TAMPA, Fla.—Largely on its own dime, industry has been developing new biometric collection devices that take up less room and weigh less than current devices and also work more quickly, capabilities that the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) wants to take advantage of as it looks to replace its legacy tactical biometric systems, a command official.
The current tactical collection devices will be legacy systems in two to three years, Craig Archer, Identity Superiority Manger for SOCOM, said at last week’s Biometrics Consortium Conference hosted by AFCEA. Existing finger print sensors now are nearly paper thin and commercial developments are improving capabilities around iris capture and cameras and other systems, he said.
What SOCOM needs from industry is the integration those multimodal sensor capabilities into tactical collection systems that are smaller, faster and lighter, Archer said. He pointed out that SOCOM has what industry wants, that is a program of record with money behind it all the way out to FY ’19. Unlike other biometrics efforts in the Defense Department, SOCOM doesn’t relay on war-spending supplemental to fund its program, he said.
The SOCOM tactical biometrics program is the Sensitive Site Exploitation program, which currently uses the SEEK II device supplied by Cross Match Technologies. The handheld device is capable of capturing fingerprints, facial and iris images, weighs under four-pounds and is nearly nine inches long, six inches wide and four inches deep.
Various companies exhibiting at the biometrics conference here demonstrated even smaller and lighter devices consisting of kits that fit around smart phones such as Apple’s [APPL] iPhone. One industry official told Defense Daily that this is the direction the military services are expected to go with the next-generation of tactical biometric collection devices.
Archer said the devices industry will come up with in the next two to three years “will blow away anything anyone” in the Defense Department has thought of.
Archer said that the requirement for identity dominance is not going away. In the past year tactical biometric collections by Special Operations Forces have increased by 300 percent, he said.
Archer added that earlier this month after the Defense Department turned on an upgraded version of its authoritative biometrics database—the Automated Biometric Identification System 1.2—that tactical collections are stored in and matched against, at some point SOF operators stopped getting responses.
“And when that happened, my four star commander was getting calls from every commander in the field around the globe,” Archer said. Calls began coming in within minutes, he said.
“So the good news is you built a great capability and the operators have learned to rely on it,” he said. “The bad news is, they rely on it.”
The path forward is not without challenges, Archer said. The top liability for global SOF forces is the lack of secure, programmatic funding for ABIS despite the fact that “we’ve been asking for it for a decade,” he said.
The ABIS database has millions of biometric records of insurgents, known and suspected terrorists and foreign nationals that work on DoD installations globally, and manages thousands of transactions daily.
Regardless whether DoD gets its act together with ABIS and provides reliable, consistent funding, SOF will remain a player in the identity solutions space, Archer said.
Another challenge, this one due to the fact that SOCOM is the only command or department with a program of record for tactical biometric collection systems, is that the under secretary of Defense for Intelligence and other decision-makers are close to classifying identity intelligence as “SOF-unique, because after a decade of war, after billions of dollars spent, the only program or record that exists is in SOF.”
Archer implored government officials that have control of spending to baseline funds for biometrics.
“If you don’t then you’re going to end up at the mercy of whatever’s left,” he said. “We’ve got to get government entities to quit arguing with themselves and actually fund that program of record.”
Regarding the elimination of war funding supplementals as well as a constrained defense spending environment, Archer said this is a dual-edged sward. On the one hand some ideas won’t get worked on and there will be fewer government service employees to consider these ideas, he said. On the other, it will “serve as a great forcing function to bring us together and that’s something that this community really needs,” he said.
With fewer defense dollars available overall and DoD missions “drawing back,” industry will be looking to develop products to meet law enforcement and commercial needs, Archer said. That means DoD has to adapt somewhat by helping to shape requirements that industry is considering to meet opportunities elsewhere while also looking “strong and hard at COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) devices” and “be willing to accept the 90 percent solution, 80 percent solution versus the zero percent solution,” he said.
With Apple’s introduction of a fingerprint sensor to login to an iPhone, the rest of the smart phone and computer industry won’t be far behind, Archer said. This will be an opportunity for DoD to leverage commercial investments, he said.
The Defense Department has to reduce costs moving forward, Archer said, noting that it can’t spend $300 million to develop something that costs less than $1 million to purchase. He said industry also has to get the costs down for the devices it wants to sell DoD.
SOCOM wants “cutting edge” technology and will buy it quickly “but we’re pretty cheap,” Archer said.
In the end, the defense environment will be “efficient but fruitful,” he said.