DISA upgrades system to track nearly 1 million targets at once

By the Office of Strategic Communication and Public Affairs

The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency released the Global Command and Control System-Joint version 6.1, which allows tracking of nearly 1 million moving objects of military interest. Previously, the system could track only thousands of such targets.

“This release primarily focused on the infrastructure update to ensure that GCCS-J can track close to a million objects in motion, which is huge. It broadens the scope of how much data we're able to interact with and essentially allows us to expand on how much data we are able to correlate and infuse in order to get decisions out the door,” says Caroline Bean, Defense Information Systems Agency Joint Enterprise Services director.

Looking ahead, the agency anticipates bringing the Joint Planning and Execution System online before 2025, which will replace the Joint Operational Planning and Execution System. JPES will be available via web browser and will support the United States Department of Defense ’s deliberate planning, crisis action planning, allocation, execution, global force management processes, and the global command and control mission.

“JPES is the system that we use for the planners to identify the units of the force that are required to execute a joint operation. It does the coordination and the execution of the deployment into and out of those joint operation areas,” says Bean. “If a crisis happens anywhere in the world, and the U.S. military needs to respond with the deployment of any forces to assist or counteract the crises, JPES is really the system that's used to pull all of that together.”

These enhancements help balance cybersecurity needs and usability, while allowing access from a variety of devices.

“Cybersecurity is a big thing. There's always that balance of user experience and cybersecurity, and we're always playing that balancing act, but we were able to do that with the user interface,” says Bean. “It can run on desktops, tablets, even a smartphone using the same code base that we put out for JPES and our own application. It also reduces some of the data duplication and the point-to-point interfaces while remaining interoperable, still with multiple systems.”

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