Panel: Warfighters want more flexible intelligence systems

As the U.S. military is called on to fight smarter, it must obtain intelligence systems that are more adaptable and work better across organizational and technical barriers, said members of a panel at the recent DODIIS conference.

DODIIS stands for Department of Defense Intelligence Information System, which is an overarching architecture overseen by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The system provides services to 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. DIA, which operates the top secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), sponsored the event held last month in Orlando, Fla.

Despite efforts to unify the collection and analysis of intelligence information, users of those information systems said they continue to struggle with lack of integration and barriers to appropriate information access and sharing. Several of the users are individuals who have recently returned from service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military intelligence can no longer function according to a Cold War mentality in which intelligence personnel count the enemy’s tank brigades and plan exactly how to hit them, said Maj. Gen. John M. Custer, commanding general of the Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca. Custer expressed concerns of this nature in a keynote speech at the conference and also moderate a panel comprised of government officials on the topic.

The United States finds itself in the 21^st century fighting unconventional wars in which the enemy might be a single individual and the challenge is not so much shooting an enemy soldier as finding and identifying him, Custer said. This enemy is smart — “all the dumb guys are dead already,” he said, adding that the stakes are higher because of enemy’s aptitude.

Technologists supporting this mission need to stop “moving down parallel development paths” and creating duplicate systems, Custer said. Instead, they need to cooperatively develop core capabilities “so that we establish a baseline, and then move forward,” he said.

Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 William Malave, who just returned from serving 15 months in Iraq, said the team he worked with to gather measurement and signals intelligence, as well as imagery intelligence, was frustrated by the lack of tools for collecting this data and organizing it into meaningful reports. The intelligence team cobbled together its own solution, using Excel and Google Earth to sort the information and display it visually. However, the team encountered a problem because their solution didn’t have clearance for the Secret IP Router Network, the military network used for secret operational information. One message he wanted to send the JWICS community was that “there are applications that are not hosted on SIPRNET and JWICS that we need to do our jobs,” he said

The information environment is much tougher in Afghanistan, where mountainous terrain blocks much line-of-sight communications, making operations dependent on more limited satellite bandwidth, said Army Lieut. Timothy Martin, chief of network operations at the Southeast Regional Service Center. It’s important to realize “there is never enough bandwidth, so it’s about making the most of what we have,” he said. Technologies for compression and network optimization are particularly important in that environment, he added.

There are still days when “I feel like DODIIS is challenging me, not helping me,” said Peter Chevere, a DIA intelligence analyst who caused a stir at the same conference last year with his sharp critique of the agency’s information technology environment. However, Chevere said that overall he thought DODIIS had made great strides, particularly in fielding much richer collaboration tools across the JWICS network.

“I can now find subject matter experts I didn’t know existed,” he said. A secure analyst social network called A-Space makes it possible to form online interest groups to collaborate without the need to travel associated with traditional, formal working groups. A new search and event-driven alert system, the Tripwire Analytic Capability, is proving useful and “is even doing a little bit of the analysis for me,” he said.

The IT team has made “really remarkable strides just the past 12 months to the point where they've turned it around,” Chevere said. However, he said he still had trouble sharing information with analysts at NATO and other trusted allies.

Several members of the panel spoke of having problems sharing information that originated on JWICS with users on SIPRNET – even with proper clearance to release the information, they ran into technical obstacles. Custer said that’s inherent to the division of responsibilities between the Defense Information Systems Agency, which operates SIPRNET, and DIA, which runs JWICS.

“There is always going to be a problem there, figuring out what collaboration tool to use on what network," Custer said.
We don’t have a problem with our networks, just with moving between them."

Vince McCarron, chief of enterprise data management for Army Intelligence, said these issues can’t be automated away. “Sometimes, the cross-domain solution is people,” McCarron said. If a JWICS user knows the information is needed by someone on SIPRNET, it’s up to that person to figure out a way to work around the technical issues, he said.