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Intel Insider

Col. Frank Swekosky

ChiefIntelligence Force Modernization DivisionSOCOM J2 Intelligence

Human Geography O Strategic Mission Planning O 3-D Flash LiDAR USAF ISR and SOF

July 2013 Volume 11, Issue 6

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Cover / Q&AFeatures

Col. Frank SwekoSkyChief

Intelligence Force Modernization Division

SOCOM J2 Intelligence

16

July 2013Volume 11, Issue 6Special OperatiOnS technOlOgy

10

Departments Industry Interview2 editor’S PerSPeCtive3 whiSPerS4 PeoPle14 BlaCk watCh27 reSourCe Center

PatriCk ernStCo-Founder and Chief Operating OfficerPixia

5iSr and SoFUSAF ISR and SOF have historically complemented one another operationally as well as doctrinally, but the past decade-plus of fighting terrorists and insurgents required different intelligence priorities and drove a flexible SOF component down its own ISR track. We re-examine the ways in which conventional USAF ISR and SOF can partner for the future.By Col. Gordon K. “Keith” Watts

19human GeoGraPhyWhile special operations usually is associated with kinetic operations under cover of darkness, special ops also involves many other strengths, such as military information support operations. Here, we examine human geography, and how U.S. goals can be attained without combat.By John doyle

28

“Every intel professional

should be thinking

about how to improve the product and how to

improve the technology so that we

can ultimately deliver the right tools to the right

people at the right time.”

— Col. Frank Swekosky

Geoint and SoFA sure way to win the fight is to know where the foe lies, the direction of its movements, and what the enemy is about to do. Here, special operators reap the benefits of myriad platforms that harvest enormous amounts of information about the opponent, all without exposing U.S. personnel to lethal dangers.By sCott nanCe

SPeCial SeCtion

3-d FlaSh lidarThis technology can have myriad applications, including aid to pilots landing helicopters in brownout or whiteout conditions, guidance for unmanned aerial vehicles, military mapping, and more. Several major companies have developed advanced systems using 3-D flash LiDAR.By Jeff CampBell

23

In the second SOCOM Virtual Town Hall, SOCOM Commander Admiral Bill H. McRaven, his Senior Enlisted Advisor Command Sergeant Major (CSM) Chris Faris, and their spouses spent more than an hour addressing concerns from participants across several social media platforms.

The commander opened with updates on the preservation of the force and families initiative, including military family life consultants, expanding the chaplain base to include a new course at joint special operations university, and recent heightened attention toward the handling of sexual assault cases in the military. “You have my personal promise, and I know I speak for the CSM as well, that we are going to do everything we possibly can to drive this to zero,” the admiral drove home. “We’ve got to make sure everybody in the entire community is attuned to these problems and prepared to deal with them.”

The commander is committed to ensuring morale after recent conflicts doesn’t dip to the historic lows it hit in 1977, when he entered the service. As CEO of SOCOM, he’s learned through family initiatives that if SOCOM doesn’t take care of the force—including the families—having the best airplanes and rifles in the world won’t matter. SOF won’t be able to operate in harsh environments without a good level of morale across the force.

An important factor in morale is an operator’s family life. Many military spouses, especially in the SOF community, face challenges advancing in their careers with a permanent change of station (PCS) move. Mrs. McRaven encouraged spouses to ensure that their new command has their current contact informa-tion when they PCS. That way the family readiness group leader there can reach out about job opportunities in the spouse’s new community. She added that spouses should stay in touch with the command’s Facebook page, where information is quickly released.

These virtual town halls and SOCOM’s bold steps into social media are outstanding ways to keep the community informed and give military families a voice in the decisions that will affect them.

Jeff Campbelleditor


Editorial

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SOCOM has issued a request for information seeking to solicit technology experimentation candidates from research and development organizations, private industry and academia for inclusion in future experimentation events coordinated by the command. The intent is to accelerate the delivery of innovative capabilities to the SOF warfighter. Materiel solutions brought to the event should be between a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 3 and 6.

SOF experimentation will explore emerging technologies, technical applications, and their potential to provide solutions to future SOF capa-bilities. Beginning in fiscal year 2014, SOF technical experimentation event focus areas and locations are as follows:

• October 15-24, 2013—Survivability and Performance Improvement/Unconventional Warfare (UW), location Camp Atterbury, Ind.

• February or March 2014—Maritime Mobility/Counter-Mobility, location TBD, anticipate RFI open late October and close early December 2013

• June 17-26, 2014—Theater Special Operations Command/Partner Nation SOF Systems, location TBD, anticipate RFI open mid-March and close early April 2014

While SOCOM announces technologies associated to specific themes, there is no restriction to accept technology nominations in other areas of interest to SOCOM.

Son Tay Warrior’s New HomeThe 27th Special Operations Wing recently held a

ceremony to celebrate the official new home of Combat Talon I, Cherry One, near the front entrance of Cannon Air Force Base, N.M.

If the retired aircraft could speak, it would undoubt-edly have many hair-raising and death-defying exploits to share. Perhaps, though, the most intimidating story it could tell is that of the Son Tay Raid, the moment this particular Talon cemented its mark in time during a prisoner of war rescue mission in the Vietnam war.

According to the National Museum of the United States Air Force, an assortment of aircraft trained for the operation, including six helicopters, five small attack planes and two large support aircraft. All unknowingly prepared for a raid on a POW camp in North Vietnam, where intelligence analysts believed 55 prisoners were being held.

“Our bird, Cherry One, aka 64-0523, is a larger than life C-130E(I)—one of the first, and has been operating in the shadows around the many hot spots of the world. She’s always brought her aircrews safely home,” said retired Major William Guenon, the aircraft’s copilot the night of the raid. “When not stemming the tide of communism, she, in the dark of night, quietly pursued those fanatics who still wanted to harm the U.S. Indeed, for a large-sized aircraft, this is certainly no small feat.”

“By displaying a proven special operations legend at the Cannon Air Force Base front gate, aircrews can see and realize the true spirit and proud tradition of the Son Tay Raid from so long ago,” Guenon continued. “Hopefully her example will influence others to succeed in spite of great odds.”

By Senior Airman Jette Carr

Global Battlestaff and Program Support

Replacement Contract

SOCOM is seeking industry input to aid with the formation of a strategy to acquire services to support the command. The acquisition of services will be in support of the SOCOM-wide mission support (SWMS) acquisition, which will focus on acquiring knowledge based services, as defined by Department of Defense taxonomy for the acquisi-tion of services.

A SOCOM contract for similar services, Global Battlestaff and Program Support, ends May 2015 and will be replaced with the SWMS acquisition. The GBPS contract is an indefi-nite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a $1.5 billion ceiling. To help develop a strategy that maximizes competi-tion, small business participation, and contractor perfor-mance, the SOCOM is seeking industry input, comments, and questions from interested companies. This exchange of information is designed to begin market research into the capabilities of industry to meet the SOCOM’s developing requirements and establish the degree of industry interest in the acquisition.

SOCOM Seeks Innovative Capability Solutions

www.SOTECH-kmi.com SOTECH 11.6 | 3

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At a change of command ceremony for Navy Special Warfare Command Rear Admiral Brian L. Losey relieved Rear Admiral Sean A. Pybus. Pybus will be promoted to vice admiral in his new assignment commanding NATO’s special operations headquarters.

Lieutenant General Eric Fiel, commander of Air

Force Special Operations Command, recently presided over the cere-mony in which Colonel William West, former commander of 27th Special Operations Group at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M., received the reins of the 1st Special Operation Wing from outgoing commander, Colonel Jim Slife. Fiel also presided over a ceremony at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M. in which Brigadier General Buck Elton, 27th Special Operations Wing commander, pinned on his first star.

Captain Robert D. Sharp, who has been selected for the rank

of rear admiral (lower half), will be assigned as director of intel-ligence, J2, U.S. Special Operations Command, Tampa, Fla. Sharp is currently serving as Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group Fellow, Newport, R.I.

The Special Operations Aviation Training Battalion held a change of command ceremony at Fort Bragg, N.C., with Major Jeffery J. Bragg assuming command from Lieutenant Colonel Mark G. Kappelmann.

BAE Systems has announced Sir Roger Carr will join its board

as a non-executive director and Chairman designate on October 1, 2013. Carr is currently chairman of Centrica plc, and deputy chairman and senior independent director of the Court of the Bank of England and a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group.

Northrop Grumman Corporation has announced the hiring of Amy F. Hopkins and Thomas E. Laux, two executives who will lead elements of a newly formed Business and Advanced Systems Development organiza-tion within the company’s

Aerospace Systems sector. Hopkins joins Northrop Grumman as director of strategy and analysis. Laux will lead the mission campaign for combat support and mobility as its director.

QinetiQ North America announced the appoint-ment of David Shrum as general manager of its defense solutions (DS) business unit. Shrum will have management responsibility for DS portfolios including software and systems engineering, aeronautical engineering, and logistics and fleet management.

Rear Adm. Sean A. Pybus

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI) announced that a U.S. Air Force remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) reached a record 20,000 flight hours on a single aircraft, the highest flight time of any U.S. Air Force Predator. The Predator 107 (P107) was performing a 21-hour combat mission in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan when it achieved the milestone.

“Amassing 20,000 hours on a single RPA airframe is a remark-able achievement and a true testa-ment to the GA-ASI team, which strives to create highly reliable, durable, and life-saving tools in support of the warfighter,” said Frank W. Pace, president, Aircraft Systems Group, GA-ASI. “With the highest mission capable rate of any aircraft in the Air Force inventory, Predators will be available to support our boots on the ground for many years to come.”

The P107 began service with the 57th Wing Air Combat Command in October 2004. About four years later it moved to the 432d Wing with the standup of the first U.S. Air Force Remotely Piloted Aircraft Wing. More than 95 percent of the P107’s flight time has been flown in support of overseas contingency operations.

Predator Soars Past 20,000 Flight Hours

Compiled by Kmi media Group staffpeOple

www.SOTECH-kmi.com4 | SOTECH 11.6

USAF ISR and SOF have historically complemented one another operationally as well as doctrinally, but the past decade-plus of fighting terrorists and insurgents required different intel-ligence priorities and drove a flexible SOF component down its own ISR track. The USAF has since advanced its ISR capabilities and doctrine, inviting now a re-examination of the ways in which conventional USAF ISR and special operations forces can partner for the future.

USAF ISR And SOF: FAmIlIAR OpS AllIAnceS

“Discussions about intelligence reform tend to fall into two broad areas: structure—or reorganization—and process. Both approaches have their advocates. Ideally, the issues should be approached together. Altered structure and unaltered process can become little more than moving boxes on the bureaucratic organization chart.”

— Mark M. Lowenthal

As the United States society collectively reeled in the after-math of devastating al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, America’s special operations forces (SOF) took the fight to the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. By mid-October 2001, U.S. Air Force (USAF) SOF faced challenges in secur-ing the tailored intelligence products that would underpin the detailed planning for aerial missions that were in turn required to sustain ongoing SOF operations. Mission planners for USAF SOF tasked with flying cargo planes on unescorted re-supply and insertion missions into Afghanistan did not organically possess the ability to sustain the production of exceptionally detailed terrain analyses the crews would depend upon for accurate and

timely airdrops. Indeed, while the particular Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) unit could certainly produce the image-based intelligence mission planning products, the unit was bandwidth limited in securing quickly the source imagery and also lacked the dedicated manpower to repeat the production as many as two or three times a day.

Looking for intelligence mission-planning support up the joint special operations chain of command to the theater spe-cial operations command (TSOC) would ordinarily have net-ted detailed, tailored products. The extraordinary times in the aftermath of 9/11, however, meant staff contingency planning consumed not only individual TSOC capacity, but also that of higher headquarters across U.S. Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) global domain. Instead, the USAF SOF unit’s intelli-gence experts went through their Air Force administrative chain to AFSOC, who then successfully leveraged broader conventional Air Force intelligence capabilities.

Thus, by late December 2001, the conventional USAF intel-ligence organization that ultimately provided direct, daily sup-port to AFSOC’s overseas mission planning for Afghanistan did so with airmen spread from the East Coast to the Midwestern heartlands. USAF efforts yielded hundreds of tailored imagery products that enabled missions planning for over a hundred sep-arate helicopter landing and drop zones. In the story recounted here, when AFSOC reached out to the conventional Air Force for intelligence support, they by chance did so to a unit with Air Force leadership who possessed prior SOF intelligence experi-ence. This serendipitous familiarity helped smooth the seams in terminology, needs and expectations between the organizations. While cooperative teaming between SOF and conventional USAF intelligence contributed to undeniable combat successes and in

By cOlOnel GORdOn K. “KeIth” WAttS

A cOnventIOnAl cOntRIBUtIOn tO A SpecIAl OpeRAtIOnS tRUth.


fact kept a production channel open between the two USAF units—one SOF, one conven-tional—well into the pre-Iraq invasion plan-ning into late 2002, serendipity ought not to be the foundation for success.

The intelligence, surveillance and recon-naissance (ISR) missions and capabilities have certainly advanced considerably since late 2001 for both special operations and conven-tional forces, yet the value of the partnering described above endures as it speaks to a larger truth. “Most special operations require non-SOF assistance”—a simple SOF maxim and the subject of this work. Recent SOF and conventional USAF operational innova-tions in airborne ISR, show that regardless of each force’s respective advances in technical capabilities, systems architectures, or tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), leadership and professional coordination still have tre-mendous value to both special operations and conventional forces. The topic deserves some narrowing, however.

the ScOpe OF ISR

Special operations cover a wide array of key missions and capabilities ranging from direct action to military information support operations and are easily subjects better suited for books. Similarly, any attempt to cover the breadth of operations encapsulated in “conventional ISR” writ large would be a massive undertaking. It’s beneficial to limit the scope of analysis in sev-eral important ways. First, focus on USAF ISR; second, and more importantly, limit ISR itself to its popular U.S. Air Force ver-nacular—airborne collection assets—both directly and remotely piloted. Finally, for reasons of mutual SOF-conventional force (CF) innovation, focus predominantly on assets which provide one or another form of imagery among its sensor suites.

SOF: WhAt mAKeS It SpecIAl

Joint Publication (JP) 3-05 states that special operations can be distinguished from conventional operations “in degree of physical and political risk, operational techniques, modes of employment, and dependence on detailed operational intelli-gence and indigenous assets.” The operations are “special rather than just elite,” though authors David Tucker and Christopher J. Lamb admit “it is impossible to articulate a strategic concept for SOF and derive associated roles and missions” absent a deep examination. Nevertheless, SOF doctrine clearly places a pre-mium on intelligence to enable its operations. Again, JP 3-05 is instructive: “SO require detailed planning, often by relatively small units. Consequently, intelligence requirements are nor-mally greater in scope and depth than that of CF.”

The doctrinal transparency underscores why SOF has grown to rely so heavily on airborne full motion video (FMV) cued by human intelligence (HUMINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT). In a 2008 Joint Force Quarterly article, authors describe how massing this type of ISR serves as an “unblinking eye” when its

“long dwell, persistent surveillance” is used to conduct aerial “stakeouts.” Essentially the advent of airborne FMV allowed from the air what SOF sniper-observer teams predating airborne FMV once provided from the ground, but at much less risk of error or injury. Anecdotally, collection managers today invoke phrases like “pattern of life development” instead of the traditional “order of battle” so ubiquitous through the turn of the century; this is a testament to the innovative uses SOF has put to airborne FMV and other multi-INT tactical airborne platforms.

Indeed, SOF has done extremely well adapting flexible sys-tems architectures amid a mix of forward-based ops-intel centers and rear-area analysts. These joint forces dynamically exploit FMV in close proximity to the SOF centers where HUMINT and SIGINT from a variety of sources cue the video sensors and tip rapid counter-terror and counterinsurgency (COIN) special operations. The tight and typically highly classified cycle of “find-fix-finish-exploit-analyze” has put a massive dent in al Qaeda and others of their ilk globally. The operational successes to date are at their core enabled by ISR.

While the sensor and processing, exploitation and dissemina-tion (PED) apparatus share origins with conventional USAF ISR, SOF ISR capabilities behind these successes developed in their own way distinct from the conventional ISR evolution, primarily in response to the Post-9/11 explosion in “kill capture” missions. Although the USAF was alongside SOF for much of these opera-tions, SOF’s ISR and its related PED architecture avoided some of the conventional ISR realm’s inflexible (i.e., legacy) processing and exploitation systems constraints and also benefitted from TTPs and lessons learned in early conventional trials with FMV. The conclusion that General Flynn, Juergens and Cantrell draw from SOF’s relative advantage (in 2008) in employing airborne FMV/ISR involves a clarity “that the services are behind in providing adequate resources to deployed forces,” which the authors in turn state suggests a need for a fleet of ISR dedicated to AFSOC to enable SOF to effectively mass ISR and integrate its

A marshaler directs a U.S. Air Force Aircrew from the 361st Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron aboard an MC-12 Liberty as it prepares for operations. The MC-12 provides full-motion video and signals intelligence to assist battlefield commanders. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force]


effects at brigade or lower tactical levels.” Written near the peak of the COIN fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the authors’ urgent operational imperative shines clearly and understandably through the narrative. On the other hand, perhaps that advo-cated approach is today more SOF-centric than is prudent.

USAF dOctRIne—A dIvISIve ISR InFlUence?

JP 3-05 advises “SOF often require conventional air support that requires timely and detailed planning and coordination” adding that the air component provides this support enabled typically by a special operations liaison element (SOLE) in the (combined or joint) air and space operations center. The publi-cation as written dictates a SOF interaction with conventional air institutions, but as a closer scrutiny of the CAOC construct below will reveal, its theater-wide operational focus drove a “peanut-butter spread” of assets—a satisficing strategy at best. This was an oft cited ground-centric complaint, offering some insights as to why SOF-centric ISR proponents like General Flynn and others. were frustrated by what they observed from conventional ISR in theater. The Air Force designated CAOCs as a “weapons system,” a designation which comes with strict controls on hardware, TTPs, and training and standardization evaluations. As such, though denigrated by some as being overly cumbersome, CAOC doctrine is by design detailed, deliberate, and optimized for the long-planning lead, target-centric, Major

theater war (MTW) campaigns which bear little resemblance to the COIN fight that has dominated force employment for the last seven to eight years. Downs rightly argued in 2007 for reforms in CAOC processes that would allow the Air Force to better wield ISR in support of the COIN fight. Conventional AF ISR made great strides by 2009 consistent with Downs’ recommendations, thereby minimizing the influence of the aspects of doctrine that helped propel SOF ISR down its own track.

the AIR FORce And ItS nOn-FlyInG WeApOn SyStemS

The USAF innovations in breaking the “COIN vs. MTW” doc-trinal impasse came out of the Air Force’s other non-flying weap-ons system—a networked set of intelligence ground sites known collectively as Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (AF-DCGS). In 2009, USAF ISR leaders Lieutenant General David A. Deptula and (then) Colonel James R. Marrs credited the organizational realignment of the AF-DCGS component units and capabilities under a global ISR Wing in 2008 as laying “the foundation for powerful regional ISR teams that live and breathe the operations of their respective … combatant commands.”

The reorganization left a large, positive legacy in that it 1) cemented establishment of regional analytic teams; 2) formed ties to engaged regional commanders; 3) emplaced trained ISR liaison officers with deployed commanders; 4) provided


leadership oversight through a dynamic global PED com-mand and control regime; and finally, 5) ensured intelligence products reached forward in a way that belied older negative “reachback” connotations.

That same year, while commanding an ISR squadron within AF-DCGS, Lieutenant Colonel Jason M. Brown laid out a compel-ling case for USAF ISR. He not only addressed some of Flynn’s and others’ criticisms by emphasizing the human role in “bal-ancing effective” ISR (SOF) with “efficient” ISR (CF), but of note, Brown also highlighted the pivotal role mission-type orders (MTOs) should play in guiding ISR operations past the relative inefficiencies of the CAOC system.

With AF-DCGS and MTO reforms guiding key CAOC ISR operations, the USAF has since refined its ISR capabilities far beyond those imagined even two to three years ago. The ISR platforms flying with the benefit of AF-DCGS are achieving remarkable successes. Even with flying more than 50 combat air patrols daily with both AF and SOF FMV assets, one of the new-est conventional USAF ISR platforms—the MC-12 Liberty—has amassed more sorties since 2010 than any other ISR platform in that period and is achieving ISR effects focused by AF-DCGS that make it the choice ISR asset for ground units. Enabled by the vast global network, conventional AF ISR support is fluid and virtually fungible—platforms are leveraged dynamically within an ops environment that can shift globally with the dictates of manpower and bandwidth while remaining fundamentally grounded in theater.

Key cOnSIdeRAtIOnS

Per JP 3-05, “SOF and CF commanders should understand each other’s mission planning cycles, intelligence and operations cycles, and mission approval processes.” Because this degree of

knowledge requires leaders exert a non-trivial level of effort to reach, the joint publication adds “Mission type orders [emphasis added] are optimal to convey the commander’s intent to permit flexibility, initiative, and responsiveness.” With this emphasis on MTOs, a common ground accommodating the distinct FMV advances within the SOF and USAF ISR communities has begun again to re-emerge.

In order to build on this partnering potential, USAF ISR experts must take on the leadership challenges inherent in this human-centric environment. First and foremost, leaders at all echelons must take advantage of the partnering opportuni-ties presented by ongoing operations—such as those MC-12 operations are currently providing. Efforts such as these can, for instance, prevent the SOF ISR community from resorting to a “make do” ISR plan when a suitable conventional solution may be readily available but which, for superficial doctrinal barriers or perceived security impasses, goes un-communicated.

Certainly, this is easier said than done. Yet establishing steady-state working dialogues between SOF and CF ISR communities becomes all the more imperative when operationally confronted by developing crises or immature environs—when for example CAOCs are partially manned, or SOLEs may not yet be present, or when there is no established ground presence or PED architec-ture. SOF is resilient and will rely on its own (often considerable) ISR resources and inherent creativity in employing that ISR to meet its needs. The impetus must be put on CF ISR leaders to establish relationships in day-to-day non-crisis ISR environments that facilitate the growth of trust and rapport, so when time-critical situations develop, the relationships can be mutually ben-eficial. Examples of this occurring abound: conventional CAOC ISR operations benefited from SOF capabilities immediately post Haiti earthquake January 12, 2010; SOF ISR benefited from the command and control innovations in USAF ISR PED networking

A 4th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron MC-12 Airframe mechanic marshals an MC-12 Liberty at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan. [Photo courtesy of DoD]


when outages have occurred. But the existence of cooperation does not obviate the need for leadership engagement.

meetInG mISSIOn needS

Conventional-force intelligence processes and capabilities still hold value and have the potential to contribute to special operations’ successes. In 2001, conventional USAF ISR—with a fraction of the capacity that it would develop over the ensuing decade—produced and delivered complex image products tai-lored to unique SOF mission demands. A suite of high-resolution image products was delivered within 12 hours of the requests. The requests—appearing only as a set of coordinates with a drop-zone name—came in randomly 24/7 and arrived only as often as the need to re-arm and re-provision struck the special operators on the ground in Afghanistan.

In this way, existing Air Force and SOF structures came together through a dynamic process to meet mission needs. Viewed more broadly, the opening operational vignette high-lights how SOF needs were translated to a CF in a way that from a SOF perspective, met mission requirements and preserved operational security, while from the CF optic, took maximum advantage of its faster, more direct access to source data and its much larger pool of image product analysts.

Today’s treasure of flying video, image and signals sensors was flatly unthinkable in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and

the volume of intelligence represented by these capabilities not-withstanding, the same type of clear-eyed, mission-centric lead-ership matters now more than ever—a fact that all must ensure does not get lost behind closed vault doors, redundant architec-tures, and geographically isolated self-sustaining operations.

As Mark Lowenthal’s opening quote suggests, as both SOF and CF move forward leveraging mission-focused partnerships, each should do so clearly understanding that creating or remold-ing organizations and missions remains only a part of the process … true advances will only come when mission processes inter-weave these innovative organizational capabilities with visionary, forward leaning leaders, creating a new whole greater than the sum of either part. O

Colonel Gordon K. “Keith” Watts is a U.S. Air Force intelli-gence officer. He is currently assigned as the commander, 480th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Group, Fort Gordon, Ga. This article is an edited version of a paper submitted to the Joint Special Operations University. The unedited version, complete with endnotes, is available on the Special Operations Technology website at www.sotech-kmi.com

For more information, contact SOTECH Editor Jeff Campbell at [email protected] or search our online archives

for related stories at www.sotech-kmi.com.


By ScOtt nAnce, SOtech cORReSpOndent

cUttInG-edGe GeOSpAtIAl IntellIGence AdvAncementS Get dAtA In SOF hAndS.

Special forces are quickly adopting and deploying the latest advancements in geospa-tial intelligence—including those that provide quick access to digital maps, satellite imagery and more—to gain better situational awareness as they carry out their missions in often remote corners of the world, according to several com-panies that are providing the tools.

“The spec ops community is a very impor-tant and unique customer for TerraGo,” said John Timar, vice president of sales for TerraGo Technologies, an Atlanta-based firm which provides a variety of geospatial intelligence and location-based tools. “The special operations community, as a whole, is a rapidly growing component of our business. Right now a little bit of everything we have to offer is deployed somewhere in the special operations community.”

These cutting-edge tools are intended to get as much data as possible into the hands of special operators, who may be working in very austere, and often bandwidth-constrained, environments.

John Timar


That’s the case with a new handheld version of Jagwire from Rochester, N.Y-based ITT Exelis Geospatial Systems. Jag-wire allows users to manage critical geospatial information across shared and mobile net-works in environments where bandwidth is limited, accord-ing to Jim Phillips, director of the Exelis geospatial intelli-gence solutions business area.

The idea behind Jagwire is to enable users like special operators “to get to the area that they’re in, and have a high-resolution look, [in a period which] could be less than a minute,” Phillips said.

Special operators who would use the product “would say, ‘Well, we want to knock on that door, but before we do, we want to look at how we’re going in and how we’re going to get out.’ We could drill down into that [data and] get a very good look at their target,” Phillips said.

Jagwire is used by the Air Force, Army and spe-cial forces to make tactical situational awareness and intelligence available to “people in austere environments and [who] have … low bandwidth connections, maybe intermittent connections, [or] connections with a lot of latency in them,” he explained. “We’re all about passing on as much information as we can, given the available envi-ronment, which is an austere environment. Our users are typically the very pointy end of the spear: special forces, Marines, Rangers, in some cases the Navy.”

Jagwire transmits satellite imagery, video and other types of geospatial intelligence, and “allows our users to get access to all of this data, which is collected all around the world,” Phillips added. “We’re not an archive, not a long-term storage. There are other systems that do that. [Jagwire is] not so much for analysts—we’re more for the people conducting the fight. The handheld [version] has been in demand for quite some time.”

That new handheld communicates over typi-cal cellphone connections and allows users in the ground forces to receive data, take images and video (whether they’re connected at that moment or not), and then transmit that back when they are connected again, Phillips said.

It also provides users a variety of data, such as that from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Army, and other government agen-cies. “If you can get a SIPRNet account, which all special forces can, you have access to all of that data—instead of just one particular piece of stove piped data,” he said.

technOlOGy cReAtInG OpeRAtIOnAl eFFIcIencIeS

These new geospatial-intelligence technologies are about driving individual analysts and special operators to be more efficient and effective at a time when the military is experiencing budget-cutting and other pressures, TerraGo’s Timar said.

Doing more with less is important for reasons beyond a reduced budget: Looking at the op tempo over the last decade will indicate turnovers and retirements in the coming years. “You’re going to face turnover challenges from operational fatigue, an environment with more austere budgets, and retirements,” Timar said. “The world’s not becom-ing a more stable, safer place; there are more requirements for the U.S. to defend its interests and pursue national security in remote parts of the globe. Technologies that are cost-effective, that allow you to add efficiencies and make any one analyst or operator more productive, are the things that we need.”

TerraGo offers a product known as GeoPDF, which Timar describes as a geospatial version of the well-known PDF format used to share a variety of documents.

“It’s a very interesting intelligence container. It allows you to put all sorts of complex data inside of a PDF and make it actionable and dynamic in either a connected or disconnected environment,” he said. “You can take a map, and you can overlay all sorts of intelligence informa-tion on that map. Then you can turn that map into this small, nimble file called a GeoPDF, and then you can interact with it dynamically in the field or wherever you are on a desktop or mobile device.”

The GeoPDF has become a frequently used tool, Timar said, noting that NGA “has created over a million GeoPDF products.”

GeoPDF is well-suited for special opera-tors who need as much information as possible in remote areas without access to the biggest

Jagwire allows users to not only receive data, but also take images and video – whether connected at that moment or not – and then transmit back when they are connected. [Photo courtesy of ITT Exelis Geospatial Systems]

SOTECH 11.6 | 11 www.SOTECH-kmi.com

systems, he said. “All the people back at headquarters have the best satellite imag-ery in the world, but the people who need it can’t get it. That’s where GeoPDF is a fantastic technology, because it allows you to have an actionable product that’s easy to disseminate,” he added.

Meanwhile, Pixia Corp., a software and information-technology provider located near Washington, D.C., has deployed its HiPER Look system to streamline the access of geospatial intelligence at U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, based in Stuttgart, Germany, according to Hec-tor Cuevas, Pixia’s director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations.

“To be able to take all of the commercial imagery of Africa and have it at the finger-tips of an Army [operational detachment-alpha] operator or SEAL operator, you’d literally be driving around with a truck full of servers. At SOC-Africa-Stuttgart, we’ve taken all that data [and] put it on a central server there in Stuttgart on the SOC Africa secret domain,” he said.

Pixia’s system is changing the assumption that special operators must “go to a website and down-load individual files,” Cuevas said.

With HiPER Look, special operators can say, “‘I’m going to Mali; I only need data for Mali. So get it to me on a [storage device], very efficiently [and] very quickly.’ As these guys go out the door, that data brick will act as their own little server on their devices when they’re forward,” he said.

The staff of SOC Africa now are all are using one server “that has the latest version of whatever they said that they need to con-sume,” whether that is map data, commercial imagery, or other data, Cuevas said.

“It’s a little bit of a game-changer because you had 15 to 20 different silos of SOC Africa of the same dataset. Now they’ve brought it all into one … [and] they quickly have access to the latest data that’s put on that server,” he added.

ReActInG tO OpeRAtIOnAl needS In ReAl tIme

Much more is available—and expected from—geospatial intelligence today than just a few years ago, according to Rob Buntz, director of geospatial solutions at L-3 National Security Solutions-Stratis, a provider of intelligence and other informa-tion-technology systems located near Washington, D.C.

The data available today is “orders of magnitude better than it was a short time ago,” Buntz said, but the need for precision and accuracy has increased. “Of course, the stakes are a lot higher when you’re delivering geospatial analysis results that are sup-porting a mission that might be happening right now.”

Access and use of imagery and other geospatial-intelligence data also is coming much more in real time, Buntz said.

“I can remember earlier in my career [when] we were excited to be able to have a 30-meter, multi-spectral satellite image that

had been captured in the last year. Now we’re deal-ing with much higher spatial resolution, hyper-spectral data [and] LiDAR data deployed tactically in more or less real-time fashion,” he said.

Analysts and others looking at the data, particu-larly for the special forces, also must react much more quickly than ever before.

“We literally are reacting to the operational needs at that time,” said James Moore, program manager, managing the special operations imagery contract at L-3. “You know that if you don’t get that intelligence out to that SOF operator, then he’s

going to go kick down a door and he may or may not know what’s out there. The stakes really are higher.”

At L-3, “there really is not a part of the process we do not touch,” from sensor development, aircraft integration, mainte-nance of aircraft, sensor operators, and intelligence and geospa-tial analysts, Moore said.

As such, the company knows that no one company or organization can drive innovation in geospatial intelligence technology. That’s why collaboration and partnership is so impor-tant, he added.

“None of us are going to be able to find the solution working in a stovepipe. So it’s really is taking an unbiased approach out in industry, and finding the best solutions that we can deliver and keep our SOF warriors safe,” Moore said.

L-3 maintains partnerships with a number of R&D organiza-tions, including North Carolina State University, Virginia Tech and the Riverside Research Institute, a nonprofit research organi-zation based in New York City.

One of the largest challenges is simply the huge amount of “big data” available in so many formats and from so many sources, Moore said.

“You must have data that has a shelf life longer than just one day. So how do you store it in a capacity that gives life to the data, so as you’re running your analysis and algorithms across this data, you’re able to actually go back and say, ‘Well, what was

James Moore

ClearTerra’s Locate XT software brings locations in unstructured data into map applications in a structured form. [Photo courtesy of ClearTerra]


happening there yesterday? What was happening there last week, or two months ago, or last year?’”

L-3 is developing a solution based on an “open architecture, so that as technology changes, you don’t have to recreate the wheel” as opposed to a proprietary system that would cost customers “millions and millions to continually re-develop” as technology changes, he said.

FIndInG the RIGht dAtA

But what if the geospatial intelligence you need isn’t already in an easily usable or digestible form? What if the coordinates a special operator needs are buried within a mass of emails, or some other documents?

That’s where a company called ClearTerra and its Locate XT software come in, said Jeff Wilson, vice president of sales. “We bring locations in unstructured data into map applications in a structured form,” he said. Frequently, “there are a lot of geospatial coordinates floating around in emails, mes-sages, documents, [and] briefings.”

It’s very common to have intel-ligence reports that reference military grid reference locations, including locations in which an insurgent was picked up along a road, or where an improvised explosive device might be, or where a mortar attack occurred, Wilson said.

“A lot of this stuff lies in the form of text. If you’re a special operations person, we want them finding the bad guys, kicking doors down. What we don’t want them doing is reading through documents and realizing there’s spatial references, and then have to fat-finger those into a system, or plot them on a map,” he said. “We like to have geeks like us build tools that can find that [geo-spatial data] and [plot it on a map] very quickly so they can react fast, and get back to doing the analysis or catching the bad guys instead of doing manual busywork.”

Whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation or a folder of 300 or 400 messages, ClearTerra’s software scans it and finds various coordinate patterns, looking for “every format we’ve ever heard of or seen,” Wilson said.

Like other technologies, special operators can use Locate XT quickly and in the sorts of austere, remote locations they typically find themselves, he said.

“Our tools work on demand, and they work for what you often call the edge of the network. You can have a guy with a laptop sitting in the middle of nowhere, and have some PowerPoint or some Word document, which wasn’t really important yesterday but which is now, all of a sudden, the most important information of the day. He can do something with our software right then and there, and not have to wait for this document to find its way into a document-management system or some [other] larger-scale system,” he said. O

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Jeff Wilson




BlacK Watch

Thermal ImagIng Camera SenSor mIleSTone reaChedBAE Systems

Troops in theater remind their teams to keep an eye on what’s

behind them with the term, “check your six.” BAE Systems’

Check-6 vehicle taillight camera helps forces do that, allowing

them to see behind their vehicles while remaining protected under

vehicle armor.

Seven years after its invention, BAE delivered the 40,000th

Check-6 system to the U.S. Army. The thermal imaging camera

sensor embedded within ground vehicles’ taillight housing has

been providing combat crews in Iraq and Afghanistan with day,

night and all-weather rear vision capability on military combat and

tactical vehicles. These include heavy-armored tracked and wheeled

vehicles such as the mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP)

vehicle, MRAP all-terrain vehicle, M1 Abrams main battle tank,

Stryker family of vehicles, and medium mine protected vehicle.

“Being able to see outside the vehicle’s armor provides a

vital increase in situational awareness and safety for the soldiers

inside it,” said Gary Morris, business development manager at

BAE Systems. “Our Check-6 cameras improve safety and mission

effectiveness, and above all, they can help save lives.”

The rear vision systems are able to replace taillight housings

common to more then 200,000 military vehicles. The systems are

manufactured in Austin, Texas, at BAE’s center for engineering and

manufacturing of integrated vision systems products for the military.

UaV CapabIlITy expandedSchiebel Corporation

Schiebel has successfully

concluded a series of flight trials with

EADS Astrium’s Pseudolite-based

local positioning system DeckFinder,

expanding its automated launch and

recovery capability for operation

where access to GPS has been

denied.

Schiebel integrated the

DeckFinder receiver segment into a

Camcopter S-100 and deployed the

DeckFinder ground segment at the

Schiebel Testing Grounds earlier this

year, enabling a joint team to conduct

a week-long flight campaign with the

goal of testing and evaluating the

capabilities that DeckFinder adds

in terms of accurate automated

operations.

“By feeding the position data generated

by the Astrium DeckFinder System directly

into the avionics of our Camcopter S-100, we

are now able to operate fully automatically,

independent from global positioning

systems during hovering, approach and

landing, enabling us to launch and recover

in environments that no one has been able

to perform before,” Hans Georg Schiebel,

chairman of the Schiebel Group, explained.

DeckFinder is a local positioning system

consisting of a ground segment of six

radio-frequency-based transmitters and a

corresponding airborne receiver. Based on

GPS-independent range measurements,

it provides the Camcopter avionics with

highly accurate and relative 3-D position

information that allows the S-100 to navigate

with an accuracy better than 20 centimeters

over the landing zone.


hmmWV To TrIal InnoVaTIVe proTeCTIon arrangemenTTextron Marine & Land Systems

The U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command

has awarded Textron Marine & Land Systems (TM&LS), an

operating unit of Textron Systems, a Textron Inc. company,

a $3.29 million firm-fixed price contract from for work on the

modernized expanded capacity vehicle survivability (MECV-S)

system. TM&LS is teaming with Granite Tactical Vehicles to deliver

innovative crew protection and vehicle survivability enhancements

for the Army’s high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles

(HMMWV). The program’s follow-on potential is for work on up to

5,750 vehicles.

The Army is seeking technical solutions to address current

and future threats to its HMMWV tactical vehicle fleet through

the use of scalable armor technologies. The TM&LS/Granite

team will install its MECV-S protection system, a production-

ready technology readiness level 8 system, on two government-

furnished HMMWVs and deliver them this summer to Aberdeen

Proving Ground, Md., for improvised explosive device testing.

Computer-aided design models also will be submitted for analysis.

“Our TM&LS/Granite MECV-S solution would replace the

current HMMWV crew compartment in a one-for-one exchange. It

offers vehicle occupants an armored monocoque V-hull protective

capsule and restores the vehicle’s tactical mobility with proven

components,” explained TM&LS Senior Vice President and

General Manager Tom Walmsley.

The lightweight, survivable TM&LS/Granite vehicle protection

system possesses a lower center of gravity than an up-armored

HMMWV and is resistant to small arms fire, blasts and the

secondary effects of blasts such as fire, crushing, rollover and

collision. It is compatible with all versions of HMMWVs currently

in service and provides mine-resistant ambush protected-

style protection by incorporating angles and a V-shaped blast

deflection under-body plate.

Compiled by Kmi media Group staff

l-band Wearable anTenna aVaIlablePharad

Pharad has introduced a new L-band antenna into its wearable antenna

product line. The antenna has been specifically designed for wearable

applications and operates over the frequency range of 1350-1390 MHz.

“Pharad is always on the forefront of innovative antenna design,

having invented and patented today’s wearable antenna technology.

Our L-band wearable antenna is another example of the

advancements originating from our antenna engineering

group,” said Pharad President Austin Farnham. “I think we

will see growth in L-band wearable communications as we see

more developments and size reductions in L-band transceivers.”

The body wearable antenna is fabricated using thin,

flexible material that conforms to the exterior of body armor or

tactical vests.

radIoS reCeIVe nSa CerTIfICaTIonITT Exelis

National Security Agency (NSA) certifications have been

awarded to ITT Exelis for its SideHat and the Soldier Radio-Rifleman

(SR-R) radios. Certification allows the radios to operate up to the

“Secret” level and be fully integrated into the U.S. Army’s tactical

communications network.

The SideHat radio hosts the U.S. Army standard soldier radio

waveform (SRW) that operates in the UHF and L-Band frequency

ranges and provides a second channel solution to single channel

ground and airborne radio system (SINCGARS) vehicular radio

installations. The Exelis SideHat is also specifically designed for

the vehicular electromagnetic and physical environment, delivering

increased range.

SideHat is designed to attach to SINCGARS, the primary tactical

communications backbone for the U.S. Army. SINCGARS with SideHat

provides a system solution with up to four channels (2 SRW and 2

VHF). It provides dismounted soldiers the ability to communicate both

voice and data to mounted soldiers in vehicles within a larger network.

SideHat has completed multiple operational tests including

command, control, communications, computer, intelligence,

surveillance and reconnaissance on-the-move at Fort Dix, N.J., the

Air Assault Expeditionary Force and Army Expeditionary Warrior

Experiment at Fort Benning, Ga., the Bold Quest Exercise at Camp

Lejeune, N.C., and the Network Integration Exercises at White Sands

Missile Range, N.M.

The Rifleman Radio is a software-defined handheld radio that

provides the individual soldier with reliable, low-weight, high-capacity

intra-squad voice and data communication in a self-forming and self-

healing network.

“These certifications by the NSA of both the SideHat and Rifleman

radios allow us to continue the Exelis tradition of providing value

and cutting-edge solutions to the warfighter,” said Nick Bobay, the

president and general manager of Exelis Night Vision and Tactical

Communications Systems. “With SideHat, we can leverage the Army’s

large installed base of SINCGARS radios while adding a significant

increase in operational capability at an affordable price point.”


Colonel Frank Swekosky is the Intelligence Force Moderniza-tion Division Chief, United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. In this position he synchro-nizes multi-domain reconnaissance, surveillance, intelligence and communications requirements and programs for national, theater and component special operations forces. As the lead command strategist for future intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), processing, exploitation and dissemination, knowledge man-agement systems, and identity intelligence operations, he is respon-sible for advocating acquisition and funding strategies for multiple intelligence disciplines and programs valued in excess of $4 billion.

Prior to his current assignment at SOCOM, Swekosky served in a variety of operational and staff assignments in multiple locations including Texas, Japan, Colorado, Maryland and the Pentagon. He arrived at SOCOM immediately after serving as senior advisor to Iraq’s lead national agency for strategic intelligence, focusing on development of all-source analysis, imagery and mapping, secu-rity, education, counter-intelligence and human intelligence, and integrated these initiatives with United States Forces in Iraq Intel-ligence and SOF. As the 22d Intelligence Squadron commander at Fort George G. Meade, Md., he led over 600 airmen assigned to 12 geographically separate locations, and served as the 70th ISR Wing lead for Air Force National-Tactical Integration and the Tactics Analysis and Reporting Program. Swekosky also made substan-tial contributions to the Air Force National-Tactical Integration program while serving at the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, as well as the Air Force Foreign Area Officer program and establishment of the International Affairs Specialty and Regional/Political-Military Affairs Strategist pro-grams at the Pentagon and at Headquarters, Air Force Personnel Center. In addition to serving in Iraq during the transition from Operation Iraqi Freedom to Operation New Dawn, he served in Italy and Bosnia-Herzegovina during Operation Joint Guard, and in the Combined Air Operations Center in Turkey during Operation Northern Watch.

Swekosky graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1990 with a degree in human factors engineering. He is a 2005 graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he earned a Masters of Military Arts and Science with the Strategist Additional Skill Identifier, and he com-pleted Air War College (with Excellence) in 2007. In 1999 he gradu-ated from the Air Force Combat Targeting Course at Goodfellow Air

Force Base, Texas, and the National Security Agency’s Junior Officer Cryptologic Career Program.

Q: Do you feel that SOF are receiving more actionable intelligence?

A: Throughout SOF intelligence, the collection managers, sen-sor operators, collectors, exploiters, all-source fusion analysts and direct-support intelligence professionals engage in an adaptive and responsive fight against broad-ranging and elusive threat networks on a daily basis. The extraordinary advances in sensors and platforms over the last six years have produced an exponential increase in exploitable data, and new data-mining, correlation and visualization techniques and technologies mean that more and more of that data can be operationalized. But it takes people networking their heads and that data together for a common goal to generate success. SOF intel resources—especially our people—are enormously effective at turning generic information into actionable intelligence; technologi-cal developments will continue to improve that capability.

SOF tactics, techniques and procedures have evolved dramatically over the past dozen years; a big reason for that is the contribution and integration of multiple intelligence disciplines to the fight. Through our ongoing fielding initiatives, we continue to present the best pos-sible intel to SOF forward, when and where needed. And we look for

SOF Leader Strives to Provide the Right Intel at the Right Time

Intel Insider

Colonel Frank SwekoskyChief

Intelligence Force Modernization DivisionSOCOM J2 Intelligence

Q&AQ&A


opportunities to refine that infor-mation, knowing that too much information can be useless, even if it’s accurate and actionable. Feed-back is critical to determining the right level of quantity and detail, and we get that feedback every day with the close relationship in SOF between intel and operators.

Q: What is your assessment of aerostat intel systems?

A: Aerostats provide valuable intel-ligence to U.S. forces, and the psy-chological factor inherent in the presence of that sensor can posi-tively influence operations just by passively acknowledging less-obvi-ous intelligence collection systems. For example, aerostats protected U.S. and coalition forces at our bases in Iraq, and they remain an obvious signal to our friends and enemies in Afghanistan that advanced technology collection platforms are keeping 24/7 watch over our people and other resources. However, in some cases, their overt signature can be somewhat of a detriment in environments where SOF are working to enable and empower the local govern-ments and security forces to work their own problems.

Q: Are you satisfied with the progress toward providing timely intel to warriors at the edge?

A: We are always looking for more and better ways to provide the right intel to the right people at the right time. This is especially neces-sary in SOF, where the ops-intel feedback loop is so compressed. We anticipate continuation of current op tempo on all levels in SOF, and our people can expect more deployments to other locations besides the Middle East. SOCOM J2 and the Special Operations Research, Development and Acquisition Center are continually working with industry, academia, components, theater special operations com-mands [TSOCs], services, combat support agencies and others to push the technological limits of putting intelligence into the hands of operators. As an example, full motion video continues to be a major contributor to our SOF airborne ISR fleet, but other intelligence dis-ciplines remain major force multipliers, and we’re looking at new and advanced capabilities to further build out the intelligence sensor port-folio. We are also considering the appropriate mix of platforms that make up our baseline airborne fleet; this initiative is partly coupled with conventional force redeployments, and will continue to enable our transition to a global SOF intelligence force.

Q: We are seeing austerity in defense funding, including a continuing budget resolution, $487 billion of initial cuts and now $500 billion of sequestration cuts over 10 years. How has this affected your operations? Have you already effected cost-savings and efficiency initiatives?

A: Like everyone in DoD, we accept and continue to monitor and employ fiscally responsible cost-cutting measures. Within the Intel Directorate at SOCOM we were planning for post-Afghanistan reduc-tions well before I arrived here in 2011. At the time of this interview, we’re preparing for civilian furloughs; again, people are our most important resource, and reductions in our civilian, military or con-tractor force is a painful reality.

The problem isn’t just about cutting resourcing of proven capa-bilities, but maintaining resourcing at a deliberate and reasonable level for newer, enduring capabilities. One area where we need to do a better job is in the realm of identity intelligence operations. Servicemembers and civilians from all intelligence disciplines have contributed to identity intelligence in a variety of ways: document and media exploitation, for example. Identity intelligence is a unique capability, and it’s not signals intelligence, geospatial intelligence or measurement and signature intelligence ... it’s not any one intel-ligence discipline, but it is actionable intelligence that contributes immeasurably. SOF will remain engaged on the world stage and will continue to require capabilities that directly support warfighters, but this is not a SOF-unique capability in and of itself. The supporting infrastructure must be developed for the good of all our current and future conventional forces as well as for SOF.

Q: How do you assess the performance of the A160T Hummingbird unmanned aerial system?

A: SOF has divested itself of the Hummingbird technical demonstra-tion project. The Hummingbird contained technologies and innova-tions that are likely to show up in future endeavors, and we continue to work multiple small platform programs that complement our medium-altitude, long-endurance platforms that constitute the basis of our airborne ISR portfolio.

An Afghan National Army commando with 6th Special Operations Kandak questions several local villagers during an operation in Qara Bagh district, Ghazni province, Aghanistan. The commandos conducted the operation to provide security and support for Afghan Local Police expansion in the area. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Army]


Q: Will the pivot to the Pacific affect your operations, and do you have the resources and personnel to do this?

A: Our relationships with partner nations today drive our readiness for ops tomorrow. SOF’s ongoing work to build trust and access around the globe is a force multiplier that benefits all of DoD. That is an absolutely invaluable resource contribution made by SOF that is shared for the benefit of the entire defense establishment.

Don’t think about SOF pivoting only to the Pacific—think of SOF pivoting to the entire globe. While we are evolving to pro-vide more effective support to the Defense Strategic Guidance, we keep in mind that we may not always be able to guarantee where the next battle will be, but we must be prepared for that battle. When called to fight, we’ll continue to effectively apply our limited SOF organic resources, while simultaneously relying on shared resources available from others. And those ‘others’ are not just U.S. part-ners; our preparation includes working more closely with partner nations’ SOF.

Many of the airborne ISR assets we currently rely on were developed specifically to address operational requirements in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the Pacific or Africa, you quickly encounter the tyranny of distance: a significant portion of each ISR sortie is likely consumed by just transiting to and from your objective. The Pacific basin, Africa, South America—all present significant resourcing hurdles when you consider the sheer size of the opera-tional environment, and where it is possible to base intel assets. SOCOM is working to enhance the manning levels and operational capacity of each of the TSOCs, and we have re-aligned J2 billets and staffing as part of that effort. At the same time, we are mak-ing incremental strides in improving reach-back analytical sup-port to SOF, which has lowered the cost of providing intelligence support to forward deployed operations while increasing our surge agility.

Q: Are there any improvements in UAS intel assets that you would like to see, such as more advanced sensors?

A: SOF continues to require a mix of manned and unmanned as well as remote ISR, all-weather, day and night platforms, with long on-station loiter, multi-sensor, plug-and-play modularity and abil-ity to support emerging capabilities. Capabilities should be rapidly expeditionary, able to operate from unimproved sites and afloat, and maintain suppressed noise and visual signature.

We continue to optimize organic SOF ISR capabilities, including communications systems and architectures, processing, exploita-tion, dissemination of networked information, ground, air, space and maritime sensor domains, and better utilization and synchroni-zation of SOF human sensor activities.

Q: In land navigation, are systems such as 3-D mapping all they should be, or would further advances be welcome?

A: We always welcome advanced mapping capabilities; we welcome advances in all capabilities, but especially when those capabilities are ready for the fight. As we transition to addressing some of the nation’s concerns outside of Afghanistan, we see an increasing demand for more and improved geospatial, navigation and target development capabilities around the globe. Every intel professional should be thinking about how to improve the product and how to improve the technology so that we can ultimately deliver the right tools to the right people at the right time.

Q: What is your assessment of the contribution of unattended ground sensors to overall ISR?

A: Unattended ground sensors [UGSs] are another force multiplier, and will continue to be as valuable in other parts of the world as they are today in Afghanistan. UGSs allow us to identify active and null spaces simultaneously in vast operating areas without incurring the normal time and manpower bill associated with sending out teams of operators with spotting scopes and cameras. In addition to the need for further developing these standalone technologies in response to SOF requirements for ready and available systems, we are interested in better integrating sensors from different domains, for example ground sensors with airborne sensors.

Q: Finally, do you have any closing thoughts concerning SOCOM intelligence efforts, and the personnel who successfully execute the mission?

A: SOF Intel is transitioning, but our people remain our greatest advantage. We have the most extraordinary group of people working critical force modernization initiatives every day in J2; I am con-stantly amazed at their ability to innovate and improve SOF intel. This applies equally to our partners in other SOCOM organizations: our acquisition managers, our financial experts, our communicators ... all are great Americans and true patriots dedicated to improving intelligence for SOF operators and for our nation. O

An airman assigned to the Iraq Training and Advisory Mission – Air Force, coaches Iraqi air force officers during an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) training mission. The Iraqi officers direct ISR aircraft and control camera movement from this fixed ground station to provide full motion ISR video for operations in Iraq. [Photo courtesy of DoD]


After more than 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military leaders have embraced the importance of knowing all about the human terrain of the battlefield as well as the actual terrain.

To add to that knowledge, the military has been turning increasingly to a skill set that maps not only the rivers and mountains where a force is operating but also the hostile vil-lages, the hungry or politically turbulent places and the atti-tudes of the people who live and do business in those places.

It’s a multi-discipline field called human geography that uses the tools of language, culture, economics, sociology, his-tory, anthropology and other fields of study to determine the real ground truth of a country or region. The explosion of social networking and geospatial imagery on the Internet has added new tools for human geographers and intelligence gather-ers who can now overlay detailed maps created from satellite photos with data about cell phone usage, animal migration or commercial activity.

By JOhn m. dOyle, SOtech cORReSpOndentRedIScOveRInG An Old SOF SKIll WIth A neW nAme.


Human geography offers a way to avoid costly mistakes, like breaking cultural taboos or offending poten-tial foreign partners and allies, by studying problems and consulting with locals before building a hospi-tal, school or road. It can help iden-tify opinion makers and leaders in a community.

That skill set, perfected by spe-cial operations forces (SOF) in Viet-nam, was largely neglected by the rest of the military until the counterinsur-gency demands of Iraq and Afghani-stan. Now the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has estab-lished a Human Terrain System to develop, train and integrate “a social science-based research and analysis capability to support operationally rel-evant decision-making, to develop a knowledge base, and to enable socio-cultural understanding across the operational environment.”

And the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., has a thriving geography program that includes some of the socio-cultural disciplines of human geography. The department’s webpage describes it as one of the most popular majors in the last decade, with about 150 graduates working as human geographers.

As the United States reduces the size of its military after a decade of war and grapples with funding constraints imposed by sequestration and other budget wran-gling in Congress, it needs “to build partner-nation capacity so that others can shoulder more of the bur-den of international security,” Deputy Defense Sec-retary Ashton B. Carter told a Washington think tank audience June 5.

In that strategic shift, SOF capabilities will be essential, he said, adding: “Whether they’re working with civil society and tribes, training local security forces, helping villagers stand up radio broadcasts, or supporting intelligence and law enforcement operations, SOF give the United States an enormous competitive advantage over our adversaries.”

And U.S. Special Operations Command’s stra-tegic vision, “SOCOM 2020,” underscores the importance of human geography, stating “we must re-balance the force and tenaciously embrace indi-rect operations in the ‘human domain,’” which the document describes as “the totality of the physical, cultural and social environments that influence human behavior in a population-centric conflict.”

SOCOM 2020 asserts that the human domain “is about developing understanding of, and nurtur-ing influence among, critical populaces,” adding that “operating in the human domain is a core competency for SOF.”

But there’s more to human geography than knowing not to extend your left hand to someone in a Muslim country or show

the soles of your feet, according to retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Craig Beardsley. He is administrator of a Kansas State University program that trains National Guard teams from farm states how to teach improved farming methods in war-wracked Afghanistan. In pre-deployment training about Afghan culture, he told a human geography conference in Arlington, Va., last fall,

“there were things taken as gospel.” But once in country, he and others learned

they weren’t always the gospel truth. One thing his soldier farmers and ranchers did learn was that women play a big role behind the scenes in Afghan village life, which is why both the Army and Marine Corps have trained female engagement teams to accompany patrols into Afghan villages to reach out and connect with the women, who are often a source of intelligence about what goes on in the area.

According to Adam Silverman, Ph.D., culture and foreign lan-guage advisor at the U.S. Army War College, human geography is very important for SOF, par-ticularly Army Special Forces whose key missions include working and training local resistance groups to either throw off an oppressive ruling government or support their legitimate government against insurgents and terrorists. “If

you’re going to be working with local people, you have to understand where the cultural, the social and the geospatial—in other words, the human geographic—intersect. You’ve got to

Joe Hillyer

Adam Silverman

A coalition force member talks to a villager about what to feed cattle during a presence patrol in Farah province, Afghanistan. The coalition forces conducting the presence patrol are deployed to train and mentor Afghan National Security Forces in their area. Afghan National Security Forces have been taking the lead in security operations, with coalition forces as mentors, to bring security and stability to the people of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps]


be able to understand or come to terms with the people you’re dealing with,” said Silverman, who stressed he was speaking for himself and not the Army or the Army War College. Those terms, he added, include where they live, how they interact with their environment, and how they and the state—if there is one—interact with each other.

But for SOF veterans, the concept of human geography, which has gone by many names over the years, is an old one.

“Human geography is nothing new,” said Joe Hillyer, director of business development for IDS International, a training, consulting and analysis firm based in Arlington, Va. A Green Beret officer in the 1980s and 1990s, Hillyer said human geog-raphy is “at the base of everything” Army Special Forces and other members of the SOF community know and do. “That’s what we were built for: the unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency fight. That’s all about under-standing the human terrain, understanding human geography or whatever buzzword of the decade that comes along.”

The bottom line, he added, is that “you’ve got to understand the

target audience country, understand the populace you’re working with.

You’ve got to be able to speak the languages, under-stand the nuances of the culture, before you can ever understand the roots of the conflict or the roots of whatever problem is going on there.”

IDS International is one of several companies, largely staffed by former servicemembers, that has evolved since September 11 to train military and civilian officials heading for trouble spots overseas. With some 50 full-time employees and a network of subject matter experts having military or gov-ernmental experience in Iraq or Afghanistan, IDS International specializes in socio-cultural train-ing using live role-playing scenarios and online tools like “Culture Shock: Afghanistan,” an online strategy game played by soon-to-be-deployed U.S. soldiers from the point of view of an Afghan village elder. “You’re going to see more and more invest-ment in use of e-learning, things that could be done at a desktop rather than a classroom and things that can be done by an individual. You’re going to see a lot more e-learning platforms that allow for better time management,” said Hillyer.

A series of online learning packages called “Improving Your Global Skillset” have been devel-

oped by Humintel, a behavioral science research company that provides training in areas ranging from cross-cultural compe-tence to reading facial expressions and other non-verbal behavior to detect deception and possible physical violence.

Founded by David Matsumoto, Ph.D., a San Francisco State University psychology professor and researcher, Humintel has studied tiny facial expressions—“micro-expressions,” Matsumoto calls them—that can give away what a person under stress is thinking. Research studies conducted with thousands of par-ticipants in recent years have shown that the accuracy rate for

David Matsumoto

Abe Usher

Coalition force members receive high fives from children in a village in Farah province, Afghanistan. Coalition forces were conducting a patrol to assess the Afghan Local Police in the village. Afghan Local Police complement counterinsurgency efforts by assisting and supporting rural areas with limited Afghan National Security Forces presence, in order to enable conditions for improved security, governance and development. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps]

SOTECH 11.6 | 21 www.SOTECH-kmi.com

someone’s ability to separate liars from truth tellers is just 54 percent, little better than flipping a coin to decide, Mat-sumoto said. But he has cap-tured the fleeting expressions that betray emotion on video. They’re hard to spot with the naked eye but readily vis-ible when the video is slowed down and then stopped. While such split-second expressions are not a guaranteed indica-tor of lying, Matsumoto said, the person being questioned warrants careful scrutiny. His program has been able to train law enforcement, as well as officials at the State Depart-ment and other federal agen-cies, how to spot micro-expressions.

Matsumoto, founder and director of San Francisco State’s Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory, said his company has done several Defense Department projects administered through the Army Research Institute involving the creation of a cur-riculum to teach soldiers how to read non-verbal behavior across cultures. There were sections on gestures, micro-expression, deception and detecting aggression. “We did provide training in a number of Army groups” including a human terrain team about to be deployed, Matsumoto said.

While there is more to cultural competency than spotting micro-expressions, “we believe, and we have data that shows, if you learn how to read people’s emotions, it will help you to adapt culturally,” Matsumoto said.

One of SOF’s core operations is countering threats to stability, and IDS International has a “close relationship” with the village stability operations community, Hillyer said. IDS is in the process of putting together a program “which is basically a four-man subject matter expert team—like an old Civil Affairs teams on ste-roids—with Ph.D.s and M.A.s that get out and do the agricultural piece or the economic piece supporting special forces teams doing foreign internal defense,” he added. But in the future, Hillyer thinks a big challenge for human geography and SOF will be the rise of densely-packed mega-cities with populations over 10 mil-lion and growing.

“The world’s about networks,” he said. “How do those net-works interface with other networks? How does the financial network interface with the human network [and] interface with the production network for certain products and services? That’s what special ops is all about: understanding that,” said Hillyer.

One network that’s been having its own population explo-sion worldwide is the social network. The International Tele-communications Union estimates that the number of mobile phones and computing devices will exceed the world’s population in 2014.

The HumanGeo Group is exploring that connection between human networks and geography. The company’s co-founders come from Internet powerhouse Google and special operations forces. With operations in suburban New York and Northern

Virginia, HumanGeo special-izes in using digital human geography to understand peo-ple and locations. It has devel-oped geospatial applications and tools to synthesize, man-age and exploit large data sets.

Thanks to Global Position-ing Systems (GPS) hardware, cell phone and mobile com-puting technology, “there is an emerging digital culture—not just in the U.S. but in other countries,” said Abe Usher, HumanGeo’s chief innovation officer. He notes that of the 2.2 billion Internet users world-wide, “about half use some form of social media.”

“A lot of social media data can be considered a form of digital human geography data,” Usher said. People who grew up with computers and cell phones use social media to communicate not just where they are but what they’re doing and seeing and with whom they’re interacting—from a flash mob in Britain to a demonstration in Turkey or a natural disaster in Japan.

“As you begin to look across all this informal data, you begin to examine it in a geospatial context. You see trends that are very informative about society,” Usher said.

One of HumanGeo’s products, Media Monitor, explores access to big data from over 100 sources, including mainstream media like CNN and BBC as well as social media like blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. It then searches public sentiment about a topic and geo-locates it, said Usher. “It’s a tool to help people understand the sentiment and the topics that are emerging in social media in different regions of the world,” he explained. Media Monitor was developed to meet the analytical and opera-tional needs of commercial companies and government agencies.

ISEBOX, another HumanGeo product, is a geospatial threat forecasting application developed to understand the operational environment in places outside of the United States such as Africa and Asia. It combines static data, like information from the Census Bureau or the World Bank, with dynamic informal data sources like social media “to give you a composite view of what is happening in an area,” Usher said.

The intersection of digital and geospatial information will become increasingly important for SOF in the future, said IDS International’s Hillyer. “The special operations community, they’re the ones who have to understand the human network in its deepest detail, because they’re the ones who are going to be the first engaged.” What human geography “brings to the table for special operations—and really anyone else who may need opera-tions in dangerous areas of the world—is a situational awareness that can reduce their safety risks,” said Usher. O



A coalition force member demonstrates weapons tactics for Afghan National Police during weapons training in Farah province, Afghanistan. Afghan National Security Forces have been taking the lead in security operations, with coalition forces as mentors, to bring security and stability to the people of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps]


The evolution of light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and its applications for special operations forces (SOF), con-tinues to emerge, especially with 3-D and real-time possibilities.

In the defense and intel space, LiDAR has just recently begun to build some momentum, accord-ing to Matt Morris, director of Integrated Solutions at Overwatch Geospatial Solu-tions, an operating unit of Textron Systems, a Tex-tron Inc. company. “You’ve got bigger factors like the National Geospatial-Intel-ligence Agency (NGA) and the Army Chief Information Officer G-6 program start-ing to drive requirements towards some kind of a lighter exploitation capabil-ity,” Morris said. “And we’re starting to see also the smaller units have require-ments for LiDAR processing as well.”

More data is available than ever, but SOF teams may not need to process as much as a bigger unit. “A larger NGA organization would process data over very large areas,” Morris explained. “It could be countries or entire areas of operation, whereas a smaller tactical user will have a defined area that they’re doing

a mission over and they want to be able to quickly generate data that can be used for that mission.”

With Overwatch’s product LIDAR Ana-lyst, an operator can create 3-D scenes of their target area. After the sensor col-lects the raw LiDAR data, LIDAR Analyst can be used to extract the terrain, build-ings and vegetation. “We can create a visually compelling, three-dimensional environ-ment using the extracted results that allows tactical users to do any kind of mis-sion planning, rehearsal, or secondary analysis. This includes 3-D line-of-sight or basic mensuration tasks such as measuring a sim-ple height of a building, or length of a bridge that they want to cross,” Morris said.

LIDAR Analyst exists as an extension to Esri’s Arc-GIS software package, so forward operating units can access LiDAR data through

a link or on a local drive with just a basic laptop. “In essence, the smaller units do the same kinds of things, it’s just that the smaller units have a very specific area they’re looking over and they need to get products to do analysis on it in a very short order,” Morris said. “We have products that

are ideally suited in many ways to those tactical users.”

Overwatch released the first version of LIDAR Analyst in 2006, when most people didn’t even know what LiDAR was, accord-ing to Morris. “We had a great package for analyzing it, but literally no one had the data, so it was experimental at best,” he said. “It’s been a long waiting process for the market to catch up with the technol-ogy, but now it seems the usage is growing by leaps and bounds. People are finding more interesting ways to use the tech-nology. We’re going to have to adapt our software even more quickly than we have in the past.”

AchIevInG FUll 3-d vISUAlIzAtIOn

Full 3-D visualization is the big-gest advancement in Overwatch’s LIDAR Analyst version 5.1, which came out in the spring. It can take a considerable amount of time to get the latest ver-sion downstream to the actual warfight-ers, but Morris said advanced users have been very happy with the advancements. Overwatch invested into developing the 3-D visualization component in conjunc-tion with an Army program of record called operational 3-D joint capability technology demonstrations (OP3D JCTD). “JCTD was looking for ways to be able to collect, disseminate and exploit three-dimensional data in a much faster way than what they were able to before,”

By JeFF cAmpBell, SOtech edItOR

Matt Morris

Roy Nelson

emeRGInG dAtA cOllectIOn technOlOGy AIdS OpeRAtORS In mISSIOn plAnnInG.


Morris said. “They identified some key commercial software solutions—LIDAR Analyst being one of them—which they wanted to enhance to better support the mission.” Morris and his team built a custom 3-D visualization component that allows the operator to quickly review results and do some basic analysis.

In conjunction with the 3-D program, Overwatch also built a distributed process-ing system, which Morris said ties in to cloud computing. “Traditional processing says you can bring a swath in, do your extractions, and then you batch process the other swaths to produce similar prod-ucts,” Morris said. With one worksta-tion, that could take a long time, so the Overwatch team built a system that allows people to distribute that processing amongst a cluster of workstations. One job could have taken four hours to produce, but with a cluster of four workstations, the information can be processed in a quarter of that time. “With today’s technology as well, oftentimes each computer has mul-tiple processing cores, so if you had four computers, each with a dual core, you could actually cut your time by a factor of eight,” Morris said. “It’s a way for us to keep up with the rapidly expanding vol-ume of LiDAR data.”

New sensors are collecting LiDAR data in wider swaths, and at greater density. While the exponential growth of data poten-tially provides more useful intelligence, operators at the tactical level can’t wait hours for it to process. “They need a way to get the data out in 10 minutes, so being able to set up a distributor processing envi-ronment is of great use,” Morris empha-sized. “Maybe not to the guy on the edge of the line, who just has a backpack, but more in the operating centers where they have a richer computing environment.”

Overwatch works to maintain a yearly cycle with updated releases of LIDAR Ana-lyst, with a continued goal of account-ing for new sensors entering the market. “There are different types of LiDAR col-lection platforms being fielded now, and some of the newer ones present more challenges in terms of data processing,” Morris said. Some of those challenges include cloud cover, where the moisture affects collection, so typically collection is done at low altitudes. Newer sensors sup-port higher altitude collection, but they also introduce more noise into the data. “So, we’ve got to spend some time looking

at that data, and we’ll continue to enhance our 3-D visualization capabilities toward becoming an industry leader in that area, and we’ll continue to maintain our position of being the key industry leader in doing feature extraction for LiDAR,” Morris said.

LiDAR has many applications, but to Morris, the best is the ability to rapidly generate an accurate 3-D scene for mis-sion planning and rehearsal. “To do a mission, you want to know the subtleties of the terrain—where exactly the building corners are, how many trees are there and what is their height, etc.—so you can plan your ingress and egress into the area.” With LIDAR Analyst, an operator can gen-erate a scene of 90-plus percent accuracy in a matter of minutes, according to Mor-ris, rather than having someone collect that over a matter of days.

ReAl-tIme cOlOR FUSIOn

A key feature of Ball Aerospace & Tech-nologies Corp.’s color, LiDAR 3-D FMV system is the fusing of the color and the fact that it’s done in real time, according to Senior Advanced Systems Manager Roy Nelson. “We fuse the color to the LiDAR in real time, generating the 3-D video scene at 30 frames a second,” Nelson said. “Many LiDAR scenes you may see pictures of in magazines are post-processed. The camera image is draped over the point cloud after the fact—we do it all in real time.”

Ball has focused its internal research and development dollars (IRAD) on real-time processing in recent years. “It doesn’t do any good to take data in real time if I can’t provide information in real time,” Nelson said. He uses a laser binary file format that maintains information related to LiDAR data, called .LAS “We do all the fusing of the color to the LiDAR in real time, we mosaic or stitch all the individual frames from each scene together in real time, and we generate the .LAS point cloud also in parallel in real time.” LiDAR now becomes LIDAR or laser imaging detection and ranging.

When people ask Nelson about the frame delay, he said, “Well, maybe one frame.” Whether for civil first responders or military special operators, time is of the essence, enabling them to exploit the information gained as quickly as possible. “We started the real-time effort a couple years ago, but just within the last six

months is when we finally got everything to run completely in parallel,” Nelson said. “Completely means generating that last .LAS point cloud also in parallel.” In the past, his team would do all the mosaick-ing, all the 3-D imagery, and then—after the fact—create the point cloud.

dIvInG IntO the pOInt clOUd

LiDAR creates a “point cloud,” where the points form a terrain map. Each point gives the analyst the range of a location on the ground, whether low or high. “The problem with most point clouds is they have no color, or you could say they’re white on a black background,” Nelson said. “Commercial LiDAR software is then used to color it by height, and generate digital surface models for example, but it still takes an experienced user to under-stand what they’re looking at.” Once the color is added and someone views the 3-D point cloud, it becomes intuitively obvious since the human mind sees in 3-D color. “You don’t need any training to under-stand what you’re seeing,” Nelson said.

Doing it all in parallel may adjust priority applications; whereas before a primary use would be in advance of a mission, now 3-D imagery via LIDAR can be used in real time to make adjustments just before a mission or on the fly. Dur-ing a recent SOCOM exercise at Camp Robert, Calif., Ball put theories like this to the test. “We fly over the ground, generating 3-D imagery in real time, just like a full motion video camera,” Nelson said. “You can either look at it on board, or radio frequency downlink for some-body on the ground to look at, and we’ve done both.”

Also out at Roberts, the Ball team had a simplified version of the software on one of the first versions of an Android tablet, where they could place the data on almost immediately after acquired. “You could hand a tablet to a soldier, which we did, and they would pick it up and manually manipulate the image: zoom, rotate, color by height, etc.,” Nelson said. “They could touch any one point, get the coordinates of that, touch two points, get a route and slope.” Placed in the hands of the user, no training was necessary. “They just picked it up and it was intuitive,” Nelson said. “Because of the color 3-D, it’s very much like a video game, so it’s familiar and doesn’t require much training.”


Most LiDAR systems in use today are for aerial mapping and imaging. Those aren’t real-time systems, and Nelson con-tinues to stress the advantage of real time. “Where time is a mission-critical param-eter, that’s where our LIDAR system has a role to play,” Nelson said. “That’s why when people ask about delay I say one frame. You could be sending something back down to the ground and have it as you’re en route.”

Military units want to know the lay of the land and see what’s in front of them, while looking at large-area footprints. When preparing for a major movement, real-time capability isn’t necessary since other surveillance vehicles or space asset imagery is available. They generally want to know what the battlefield looks like, according to Nelson. “Now you go to a small SOF unit, they’re operating in real time,” he said. “They need to know what’s around the corner—if they have to send out a team tomorrow morning to an area for which recent imagery doesn’t exist, they could put this LiDAR system on a UAV.” After the UAV collects information from a specific area, the UAV could land and operators could pull the hard drive, or while the aerial platform is en route, they could bring the information back down to the ground. “When the operators step out on that mission, whether within the hour or the next day, they have very recent, relative information,” Nelson said.

Perspective from potential end users always helps industry best develop what will help complete the mission, whether it’s infiltrating an enemy compound or fighting a wildfire. Nelson found another application for the technology recently at the Boulder, Colo., Office of Emergency Management, where the he thought the initial use—similar to special operations ingress and egress uses—would be for fire-fighters and first responders to see a wild-fire scene and learn how to access routes where they wanted to go. It turns out the OEM chief saw it as a communications tool, since whenever there’s an emergency, the public gives him 24-36 hours before they’re demanding information on the fire and the status of their homes. “He said if he had the product from our sensor, he could put it in a kiosk on the computer screen,” Nelson said. “Everybody in an affected area knows their surroundings, they know how to find their house if you give a photo to them … but if they had

3-D capability, they could zoom in on their house, pan in around it, and look at adjacent areas.”

Whether it’s a SOF team member or the average homeowner, anyone can pick up a joystick and use the color point cloud like a 3-D model without training, accord-ing to Nelson, and the applications keep growing. “All the people I’ve talked to, various users, they all see a unique way they can apply it based on their specific area of expertise,” he said.

One Marine involved in special ops saw the Ball system recently and saw how he could gain immediate information on ingress and egress routes. “When they go into an area, our system could give them very high resolution imagery of the area of interest so they know how to get in and out,” Nelson said. With a complete 3-D map, mission-planners can see if the enemy has a sniper or someone at a par-ticular location the SOF unit is trying to access. “They could use our data to find out what’s the safe access route where that person can’t see them,” Nelson said. “You have to think, with a model, you can put yourself down in a valley looking up, you can put yourself on the top of a mountain looking around … you really have to think of it as a full 3-D immersive model which you can put yourself in to see what’s where.”

Another possible application for Ball’s system came from a helicopter pilot who explained to Nelson that he would use it if he had had to fly a route and wanted to use the terrain for sound masking, by noting the slope of the hills in the area. “You can’t get the slope and the full 3-D depth from a high-altitude 2-D image,” Nelson said. “With the 3-D model, he could actually fly the route and plan his approach using that 3-D information.”

chAnGInG GeOGRAphy, AdAptInG SOFtWARe

Whether the harsh terrain in ques-tion is a bare desert or a dense rainfor-est, LiDAR processing solutions can adapt and overcome because they aren’t built around a specific collection platform or sensor. “We try to keep our software as generic as possible, so that as new sensors emerge or as new problems emerge, they can quickly be adapted,” Morris said. “As new data types are collected or new sen-sors emerge, we might have to tweak our

software to take advantage of it or deal with an increased flow of data, but there’s really nothing specific that would preclude it from working in different areas.”

Future LiDAR processing capabilities may assist with autonomous vehicle navi-gation, more detailed mappings of inter-nal building structures, and identifying biological threats. “I think people are just starting to scratch the surface of what they can do with LiDAR data,” Morris said. “Whether it’s in the area we work in, which is aerial, or terrestrial-based LiDAR collection where they’ll have it mounted on vehicles, so you’re getting more build-ing façade extraction—a view at the street level as opposed to the aerial level.”

Nelson has been involved in laser appli-cations in one way or another for more than 30 years, and the improvements in timeliness continue to impress him. Its assistance in a disaster scenario such as an earthquake or tornado is invaluable to first responders. “If there are buildings collapsed, you could tell how big an area of rubble is or if a building is tilted on its foundation, because LIDAR can measure the slope of a roof,” Nelson said. “The real-time nature to support first respond-ers—those first responders can be military special operators, they can be civil … it’s just the timeliness of information that is my favorite use of LiDAR.”

Even though Nelson’s talked with operators about what the system is capable of providing them, until they see the 3-D videos, data and demonstrations, some still don’t believe that the information can actually be acquired in real time. “People are used to LiDAR being a static image, a picture, a 3-D model,” Nelson said. “The fact that it’s available right now in Ball’s system—it’s all been built under a company IRAD contract—I think the SOF community has a tool available to them that has many applications depending on what the user’s needs are.”

The possibilities may be limitless, and solution providers intend to adapt to account for all the different ways LiDAR is being represented, but the end goal is to provide SOF operators with the right data at the right time. O

For more information, contact SOTECH Editor Jeff Campbell at [email protected] or search our online archives for related stories

at www.sotech-kmi.com.


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2013 SOCOM

PROGRAM MANAGEMENT UPDATES


Patrick Ernst has been responsible for and actively involved with all business development activities since the company’s inception. In this capacity he has been instrumental in developing brand awareness and generating revenue, especially within the Department of Defense and intelligence community. He has also played a key role in virtually all other aspects of running the company, such as raising capital, developing the business model, forming strategic part-nerships, managing day-to-day operations and developing strategic plans for the future.

Prior to joining Pixia, Ermst was involved in several entrepreneurial ventures including running and growing a highly successful and profitable wholesale distribution company in New York City.

Q: Can you tell us about Pixia and what you offer the special operations community?

A: Pixia is a commercial software company founded 13 years ago primarily focused on providing high-performance access to very large data sets. We provide our customers on-demand access to wide-area motion imagery, full motion video, digital imagery and a vari-ety of other data types. We develop modular-ized open standards-based software solutions.

Pixia offers the SOF community agile solutions to quickly and efficiently access intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance [ISR] and geospatial data from traditional and non-traditional sources to support a wide variety of missions. Departing from the legacy approach of handling massive datasets as fragmented individual files, Pixia technolo-gies uniquely organize data to enable rapid access by global users in any connected or disconnected environment. We have success-fully integrated our technologies into some of the most advanced architectures, as well as legacy systems and programs currently deployed in operational settings.

Our solutions are based on open standards [such as those defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium] and span from enterprise-scale web services that provide global data access through networks or deployable disconnected solutions. We see great potential for these capabilities to help connect a global SOF with

ISR and geospatial data to support traditional missions as well as assist SOF coordination with diplomats, host-nation, coalition part-ners and foreign SOF units.

Q: What unique benefits does Pixia Corp. provide its customers in comparison to other companies in your field?

A: We focus on end-user experience. It’s all about quick and easy access to the most rel-evant and recent information as well as pro-viding access to archived data with forensic and strategic value. Our customers quickly search, discover and access specific informa-tion within enormous volumes of ISR data to extract and generate only the knowledge they need to complete their mission. This provides significant time savings by not hav-ing to review or scroll through entire video files or wait for files to buffer. Our access is fast regardless of how much data you have, from gigabytes to petabytes, with little differ-ence in access speed. This is a game-changer for folks who rely on data; if it’s too cumber-some or too time-consuming, you’ve just lost that customer. Pixia exponentially reduces the time it takes to analyze data to make informed decisions.

In addition, all of our software lines are “cloud-ready” and designed around an open standards-based architecture which can be integrated with any third party tool or storage device. We are truly agnostic when it comes to customer preferences for hardware infra-structure or data visualization and exploita-tion tools. We simply provide customers a different way of thinking about data to make it instantly more relevant and useable at a fraction of the cost of changing architectures. We can deliver these improvements now, which is a departure from costly, proprietary, monolithic solutions of the past.

Q: How does a future government budget-constrained environment impact you?

A: I believe the uncertain budget environ-ment is a great opportunity for the govern-ment to capitalize on cost savings from small business solutions to create options for changing architecture elements without perturbing the whole system or creating something new. We are seeing a trend where larger enterprises are embracing innovative ways for managing data and optimizing cur-rent architectures by reducing unnecessary redundancies and data replication. This is where we thrive.

Rapidly increasing collection of data is an expensive problem. In my view, tighter bud-gets will force a hard look at data generation, data storage and how those impact, or com-plement, knowledge generation. We hope it will inspire new thinking on the overall process of data collection, processing, exploi-tation and dissemination to ensure we get more value from data collected and how we derive knowledge from that data. We think what a customer is going to do with the data is more important than just collecting data and should be considered ahead of platform development, which we call the “back-end-up-front.” It’s less sexy than bending metal on an overhead system but will save money and may influence platform design. I also believe more rapid acquisition practices will maximize cost savings by allowing the gov-ernment to take greater advantage of small business efficiencies now and better keep pace with industry in the future.

Q: What new innovations are on your horizon?

A: HiPER Watch is our newest product line, which normalizes, manages and streams large quantities of full motion video ingested from various platforms: air, space, surveil-lance cameras and mobile devices. This pro-vides a highly scalable, open architecture that will keep pace with the increasing number of high-definition video feeds while making the data available to any third-party exploitation tool via open standards. O

[email protected]

inDUStry interVieW Special Operations technology

Patrick ErnstCo-Founder and Chief Operating Officer

Pixia


August 2013Volume 11, Issue 7next ISSUE

Cover and In-Depth Interview with:

CommanderAFSOWAC

Brig. Gen. Jon Weeks

Special Section Unmanned SystemsIncreasingly, missions ranging from ISR to high-risk EOD work are being executed by unmanned systems, which often have far greater endurance than humans. It means that combatants aren’t placed in harm’s way.

InsertIon orDer DeaDlIne: JUly 24, 2013 | aD MaterIals DeaDlIne: JUly 31, 2013

FeaturesFull Motion VideoWarriors need to know where the enemy is, and what he is preparing to do next. Full motion video can provide that critical information, and also keep friendly forces informed of each others’ location.

UAV Weapon SystemsTraditionally, UAVs performed ISR missions to locate potential enemy targets, which then would have to be taken out by land or air forces. But now, UAVs—after discovering targets—can also eliminate them, saving critical time. We examine key UAV weapon systems.

Precision Strike TechnologyIn an age where U.S. and coalition forces must scrupulously avoid harming sensitive structures such as mosques and schools, precision strike is a must. We look at systems that demolish the target —without unwanted collateral damage or civilian casualties.

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ConFirMeD SPeaKerS inClUDe

the Honorable James r. Clapper Jr.Director of National Intelligence (DNI)

Ms. letitia a. longDirector, National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA)

aDM William H. Mcraven, U.S. navyCommander, U.S. Special Operations Command

sotech 11 6%20final

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