DCGS coming to NetCents
The Distributed Common Ground System is a family of programs with common elements designed to meet the military services’ intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance needs.
DCGS, as it is being developed, provides an interoperable architecture for the collection, processing, exploitation, dissemination and archiving of all forms of intelligence.
Although DCGS includes common elements, it is not technically a joint program. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are each working on DCGS platforms.
“DCGS is at the cusp of legacy and future systems,” said Jeffrey Roncka, vice president of CRA International, a Washington-based defense consulting firm. “The focus is on coming up with a family of common ground stations that take multi-source intelligence feeds using different types of data from 10 different intelligence pipes and putting them all in one pipe with a set of common standards that everyone can read.”
The DCGS Integration Backbone provides a common operating environment that represents a departure from the old Defense Department architectures that integrated systems on a point-to-point basis. The backbone provides a standard scheme so that all the DCGS systems recognize one another’s data.
Peter Buxbaum is a special contributor to Defense Systems.