WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- A real-time intelligence-sharing network designed for the U.S. Air Force has gone operational.
Lockheed Martin announced Thursday its DIB system had been integrated into autonomous intelligence databases at two air bases in the United States and a third in Europe.
The result is that users at the three previously "stove-piped" installations can now access each other's imagery and other data immediately. Lockheed said the two U.S. installations were Beale Air Force Base in California and Langley AFB in Virginia, both processing centers for intelligence collected by unmanned aerial vehicles and U-2 spy planes.
"This is a critical step toward a worldwide intelligence sharing enterprise," Col. Alan Tucker, commander of the 950th Electronic Systems Group, said in a Lockheed release. "We now have multiple ways to share data and alert services."
Tucker said more than 80 percent of the imagery produced by the group could be accessed through a DIB (DCGS Integration Backbone) portal.
The imagery comes from a variety of manned and unmanned reconnaissance sources. Previously, analysts would frequently have to contact multiple sources to get all of the pictures they needed. The DCGS (Distributed Common Ground System) project is aimed at processing the information. The backbone portion deployed by Lockheed established the architecture needed to make it possible to access the data from a single secure location as long as the user has the right security clearance.
