ISR
Top right: Matt Roper is chief of joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance at the NCI Agency.
Top left: Brigadier General Houston R Cantwell is the commander of NAGSF.
Opening page: One of the AGS system’s five remotely piloted Global Hawk aircrafts.
the ground and the mechanisms by which the data is taken from the platform and brought back down to the ground,” explains Matt Roper, chief of joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance at the NCI Agency. “We are also responsible for providing much of the ground-based network and infrastructure to carry that data around the Nato force and command structure and, in time, connect the nations to the AGS core.”
Capture and package the data The two primary sources of data that are gathered by the platform are Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which creates 2D images or 3D reconstructions of objects such as landscapes, and Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) radar, which provides continuous wide area surveillance coverage of ground moving vehicles.
“It’s a very flexible system focused on providing meaningful information to support decision makers at all levels within the Nato force and command structure.”
Matt Roper 5 Nato 40
High-altitude, remotely piloted Global Hawk surveillance aircraft make up the air segment of the AGS platform.
Captured by sensors, and digitally passed through a series of data links and satellite communications back to the AGS’s main operating base in Sigonella, Sicily, they provide a rich picture of what is happening on the ground.
When the information arrives at AGS HQ, it’s the analysts’ job to make sense of it, normally in response to a request, which could be anything from a geo-political question about a specific location or activity from, say, the North Atlantic Council (NAC) to a specific tactical question from a small tactical unit in the field who need a better
understanding of a particular situation. Analysts may also bring other intelligence feeds into the mix to help produce collated reports that commanders around the alliance are asking for.
As Roper explains, there are different timelines that come into play: “Some pattern of life analysis takes a little longer and can run into days and weeks because it’s not so time critical, but some of the tactical information could be very urgent and need much more rapid analysis,” he says. “In some cases, they may just need the image itself if there is a tactical activity which has got a very short time fuse. It’s a very flexible system focused on providing meaningful information to support decision makers at all levels within the Nato force and command structure.”
Connect AGS to the Nato environment One of the most important roles NCI Agency plays is protecting the data as it flows through the Nato cyber environment, where it covers substantial distances and moves across multiple countries and commands, all with different points of vulnerability. The key, according to Roper, is to ensure that the various nodes of the information flow are properly protected. For this reason, a great deal of effort is being put into ensuring the communications network is resilient to intrusion and attack. That has included vulnerability assessments, specialised penetration testing and cyberresilience testing, all to ensure the system can meet the requirements of the formal accreditation process that all new Nato systems and capabilities must go through. “It’s not an easy task,” Roper says. “Often systems won’t pass first time around and the testing will reveal vulnerabilities that have to be rectified and corrected before a subsequent test can be achieved, which hopefully gives us the green light to connect these systems and capabilities into
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
NCI Agency; US Navy / Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Kegan E Kay
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