Intel Sharing for Homeland Defense - Michael Noll, Director of Intelligence (J2), U.S. Northern Command/ North American Aerospace Defense Command
Starts off with the oft-repeated point, that thus far AQ has successfully conducted zero attacks on US homeland since 2001.
What's the real threat that NorthCom is supposed to spend time on? Terror? Natural disasters? ICBMs?
How many &%$^# times do you need to remind people to turn off their damn phones?! (Checking mine quickly, of course...)
Fortunately, my phone was off.
Talking about differences between "Homeland Security" and "Homeland Defense" but I have yet to hear much about the difference between "Homeland Defense" and "Department of Defense"...
"Homeland Defense" apparently revolving around defense of critical infrastructure. Never got that memo from DHS... would've been nice to know that's their raison d'etre.
Apparently "critical infrastructure" includes nursing homes.
Should DoD get involved? Yes! Never again will we let people drown in nursing homes.
Gee... I seem to remember us telling those people to evacuate and they didn't.
Talking about using C4ISR assets for homeland missions, like aerial surveillance for firefighting in California: ID hotspots from the air with IR, use live video feeds to overwatch firefighters on the ground, map the post-burn areas for potential mudslide hazards afterwards.
Important point about who has authority to authorize use of military ISR assets in a homeland defense/security mission. Can you use military assets within US boundaries?
Apparently, the FAA is not fond of UAVs at all - plays havoc with air traffic control...
A lot of talk about considerations, but not a lot about actual solutions. Could've been a much better talk about details within specific incidents, rather than just hand-wave over "bridge collapse in Minnesota when the Navy was working for the county sheriff." Why was sheriff in charge? How was that agreement reached? What were implications/ramifications?
Needed a much more dynamic speaking in the first post-lunch session...
Next Session
CDR Phil Turner, USN CANES project
SOA-oriented program to get data on boats and share it...
Current issue is that anyone coming on a boat was required to bring their own systems: hardware, software, etc. That was a lot of time and money and space allocation on the boat.
Had some issues with ratio between space/capacity and frequency of use. Fleet wanted greater capacity with reduced footprint. Complicating factor is that ships only lay up every 2 years for refit and IT overhauls have to happen then.
Big wake-up call was when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows NT and it was a huge effort for Navy to overhaul the fleet. Microsoft told Navy to catch up since they were a tiny percentage of Microsoft's overall budget. Navy realized need to get away from being tied to COTS.
Navy currently trying to migrate away from COTS to GOTS and SOA-based architecture. Move legacy systems and data to the future.
Navy had a standard of 95% availability on networks, but 1 hour of downtime during a day resulted in 24-hour reset time when underway, and that was unacceptable in the fleet.
Roadmap has common computing environment online in FY08 and legacy systems collapsing into that thru FY11 when CANES should go live.
Afloat Core Services (ACS) is basically Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES). Each service building NCES-compliant projects to meet their individual needs. SOA is a migration through iterative process, not a 'lightswitch' where suddenly today you're SOA when yesterday you weren't.
Example of migration from legacy to SOA environment is the SABRE airline reservation system. SABRE system wasn't changed, but exposed thru SOA to websites like Travelocity.
18 different architecture and engineering docs over the past 6 months bounced between Navy and industry with monthly updates based on comment/review from subject-matter experts.
Pilot program has been the Lincoln Strike Group, and reduction in racks/rack space from 18 to 3 equates to space, weight, power on the boats, which is vital when afloat.
BREAK TIME...
Keynote Speaker - LTG Sorenson, Army CIO
We're in en era of persistent conflict: globalization, resource competition, WMD proliferation, climate change, failed/failing states, demographic trends. Protracted conflict fueled by these six factors. (ed note: not much in the way of expected conventional warfare there)
The decade of change: GEN Shinseki (transformational focus - more deployable Army); GEN Schoomaker (operational focus - modularity at brigade/battalion level); GEN Casey (institutional focus - transform enterprise to expeditionary focus)
4 Army Imperatives: Sustain, Prepare, Reset, Transform
Restore balance between current needs and future force requirements
Catalysts for change: tansformation from division to brigade-based force; GWOT global fight; CONUS-based force.
Expeditionary Tenet: Short/No-Notice deployments; fight-upon-arrival; Austere operational environment; CONUS-based Army; Operational flexibility with modular taskOrg
Fight-upon-arrival will require overcoming networks challenges given the lack of sufficient bandwidth in conflict zones (ie, no one's laying fiber on the battlefield before we get there - unless we start building services for the enemy...).
Current networks are all point-to-point in their stovepipes, requiring a lot of bandwidth to remain open in case it's needed, instead of shared bandwidth between many SOA-enabled apps.
Current LandWarNet organization is expensive and not synchronized and hard to deploy on little notice to austere environment.
Next move is federated systems. Operating principles are to aggregate, consolidate, standardize, modernize.
Goal is an enterprise with global, standardized, protected, economical portfolio of projects.
Building better connectivity by building centralized data centers that are easier to secure and require smaller footprints.
FY09 start APCs
FY10 SWA and all CONUS servers up
FY11 global system ready, including Pac-rim
Army KM principles went by too fast for me to type out - there were 14 of them... gimme a break...
Started a set of AKO-based web forum portals for types of units. Allowed Stryker BDE's to share ideas/info from downrange to home station
wrap-up slide:
Posturing for persistent conflict; Network service centers (global network enterprise construct); Future data solutions; Shared situational awareness
Still preaching the SOA gospel during the Q&A, especially as it relates to FCS battle command, and migrating ABCS to FCS SOA.
GREAT question about how to allow reservists/Guardsmen to bring their personal equipment into armories for weekend drills and use their same equipment they use at home preparing for drill while they're at the units. Currently not allowed to do that, but it's a need, especially given that there's remote access capability from home, but no direct-line access capability at the armory.
Solutions might include thumb-drive keys allowing log-on, or CAC-card readers, something similar.
So apparently there's a broad-strokes plan to migrate the data, but not a lot of details in the Q&A.
I don't know if I'm going to do this for day 2 or not. It's not a bad way to take notes, but gets tiring trying to keep up.
By: Brant
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