were able to fully federate with the US DCGS Enterprise using their own data sharing architectures," said Colonel Tschuor. "This large scale cross-domain coalition data sharing was the first of its kind in the history of Empire Challenge."

Another ESC capability showcased during EC '10 was Dynamic ISR Re-tasking. There are two parts to this capability; Evolved Mission Planning Interface to Raise Enterprise-level Awareness, or EMPIRE-A, and Preemptive Actions with Dynamic Anticipatory Targeting, or PREDATAR.

EMPIRE-A is a planning and management tool that provides a central repository for ISR task requests and an enterprise level situational awareness view of key ISR data sets to assist in the effective management of ISR assets.

"EC10 was beneficial to us in that we were able to continue operational context interaction with the system's primary community - ISR -- and also use the venue as a feedback and test event," said Hassan Terry, MITRE mission planning and intelligence subject matter expert, who is supporting EMPIRE-A. "We brought the current beta version of the system, which will be fielding in September. The bugs found and inputs received during the exercise allowed us to make refinements that will benefit this September release."

PREDATAR is a tool that assists analysts in dealing with the large volume of intelligence data that is gathered in an operational environment. It is able to look at various intelligence pieces and reason whether or not there is a potential target of interest.

"If the system decides that something needs a closer look, it will automatically cue an intel analyst," said Capt. Amoy Manley, DISR2 project manager.

The Joint Surveillance Attack Radar Target System also participated in the demonstration. Joint STARS platforms provided moving target indicator data to the overall operational picture. The system also demonstrated a new capability that allowed it to transport its tactical picture to the ground in near real time.

All of the ESC participants thought it was valuable to participate in Empire Challenge '10. As the demonstration was set up to emulate Afghanistan, they thought it was useful to be able to evaluate their capabilities in an operationally relevant environment.

"Most importantly, we were able to demonstrate systems that will provide a positive impact for our warfighters," said Captain Manley.