open architecture | The Contracting Education Academy

May 23, 2018 By AMK

Helping the Air Force search for actionable intelligence worldwide

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, analysts huddle around computer screens in U.S. Air Force facilities around the world scanning for information that might require immediate action.

These analysts are part of the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (AF DCGS), which is designed to sift through vast amounts of information for “needles in the haystack” that are critical to national security.

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are supporting the mission of AF DCGS in a broad range of ways. GTRI is providing expertise from subject matter experts in an array of sensing areas in which GTRI researchers have extensive experience supporting the development and prototyping of new services needed by the Air Force, conducting training and technology transfer activities for DCGS personnel, and providing advice on the information technology that underlies the DCGS to the programmers who maintain and enhance the system.

By modeling the flow of information through the DCGS, GTRI is helping the Air Force continuously improve the system, boosting efficiency and enhancing its ability to bring together the massive data sets that quickly provide critical information.

“For the Air Force analysts sitting at these workstations around the clock, we want to make sure they get the information they need as quickly, accurately, and efficiently as possible,” said Molly Gary, a GTRI principal research scientist who has led the project for nearly five years. “We want to help the Air Force improve the fusion of data so the analysts can more quickly get an understanding of what it all means and provide actionable intelligence to the commanders.”

The DCGS is the primary intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform for the U.S. Air Force. As part of its operation, more than a thousand analysts sift through a broad range of information, including real-time video, geospatial intelligence, intelligence collected by humans in the field, electronic signals, and other sources to create regular reports on what is happening in global trouble spots.

The Air Force system provides globally-integrated ISR capabilities and feeds into subsystems operated by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and other agencies that provide information at the unit level.

The system is complex, dating back to the 1960s and involving more than two dozen facilities around the world. DCGS has been built by a number of different vendors, contributing to a “stovepipe” system in which analysts on one part of the system do not necessarily have visibility into what analysts in other parts of the system are doing. Other challenges include disparate hardware and software systems, duplicated applications, differing operating systems, redundant software solutions, network security requirements, and a variety of information technology (IT) procedures.

To address these challenges, the Air Force is adopting an open architecture strategy in which systems are more standardized and the connections between specialized areas are more transparent – with a goal of making the system modular, more efficient and less expensive to operate. As an independent not-for-profit university-based organization, GTRI is helping map out the full system and how it is connected to the flow of data from one part to another – and ultimately provides information useful to warfighters.

“By going to an open architecture system, the goal is to break down the barriers between different stovepipes to realize more efficiencies,” said Louis Tirino, a GTRI senior research engineer who’s also supporting the project. “We can help leverage a lot of existing and new technologies that are available to break down those barriers to bringing data together. Ultimately, this will help reduce costs for the Air Force and ease the management burden.”

Regents Researcher Bill Melvin and Principal Research Engineer Alan Nussbaum teamed together and initiated the partnership with AF DCGS. The program is also supported by GEOINT Specialist and Senior Research Engineer Kyle L. Davis, and SIGINT Specialist and Senior Research Associate Clayton Besse. Several of GTRI’s eight laboratories are involved in different portions of the program.

Over the past six years, GTRI has been engaged in multiple DCGS tasks. Among them was Project Liberty, which developed and deployed a Forward Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (FPED) system to analyze real-time, full-motion video, signals intelligence, and other information to provide critical information to field commanders. The system was delivered just eight months after it was proposed.

GTRI’s support to DCGS builds on earlier work done to improve the capabilities of the Nation’s Multi-Disciplinary Intelligence (Multi-INT) system, which monitors incoming data. GTRI’s work in that effort, known as the Multi-INT (MINT) Data Fusion System, helped automate and rapidly transform functions within the intelligence process to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of analysts working on this task.

MINT also addressed issues of improving network bandwidth and information processing power to help human analysts stay on top of incoming data by focusing on the most significant information. It used the STINGER Graph tool, developed by GTRI, to assist in identifying relations between data.

For the GTRI researchers, the DCGS work is rewarding because it supports the people who risk their lives in the field.

“Ultimately, the entire weapons system is to help the analyst and warfighter do their jobs,” said Tirino. “By breaking down these barriers across the different lanes of incoming information, we can help make the information more readily accessible to the analyst. All of this is here to support the warfighters.”

Source: http://www.news.gatech.edu/2018/05/08/helping-air-force-search-actionable-intelligence-worldwide

January 5, 2018 By AMK

Army charts 30-day acquisition process for new cyber capabilities

The Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental broke new ground for Defense acquisition by setting up a process that gets vendors on contract in as little as 60 days. Now the Army thinks it can move twice as quickly with a new rapid prototyping process designed specifically for cyber defense.

The service’s program executive office for enterprise information systems (PEO-EIS) is in the process of putting together a vendor consortium that will make use of DoD’s other transaction (OT) authorities, a trend which has grown over the past year as Congress and the Pentagon have granted Defense components greater leeway to enter into agreements that sidestep the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

First, the Army needs to hire an independent firm or group to manage the consortium, and is meeting with candidates this month. The winner, expected to be selected in May, will be in charge of recruiting companies into the consortium to make sure the Army has a healthy base of cyber defense vendors to choose from, recommending new technologies for the government to prototype, managing security approvals for newly-selected technologies through the Risk Management Framework, enforcing the Army’s open architecture standards, and general administration of the consortium.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/army/2017/12/army-charts-30-day-acquisition-process-for-new-cyber-capabilities/

November 17, 2015 By AMK

Securing the future by ‘Bending the Cost Curve’

Bending the Cost Curve (BTCC), one of the 13-Make-Every-Dollar-Count cost initiatives launched by the Air Force, includes a growing and evolving set of more than 20 acquisition reform activities. These activities are focused on finding ways the Air Force can be more effective at how it spends money to get better capabilities to the warfighter faster.

“BTCC is coming up with ideas with industry, then going out and trying those ideas to see if we can actually drive down cost, increase capability and get it delivered faster,” said Dr. Camron Gorguinpour, the director of the Air Force Transformational Innovation Office, Air Force Office of Acquisitions. “Everything we do with BTCC is in collaboration with industry. (They are) a big part of the solution, so working closely with them helps us come up with better ideas of things that we should be doing.”

One program, Open Systems Acquisition, has reached a level of success. The concept is to move Air Force weapons systems toward a more open architecture, allowing traditional and non-traditional industry partners more flexibility for future improvements.

“Basically, OSA is a plug and play type of model. You have a system that anyone can understand and plug into if they develop a product that complies within certain requirements,” Gorguinpour said. “That way one company can create a system, but down the road, when you need a new capability, another company can create the new part and it can be changed out without a huge contracting action.

“This new open architecture environment will allow us to rapidly change out capabilities, to compete to a very broad segment of industry and be able to build on certain designs rather than having just one fixed product.”

As part of this program, the Air Force Research Laboratory created its own acquisition vehicle tailored to the new OSA model. With this new system, it will take only three weeks from the time companies demonstrate their capabilities to the time the winner is funded and doing work.

“This is getting us closer to the point of where you can acquire at the pace of global innovation,” Gorguinpour said. “There is definitely a lot more work to be done to smooth out the process for everyone to use, but we are getting it closer to being a reality.”

Thinking outside of the box and in the spirit of innovation, the Air Force launched the largest cash prizes ever conducted by one of the military services called Air Force Prize — worth $2 million to the entity that can produce a lightweight, mid-sized turbine engine.

“Turbine engines are important, especially if it can be installed into a smaller vehicle, the engine can double the fuel efficiency and improve the lifecycle cost,” Gorguinpour said. “The opportunity to win the cash prize started in May and companies will have two years to provide a product.”

Also included in BTCC is the Cost Capability Analysis program that would create better transparency by providing more awareness of Air Force requirements to industry to reduce the costs and development times for Air Force systems.

“When buying something as simple as a computer, you can see where a small increase of speed or memory is going to dramatically increase the cost,” Gorguinpour said. “So you need to find the optimal setting for your requirement. Because of BTCC, the Air Force is working with industry early in the acquisition process to refine what the requirements should be.”

The Air Force is looking to provide more tools to help navigate the complex acquisition process with AQ Prime, a beta website powered by a learning computer with the knowledge of the federal acquisition regulation. This website will serve as a resource for businesses not used to working with the military, as well as the public, an easy way to understand the complex government regulation.

“Even if we do the best job at streamlining bureaucracy, the fact is that it is going to be complicated because the work we do is incredibly complex,” Gorguinpour said. “We not only need to streamline the process, but also give people the right tools to navigate this better.”

BTCC activities will continue to improve the internal Air Force acquisition process, enhance interactions with industry throughout the acquisition lifecycle, and expand competition among traditional and non-traditional industry partners.

Source: http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/627140/securing-the-future-by-bending-the-cost-curve.aspx

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, analysts huddle around computer screens in U.S. Air Force facilities around the world scanning for information that might require immediate action.

The Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental broke new ground for Defense acquisition by setting up a process that gets vendors on contract in as little as 60 days. Now the Army thinks it can move twice as quickly with a new rapid prototyping process designed specifically for cyber defense.

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