By now, the U.S. Valiant Angel video management computers were supposed to be aiding in the hunt for al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Instead, the equipment will be delivered to Arizona later this year for more testing.

U.S. Central Command said “no thanks” to the system, which would store and display video feeds from aircraft, on the eve of its scheduled shipment to Afghanistan in April. At the time, engineers were working to fix a data compatibility problem in a portion of the system, U.S. officials said.

Central Command’s rejection of the $29 million system surprised Joint Forces Command, which has been managing development of Valiant Angel since August, when Lockheed Martin won the contract to develop the video servers and software tools. An advance team was in Afghanistan preparing for delivery of the equipment.

The joint command is overhauling the program to include tests at the upcoming Empire Challenge intelligence sharing demonstration in Arizona and an accelerated transfer of responsibility to the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).

Central Command decided not to deploy Valiant Angel after the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan, Army Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, balked at the deployment in an internal memo. Flynn, by e-mail, said his organization supports fielding of a “fully operational” Valiant Angel, and he confirmed his recommendation that Central Command reassess the system in about a year. In a May 26 statement, Central Command said it would do so.

In a prepared statement, Lockheed said it continues to refine Valiant Angel, but said it “is ready to be deployed today.”

Intelligence analysts and troops were expected to use Valiant Angel’s commercial-broadcasting-inspired software tools to view full-motion video mostly from unmanned planes. Analysts would be able to view multiple feeds in real time and pull video from archives by entering search terms, similar to the way news and sports producers conduct rapid searches.

Valiant Angel was supposed to solve another problem by making wide-area imagery available over the network, a capability that does not exist today because of the size of the image files. Wide-area images span kilometers and are considered motion imagery rather than full-motion video because they flow at several frames a second instead of 30 frames a second. Most wide-area imagery is collected by piloted Constant Hawk aircraft, but the Pentagon wants to launch a wide-area-surveillance revolution by installing wide-area cameras on unmanned aircraft. Valiant Angel was meant to solve the imagery dissemination challenge presented by that plan.

11th HOUR TECHNICAL HURDLE

The Valiant Angel delivery plan began to crumble in March about the same time the joint command showed the equipment to reporters at a government laboratory in Suffolk, Va. During the media tour, officials explained that military evaluators were assessing the system before it was to be packed up for the flight to Afghanistan. That evaluation revealed a problem with one aspect of the system, said Air Force Col. George “Skip” Krakie, who oversees Valiant Angel work as head of the joint command’s ISR Integration Division.

Evaluators discovered that Valiant Angel’s commercially derived software was not fully compatible with video feeds from the U.S. Global Broadcast Service, a satellite-based network for distributing video and other intelligence to U.S. forces. Specifically, the Valiant Angel software would not accept the metadata — details of the time, location and content of the video — accompanying the GBS feeds. Valiant Angel relies on this metadata to display the correct video for analysts and troops. GBS is just one source of full-motion video feeds, but the problem had to be fixed.

“Our vendors had to go back and basically produce patches for their commercial software to handle the GBS feed,” Krakie said. “We were in the process of working that issue when we got the memo.”

Central Command summarized the command’s decision in the May 26 statement: “USFOR-A” — the Kabul-based command and control headquarters where Flynn is deputy chief of staff for intelligence — “conducted a re-examination of Valiant Angel employment and evolving operational requirements coupled with force, logistics, and architectural priorities and determined that existing capabilities in theater satisfy their immediate requirements.” Central Command, which sets requirements for ISR equipment in Afghanistan, said it would re-examine Valiant Angel in 12 months and would support fielding “a fully operational Valiant Angel system.”

MORE TESTS

Instead of rushing Valiant Angel to Afghanistan, Joint Forces Command plans to include it in the next Empire Challenge intelligence demonstration, scheduled for August at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. Previous Empire Challenges have taken place at China Lake, Calif. Krakie said Valiant Angel will be the “backbone” of the full-motion video system at Empire Challenge.

In August, a panel of military officials selected a team of Lockheed Martin, Harris Broadcasting and NetApp as the Valiant Angel contractor. The goal was to deliver the system rapidly — within months — by adapting commercial technology. The selection was a bitter disappointment to members of the SAIC team who had pitched the idea of Valiant Angel in meetings with the ISR Task Force in 2008. They proposed developing a successor to a video management system, developed by the small company EchoStorm, called the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Information Service, or ISRIS.

Krakie said he is OK with Central Command’s decision to slow the program. “Our goal is never to shove anything down the throat of the war fighter. We’re responding to war-fighter requirements. They established their requirement, and told us that right now, they didn’t need a [quick reaction capability],” he said.

Without the rush to field Valiant Angel, Joint Forces Command is accelerating the planned 2012 transfer of Valiant Angel to NGA. “We can probably push up that period rather dramatically,” Krakie said. Empire Challenge would provide a “baseline of capabilities that would transition” to NGA.