DENVER — Many of the highest ranking leaders of the national intelligence community recently converged here for a four-day convention to discuss the development and deployment of the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS). With all four services developing their own version of DCGS, a capabilities and status briefing was delivered by each service. Lt. Col. Daniel Cunningham, Product Manager for Intelligence Fusion provided a highly anticipated presentation on DCGS-Army version 3.1 to a standing room only crowd.
Cunningham, a 21-year veteran, has been chartered to design, develop, field, train, and sustain DCGS-Army version 2, version 3 and within the next year, version 3.1. In the less than two years since DCGS-A was first deployed, the system has grown exponentially in both capabilities and reliability.
Currently, intelligence analysts are using either DCGS-A version 2 or version 3 depending on their geographic Area of Responsibility. Within the next six weeks, all clients in Iraq will have version 3.0. Those in Afghanistan will be upgraded to version 3.0 by the end of fiscal year 2008.
There are a number of significant differences between version 2 and version 3 including their procurement processes. DCGS-A version 2 took advantage of an existing Quick Reaction Capability as a surrogate to full DCGS-A capabilities to address the urgent needs of analysts engaged in both Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Version 3 built on version 2’s success but went through formal Army acquisition and testing processes.
“Version 2 was an excellent tool for analysts with its ability to perform data mining and offer a significant amount of analyst visualization and collaboration tools,” said Cunningham. He added that DCGS-A V2 offered analyst a direct interface into the Brain, a data warehouse which is a feature of DCGS-A, enabling analysts below the division level to attain information in an instantaneous timeframe. Prior to DCGS-A, an analyst would have to submit a Request for Information to higher headquarters and wait for them to answer the requested information which proved to be an untimely process. Now with the analyst having a direct link to the Brain, they can obtain vital information in seconds.
The contributions DCGS-A has made to the war fighter are easily recognizable especially by analyst who saw their production increase dramatically via the systems capabilities first hand. Sgt First Class Nicholas Psaki, a recently returned analyst from Iraq who was in charge of an element of seven analysts in Baghdad, gave an account of DCGS-A wartime contributions to the more than 900 in attendance.
Psaki stated three of his analysts had limited training experience with DCGS-A when they arrived in theater; however, they were able to operate at a more productive rate then larger, higher echelon units that did not have DCGS-A available to them. “DCGS-A allowed seven people to operate like 30,” said Psaki. “DCGS gave us a unified coherent view of what is happening on the battlefield.”
During Psaki’s deployment in Northwest Baghdad (specifically Kadhamiyah and Mansour Security Districts) the civilian casualties dropped from a high of 174 in a week to a low of four, and the number of Improvised Exploded Device incidents dropped 80%, between November 2006 and September 2007, due in part to the work of Psaki and his team of analysts using DCGS-A.
Building upon the success of DCGS-A version 2, the Intelligence Fusion Product Team at DCGS-A has added a number of new capabilities in version 3.0, and recently delivered these tools to war fighters in Iraq. An integrated application framework, called the Multi-Functional Work Station, was incorporated into DCGS-A version 3.0. “Instead of an analyst having a bunch of different applications on their desktop that they have to open, close, cut and paste, they can now query for information in a single window,” said Cunningham. Because commonly used analyst applications are integrated, analysts can drag and drop data from one visualization tool to another, allowing the analyst to view the data from different perspectives in seconds. MFWS includes a message center interoperable with other Army Battle Command Systems, collaboration tools, mapping tools, link analysis tools, association matrices, time wheels, and other commonly used analyst tools.
“Prior to version 3.0 an analyst would have five or six windows open at time which slows down the processing power on their client and clutters their desktop, whereas in version 3.0 we have integrated the common functions,” Cunningham adds.
Using the MFWS’ link analysis program with an integrated database, analysts can quickly build a social network on individuals they are tracking, complete with any associated multimedia files, and make recommendations to battlefield commanders, including pictures of these persons of interest.
“In the old days the analyst would take a power point chart to the boss with the information they collected and this could induce a decision in 24 hours,” said Cunningham. “Now you take results with all the link analysis, including all the multimedia files you have on a subject and you can send that data off and the commander can make a decision on how to proceed in seconds.”
Another feature of V3.0 is the addition of the DCGS Integrated Backbone metadata catalog server. The Services and the National Agencies are publishing metadata, or data about data, in the mutually agreed upon DIB format. The DIB gives analysts the ability to query information in reliably uniform format, making it easier and faster to find information . Analyst will be able to find metadata from the DIB and all the national agencies in a URL link and can decide whether to open a link by reading the metadata, allowing analysts to avoid wasting time. This is very similar to searching the card catalog rather then reading every book in the Library of Congress. Analysts do not have a problem with scarcity of information; their issue is how to manage the volumes of information that they already have.
With DCGS-A version 3.0 fielded throughout this year, V 3.1 should be set to hit the field toward the end of 2008. A major addition to V3.1 deals with the MFWS framework. The newest DCGS-A iteration will change from a Java-based MFWS to a Microsoft .Net based one, code-named Viper. “This change will give us the ability to rapidly add analyst tools because there are so many Microsoft developers and applications already available that are potentially useful to the analyst,” said Cunningham.
Cunningham emphasized that the government owns the Viper Software Development Kit, which means that the Army has the ability to rapidly assess new Commercial Off The Shelf technologies, which translates to the potential to rapidly make decisions to add new tools to the DCGS-A baseline. “There are a ton of people with good ideas but it is very hard to analyze all the ideas that come in,” said Cunningham. “Now with Viper if a vendor has an idea we can give them the software developers kit – tell them to build it in Viper- and when they are finished, we can analyze it to see if it is something that analysts would want to use.” An additional benefit of Viper stems from the fact that a number other product managers plan to use it within their systems, increasing the interoperability between systems by sharing common tools with other products and reducing development time and procurement costs. When systems share common tools, it also make training Soldiers easier and more efficient.
The continued success of DCGS-A is vital to Army operations as it is set to replace nine Programs of Record. The DCGS-Army Project Office, using spiral development, will take capabilities from the POR’s and combine them into DCGS-A. Cunningham refers to the PORs as “cylinders of excellence”. He stated they were originally designed for a high to mid-intensity conflict. They were not created to defend the nation against acts of terrorism nor to assist the Army in operations it is currently engaged in; dealing with street fighting and acts of terrorism.
“In order for an analyst to really get a grip on what happened or why an IED went off and what the story behind it you need to use several of those tools that ‘cylinders of excellence; present but only within their own intelligence discipline, and the data was not easily shared between disciplines. You need to have pictures, signal intelligence, and human intelligence,” said Cunningham. “We want to break down the stovepipes-not break them- so that we can share the information and leverage it through DCGS-A.”
When we put those nine cylinders of excellence together there is synergy, you are creating more than the sum of the parts, such as using one discipline to cue another discipline creating ISR synchronization.”
Throughout the conference, the benefit of benchmarking from other services’ DCGS systems was abundantly clear. As a testament to the usefulness and openness of the DCGS-A system, the percentage of users outside the Army tapping into the Brain is higher than the number of Soldiers that access DCGS-A. The Army only accounted for 12% of the JWICS hits and 46% of SIPRNET hits, with the other Services and National Agencies making up the bulk of users. “It goes to show you that analysts are smart and they will go out and find the information somehow. The fact that we have useful information in the Brain that analysts from the other Services and the National Agencies want to tap into is great.”