News From USJFCOM: Empire Challenge 10 planning continues as event nears


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Empire Challenge 10 planning continues as event nears

The Empire Challenge team puts the final touches on preparations for this year’s demonstration, scheduled to be held in late July/mid August at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

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By Army Sgt. Josh LeCappelain
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va.- June 18, 2010) -- Final preparations for U.S. Joint Forces Command's (USJFCOM) Empire Challenge 10 (EC10) are underway, with the final planning conference concluding recently.

EC10 is an annual joint and coalition intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) interoperability demonstration, now in its seventh year, designed to showcase emerging ISR capabilities, and improve joint and combined ISR interoperability to support warfighters at the tactical edge.

This year's event will run July 26 - Aug. 13 at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., with locations participating via a digital network including USJFCOM's Joint Intelligence Lab and Joint Systems Integration Center in Suffolk, Va.; service DCGS and combat support agency labs around the U.S.; coalition sites in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; and the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency in the Netherlands, among others.

John Kittle, EC10 program manager, explained that this year's event has a variety of goals.

"The foundational element of EC is service distributed common ground/surface system (DCGS) interoperability," said Kittle referring to the various service systems that collect, process and disseminate intelligence and imagery from manned and unmanned reconnaissance sources to various intelligence customers. "That's what EC started out with and it remains a key goal to test, demonstrate and assess the interoperability of each of the service's DCGS," Kittle said.

"Another goal is that we are expanding our multinational play, as we fight as a multinational force - particularly as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last few years. We want to ensure that we can share ISR information with our coalition partners.

"We're also trying to develop some solutions to some of the ISR challenges or requirements that they have in theatre - particularly in Afghanistan, which is where we are primarily focused this year," he continued, adding that his team was ready for the event and looking forward to it.

Fort Huachuca was specifically chosen due to its terrain and environment, said Kittle.

"We chose Fort Huachuca based on the requirements we identified very early on," he said. "We decided that we needed to focus on the fight in Afghanistan and provide improvements or solutions to the problems they have over there. We looked and Fort Huachuca presented the right operating environment for us. It has a good mix of the kinds of environment they have in Afghanistan - the desert, mountains, valleys, vegetation."

The event's command and network structure will closely mirror what the International Security Assistance Force uses, to provide relevant, mission critical ISR capabilities to the warfighters. EC10 will include live operations, augmented by virtual and constructive modeling and simulation capabilities.