Applying ISR to the challenges of irregular warfare in Afghanistan and integrating it more effectively in support of airstrikes will be among the major themes when American, British and other coalition officials gather in July in California for the fifth-annual Empire Challenge networking demonstration, which will involve more than 2,500 coalition forces around the world.

With the U.S. shifting its emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, officials in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and U.S. Joint Forces Command plan to focus on the specific coalition intelligence-sharing capabilities commanders will need there. Perhaps to make the point, they have assigned Joint Forces Command, which has spearheaded U.S. efforts to improve sharing among its own forces, to lead the demonstration centered at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif.

During the July 21 demonstration, coalition partners will operate ISR aircraft, including ScanEagles and other UAVs, at China Lake. Organizers chose the site partly for its geographic similarity to Iraq and Afghanistan. They will attempt to share intelligence information among one another using the latest intelligence-sharing software.

“The key thing for us is our relationship with the coalition forces,” said U.S. Air Force Col. George J. Krakie, the deputy director of intelligence at Joint Forces Command. “It’s not enough anymore for our Predator feeds to feed into our systems — they have to feed into everyone’s systems.”

U.S. and British officials have been pushing for advances in coalition warfare for years, but commanders and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have said international forces waging the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan must work harder on interoperability if they are to succeed there. The renewed emphasis on sharing intelligence is embedded in the Defense Department’s latest Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, signed in January by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Other commanders have also reiterated the need for better international coordination.

“Our strategy must acknowledge and embrace that we fight in coalitions. We must have a coalition-friendly command and control, and a coalition-friendly approach to operations,” U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation and commander of Joint Forces Command, told attendees at the Joint Warfighting Conference in May.

Raptor

Empire Challenge — the name refers to the British empire — had a low-key start in 2005. U.S. and British defense officials wanted to see if they could each use photos from Britain’s Reconnaissance Airborne pod, or RAPTOR, which is installed on Tornado jets.

“What started this was a question that a U.K. flag officer asked to one of his American counterparts,” said John Kittle, the project manager for Empire Challenge ’09 at the Joint Forces Command, which hosts the exercise. “Essentially, he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great new airborne platform sensor, and it gathers a lot of data, but I can’t process or exploit it all. Nor can I seamlessly get it to my American coalition partners. What can we do about that?’”

The conversation led to the first Empire Challenge exercise at China Lake, which consisted of two aircraft: a Royal Air Force Tornado G4 equipped with a RAPTOR imaging pod, and a U.S. U-2 spy plane, plus a prototype imagery ground station and about 50 people, Kittle said.

Since then, the event has nearly doubled in size each year, he said, “to the point where last year, we had 2,000-plus people participating,” including some at far-flung locations around the world. Joint Forces Command began participating in the event in 2006. This will be the first time the Pentagon has put Empire Challenge completely under the joint command’s management. Previously, the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency managed it.

The number of participants in Empire Challenge is projected to be the largest ever, with more than 2,500 military and civilian personnel involved around the world.

The scenarios for the exercise this year will focus on four areas, Kittle said. “The first is irregular warfare and the counter-IED [improvised explosive device] problem, which of course is very big right now, both in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “The second is ISR in support of strike operations, which we call ISR-Strike Integration. The third one is joint ISR management, which is a capability we’re trying to develop to make maximum use and efficiency of the ISR capabilities we have. And the last is multidomain awareness, which is kind of an umbrella term for multiple areas — improving the situational awareness information for war fighters across the maritime, ground and air operational domains.”

Much of the work in those four areas will revolve around testing of the Distributed Common Ground/Surface system (DCGS) — a network of intelligence work stations that, once completed, will allow uniformed analysts from all U.S. services to share information seamlessly. Organizers plan to test the integration of the DCGS network with NATO-member ISR systems.

Last year’s event was a major test of interoperability of the U.S. services’ implementations of the DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB) — the middleware that facilitates the distribution of ISR. It also was the first major test for connections between DCGS and the Multi-Sensor Aerospace-Ground Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC) project Coalition Data Broker, a variation on the DIB developed by Raytheon for NATO. It allows NATO members to access the ISR data coursing over the U.S. DIB system.

“We’ve been pretty successful in making the basic data exchange process work in previous years, and we’re trying to build on that for this year.”

For last year’s exercise, Raytheon put 29 DIBs in place, and installed them all around the world, said Mark Bigham, director of business development for Raytheon Defense and Civil Mission Solutions. The DIBs were then interconnected, or “federated,” for “four different classification levels, in seven different countries, all interfaced together, sharing intelligence information across the coalition enterprise,” he said.

Interoperability issues

The testing last year exposed a number of issues with interoperability among DCGS stations — not just between coalition partners, but among the individual U.S. military services.

The most glaring involved the U.S. Navy, which chose to lock its DIB behind a firewall to demonstrate a possible alternative approach called Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), which would achieve data compatible through common standards. The Navy was able to share some data with other services, but the DCGS at Charleston, S.C., came up red on the official Empire Challenge scorecard, meaning other services could not access enough of its data. “Making sure that both sides use the right data, so we can pull off each other’s systems and push products back and forth — those are lessons learn that we had last year, and we’re continuing to improve on as well,” Kittle said.

There are several major revisions of DCGS up for testing at Empire Challenge this year, Bigham said. The latest version of the DCGS software, called 10.2, will be partially tested. “For the very first time, we’re going to expose some of the DCGS 10.2 capabilities to the Empire Challenge enterprise,” Bigham said.

As for the latest DIB software, DIB 1.3, will allow for DCGS systems connected to a common network to automatically recognize and integrate with each other. “We’re going to cross-federate three different domains,” Bigham said.

Testing that federation of systems is one of the major goals of Empire Challenge ’09. “This year, one of our key things that we’re trying to do is develop an interface between the U.S. collection management system and its counterpart on the NATO side, the NATO collection management system,” Kittle said. “We’re actually engineering an interface between those two capabilities, so at the end, a coalition member can participate in the joint or coalition forces collection management process. That is, a coalition member on his side can nominate a collection target, or an exploitation requirement, and that gets into the U.S. collection management system, and it’s acted on from there. That will be a very big win that we’re anticipating this year, and there’s a lot of technical requirements, and issues related to that, building the right interface, and then testing it during this event.”

The ISR data generated out of China Lake will be shared over eight different networks to sites across three different security domains — U.S. only, 4 Eyes (meaning Australia, Canada, the U.K. and U.S.), and 9 Eyes (meaning NATO). The networks will connect to several U.S. sites as well as ISR centers in the U.K., Canada and Australia, as well as the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency in the Netherlands.

The source of most of that data will be the field portion of the exercise at China Lake. The U.K.’s Ministry of Defence is sending a Sea King Mk 7 airborne surveillance and control helicopter, Kittle said. “They like to bring those kind of airborne platforms to China Lake because it represents the operational environment that they’re going to be deploying to — Afghanistan or Iraq — high, hot and dusty.” he said.

On the ground, Kittle said, the U.K. contingent is “bringing a system they’re developing that’s a force-protection system that’s a mix of various types of sensors — cameras on sticks, or man-portable detection systems that they use for both base defense and personnel defense.” The Canadian armed forces are bringing “a couple of exploitation systems with them in the hope that they can get access to U.S. or other coalition partner data, and work with that data collection information on their exploitation systems,” Kittle said.

The amount of ISR equipment on hand at China Lake will be less than overwhelming, however, for precisely the same reason the U.S. and its partners are conducting the demonstration. The hardware is busy supporting forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Some of the coalition members are a little strapped as to being able to provide assets,” Kittle said. “Their uniformed services are fully committed — sometimes they just can’t spare additional platforms because they’re all deployed.”