Lockheed Martin Supplying Upgrades to U.S. Army's Battlefield Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Enterprise

Posted by Skyler Frink


Washington, D.C., 11, Oct. 2011. Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] is upgrading the data management and fusion capabilities of the enterprise that disseminates intelligence for the U.S. Army in hopes of making sorting through the massive amounts of operational intelligence available to those in theater easier. Through multiple projects, Lockheed Martin is modernizing many of the tools needed to support the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System’s (DCGS-A) intelligence missions.

DCGS is a family of systems that enables military analysts from all services to access shared intelligence. DCGS-A takes sensor data from all sources - signals, imagery and human intelligence - then integrates it into a common data format in a fused environment, making multi-source intelligence analysis possible.

“Army intelligence analysts increasingly rely on DCGS-A for their information and intelligence data,” said Jim Quinn, vice president of C4ISR Systems with Lockheed Martin IS&GS-Defense. “Providing improved fusion and data management tools will enhance DCGS-A performance while reducing manual efforts that benefit both analysts and decision-makers across the Army, its coalition partners and the greater intelligence community."

Lockheed Martin is supporting the Army’s efforts to modernize the capabilities of DCGS-A Version 3.1, currently fielded in Afghanistan. This software version’s primary objective is to meet urgent operational needs for better and more intelligence. To ensure that intelligence is not corrupted or lost when transferred between heterogeneous intelligence systems, Lockheed Martin is incorporating a data management and transfer capability - Data Mover - which enables soldiers to move data between disparate databases while preserving data integrity and previously identified associations made through intelligence analysis. Another new capability automatically merges intelligence data, allowing objects and associations obtained from intelligence to be refined, giving soldiers a more coherent view of the battlespace.

Lockheed Martin is also modernizing the user interfaces and porting the software for the ACE Block II All-Source Fusion subsystem and the single source subsystem to a Linux platform. This will significantly reduce hardware and software sustainment costs and simplify operator workflows for both systems.

The DCGS enterprise is interconnected by a robust communications structure that enables seamless, real-time, multi-agency intelligence sharing and collaboration - DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB). Lockheed Martin is also upgrading the DIB, which supports real-time ISR data query and retrieval capabilities for the U.S. and its coalition partners.