Lockheed Martin engineers to upgrade Distributed Common Ground System intelligence sharing and collaboration
Posted by Courtney E. Howard
PHOENIX, 23 Sept. 2011. Engineers at Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) are upgrading the infrastructure that connects multiple intelligence entities--including the Department of Defense, Government agencies, and coalition partners--to help facilitate the sharing of intelligence data and services. Lockheed Martin won a contract from the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Multi-Service Execution Team Office (DMO) to upgrade the DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB).
This upgraded edition of the DIB, version 4.0, brings end-user enhancements and integration with Google Earth. The integration enables warfighters to bring intelligence into their current environment, providing a correlated visualization across the vast breadth of federated intelligence, according to a spokesperson.
Additional DIB updates include: enhanced user interfaces for querying and viewing intelligence, as well as an increased capability to populate these interfaces with valuable intelligence, accomplished through greater seamless interoperability with coalition partners. With the DIB upgrades, intelligence analysts no longer have to visit multiple collection sources to gain the data needed to accomplish their missions.
"The current DIB architectural evolution is a critical step toward a true coalition intelligence sharing enterprise," says Lt. Col. Thomas Tschuor, DMO director. "The key to this latest version is that this enhanced framework enables faster and more affordable exposure of intelligence data to the DIB federation at the enterprise level."
The DCGS--consisting of global sites capable of receiving, processing, correlating, and disseminating intelligence feeds from multiple sources--distributes intelligence from manned and unmanned reconnaissance sources based on the ground, in the air, and at sea. The DIB software framework allows different areas of DOD to exchange intelligence acquired by DCGS, empowering collaboration, interoperability, and shared awareness.
"As an original member of the DIB development team, Lockheed Martin has maintained a prominent role on this capability since its inception in 2003," says Jim Quinn, vice president of C4ISR Systems with Lockheed Martin IS&GS-Defense. "These enhancements expedite intelligence to those who need it, and allow warfighters to better adapt to their perpetually changing environment."
