CSA's focus area 16: actionable intelligence: national joint and expeditionary capabilities.

In previous issues, we discussed the focus of Intelligence Transformation as providing optimized intelligence support to the one who needs the information the most--the soldier. We are effecting this change primarily through the improved changes in our new modular units and the improved capabilities and processes the Intelligence Community brings to the fight as a vertical enabler.

This article focuses on a more detailed discussion of how the six critical Actionable Intelligence initiatives are complementary enablers of our tactical forces and nested within our Nation's joint and expeditionary capabilities.

These initiatives are:

[] Tactical Overwatch.

[] Information Dominance Center.

[] Pantheon Project.

[] Interim Distributed Common Ground System-Army.

[] Project Foundry.

[] Red Teaming Capability.

The six critical initiatives of Focus Area Actionable Intelligence fundamentally change the way the Army thinks about and performs intelligence collection, analysis, production, and dissemination. Our focus is to transform both our analysts and software tools from Industrial Age processes aided by technology to true Information Age processes that allow us to process, analyze, and visualize the vast amounts of information available today.

Background

We need better data tools that are capable of processing millions of data elements and presenting this information visually to the analyst, thereby allowing a human to see the relevant information contained in, for example, 200,000 messages rather than having to read and analyze each individual message. Some of these advanced tools, such as STARLIGHT data software, are in use today and are radically changing the way we do intelligence analysis.

Army Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations, identifies information as an element of combat power. As we increase our communications capabilities and develop better network-centric battle command practices, our tactical commanders are significantly increasing their appetites for more information and greater situational awareness. Applying Information Age approaches changes the way we fight, but not the nature of war. The difference is that by better leveraging information and situational understanding we are able to mass effects, rather than mass combat forces. This enables us to better develop the situation out of contact, engage the enemy from standoff distances without detection, and mass effects to decisively defeat the enemy at the time and place of our choosing.

Army Intelligence must also adapt to achieve dominant knowledge, address the changing nature of the threat, and fight within the contemporary operating environment we face today. As the larger Defense Intelligence Community transforms, the Army plays a major part in developing the investment strategies, business practices, and collection capabilities that ensure protection of the needs of our soldiers. In September 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally chose "optimize intelligence capabilities" as one of his top ten priorities.

The U.S. Intelligence Community has always tried to balance its ability to support government leadership (decision makers) and the military or the warfighter. Typically, the Intelligence Community's definition of the warfighter has equaled the Combatant Commands down to as low as the joint task force (JTF). Today, more is required. Today we need to leverage the Intelligence Community to support three groups: our government's leadership, military commanders, and our tactical units, down to individual servicemen and women engaged in operations on the land, sea, or in the air. This is a significant change, requiring an enterprise approach for the conduct of the U.S. Intelligence Community's business. It is a significant challenge, but one that is achievable.

Army Intelligence transformation is leveraging joint, national, and interagency capabilities to align with the three components of our Army's transformation strategy: the transformation of Army culture, the transformation of processes, and the development of inherently joint transformational capabilities. Given our knowledge of the threat and the lessons learned since 11 September 2001, our transformation process is enabling our Army with new combinations of processes, concepts, capabilities, people, and organizations necessary to conduct full-spectrum operations and achieve dominant knowledge of the battlespace.

Traditional intelligence methods and products served the U.S. forces well during the major combat operations phase of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF). However, we fell short of achieving the desired level of situational awareness for our forces on the attack because of the lack of adequate on-the-move communications and the inability to rapidly fuse all-source intelligence from disparate data sources.

During the stability operations phase of OIF, intelligence collection requirements shifted dramatically from identifying Iraqi military forces, to identifying insurgent groups and their respective intentions. This significantly increased human intelligence (HUMINT) capability requirements as well as select technical collection capabilities. What really changed was a much greater reliance on dominant knowledge to attack the threat surgically in an urban environment, vice using overwhelming firepower against a conventional threat on a relatively open battlefield.

Focus Area Actionable Intelligence is addressing these concerns through the development of six critical initiatives. The focus area originally developed 22 new initiatives as part of its mission analysis. As a result of further review, these six were deemed direct and interdependent enablers to the modular changes of our new Unit of Action (UA) force structure.

Critical Initiative: Tactical Overwatch

The concept of "tactical overwatch" is not new, but was previously constrained by an inadequate technological framework to facilitate rapid sharing, fusion, and visualization within tactically useful timelines. Tactical overwatch mitigates the current risk to our forces on the move and leverages all available data within the Intelligence Community to support our tactical units.

An example of the problem overwatch addresses would be the situation a brigade S2 in the 3d Infantry Division (3ID) faced while advancing on Baghdad. The brigade had been advancing for a period of time before it hit a sand storm and came to a tactical halt. The brigade S2 established his limited tactical communications and proceeded to start downloading his message traffic. He had more than 900 E-mail messages exceeding one Megabit apiece. Even if he had the bandwidth to download this traffic, he did not have sufficient personnel or processing power to make sense of it. What he needed was one message to update his common operational picture (COP) and a place to send his commander's request for information (RFI) that would quickly provide an answer.

The honest fact is that today the brigade's RFI would compete with other requirements at the division analysis and control element (ACE). Despite our best efforts, often brigade RFIs would fall to a lower priority than the division commander's requirements. We can do better, and one way to resolve this issue is the creation of dedicated tactical overwatch teams at the theater ACE. Embedded within the theater ACE, these teams' sole mission is to provide a tactical overwatch capability dedicated to units in the field down to brigade level. We are building four tactical overwatch teams into the MI force structure of each theater intelligence brigade. The UEx G2 (division of today) will be allocated a percentage of overwatch teams, similar to the way we allocate priority of fires, and the G2 will decide how to apportion the overwatch support.

Formalizing "tactical overwatch" as a discrete, downward-focused mission task is necessary to harness the power of forward area and national collection, analysis, and synthesis of information from shared databases, advanced processing, and distributed visualization. Tactical overwatch will provide responsive support to designated tactical forces during lesser situational awareness-high vulnerability periods--e.g., tailored, fused assessments, targets, cueing, and warning at classification levels they can use instead of megabytes of information. Overwatch teams will also be capable of rapidly merging the essence of restricted Intelligence Community reporting from sensitive compartmented information (SCI), collateral (Secret), and Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) domains into succinct answers for our tactical forces. Tactical Overwatch is already in a proof-of-concept phase providing support to 3ID during its preparation, deployment, and employment in OIF 3.

Critical Initiative: Information Dominance Center

The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) Information Dominance Center (IDC) is a state-of-the-art operational intelligence organization. The IDC has pioneered processes and methodologies for rapid fusion and analysis of complex threat networks and activities. It uses "cutting edge" software tools developed by nationally ranked software developers sitting side-by-side with analysts against all-source, all-classification databases comprised of data-tagged signals intelligence (SIGINT), HUMINT, imagery intelligence (IMINT), counterintelligence (CI), sensor measurement and signatures intelligence (MASINT), and tactical and open-source reporting.

IDC extensions are established in each of the INSCOM theater intelligence brigades and JTF headquarters in both Iraq and Afghanistan. IDC fusion analysis leverages national, theater, and tactical reporting to rapidly establish threat association and linkages; recognize threshold events, activity patterns, and anomalies; and understand the significance of information "buried" within an ever-increasing volume of collected material. The IDC extensions can quickly visualize the resulting answers and analysis and share them with IDC extension nodes and, through existing networks, down to tactical consumers. The fielding of a software bridging capability between the IDC and the interim Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) during the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2004 (FY04) will facilitate near-real-time sharing and visualization across the Top Secret SCI and Secret collateral domains. The IDC is an intelligence force multiplier for deployed Army and Joint forces. The IDC will also execute the tactical overwatch proof of concept with 3ID during OIF 3.

Critical Initiative: The Pantheon Project

Today, any new technology that has intelligence applications requires prompt incorporation into the intelligence system. To that end, we are implementing a rapid fielding capability through the creation of the Pantheon Project. The project has brought together a team of 10-12 elite, world-class individuals from business, academia, and government to address and solve the hardest technical problems, creating technological or procedural solutions for the enhancement of tactical through national intelligence echelons. These solutions will then be rapidly spiraled forward into the Intelligence Community and tactical units.

This program will integrate emerging capabilities into a software integration lab within the IDC, a collaborative effort between the Pantheon Project, the IDC, and the DCGS-A program. The software integration lab will then operationalize these emerging capabilities and integrate them into the next version of DCGS-A software fielded to the force. The Pantheon Project provides us the benefits of world-class expertise within a constrained government budget.

Critical Initiative: Begin Fielding an Interim DCGS-A Capability This Year

DCGS-A is the centerpiece of the future Army intelligence framework and is the enabler for all intelligence operations at all echelons from the brigade to national level. DCGS-A is also part of a joint Distributed Common Ground/Surface System (DCGS) family of systems under simultaneous development by all the Services. For the Army, DCGS-A is already a Future Force Program of Record (POR) designed to field a capability in FY08. DCGS-A replaces all of our intelligence processing systems such as the All-Source Analysis System (ASAS), Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities (TENCAP) systems, CI/ HUMINT Information Management System (CHIMS) and CI/HUMINT Automation Tool Set (CHATS), and the Integrated Processing Facilities (IPFs) for Guardrail Common Sensor. We have already begun accelerating DCGS-A to the field in a spiral development approach and have already fielded interim DCGS-A fixed-site capabilities to the theater intelligence brigades and groups. We are expanding this effort and will provide the Army with increasing capabilities that correspond to improvements in automated fusion and information visualization technologies down to the maneuver battalion level. We are currently testing and fielding an interim DCGS-A capability to 3ID, which will redeploy to Iraq with this new capability.

The objective DCGS-A will fuse and integrate data from all collectors and sources. This includes national-level, non-intelligence Army sensors, and other Service platforms. Additionally, DCGS-A will receive, retrieve, and exploit information available in the Joint, interagency, and multinational arenas. This will enable the Army to leverage the essence of the vast amounts of data available at various classification levels and provide our soldiers a COP and a running intelligence estimate. The COP will provide situational awareness and the running estimate will add predictive analysis to enable our soldiers and commanders to move from situational awareness to situational understanding.

Critical Initiative: Project Foundry

Project Foundry complements Army efforts to infuse greater intelligence capacity in UEx and UA elements by providing a vehicle to integrate a percentage of tactical intelligence soldiers into ongoing live-environment intelligence operations and expose them to complex theater environments. It will involve a significantly larger percentage of "tactical" intelligence soldiers in "real world" intelligence operations of theater and national relevance (SIGINT, HUMINT, CI, and analysis). Assignment of Foundry soldiers is to combat UEx/UA maneuver units (they wear that "patch"), but their stationing is with their families at geographically dispersed UEy (INSCOM) intelligence brigades for the same period of stabilization as their assigned tactical unit, then they receive reassignments based on Army needs.

Project Foundry has three primary goals:

[] Provide our soldiers with better technical training for their military occupational specialty (MOS) skills.

[] Expose our soldiers to the cultural issues associated with the region in which they are likely to operate.

[] Enable our soldiers to contribute to the overall intelligence effort of our nation.

During the Foundry stationing period, UEy intelligence brigades will exercise operational control of Foundry soldiers, employing them on live-environment intelligence missions, but returning them to their parent UEx/UA units for scheduled major training events and pending contingency deployments. Foundry will infuse more highly trained and experienced teams into "early deployer" combat units. Foundry soldiers will also receive cultural, religious, ethnic, and environmental experience that continental United States (CONUS) bases cannot effectively replicate. This concept is similar to the Navy "Ship Rider" program where they station intelligence sailors with national intelligence units and agencies to hone their technical skills in preparation for deployment with the fleet.

Critical Initiative: Red Teaming Capability

We need to integrate an ability to see ourselves as the enemy sees us better during routine planning and operations. The standard intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) process does not sufficiently address asymmetric threats. To meet this challenge, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is establishing a "Red Team University" (RTU) under the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They will model the RTU after the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) in that it will be an advanced curriculum open to all branches of the Army. The first pilot course will be during the 2004-2005 academic year. RTU graduates will serve as staff advisors to our units and to regional Red Teams at the theater level.

The Army will assign Red Team-trained personnel to unit staffs; they will actively participate during the planning process to ensure proper consideration of both conventional and asymmetric threats. Other Red Team personnel will be available to conduct final reviews of operational plans and for special projects addressing areas of concern to our commanders.

To achieve this capability, we need to establish and ramp-up an initial core Red team capability for each regional theater of operations. We have stood up an initial core team to meet immediate Army needs and lay the foundation for expansion of this capability to each regional theater. This core group will comprise full-time threat and functional experts (information operations [IO], Special Operations Forces [SOF], logistics, etc.) who will develop a broader network of regional, cultural, and subject-matter experts from across the Army and the Intelligence Community. These experts will holistically assess proposed Blue Force operations from an adversary's perspective, identify weaknesses, wargame mitigating solutions, and determine second and third order effects.

The Future of Military Intelligence

Transforming to Information Age processes will allow us to leverage the essence of the vast amounts of information available today. This will radically change the way we do business and dramatically improve the commander's and soldier's understanding of the battlespace. The soldier, whether intelligence analyst or operator, will interface directly, and in near-real time, with the information required for current operations. We have begun to ingrain the concept that "Every Soldier is a Sensor" within the Army. Tactical commanders nearest to the fight will leverage modular, tailored packages to develop intelligence, while receiving support from a network of analytic centers providing overwatch.

The success of Actionable Intelligence will be judged by the ability of our soldiers to operate more efficiently, with greater situational awareness, prevailing in an environment very different from that of our recent past. They will accomplish their missions and return home safely using our asymmetric advantages of advanced technology, precision firepower, and a pervasive presence to destroy the terrorist networks threatening us today. Actionable Intelligence will be the key to those advantages. Our Army and our Nation demand no less.

Lieutenant Colonel Steve Iwicki is currently assigned to the Army G2 and serving as the Deputy Director of Task Force Actionable Intelligence (TF-AI). Readers may contact him via E-mail at steve.iwicki@hqda. army.mil and telephonically at [phone].