Vice Adm. Kendall L. Card, U.S. Navy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence during a panel discussion at the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference April 26. (Thomas Brown/Staff)

The intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance community is facing a time of change, of both platforms and missions, and it is coming in an age of budget austerity. This requires a change in thinking, top ISR officials from all services said at the closing of the C4ISR conference this afternoon.

Service branches are going to need to work more closely together as they face new mission challenges, including a shift to the Pacific and the draw down in Afghanistan, while analysts and operators used to working in permissive environments will need to adapt to working in possible anti-access, area denial situations.

“You’re going to see more integration and more sharing, and that’s going to drive our solution set overall,” said Vice Adm. Kendall Card, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

For the past decade, intelligence gathering has largely focused on what’s flying above, with unmanned aircraft and other air frames such as the manned MC-12 Liberty providing surveillance largely free of danger, and providing that information in “mall security" type video feeds.

“As we think about where the strategy is taking us in the future, which is in contested environments ... and focusing on broader areas of the Pacific, it really requires different thinking and different capabilities,” said Lt. Gen. Larry James, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for ISR.

A necessary change in thinking will be to move away from a focus on the solely on the air frames, who is flying them, and how often they are flying. Instead, the focus needs to shift to the capabilities that can be provided to the troops on the ground when they are needed.

“We have to stop measuring capability in terms of input measures,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and moderator of the discussion. “The soldier, sailor, airman, Marine does not give a hoot about the number of (combat air patrols) or orbits that are airborne. They care about do they have an increase in their situational awareness that is provided by something.”

Additionally, the focus needs to increase on the ground level and the military increases its focus on areas such as Africa and South America, officials said. This includes more emphasis on human intelligence and expansion of programs such as the Distributed Common Ground System-Army.

“It’s a huge mission,” said Lt. Gen. Mary Legere, the deputy chief of staff of the Army for intelligence, of Africa. “There’s huge opportunities from the non-traditional ways of getting at things.”

Chris Biow CTO - Public Sector & VP, MarkLogic Corporation during a panel discussion at the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 26. Thomas Brown/Staff

The exponential growth of intelligence data need not hamper agencies' ability to share and analyze it in real-time, industry experts said Friday at a C4ISR Journal Conference.

Companies like Google have mastered the ability to serve up queried data in sub-seconds, and that should be the expectation for ISR, said Chris Biow, chief technology officer for public sector at MarkLogic Corp. Speaking on a conference panel, Biow said agencies should expect that level of service from big data tools and services from industry.

"Google has done a great job of building expectations even as the data gets bigger," Biow said. "The size of the Web doubles every so many months, [but] Google doesn't get twice as slow."

The growth of intelligence data isn’t a new phenomenon, but the variety of data from videos, sensors and photos are forcing agencies to contend with issues like bandwidth and larger quantities of data being produced rapidly. "In C4ISR, bandwidth is not a commodity, it's precious, said Biow."

Cloud computing is not the answer to all big data problems, he said. He suggests agencies invest in automated tools and techniques that enable data to be analyzed and tagged in the field where data is being created. Soldiers may not have network access or the ability to transmit large amounts of data up to a repository, but they can send subsets of data or even a description of what data they have collected when connectivity is available.

Where agencies stumble with big data is relaxing their expectations, Biow said. Big data projects should not take years to provide value, and agencies should redirect their focus if they're not seeing results.

Agencies must first have a business case for using big data, said Kapil Bakshi, chief solutions architect for Cisco Public Sector. Big data is being used for mission capabilities, such as cybersecurity, delivering health care and scientific research, all of which are data-intensive fields, Bakshi said. But only a small fraction of the data produced is being analyzed.

"The rest...is just there," Bakshi said. Agencies must bridge the gap between complex and variable data and structured data to create a full picture for decision-making.

"Be evangelists of your data and show value," he said.

Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, addresses the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 26. (Thomas Brown/Staff)

Unmanned aircraft are good for surveillance and reconnaissance, but the best way to learn about your adversary is through human intelligence, said Army. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“We can think about ISR platforms and we can think about the different ways that we will collect and the kinds of stuff that we need … but we really do have to have some folks that are studying and know when we get out into these environments what is happening out there,” Flynn said on Friday at the C4ISR Journal conference.

While he’s a “huge fan of ISR,” human intelligence provides a “fingertip feel” of your adversary, said Flynn, one of three authors of a January 2010 paper arguing that U.S. intelligence efforts in Afghanistan were too focused on killing badguys instead of understanding the human environment in which U.S. troops operate.

“Aerial drones and other collection assets are tasked with scanning the countryside around the clock in the hope of spotting insurgents burying bombs or setting up ambushes,” the paper says. “Again, these are fundamentally worthy objectives, but relying on them exclusively baits intelligence shops into reacting to enemy tactics at the expense of finding ways to strike at the very heart of the insurgency.

After more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, U.S. leaders still refer to Afghans is “Afghanis,” which is the name of the country’s currency, showing a persistent ignorance about Afghan culture, he said Friday.

“The best intelligence that I’ve ever had has been [human intelligence]-enabled,” Flynn said. “We’re not going to be everywhere all the time. We’re not going to have forces – in fact, we don’t want to have our forces out there. We want to be very precise.”

The scale of geography is a major limitation for unmanned aircraft, he said. For example, the eastern coast of Somalia alone is the distance between Maine and Florida. Unmanned aircraft also need permission to fly over certain countries, and the U.S. may not be able to count on having air supremacy

“We typically look at things 300 feet above the ground instead of looking at things on the ground,” Flynn said. “In our national security strategy and in our national military strategy, it really stresses the idea of building partner capacity. The more we can enable our partners to take care of their law enforcement and their military and their domestic security needs, the better we’ll be: You develop stronger partnerships, you develop stronger relationships, more enduring – and it’s a lot less expensive.”

Col. Fred Hargreaves, Head C4ISR at UK Ministry of Defence, left, moderates a discussion "International Cooperation and Partnerships" at the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 25. (Mike Morones/Defense News)

Coalition efforts to share intelligence will become increasingly important in a world where major powers are undergoing fiscal austerity and other nations are demanding a democratization of intelligence, several intelligence experts said Thursday at the C4ISR Conference in Crystal City, VA.

The experts, speaking as part of a panel on the role of international partnerships, highlighted the need to develop relationships between countries, as well as compatibility of equipment, ahead of potential conflicts.

“A lot of this deals with building relationships ahead of time,” said John Arpin, and intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency.  “A crisis is not the time to start handing out business cards.  Those relationships need to be built and nurtured.”

And the experts agreed that the next crisis is unlikely to wait until the distant future to emerge.

“There’s a lot happening in the world,” said Vicente Echandia Roldan, minister counselor of congressional and security affairs at the Colombian Embassy.  “Everyday you have the fiscal constraints that hopefully after 2015 are going to be less, but you never know.  You’re going to have to rely more and more (on partners) not only because of the fiscal constraint but because countries all over the world are starting to grow and get their act together in every region.”

In the past many of the issues with interoperability have centered around technical challenges, but the experts agreed that the larger issue is intelligence community culture.

“The issues we see tend to be more cultural,” said Joe Ross, principal scientist for the Joint ISR Capability Area Team 5 ath the NCI agency.  “The technology piece is not that hard.  Put a bunch of technicians in a room and say, ‘we’ve got a standard, we need to make this work.’  They’ll make it work.”

"As long as we keep our eyes on the ball, if we get to conference we’ll be able to work an agreement out," Andrew Grotto, professional staff member for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Thursday at the 4th annual C4ISR Journal Conference. The focus must remain on cyber information sharing, not other cyber-related issues such as Internet piracy, he said.

Grotto said there is broad consensus on the parameters of information sharing, including sharing among the private sector and between the private sector and government. There also must be reasonable privacy protections, said Grotto, who spoke on a panel with staffers from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee.

One cybersecurity issue Grotto said he hopes Congress will tackle is the Department of Homeland Security's role in cyberspace. While DHS has jurisdiction to defend the dot-gov domain, there are some federal networks at the Justice Department and other agencies that DHS doesn't have authority to monitor. DHS is challenged in carrying out its mission if it can't access all federal networks, Grotto said.

Another issue on agencies' roles and responsibilities that Congress must address is which agency should directly interface with industry to sharing cyber information, said Thomas Corcoran, senior policy adviser for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House this month, was amended to name DHS as the main point of entry to receive information shared by the private sector.  This may also be a topic for debate in the Senate, if and when an information sharing bill is introduced, Corcoran said.

Col. Mary O'Brien, USAF, Commander of the 70th ISR Wing, addresses the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 25. (Mike Morones/staff)

The Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency's entry into the service's top combat exercise was just a first step in the integration, with future exercises expected to test how the service can collect information in a contested environment.

Col. Mary O'Brien, commander of the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Fort Meade, Md., said today at the C4ISR Conference in Crystal City, Va., that the service fully integrated ISR assets into the most recent Red Flag exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., as a way to provide "more realistic training for ISR analysts, more training like we fight."

"We bring everybody together for Red Flag, so we thought we should do the same for ISR," O'Brien said.

The agency had the 526th Intelligence Squadron to take part in the exercise, with off-site support from the 566th Intelligence Squadron and the 70th and 480th ISR Wings. The group set up the first "ISR package commander" to plan and oversee the missions, which featured air frames including the MC-12 Liberty, RQ-4 Global Hawk and footage from U-2 spy planes. For three weeks, ISR analysts tested their capabilities in core Air Force missions, including close air support, global strike and air interdiction. The exercise ran from Feb. 25 to March 15.

"We really want to get a handle on that non-(counter insurgency) training," O'Brien said. "A lot of our ISR agents have only worked in a permissive environment, so we need to train for contested and integrated operations. It's the only way to guarantee that those wartime capabilities will be there when you need them."

One example mission focused on providing close air support in an area with a credible anti-air threat. ISR agents worked with an MC-12 Liberty crew to provide information to joint terminal attack controllers on the ground for close air support from friendly aircraft.

"That's one of the things that we need to figure out, how much risk would we have to take to fly airborne ISR assets," O'Brien said.

The first test was just a way for ISR to get their "foot in the door" into the exercise, and they worked around the original flying missions that are the focus of current Red Flag exercises. But going forward, the agency wants to test its assets and abilities in contested environments and ensure that their analysts can work with their equipment in missions other than the ones they currently face.

"I really want my analysts to know how to use the ISR capabilities we have already fielded and use them in a new environment," O'Brien said. "This was really focused on 'Are we using this to the best of our abilities?' "

The agency is looking at including ISR in future Red Flags and other exercises across the Air Force, O'Brien said. These exercises face an uncertain future, however, with sequestration canceling the next Red Flag-Alaska and other exercises such as the Air Mobility Rodeo.

Dale Meyerrose, founder of the MeyerRose Group, participates in a discussion, "Cyber Security, Threats and Responses," during the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 25. (Mike Morones/Staff)

The best way to fix the discrepancies in cyber defense facing the U.S. is to apply techniques used in other military and security realms and to cease viewing cyber as unique, several experts said during a panel discussion Thursday at the C4ISR Journal conference.

The panelists, who focused on cybersecurity and ongoing international threats, pointed to ways in which cyber has been separated from normal practices and as such removed from the lessons learned in other domains.

“Cyber is not an isolated domain,” said Dale Meyerrose, former associate director of national intelligence.  “Those of us in this business seem to get all wrapped up in the business of cyber this and cyber that.  Cyber is a means to human endeavor, we sometimes have trouble with that.”

Meyerrose, who now runs the MeyerRose Group, said that the development of cyber mirrors that of the domain of space, where ongoing debates lingered into the 1990s until it was integrated into traditional military planning.

“Maybe we need the discussion of cyber as a special topic in order for us to become more educated.” Meyerrose said.

Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, drew comparisons to law enforcement, saying that experts get too focused on the tools of the cyber trade as opposed to the general principle of apprehension and justice.

“When someone is shooting at you, you’re not asking ‘is that a 20 caliber or a 40 caliber bullet’ that’s flying at you,” he said.  “You don’t really care.  You care about who’s shooting at you, why they’re shooting at you, what you’re going to do to neutralize that threat.  The gun they use is only of interest after they’ve actually killed you and the police are going to arrive to determine from the forensics on the gun who the actor actually was.”

And the focus on tools has led to an exclusive emphasis on improving defense which, if one views cyber through the model of physical security, doesn’t work.  Improving locks or putting bars over windows doesn’t create perfect protection, Alperovitch said.  Instead, looking at the way an alarm system deters crime shows the limitations of our current cybersecurity approach which is largely unsuccessful in bringing an attacker to justice.

“An alarm system does absolutely nothing to secure your house, people can still break in,” he said.  “But what it does is it says, ‘we’ll concede that you can get into this house, but when you do maybe I have cameras that will take a picture of you and the alarm company will get notified and will call me at three in the morning and they’ll say sir or mam, your door was kicked in, we are sending who?  Not the locksmith to fix your door, we’re sending the police to catch the guy.”

Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) addresses the 12th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference on April 25. (Mike Morones/Defense News)

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, plans to introduce cyber legislation this summer that would codify the roles and responsibilities of agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and make DHS the lead for cyber information sharing with the private sector.

McCaul, who spoke Thursday at a C4ISR Journal Conference, said most of the bill has been drafted and could be introduced by July. Under the bill, DHS' National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) would be the primary hub for collecting and disseminating cyber threat intelligence shared with the private sector.

"We want to know what's out there in the private sector," McCaul said. "People think that NSA has all the threat information or Homeland Security, and the fact is it's a very small part of it. It's like a phone book, and the majority of that phone book is laying out there in the private sector"

The bill would include so-called safe harbors and liability protection for companies that share threat information. The criticism of the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which passed the House this month, is that citizens' private data would not be properly protected when Internet companies and other private firms share data with the government. Critics also said the bill was overly broad in describing how shared information could be used, such as for cybersecurity purposes.

McCaul said it's too early to comment on the liability protections his bill will including or the guidelines around what shared information could be used to do. He has been working with the White House, critical infrastructure companies and lawmakers in the House and Senate to hash out details of the bill and address their concerns, he said.

"I have no interest in passing a bill that isn't going to go anywhere," he said.

McCaul was one of 288 lawmakers who supported CISPA, but the White House has threatened to veto the bill.

"It's truly a win-win situation, if done right," he said of information sharing with the private sector. "If not done right, it can be very damaging. I want to do it the right way, so I can encourage a two-way street of sharing information."

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (Mike Morones/Staff)

The intelligence community did its job in handling information on the Boston Bombing suspects, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday at the C4ISR Journal conference in Crystal City, Va.

Despite the fact that one of the two brothers accused of the bombings was on a terrorist watch list prior to the attack, Clapper emphasized that the government handled the suspect appropriately.

“Being in the database is not necessarily indicative of plans for nefarious activity,” he said. “I don’t think it was (an intelligence failure).  There are half a million people on the watch list.”

Clapper said that there continues to be a great deal of difficulty in predetermining when an individual has become radicalized in advance of terrorist action.

“I think it would be a real good idea not to hyperventilate until we get the facts,” he said.  “I think the bigger issue here is what is the government’s responsibility for mindreading about the point at which someone will self-radicalize?”

In response to the bombings many have been pushing the notion of government surveillance, Clapper said, but protection of civil liberties has been an afterthought.

“There’s a bigger issue, and that is the extent to which you want the government to monitor U.S. citizens’ behaviors,” he said.  “I think at some point we have to come to a judgment here, on just how intrusive we want big brother to be.”

“I would liken it to a pendulum.  Of course the pendulum is going to swing now in one direction, and it will swing back later.”

November 2012

Each year, C4ISR Journal scans the world of network, sensors and intelligence looking for the new technologies and new efforts changing the way military forces and policymakers do their jobs. We find these candidates in many ways. Some are nominated by the manufacturers, some by their users, still others are in the news. We scrutinize each one — Is it new? Is it available? Is it useful? Is it being used? — and slim down the pool to a list of the best.

Arrayed in five categories — Sensors, Innovations, Network Systems, Organizations and Platforms — this year’s winners run the gamut from “app stores” that could put crucial mission information on an infantry smartphone to a reusable space plane that flies home from orbit. Last month, we revealed the entire Big 25 list; this month, we honor the Top Five.

• SENSORS:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the Imaging System

Awarded  for Immersive Surveillance. MIT’s multicamera video surveillance system can monitor an area the size of seven football fields and zoom in on people with enough resolution to identify them by their facial features up to 100 meters away in all directions. The system does this by seamlessly combining the views from 48 cameras. A prototype of ISIS has been tested at Terminal A of Boston’s Logan International Airport, where hijackers boarded two of the doomed flights of 9/11.

• INNOVATIONS: U.S. Army G-2 intelligence staff, the National Reconnaissance Office, the  Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate of the Communications-Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center, and Thermopylae Science and Technology

Awarded for:   Windshear, software that connects a soldier’s hand-held device to biometric data and intelligence products on the Distributed Common Ground System-Army network. Windshear is the brainchild of the late Pedro “Pete” Rustan, former director of NRO’s Mission Support Directorate, who sought to give small units the same ability to reach that civilians have on smartphones. Now Windshear officials are talking with managers of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s TransApps mobility project about how to integrate their effort. Rustan, who died in July, handed the project to his staff, saying, “It’s your responsibility to force change on a system that won’t want it. Your first approach should be the front door, but if your polite knocks go unanswered, go to the back door. ... Whatever you do, don’t give up until you have pulled the community forward.”

• ORGANIZATIONS: National Security Agency

Awarded for Project Fish Bowl, a pilot effort to create mobile devices that can securely handle top-secret conversations and data. The intelligence community needs to keep pace with mobile communications breakthroughs in the commercial world. Project Fish Bowl is doing that by letting intelligence IT workers test off-the-shelf cellphones programmed with special security features and extra encryption. Participants in the Fish Bowl pilot are allowed to engage in top-secret conversations tunneled through a commercial cellular network. For now, NSA is focusing on voice-over-Internet, but eventually it would like to give users access to data, too. For security, the data would not be stored on the device; users would view in the intelligence community’s private cloud.

• NETWORK SYSTEMS: Army’s Distributed Common Ground System-Army program and 42Six Solutions

Awarded for Coral Reef, an intelligence community computer application that lets analysts upload, search and perform analysis on data extracted from cellphones and GPS devices. The app increases the knowledge of analysts and tactical operators at checkpoints or forward operating bases or on intelligence collection missions. A user in the field acquires data extracted from an adversary’s digital communications, cellphone calls or GPS signals and uploads the information into the Coral Reef network for analysis. The technology helps operators identify suspicious individuals so they can access other intelligence associated with them.

• PLATFORMS Boeing and the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office

Awarded  for the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, the service’s “space plane.” The Air Force has kept its X-37B operations largely secret, but what is known is that the vehicle allows the Air Force to test equipment in space for months at a time, then bring it home for inspection. Such capabilities raise the possibility that the U.S. could deploy sensors into orbits tailored to observe regional hot spots, although the government does not acknowledge this mission. The X-37B vehicle landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., in June to conclude a mysterious 15-month stay in orbit.