Connecting the dots: battlefield intelligence: easy to collect, tough to share.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Intelligence

The U.S. military has deployed unmanned aircraft and other information collection devices at a pace that exceeds the capabilities of battlefield intelligence systems to archive, analyze and disseminate the video and imagery. Networks with limited bandwidth further compound the problem by slowing down data transmissions.

To combat the backlog, defense officials have distributed portable video receivers to ground units. While they can now access imagery that a drone is beaming down in real time, troops have complained that the solution tends to yield only a "soda straw" view of the battlefield.

Troops want to maximize the utility of the intelligence exploitation nodes, says John Kittle, project manager for Empire Challenge, an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance event sponsored by U.S. Joint Forces Command. War fighters are seeking improved ISR support for strike operations and roadside bomb search missions. They also would like more persistent surveillance capabilities to track insurgent commanders in urban areas, he tells reporters during a teleconference from Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., where more than 1,700 participants were taking part in the 6th annual event. Many of them were plugged into the demonstration from distributed sites around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and The Hague, Netherlands, where German and French imagery exploiters were seated at terminals looking at the data being collected and providing their analysis.

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The focus of the annual event is to ensure that critical data that are gathered by U.S. and coalition teams can quickly be accessed by troops in battle, says Air Force Col. George Krakie, director for intelligence operations at JFCOM and the military lead for the challenge.

Out on the desert range, troops proceed through live scenarios that emulate battlefield conditions found in Afghanistan and Iraq. California National Guard members conduct convoy operations and cordon-and-search missions and are attacked by Navy reservists playing the role of insurgents. The hope is that the simulation will give the Defense Department an inkling of how technologies would fare in the war zones, officials say.

One of them is a new sensor ball that is being tested to "vastly improve the quality of video that comes down" from surveillance aircraft, says Kit-de. With a video stream that will be protected by type I and type III encryption, the MX-15...