News From USJFCOM: USJFCOM, coalition partners seek MAJIIC solution to coalition ISR interoperability

JISR Collage USJFCOM, coalition partners seek MAJIIC solution to coalition ISR interoperability

Members of a working group made up of nine nations met here for a project that will help coalitions share data between their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets and systems with the goal of ensuring their future successes when they fight wars together.

By Army Sgt. Jon Cupp
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. – Feb. 10, 2006) -- Nations that go to war together might not share a common language and may encounter a few communication barriers. However, on the battlefields of the future it will be necessary for them to use common concepts, procedures, strategies, warfighting terms and technological capabilities that foster and enable interoperability.

The ability of one nation to access and use ISR sensor data from another nation will help commanders on the ground to make rapid decisions, improve their situational awareness, and improve the sharing of information between coalition forces as they strive to foil common, future adversaries.

A working group made up of nine nations, which met here, discussed just that, as they focused on a common vision for coalition ISR data and system sharing.

U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) personnel along with more than 100 members of the Multi-sensor Aerospace-ground Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC) Project Working Group attended a meeting in January with the goal of finalizing plans for the upcoming MAJIIC Simulation Exercise (SIMEX) which runs Feb. 13 to March 2.

The MAJIIC Project Working Group consists of active duty military, government civilians, and contractor personnel from NATO’s Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A), Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Although just a piece of the MAJIIC project as a whole, the U.S. contribution to the effort is the MAJIIC Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD).

ACTDs are mature capabilities designed to provide new and transformational operational capabilities to benefit the joint warfighter, the deputy undersecretary of defense for advanced systems and concepts is the overall sponsor for the program which involves all combatant commanders and services.

The multi-national portion of the MAJIIC project began in April 2005 with the first meeting of the working group, and served as a follow-on venture of earlier insight into intelligence capability needs discovered during the Coalition Aerial Surveillance and Reconnaissance (CAESAR) ACTD, which exploited multinational military interoperability of aerial ground surveillance resources.

“The most significant thing about the MAJIIC project is it provides the capability to share data amongst the coalition force and it really takes data from (ISR) collection systems and makes it available to any user on the network and that’s what we’re all about,” said Stan Stefansky, operational manager for the MAJIIC ACTD. “It’s important to be able to make that data relevant to the warfighter in a timely manner and in the format that he or she needs.”

“This meeting focused on an event in which we bring in uniformed operators from all the nations to participate within the MAJIIC information sharing environment which proved very effective in an October technical interoperability experiment that we did at The Hague,” he added.

“Partnering with them is absolutely critical to helping our relations with each other. The U.S. will not fight another war alone and will most-likely be part of a coalition, like we’re currently seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, nations must be able to share data and it’s something we’re seeing as essential when we look at the various lessons learned reports.”

In SIMEX 06, participating nations will bring their (ISR) sensor simulators to the NC3A at the Hague, while the U.S. will play out of the Distributed Ground System-Experimental (DGS-X) at Langley Air Force Base, Va.

“Coalition partners at the Hague will also bring their exploitation and command and control workstations and the goal with these is to establish an environment that enables ISR data sharing from electro-optical, infra-red sensors, thermal imaging, and the various nations’ disparate radar systems. It allows one nation to access another’s ISR data and gives the ability to exploit it on their workstations,” said Stefansky.

“There are a lot of systems involved, and it really is a tremendous effort to lash them together but it does give operators - the uniformed folks - the chance to use and share a common architecture to perform certain missions and tasks to support time-sensitive operations.”

The exercise will also serve as a venue through which the participants will help refine tactics, techniques, and procedures in the project. For the MAJIIC ACTD, it will serve as a military utility assessment event.

The ACTD and the multi-national MAJIIC Project make up all the aspects of an overall MAJIIC capability that once fully realized will allow coalition partners to sign onto a common network at a computer workstation and access data available from multiple ISR sensors that are inherent to all of the nations involved.

The ACTD will allow two-way data sharing between members of the coalition and will also give a multinational integration for various disparate radar systems such as found in Ground Target Motion Indicator (GTMI) or Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR).

Personnel working at ground stations will also be able to access ISR resources and data from various air platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles, aircraft or satellites. Some of the enabling technology will include full-motion video, dynamic video capture, discovery and rapid dissemination capabilities, among others.

All of MAJIIC’s capabilities, according to Stefansky, will enable warfighters to access data in near-real time, giving them the “unprecedented” ability to rapidly use the collected coalition intelligence before it loses its utility.

The vision for pursuing the MAJIIC project has roots in Kosovo, said Canadian Air Force Capt. James Peck, the Canadian national project officer for MAJIIC, who also participated in coalition efforts during operations in Kosovo.

“I saw first hand how little we (as a coalition) weren’t able to move information and the operational impact of not being able to,” said Peck.

For instance, if one country’s aircraft went down and another country had imagery of it, there was no way for the pilot’s country to obtain the imagery.

“That was the turning point - when people asked ‘can we overcome the issues that prevent us from sharing information’ - whether it’s classification issues or technical differences,” said Peck. “As soon as people said ‘there’s no reason why we should covet our information,’ and that we should share it, we actually started doing things quid pro quo. I’m going to give something to get something, but what I get will improve my situational awareness.”

“From the perspective of having been an operator myself, the idea of sharing information is appealing, but far more appealing is being able to get information from a sensor that I don’t currently have in my theater of operations—whether its a tactical, operational, or strategic level asset,” added Peck. “The key is being able to push and pull information between those different sensors.”

Within the project and the working groups, one of the major goals has been ensuring interoperability for a common operational picture or coalition ground picture by pursuing documentation that places coalition forces on the same page.

“The critical documentation for this has been the concepts of operation and the tactics, techniques and procedures developed from the previous CAESAR project which provide a common language, a common understanding, a common set of tasking and orders, a common set of reporting formats and a common set of procedures,” said Alan Gray, a recently retired British Army officer and currently the deputy chairman of the operations working group for MAJIIC.

“It would therefore be possible for a French ground station with a predominately GTMI radar system to be able to ask an American or British system for a SAR radar image of a particular area at a particular time for a specific purpose that may be outside the original area of responsibility of those two SAR systems.”

“When you talk about interoperability, it may be between an air platform and a ground station so that any air platform can be commonly linked to the ground station by a common datalink,” he added. It may also include the ability of one ground station, or multiple ground stations, to link into another ground station to see images obtained by the assets of any of the stations.

The Norfolk meeting marked the third time the MAJIIC Project Working Group has convened. Other meetings have been held in Oslo, Norway and The Hague.