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| Experimentation: Fielding New Technologies Fast December 2000 Here's the inside story of how MITRE engineers accepted a challenge, hacked out an experimental approach, and in record time helped deliver a capability that fundamentally changes how the services conduct missions and fight wars. The services are exploring ways to field new technologies fast—alternatives to the traditional cycle that took 10 or more years to deliver a capability that would often be obsolete before it arrived. Experimentation is an alternative approach that works, and this is the inside story of how the process of experimentation fielded an important new capability faster than anyone envisioned. The story begins in Massachusetts, under a camouflage net beside the runway at Hanscom Air Force Base. Olive drab flight suits are the uniform of the day, and military personnel far outnumber civilians, MITRE staff included, who are participating in Fort Franklin, an exercise that is attracting VIPs from all over the Department of Defense (DOD). One incident at this event, the simple act of handing an ordinary VHS videotape from one person to another, ultimately leads to a capability that fundamentally changes how the services conduct missions and fight wars. An important theme in this story is how technology, through a process of experimentation with end users, quickly moved from a concept to a capability deployed in the Balkans. The Significance of Video Broadcast from UAVs
"Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in conjunction with global broadcast technology have fundamentally changed how we conduct missions and fight wars," says Principal Engineer Steve Hansen. "This is the first time we've had real-time imaging assets owned and controlled by the people who need it. You can sit anywhere in the world and literally count people and vehicles. That, in its own right, changes fundamentally how we go about prosecuting a conflict, because now you can be talking about a real-time sensor-shooter capability." The Challenge at Fort Franklin MITRE played an important role in developing this capability, and Steve recalls exactly when the challenge arrived. "We were at Fort Franklin, doing our thing with intelligence-fusion systems, and someone walked up and handed us an ordinary VHS videotape that contained imagery from a Predator UAV. They said something like, 'You guys claim your MITRE research program can represent virtually any kind of intelligence.' We looked at that tape and told ourselves, 'We're in big trouble now.' We had never thought about things like moving pixels, and at that time, Predator was just an experiment flying around Nellis AFB, Nevada. "That night, we were sitting in the Hanscom O-Club, talking about what to do with that VHS tape. First, we said, 'We don't do this sort of thing.' Which then led to, 'Well, video is nothing but still imagery presented at 30 frames per second, and we've been doing still imagery from aircraft and satellites. ' So that was the start. Building A Prototype Over the next three days we built a quick and dirty prototype around a video compression card, literally there in the tent at Fort Franklin, hacking our brains out between the demos. "Members of the JROC (Joint Requirements Oversight Council) walked up and said something like, 'You've got moving pixels on your display!' One of these members, Admiral Owens, then sat down and we handed him the mouse and said, 'Here, sir, you can do this as well as anybody else.' (In 1994 President Clinton had appointed Owens to serve as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
"As a result of that event, a couple of months later when the Balkans erupted, we got the phone call: 'You guys were at Fort Franklin, working with moving pixels off this Predator vehicle, and we want to experimentally drop Predator into the theater.' Our first response was: 'If you're going to put us into the theater, we'll have to be at the ground station, because that's the only place the video goes—and we have to be there to exploit the imagery.' "Then we heard, 'And by the way, we're going to plug it into Global Broadcast.' Then, our response was: 'If you're going to put Predator into the theater, and if you're going to do global broadcast, then we can plop ourselves down anywhere in the theater such as the CAOC (the Combined Air Operations Center in Vicenza, Italy)." Airman Magazine described the CAOC as a, "coalition melting pot, combining the talents and efforts of more than 13 NATO and non-NATO nations, including Russia, into a single multiservice, and multinational command and control headquarters—a one-stop shop for intelligence, reconnaissance, airlift, air refueling, treaty compliance and determining airspace requirements for flight operations over Bosnia and the surrounding areas." Steve notes, "This was 1996, when ESC was extensively supporting the CAOC and fielding requests from the CAOC staff. One request was, 'Include Predator imagery in a multi-source context.' "So we took our glorified hobby-shop project over to Italy, that baling wire and duct tape thing that we developed at Fort Franklin, and they didn't care how rudimentary it was. That was purely a function of the personality of the CAOC's head of intelligence, General Robinson, who was a colonel that time. Robinson saw the Balkans as a conflict— and as an opportunity to exercise more capabilities. He really wanted to push the technology, breaking that old myth: 'We train the way we fight, so keep your hobby-shop thing out of our exercise.' "We were in the CAOC for a month during the conflict, and came out of it with an enormous amount of knowledge. We brought the lessons back and offered them to anybody who would listen, enormous lessons, including exceeding small technical lessons on video—like how fast the video card has to be. Really down in the nits sorts of things. "We also brought back lessons about the big picture—such as how NATO is prosecuting the conflict. We've been at it ever since, and it affects the contractors and the research community. We worked with NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, to build video metadata standards, which last year finally got implemented during OAF, Operation Allied Force. MITRE's Ongoing Role in Experimentation "Our role in this technology and research is to push our understanding of what this new kind of intelligence asset is. We've never had live moving pixels before. It's a very immature technology. We're using and evolving our systems like we've done with everything else. With Joint STARS, it was a big sensor, big bird, pipeline down to the ground. We spent ten years figuring out what to do with it and we've developed the technology and the users. "This year, our mission-oriented research program has buy-in from a theater commander, General Robinson, who got to know us from the work we did with him when he was a colonel at the CAOC. "Our role in the theater now is to inject technology and expose the user community to very, very advanced prototypes—to do experiments—not to bring the tools they will have and live with forever. "The traditional method of acquisition was to say ,'Here's how we think the future is going to develop and we'll drive our acquisition to that—in an eight- to ten-year cycle. This doesn't work any more because the user community is not really all that cognizant of where the state of the technology is today, or six months from now, or two years from now. So we're injecting technology very rapidly, pretty much putting this stuff in every 8 to 10 weeks. "This will get users smart in what is realistic and what isn't.
Sometimes, we walk in and they say, 'We want to do this.' And we say,
'That's easy, we can go down to a place like Radio Shack and buy that
for you.' Other times, we say, 'Well, look, you're going to be old and
have grandchildren on the floor before that ever happens'—because
they're not cognizant of the technology. The Key to Experimentation Working with different users, Steve has taken two approaches to introducing new technology. For one customer, he provides specific instructions on how to use a particular technology. For the other customer, he provides the technology and observes how they make use of it. Two different forms of experimentation and teamwork, depending on the culture of the shop. "We were going over to the JAC (Joint Analysis Center) in England every 8 to 10 weeks," Steve recalls. "One nice thing about being over there, we've been able to get into two different shops. They would tell us what they wanted in enhancements, and we come back and help work them." (The JAC is responsible for doing the high level intelligence analysis for the European theater; it has both US and NATO facilities.) Steve says, "We work with two very different groups of people: different skills, different technologies. The first shop has high-tech tools and a very well educated and trained staff—but they're shorthanded and very busy. The other shop has stood up, with very little technology except VCRs and spreadsheets, an almost state-of-the-art capability for UAV-video exploitation. "At the first shop, our approach was to say, 'Here it is; here's what you do with it; here's how the job is done.' At the other shop, our approach was,' Can we come into your shop and bring this technology? We want to drop it in, train the staff on how to push the buttons, then we want to sit back like a fly on the wall and watch what they do with it.' It's been a very rich experimental environment. Both customers benefit, and we learn a lot from them." Commenting on the importance of having a close relationship with customers, Steve says, "This would never have been possible without site support. Bill Jameson is our guy on the ground at the JAC. I fund him 50 percent. Bill gets us into all these places. He's on the ground there. He negotiates with the colonel about what we propose to do, so when we show up at the door, two airmen ask us where want the tables, where we want the electricity, the network drops, and whether want a cup of coffee. So this ongoing relationship is invaluable. "Last year, the MITRE role there went from traditional systems engineering to test and evaluation. Now, we're sort of the theater's spearhead for test and evaluation. Really important. Summing Up Looking at the big picture, Steve notes, "We evolved this technology quickly under the MITRE technology program. Then, we were able to get it into the field and experiment with it, in real world situations. Those experiences shaped how we do the research and technology. If we hadn't had those experiences, we wouldn't have the tools that we have now. Yet, it's a balancing act. Too hard on one side, you're not doing enough research, and you don't have enough coming down the pike. "Going out into the field impacts things in a much larger way than I ever anticipated. For example, we can go down to NIMA and say, 'Look, we were there for the last 18 months, and this is what you really need, We have the credibility to influence that community. "We had good corporate support and the right staff. If a person wants to be a lab rat, you can't suggest, 'Why don't you go over to the CAOC during a shooting war and see if you can help?' We had a presence there and Col. Robinson knew we were there to help—not to sell a product." 
Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force
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