ARMY VIEWS EMERGING INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGIES
“Emerging Intelligence Technologies” is the theme of the latest issue of the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (MIPB), January-March 2014.
“Rapid technology developments in response to urgent wartime requirements have brought the intelligence community (IC) some tremendous new capabilities. Advancement in the areas of biometrics, battlefield forensics, miniaturization, SIGINT terminal guidance, DCGS-A, and distributed processing have been vital to the success of Military Intelligence (MI) and the Army,” wrote Maj. Gen. Robert P. Ashley.
“This issue of MIPB looks at several of these capabilities and their integration into our formations.”
The new Bulletin was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Phi Beta Iota: Highlights include Army advances with GoogleEarth; focus on battery life, biometrics, big data, forencis, and context-based data-mining (code for making sense out of persistent surveillance without regard to actually knowing any humans). While a good idea in principle, in reality home-based intelligence forces are neither responsive nor capable in support of tactical operations — this appears to be over-sold — apart from the bandwidth issues. We anticipate that DIA's new Director will enter with the same narrow base of knowledge that has skewed Army intelligence in the wrong technical direcitons, and that DIA will not become part of the solution going forward toward 2017 when yet another Director of DIA should be appointed. The Army's confusion of social media (albeit in foreign languages) with Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is a major handicap, when combined with the fact that the CIA Open Source Center is not allowed to talk to subject matter experts, having been forbidden to do so by the clandestine service at CIA….a prohibition something no Director of CIA should allow to continue. Overall this is an excellent issue with a great deal of truth-telling that will never reach Congressional staffs or be integrated into Army PPBS/E.
QUOTE (Page 16):
Overall there is no base line or common operating procedure for every system to operate so that each system communicates effortlessly with other systems. Although CPOF, DCGS-A, and FBCB2 were all developed for different reasons and developed separately with the intention of making them compatible at some point, the Army missed its mark. The software for these systems, which was written exclusively for the Army’s use, was poorly designed and built. The fix then is software, the software is Google Earth.
QUOTE (Page 24):
In the gap analysis, the authors identified five major capability gaps (lack of capabilities) documented and validated by TRADOC through multiple capabilities based assessments and initial capabilities documents. These five gaps are:
- Insufficient collection.
- Limited network connectivity.
- Limited network capacity.
- An inability to display and share relevant tactical information.
- A lack of capabilities to enable collaboration.
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