Photo By Krishna Jackson | 170223-N-RP435-000 SAN DIEGO (Feb. 23, 2017) Tom Higley (left), Tom Johnson, and Jason...... read more read more
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Ask the integrated product team lead for Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific’s Intelligence Carry On Program (ICOP) what ICOP is and he’ll give the short answer: It’s a mindset.
Ask him about the ICOP mindset, and he’ll tell you its origins: What would it look like if Silicon Valley built high-end intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities for the Navy? How could we build the need for continuous, rapid improvement into its foundation?
Tom Johnson could list all the technical capabilities ICOP delivers to the fleet, but he and Paul Baggerly, the ICOP East Coast engineering team lead, insist it isn’t the bells and whistles that make ICOP successful; it’s the culture it fosters at NIWC Pacific and in its collaboration with warfighters. The capabilities, they say, emerge naturally from the culture.
It’s akin to a mindset championed by NIWC Pacific Executive Director Bill Bonwit: continuous delivery of capability to the fleet — at the speed of relevance, and even before the warfighter anticipates need — requires a reimagining of development, security and operations (DevSecOps).
“It’s not just about delivering faster, but it’s about keeping the connection with the warfighter so the ‘Ops’ part of DevSecOps is the connection with the people who are using the system,” Bonwit said.
On paper, ICOP is an all-source intelligence system with capabilities ranging from visual information (VI) management to training resources. To operators, it’s better battlespace awareness, increased readiness, and lethality at the tactical edge.
Information Dominance
All the reasons you would want a dashcam for your car are the same reasons the Navy needs robust fleet VI: surveillance, situational awareness, and proof when other drivers violate the rules of the road.
At sea, those violations look like armed seizures of merchant or civilian ships, or the deployment of explosive boats and sea mines. When foreign adversaries violate internationally agreed-upon seafaring protocols, ICOP’s VI management system ensures the U.S. Navy is the first to know.
“If you’ve ever seen maritime or fleet-related footage on the news, you’ve seen a product of the ICOP system,” Johnson said. “Odds are, that video came from ICOP and was later declassified.” ICOP’s most visible impact is as a dashcam for the seas, key for winning the battle of the narrative against unsafe and unprofessional interactions by foreign militaries with its maritime vessels and aircraft.
But fleet VI management, Baggerly says, is only about 10% of what ICOP can do. ICOP systems are capable of receiving over-the-air, full motion video (FMV) from any Department of Defense-approved unmanned aerial system or other aircraft that can transmit FMV. The ICOP team is also working to improve transmission in denied environments by setting up an ICOP network to transmit, disseminate, and share FMV and other data.
“Imagine there’s an aircraft flying at 50,000 feet and looking out hundreds of miles,” Johnson said. “We can actually take data from that platform — video and other types of data — and send it back to a ship directly so the ship effectively has eyes that can see out hundreds of miles further than they could before. That’s the impact of leveraging the investments the Navy and DOD have made in these ISR platforms.”
But ICOP isn’t just a powerful extra set of eyes for the fleet; it’s also a self-contained training system.
YouTube for the Fleet
Five or so years ago, Johnson was thinking aloud with his colleagues and realized no one wants to look through user manuals anymore. “If you’re fixing a leaky faucet under your sink,” he said, “you just go to YouTube and ask ‘how do I fix this?’” This was the seed for an effort Baggerly would eventually lead, cultivating a series of how-to videos for basic functions in ICOP.
This means better continuity of operations for the fleet, more robust — yet flexible —knowledge management, and increased speed and readiness. “The power of accessible knowledge and training is that it equips Sailors with the tools they need so if something breaks, they don’t have to drop what they’re doing and call someone else in to fix it,” Johnson said. “They’re empowered to fix it themselves. It’s been game-changing.”
Users can upload their own videos through the software as well, helpful for showing the NIWC Pacific team what problems Sailors are facing in near real-time. In response, ICOP support can send troubleshooting and how-to videos back to operators, adding to the knowledge database at a rate of roughly four videos per week, resulting in growth of the ICOP knowledge base fueled specifically by what Sailors need. Thanks to this direct line of communication, the team has dramatically reduced the need to send personnel overseas to fix ICOP systems.
If you have ever used Snagit, you’ve used the tool that makes building the ICOP knowledge base possible. If you’ve ever used the Defense Collaboration System, you’ve used the very same desktop sharing, camera, and video functions that fuel ICOP’s constant collaboration capability. That’s the draw of the mindset, explained Baggerly: “The technology is already out there, but coming up with innovative ways to use it has enabled us to partner with our deployed folks in a way we’ve never been able to before.”
Using tools at hand in new ways to deliver lean, rapid solutions to the fleet is a large piece of what makes up the ICOP philosophy.
“It’s a mindset”
There is a difference, says Baggerly, between satisfying the requirement and interpreting it based on what the user really needs. “I could build a system that has a thousand buttons and it’ll satisfy a thousand requirements, but it could be the exact opposite of what today’s users are going to want to look at,” he said, in line with “Think Warfighter,” one of the Center’s four strategic objectives.
“Thinking Warfighter” — delivering systems that are easy to use, easy to install, and easy to maintain — comes naturally to the ICOP team, all of whom are veterans. “We’ve all deployed with systems we didn’t like and that didn’t work,” Johnson said, “and now this is a chance for a bunch of operators to build the gear we wish we had when we were on active duty. Everything we do goes through that lens.”
What makes ICOP unique is its government-owned baseline and all-government engineering team, who maintains complete configuration management control of the hardware and software throughout the experimentation-to-deployment cycle. A program of record in the Battlespace Awareness and Information Operations Program Office (PMW 120) since 2015, the NIWC Pacific team has fielded ICOP systems across more than 90 ships, cruisers, and destroyers. The Marine Corps has funded ICOP and its associated antennas across every amphibious class of ship in the Navy. Thanks to its flexibility and capability to operate across multiple security domains, ICOP systems are now deployed across five numbered fleet Maritime Operations Centers providing critical support at the operational level of war.
Today, a Sailor can rebuild an ICOP system in 20 minutes without having to request support from an overseas contractor, which could cost around $25,000 for two weeks of work, or even more in a pandemic environment. From every perspective that counts for the fleet — administrative, buildability, and usability — ICOP is a non-stovepipe system, critical for the all-domain fight.
It’s also a key part of the connective tissue that makes up Project Overmatch, the Navy’s platform for delivery of tools and analytics to the fleet.
Supporting Project Overmatch
Frank Watson, lead technical engineer for ICOP, describes Project Overmatch as the interlocking structure of capabilities used to multiply naval power by extending warfighters’ use of weapons, broadening their situational awareness, and improving decision making across the joint force.
As a forward-deployed command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) software armory, ICOP provides Overmatch with the ability to rapidly field tactical capabilities to the edge of the battlefield. Its power lies in the ability to plug in and out of the Overmatch enterprise and maintain its agile, flexible, government-owned structure with minimal dependencies.
“Imagine you’re walking through the forest and everything is beautiful, simple,” Watson said. “Then imagine you put on a special pair of glasses, and suddenly, you’re in one of those giant spider nests, and you can literally see the thousands of spider webs that span the entire forest.” The web is the true nature of cloud and enterprise capabilities, but as Watson explains, elegant design means most of the web is hidden from users. The challenge is integrating seamlessly into the web of capabilities, but not relying upon it to operate effectively.
By limiting ICOP’s dependencies, it can be cut from the rest of the web — valuable for small platforms or in contested environments — yet maintain its power and agility.
What’s next for ICOP, according to Johnson and Baggerly, is continuing to grow its capability set and attract the right talent so the team can keep tackling the toughest ISR challenges for the Navy and Joint forces.
“You don’t need a lot of people,” Johnson said. “You just need the right people, and when you have them, you can do some pretty amazing things.”
As a part of NAVWAR, NIWC Pacific’s mission is to conduct research, development, engineering, and support of integrated command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, cyber, and space systems across all warfighting domains, and to rapidly prototype, conduct test and evaluation, and provide acquisition, installation, and in-service engineering support.
| Date Taken: | 07.11.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 07.11.2022 18:47 |
| Story ID: | 424734 |
| Location: | SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 689 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, NIWC Pacific’s all-source Intelligence Carry On Program reimagines DevSecOps for the fleet, by Maison Piedfort, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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