DCGS upgrades reduce image processing costs

Raytheon Company has upgraded the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) nodes for the Kansas and Indiana Air National Guard with the latest net-centric, cost-efficient and service-interoperable capabilities.

The DCGS upgrade allows the Guard's 181st and 184th Intelligence Wings to process data from the Predator, Global Hawk and U2 aircraft. The upgrade provides a two-fold increase in imagery processing capability and also gives the Air Force DCGS enterprise more capacity and flexibility for high-altitude missions, reducing operating and maintenance costs as well as costs associated with future upgrades.

"The Kansas and Indiana DCGS upgrades streamline the intelligence-sharing process, making it more operationally efficient, and establish an open-system architecture that is more affordable to maintain and upgrade," said Todd Trapp, director of Tactical Intelligence Solutions for Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems business.

Because Raytheon's next evolution of the system is Web-enabled, it can more easily integrate applications and workflow, allowing the system to be readily updated with the latest technology as mission tactics change. In addition, Air Force and Army users will have access to each other's data, making intelligence gathering and command and control of ISR situational awareness more effective.

The Guard nodes in Kansas and Indiana are, respectively, the third and fourth US Air Force sites to enhance system capabilities -- and also represent the first National Guard sites to have the same tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination capabilities as core active-duty DCGS sites. Core DCGS sites at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, and Ramstein Air Base, Germany, upgraded to the new DCGS baseline earlier this year.

The network-centric upgrades to DCGS for the Guard are important elements of DoD's initiative to enable seamless, real-time, multi-agency intelligence sharing and collaboration. Once sites are federated across DoD, DCGS will be able to serve as a key part of the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise architecture for worldwide intelligence-information sharing.

Source: Raytheon