Empire Challenge challenge

Exercise Empire Challenge (EC) is always one of the most interesting events of the year. It's joint, multinational, multidisciplinary, and high tech. These are some of our favourite things. The bottom line, however, is its' focus. How can new intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) technologies help or hinder the commander?

Empire Challenge will be hosted again this July by the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). All the big "players" will be there from different Forces, Branches, nations, and industry. Each will be showing off their own developments. Each will be trying to demonstrate how they can be part of the commander's solution. It's a fascinating process.

Historically one of a commander's most important tools is the map. He wants the best possible terrain information coupled with the most up-to-date intelligence. The bridge over the river is in place. It can support five tons. That's good to know. In this day of joint operations additional knowledge coming from an allied force's UAV, for example, could be invaluable. At 0900 hrs dismounted Red forces were detected five kilometres away moving toward the bridge on the south shore.

There have always been impediments to sharing information even between allies. The first is a culture of secrecy and that is, perhaps, a topic for another time. However, where some level of trust has been established incompatible technologies have often stood between commanders and the latest ISR.

The major GIS companies all make excellent products but in their ideal world you use their kit and their kit only. So imagine your nation uses only one company's GIS software (not that this happens). What does the UK, Germany, or The Netherlands use? Can they communicate with each other and you? Bottom line thinking these days is that you own your data - not the supplier. You use their software to manipulate and display it as you want. Change is in the wind.

Of course an effort like this requires standards and "buy in". Fortunately there is already a group dedicated to this. "The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a non-profit, international, (and) voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services." The OGC 's presence has begun to be felt in a variety of industries. There's no reason this can't happen in a military environment with the ultimate winner being that commander somewhere trying to make the best decision. To this end the OGC is soliciting potential Empire Challenge participants.

"The EC08 OGC Pilot will examine the suitability and performance of OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and OGC Web Services (OWS) standards for providing open management of and access to sensors of varied types and Web service access by analysts to the resulting data and products. Several use cases and supporting workflows are provided to enable understanding of the design of the pilot. The use cases involve both sensor management and exploitation by a targeting analyst."

Sources: As cited