BY MARCUS WEISGERBER

A shift to cloud computing by the U.S. intelligence community and a streamlined information technology system would likely save the U.S. Defense Department money, just not in the near term, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Kevin Meiners

Expect spending for these types of projects to potentially rise in the DoD's five-year budget blueprint, the future years defense plan (FYDP), said Kevin Meiners, deputy undersecretary of defense for portfolio, programs and resources in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

"Within the FYDP I would tell you, you would probably see an increase going to the agencies in terms of trying to build up this converged IT system and the savings would be in the out years," he said during a presentation at the C4ISR Journal Conference in Arlington, Va.

Last week, James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, told an audience at a conference in San Antonio that the White House is calling for billions of dollars of cuts "in the double digit range" across the intelligence community.

About "one half of the needed savings" could be achieved through information technology "efficiencies," Clapper said.

Earlier this week, Grant Schneider, chief information officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the scaling of IT systems between agencies -- such as the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency -- could yield a 25 percent savings.

The Budget Control Act, enacted in August, calls for a $450 billion reduction in planned defense spending over the next decade.

BY MICHAEL HOFFMAN

A U.S. Army three-star general who’s proven he’s not afraid to publicly call the military out on its intelligence problems said the Defense Department must do a better job of ensuring the military services fuse their intelligence efforts.

All four services have their own projects to combine intelligence into one pipeline on the battlefield, said Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the assistant director of national intelligence for partner engagement, during the C4ISR Journal Conference. The Defense Department needs to select a service to lead the effort for all four, Flynn said.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

Flynn said the effort to create better fusion cells needs more direction in order to meet immediate needs.

In January 2010, Flynn, who  served as the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, wrote a harsh critique of the military’s intelligence efforts there. The candid report, published by Center for a New American Security, a Washington, D.C. think tank, grabbed the attention of military and government leaders.

Flynn was later selected for his new position by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In November, Clapper said the move would allow Flynn to act as “kind of the bully pulpit for collaboration and sharing.”

When asked what the U.S. military’s intelligence teams have done right in Afghanistan, Flynn immediately mentioned bomb-sniffing dogs.

“We don’t have enough of them,” he said.

He also commended the Army for focusing on making the soldier a sensor. However, he said the service is not moving fast enough to equip soldiers with the intel right tools.

Technology is moving so fast the Army is struggling to keep up, Flynn said. Rather than five-year technology roadmaps, he said the military needs to shrink those timelines to a year.

Flynn wants ground commanders to expect more from the intelligence shops. Rather than requesting data, he said commanders should be telling their intelligence analysts the problem and depending on them to come up with solutions.

The U.S. military has made major strides in population-centric intelligence collection, he said.

BY MICHAEL HOFFMAN

The U.S. Army has teamed with the nation’s top-level digital security agencies to establish a secure wireless network to protect the smartphones service leaders want to get into soldiers’ hands.

Michael McCarthy

The National Security Agency’s commercial products division contacted Michael McCarthy, director of operations for the Army’s Brigade Modernization Command’s Mission Command Complex, to ask how they could help.

“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” McCarthy said at the C4ISR Journal Conference.

Army leaders have met with the NSA and the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Information assurance remains the greatest challenge to the Army’s pursuit to put a smartphone in every soldier’s hand.

McCarthy cautioned that the answer doesn’t necessarily lie in the handsets themselves, but rather in the infrastructure and network the Army establishes to support the phones.

The Army is testing a host of different infrastructure solutions, both traditional networks and those that use a radio and frequency hopping infrastructure to protect information sent to the phones.

McCarthy said he’s especially interested in the frequency hopping network built by xG Technology, based in Sarasota, Fla. During a test, a military jammer shut down all of the Army’s communications systems except for the xG network, he said.

Soldiers and engineers will test the xG network as well as other network systems at the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in 2012. McCarthy said the NIE has been valuable tool in getting smartphones in soldiers’ hands in simulated combat exercises.

“We’ve been able to get immediate feedback from these soldiers at what works and what doesn’t,” McCarthy said.

Rep. Mike Rogers

BY JILL LASTER

The House’s top intelligence leader slapped down administration plans for large reductions in intelligence funding, saying such cuts would cripple America’s ability to stay competitive on a global field.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said today during the 11th annual C4ISR Journal Conference near Washington, D.C., that he doesn’t want the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance community “to do more with less.” Instead, he said, Congress must find efficiencies while keeping intelligence budgets stable or allowing for a small increase.

“I will not allow a cut in mission capability,” said Rogers, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “We have to save money. We have to get efficient. But I’m not going to nick the bone.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said earlier this month that the White House’s deficit-reduction plan “calls for cuts in the double-digit range — with a B — over 10 years.” To make those kind of reductions, he said, the U.S. intelligence community will try to kill redundant information systems and shift to cloud computing. Clapper also told the audience at the Geospatial Intelligence conference in San Antonio that the coming round of budget cuts would be a critical challenge for political leadership and the intelligence community.

Rogers said he and Clapper would meet today to discuss the intelligence budget and what cuts could be made.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is the House panel responsible for funding and overseeing U.S. intelligence capabilities. Rogers said the committee looked line by line at every intelligence program in the fiscal 2012 budget and found that certain efficiencies could save money, such as in information technology.

Rogers added that as the panel, and Congress as a whole, grapples with belt-tightening, the nation’s ISR community must focus on what it needs to do versus what it needs to buy — considering the purpose of each tool instead of its capabilities.

“I am not saying do more with less,” he said. “I’m saying we ... need to do business differently to remain competitive.”

Rogers also said more attention needs to be paid to the “back end” of intel — filtering through all the data collected by ISR assets on the front lines. He said the 2012 defense authorization bill reflects a need to ensure there isn’t more ISR technology than there is manpower to manage it.

“Everyone rushed to get their soda-straw capabilities to the front lines, and we may have lagged in the back end to analyze the sheer volume of information coming in,” he said.

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