interoperability with the other services. It’s just completed the fourth
spiral and it will culminate in a
grand exercise at the end of July.”
U.S. NAVY
The aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is the first U.S. Navy ship to receive
the Distributed Common Ground System-Navy (DCGS-N). Truman crew have
been training with the DCGS-N equipment and software since early this year
and will conduct an operational evaluation in August. Truman will deploy overseas in the fall as the first operational unit to feature DCGS-N.
hooks into other things over the larger network. One
of the real challenges for the Navy is how do you bring
this ISR sensor receiver piece and actually make it
work in an afloat environment and integrate with all of
the other systems that are on that platform.”
INTEROPERABILITY
PARKER: “Interoperability has been part of a continuum during our test strategy, we’ve been demonstrating interoperability all along.”
MILLER: “Truman is the first platform that you can
actually say it’s operational on. As Capt. Parker said,
it’s a continuum, so as the program evolves we’ll continue to work on interoperability with the other services and agencies. What we’re doing with the Navy side
is more focused on making sure it works in the shipboard environment.”
PARKER: “We have a checklist we go by to show the
different aspects of the system that are interoperable and
we’ve been working down that list through our operational testing. At the same time, the DCGS community
has a series of operational exercises called Empire
Challenge. Right now, we are participating in Empire
Challenge ’09, and that’s where we actually demonstrate
TESTING AND TRAINING
MILLER: “One of the reasons we
picked Truman was it matched up
well with their training cycle and
what we needed to do from a testing perspective.”
PARKER: “They have the predecessor system onboard. To manage
risks, we installed both systems in
parallel. But after the Truman crew
got a taste of the system they made
the decision to only focus on
DCGS-N.”
MILLER: “The legacy systems
are reaching the end of their lives,
so we really focused on getting
something out there quickly, the
80-percent solution if you will, and
evolve it over time with the fleet,
based on their feedback. I think it’s
paying off and we’re starting to get
some really good feedback. [The
Sailors are] pretty excited to have
the latest and greatest technology to
help them meet their mission, they
have been very receptive and they are actually helping
us figure out where to take the program in the future.”
PARKER: “Training has gone very well. We had
Sailors training in Charleston while the system was
being installed [aboard Truman.] When they did the
operational assessment in March, which was conducted in the lab, the crew of the Truman was manning the
equipment. They’ve been training with the system day
in and day out during their workups, so they have a lot
of hands-on time with the equipment.”
EVOLUTION
PARKER: “DCGS-N is going to be an evolving system. You take a look at what the intel community is
doing, the capabilities are not standing still, so the most
important thing about DCGS-N is we finally have an up-to-date intel capability out in the fleet and it represents
the nucleus for us to start expanding that capability. It’s
a very open system, so it’s very easy to expand.”
MILLER: “When we re-baselined this, one of the key
factors was we wanted to be able to rapidly upgrade the
system. Our hope is that we’ll be able to continually spiral out capabilities more rapidly with this baseline than
we were with our previous intelligence systems.” ■
SEAPOWER / AUGUST 2009
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