The Air Force is looking for automated ways to help sift through data provided through its Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) weapons system.
Headquarters Air Force ISR Agency’s Plans, Programs, Requirements and Assessments Directorate Acting Deputy Director Col. Mike Shields told Defense Daily Monday the goal is to point airmen using DCGS to an area of key interest and let them perform analysis against it instead of spending valuable time sifting through thousands of bits of data. The Air Force often says it doesn’t have enough manpower to sift through all its ISR data.
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| The Air Force’s DCGS uses General Atomics’ MQ-9 Reaper UAV as a platform. Photo: Air Force. |
“Present that to the airmen so they can put their analytical training and knowledge and skills against what’s important,” Shields said. “The point is to whittle through that set of data so they’re not wasting their time.”
Both the Air Force and Army have their own similar DCGS. The Air Force’s DCGS produces intelligence information collected by the U-2 spy plane, the MC-12 turboprop aircraft and the RQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-9 Reaper and the MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The Air Force’s DCGS is currently composed of 45 geographically separated, networked sites and a mixture of active duty, Air National Guard and Air Force reserve units working together.
The nodes are regionally-focused and paired with corresponding Air Force components to provide critical processing analysis and dissemination of ISR data. Shields said the Air Force’s DCGS system, at its most simple form, collects data as code and processes it into information so, rather than a string of characters, airmen can view, for example, an image. Shields said the Air Force’s DCGS pushes that information through to people who can consider and interpret that information and then make a decision.
“There could be value in knowing there is not something going on in a given place and then push that out as first-phase intelligence,” Shields said. “That’s the kind of thing we do.”
The Army’s DCGS performs many similar features as the Air Force’s, but Shields said the air service’s version is a lot more of a “first-phase, exploitation and production system” where the Air Force creates organic products off of information gathered before being pushed out to support the immediate needs of warfighters. Shields said this is complementary to the Army’s DCGS, which he described as a “kind of analytical hub.”
“I would say, in general, they’re complementary systems,” Shields said. “(The Air Force takes) the raw data that’s coming in and turns it into intelligence and (the Army) has the ability to look analytically across intelligence that is out there and find deeper value and support needs.”
Shields said the Air Force in the future wants to be able to process more types of data from more types of sensors to better support warfighters. But Sheilds said despite adding airmen to help process the ever-increasing amount of ISR data coming in, the improving quality of data coming from better sensors increases the ISR challenge for the service.
“In the end, the effectiveness they have is going to rely on the skills of airmen, of Air Force folks putting their experience and brain power against sets of data,” Shields said.
Major system contractors for the Air Force’s DCGS are: Raytheon [RTN]; Lockheed Martin [LMT]; L-3 Communications [LLL]; Northrop Grumman [NOC]; Hughes Network Systems; Goodrich, a division of United Technologies Corp. [UTX] and Houston Fearless. Contractors for the Army’s DCGS include Northrop Grumman [NOC]; Azimuth Inc.; Lockheed Martin [LMT]; General Dynamics [GD]; CACI [CAC], Mitre; Overwatch Systems; Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] and Raytheon.