By Geoff Fein
Raytheon‘s [RTN] Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) should start to go operational within the next three months, according to a company official.
The system has been undergoing enterprise and operational testing at four classified sites, Mark Bigham, vice president information intelligence systems business, told Defense Daily recently.
“It has been rigorously tested. That system provides a huge step forward in secure information sharing capability for the Air Force and the other services,” he said.
What DCGS 10.2 will bring operators is the ability to exchange information that is less cumbersome, Bigham noted.
With the old system, operators sent out reports over e-mail. But that required operators to know who was requesting the information and, in turn, the requestor had to know the operator, Bigham explained. The operator would also have to have the requestor’s e-mail or FTP (file transfer protocol) address, he added.
“That’s a very manpower intensive old way of doing business,” Bigham said.
DCGS 10.2 completely changes that process to make it more like Facebook, he added.
Just like people can post comments, pictures and other material on Facebook and have it automatically send out alerts to friends or subscribers, operators can publish data with the classified DCGS 10.2 that can include reports, maps, even warfighter comments about a specific area. Users can then subscribe to obtain specific information, Bigham said. Subscribers can also ask to receive alerts when specific information is published, he added.
While DCGS 10.2 is will be a more efficient way of sharing information, Bigham does acknowledge there are still some hurdles.
“There are some struggles. [Culturally] this is a very different way of doing business as you can imagine. Some of the operators are very nervous,” he said. “You are going from a culture where the imperative is to protect the information, but you also have to share the information. We have never had the tools in the ISR world to share before. All of the CONOPS, all of the work processes, all of the things we have done in the past, are having to be relearned and retrained.”
But Bigham is confident that as DCGS 10.2 comes online and the enterprise stands up, operators and users are going to “love it.”
With DCGS 10.2, an operator doesn’t have to know specifically what user is interested in the information and in turn, the user doesn’t have to know who is collecting that data, he added.
“When you aggregate that to the entire enterprise where you have thousands of analysts that are gathering and collecting information, that really makes it a much more efficient way of discovering and finding information about problems you are trying to solve,” he said. “And if I want to do a search I can search the classified data repositories where people have posted or published data and I can search across all those classified enclaves and find that information and discover it and pull it right to my desktop.”
That’s the whole point of DCGS 10.2, Bigham said. “To dramatically improve the ability of the intelligence community to share intelligence and discover information and put things together and connect the dots.”
To ensure the ability to share information across different systems, DCGS is built upon the Defense Department’s DCGS Integration Backbone or DIB. It is the common information sharing backbone that DoD has put together. The DIB is also an element of the Multi-sensor Aerospace-ground Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition MAJIIC and the Cross-domain Enterprise All-Source User Repository (CENTAUR), technologies NATO partners are working with as well, Bigham said.
“[DCGS is] a core element of that so they can share across the international community with our coalition partners as well,” he added.
“The other thing is, what you want to be able to do, you can use whatever browser is your home browser, and you can search and get access to the data via the DIB,” Bigham said. “So it doesn’t take a custom workstation. All it takes is a standard browser that can tap into that infrastructure so you can share information, applications, or services.”
Raytheon built the DIB, and the technology is now owned by the government, he added.
“We comply with the architectural standards which are all about open architecture–an interface standard broadly used and well understood so that others can build to it,” Bigham said. “There are some very strict standards you have to build to. The business model is not the same as the old vertical stovepipe model, which is changing the way everybody works in the intelligence community.”