Lockheed Martin Demonstrates Coalition Intelligence Interoperability at U.S. Joint Forces Empire Challenge Exercise
Using advanced, multi-level security intelligence sharing technologies, Lockheed Martin enabled members of the Five Eyes international consortium (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand) to securely share intelligence of dissimilar classifications during the recent Empire Challenge Joint Forces exercise.
The end to end processing, dissemination, and exploitation of non-traditional intelligence data was also demonstrated using fully operational products built on the new Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise framework. Currently, coalition access to intelligence from the globalDistributed Common Ground System (DCGS) sites (which process, correlate and disseminate intelligence feeds from air, ground and sea-based assets) is limited solely to U.S. force collaborators, or requires use of high level cross-domain guard solutions, both of which inhibit seamless intelligence sharing between multi-national forces.
Currently, required is a cross-domain secure guard to enable U.S. and coalition collaboration. Lockheed Martin’s development and employment of the latest generation of DIB technology within the DCGS Enterprise verifies data classification tags against user security credentials before allowing them access to data. This trusted computing layer enacts authentication and authorization access controls to enable coalition partners to discover and access intelligence via the DIB as it became available using interoperability standards.
The benefit is twofold: U.S. and coalition partners share the same intelligence as it becomes available and, more significantly in today’s fight, trusted credentials and open architecture increases the availability of intelligence while reducing delivery time. Empire Challenge is an annual joint and coalition interoperability demonstration that showcases emerging U.S. and multi-national intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance solutions that can be fielded rapidly. The 2011 demonstration was held at Fort Huachuca with distributed locations throughout the United States and coalition sites in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
