ESC team building on Empire Challenge successes

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. (AFNS) --  An Electronic Systems Center team is busy incorporating technical improvements and lessons learned from this summer's Empire Challenge to improve intelligence distribution, processing and inter-service sharing.

Empire Challenge 2009 was a global test event, with more than 2,000 participants from seven countries, plus NATO. Many of those participants spent much of July verifying the interoperability of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance processing; exploitation; and dissemination capabilities with the Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS, family of systems.

Now the DCGS Management Office, or DMO, is using the results to enhance the future DCGS Integration Backbone, known as the DIB.

The DMO supports each member of the DCGS family of systems, which is composed of six separate but connected programs of record: Air Force DCGS, DCGS-Army, DCGS-Navy, DCGS-Marine, DCGS-Special Ops and DCGS-Intelligence Community.

"Empire Challenge helped us prove and demonstrate the federation among the family of systems," said Lt. Col. Tom Tschuor, the DMO director. "The fact is, we were all able to see each other's data, which meets the data exposure mandate set by the Department of Defense."

The challenge for the DMO was to establish a realistic, scaled model of a DCGS enterprise and demonstrate not only cross-service, but national and coalition interoperability in EC09's live-fly, multi-intelligence-source environment, he said.

EC09 demonstrated the largest federation of DIB systems to date, with 27 systems supporting the exercise operating on seven networks and four security domains.

"EC09 was a true test of ISR systems interoperability, and the DIB software passed with flying colors, achieving a 100 percent interoperability score among the U.S. DCGS systems and 83 percent across multiple coalition networks," Colonel Tschuor said.

The Joint Interoperability Test Command, which provided data instrumentation, collection and analysis of the DIB systems during the exercise, recorded more than 400,000 data discovery and retrieval transactions using DIBs.

Moving forward, the DMO and individual DCGS program managers hope to build on the validated EC09 results, with a DIB that makes real-time operational data sharing faster and easier.

"The DIB allows analysts to query for the exact data they need, which means they can spend less time searching and more time analyzing," Colonel Tschuor said.