News From USJFCOM: USJFCOM signs cooperative research and development agreement with Northrop Grumman

Norfolk, Va– Officials from U,S. Joint Forces Command and Northrop Grumman signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). The CRADA signed by Deputy Commander USJFCOM Lt Gen Bob Wood is a three-year agreement focused on assessing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) requirements and potential solutions in support of future missions. (Click in the image abive to download a high quality version of the image by: Staff Sergeant Joe Laws)

USJFCOM signs cooperative research and development agreement with Northrop Grumman

U.S. Joint Forces Command signed a cooperative research and development agreement with Northrop Grumman focused on improving intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

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By Robert Pursell
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. – April 3, 2007) - U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) today with Northrop Grumman to address some of the difficult and emerging challenges of the joint warfighter.

A CRADA represents a non-Federal Acquisition Regulation legal agreement between USJFCOM and one or more non-federal government parties, such as private industry and academia. CRADAs offer both parties an opportunity to share knowledge, personnel and facilities when conducting mutually beneficial research and development (R&D).

The CRADA between USJFCOM and Northrop Grumman is a three-year cooperative agreement, focused on assessing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) requirements and potential solutions in support of future missions.

The purpose is to find ways to shorten the amount of time it takes sensors to collect intelligence, analyze the information and distribute it to warfighters. This will increase situational awareness and the probability of a successful mission.

USJFCOM’s chief of the intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) transformation division, Christopher Jackson, explained the importance of the CRADA.

“Northrop Grumman has a leading role in developing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, specifically the programs in sensors, and as an adjunct to that, they have a very robust modeling and simulation capability to see how well these sensors operate within specific confines,” said Jackson.

As part of the agreement, Northrop Grumman will grant USJFCOM access to its Cyber Warfare Integration Network (CWIN), which can generate an operationally-based, virtual battlefield environment, and provide other modeling and simulation capabilities to the command. This will allow USJFCOM to better evaluate ISR systems.

“We’re going to have the opportunity to leverage some of the capabilities that Northrop Grumman has developed over the years that we don’t have, such as high resolution simulators which are going to be available for us to use for evaluations of sensor systems,” added Dr. Russ Richards, who heads the USJFCOM Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA).

“I think with the Northrop Grumman CRADA, we’ll be able to do some evaluations that we have a hard time doing without the CRADA because we just don’t have the high resolution simulators that they have,” he said.

In addition to CWIN, Northrop Grumman will offer personnel, intellectual assets, technology, applications, materials, facilities and personnel with each other to enhance ISR capabilities.

Richards explained how the CRADA can benefit Northrop Grumman.

“We offer the ability for them to run evaluations that they might have a hard time running because we can provide the real world scenarios, the databases, the people, and the experimentation venues,” he said.

Jackson went on to sum it up.

“They bring us the sensor capabilities and models. We bring the understanding of how it works and operate within a joint warfighting context,” he said. “On the basis of that we can use war games, seminars or simulations to determine whether or not there are architectural gaps or problems that need to be addressed in order to support the commander’s warfighting needs.”

Richards discussed the importance of CRADAs, in general, and how each partner can benefit from them.

“Every time we’re adding an industry partner, we are expanding USJFCOM’s ability to do experimentation, evaluation, assessments of capabilities because these organizations are coming in saying, ‘use my networks, my capabilities, my facilities located all over the country. The environment that USJFCOM has available to do these evaluations, tests, and experiments are being enhanced by all of our CRADA partners,” he said.

The agreement with Northrop Grumman is the third in three weeks to be signed and one of many USJFCOM has entered since the Office of the Secretary of Defense delegated technology transfer authority to the command in 2005.