News From USJFCOM: Valiant Angel soars at EC 10: "An intelligence system that will allow warfighters to access, retrieve and analyze massive amounts of still imagery and video was tested successfully and vetted, meeting all its objectives at Empire Challenge 10 (EC 10).
Valiant Angel, a program being executed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command’s (USJFCOM) Intelligence Directorate, improves access to, and movement of, large data files, including full-motion video (FMV) and wide-area surveillance (WAS) data across existing networks to warfighters at the tactical edge.
Two Valiant Angel nodes travelled to EC 10, an annual USJFCOM-led multinational intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) demonstration that showcases emerging capabilities and provides lessons learned to improve joint and combined ISR interoperability.
Andrew “AJ” Forysiak, Valiant Angel deputy program manager, said the team successfully accomplished what it set out to do.
“Valiant Angel is serving as the baseline architecture for moving FMV in this demonstration,” Forysiak said. “We’re trying to replicate the environment in theater and share FMV with our coalition partners; Valiant Angel is performing that role.”
According to Forysiak, Valiant Angel is working as advertised.
“We had a series of objectives when we got here, and have gone down the list and met them all,” he said. “We’ve performed better than we had expected. EC 10 analysts are adding metadata to files which in turn makes them easy to sort and discover. Also, all the [forward operating bases (FOB)] are tied into us and we are sharing our data.”
He added that anything producing FMV in EC 10 was ingested by Valiant Angel and pushed out by its web client. This allows access to FMV for disadvantaged users who would have no other way of viewing these feeds.
“An example of this is at the U.K. FOB, U.K. analysts did not have access to the [Base Expeditionary Targeting and Surveillance System – Combined (BETSS-C)] producing FMV at a U.S. FOB. We went on a visit to the U.K. FOB, offered the Valiant Angel web client, and immediately gave them access to this feed,” he said, adding that type of FOB integration has been an important tenet for EC 10. “There’s nothing like walking into a coalition FOB and seeing our Valiant Angel web client providing access to FMV for our coalition partners.”
Coalition interoperability was another objective for the team.
“We had to get EC10 FMV to the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A) located at The Hague (in the Netherlands),” Forysiak said. “We successfully sent FMV to (them) and in turn received FMV streams back, thus making NATO FMV available to the EC10 player audience.”
In addition to moving FMV around for the player audience, Forysiak said all Valiant Angel products generated from FMV were sent to the Distributed Common Ground System Integrated Backbone (DIB), and the DIBs could all view information called metadata embedded in the FMV.
“It’s all about the metadata,” added Forysiak. “Other FMV dissemination systems strip out the metadata, which makes it easy to move around. We not only preserve the metadata, but actually enhance it. This allows analysts the opportunity to easily search through the large volumes of collected FMV, which cuts down on the time needed to find what they need to accomplish their mission.”
Other challenges involved the sheer number of sensor feeds being collected and sent out.
“EC 10 has been a challenge – it’s not called Empire ‘Easy’. There’s been a wide range of sensors collecting FMV, everything from cameras on a stick to aerostats to unmanned and manned aerial vehicles,” he said. “Some of these sensors and formats we’ve never been exposed to before and we’ve had to change on the fly and meet these challenges. Overall, I think we’ve done a fantastic job.”
