Raytheon's CENTAUR system deployed at Empire Challenge

US Joint Forces Command sponsored the use of a Raytheon cross-domain and multi-national data sharing capability at this year's Empire Challenge exercise, May 23 to June 3, at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

The Cross-Domain Enterprise All-Source User Repository (CENTAUR) capability was formally evaluated during the last two Empire Challenge exercises. Since last year's exercise, Raytheon was awarded an indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity contract with a ceiling of $68 million by the US Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Multi-Service Execution Team Office for CENTAUR. The first order was awarded for delivery to US Central Command. Under the terms of the IDIQ, Raytheon will procure, deliver, install and sustain CENTAUR components throughout a two-year contract ordering period with an additional year for sustainment activities.

"With CENTAUR, US and multi-national forces can operate in a near-real-time, common environment," said Todd Trapp, director of Tactical Intelligence Solutions for Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems. "It can save mission-essential hours and sometimes days depending on the scenario, allowing multi-national forces to securely share valuable intelligence data."

CENTAUR is a suite of products for machine-to-machine, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information sharing between US security domains and multi-national partners' security domains.

Before CENTAUR, if intelligence officials wanted to share information, an analyst had to submit a request via phone to another analyst to create a CD and manually push its content to another domain. Pushing intelligence from one domain to another, between classified and unclassified systems, also means working through a guard that validates whether the transfer can take place by enforcing defined releasability policy. CENTAUR automates this process and enables Web-based queries to electronically transfer information. The Raytheon High-Speed Guard CENTAUR component validates security, ISR information markings and data structure prior to transferring the information between security domains.

A CENTAUR system is currently being used at Fort Gordon, Ga., and other systems are being tested at various domestic and international locations.

Source: Raytheon