Of Standards, Interoperablity and Budget Constraints for the Defense-Intelligence Community #GEOINT

Gil Klinger, the director of the Space and Intelligence Office, and Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, for the Department of Defense (DoD) was speaking in the session on “Interoperability, Standards and Architecture" at the GEOINT conference in New Orleans. Specifically he was addressing the applications of emerging sensors and how each interoperate with each other. In the context of then turning those new data into information, he said, "None of that stuff means a damn, it simply doesn’t happen, if we don’t get this piece right ... As unappealing as interoperability and standards, and architecture approach are, they are all the more important now."

Klinger said that the government was running up against a massive recapitalization of our infrastructure. "We’ve run out the lifetimes [of intelligence infrastructure] during the course of two wars. “Against this backdrop, we are on the front end of a very serious downturn of the defense budget. We’ll be lucky to have a flat line budget in the next few years. It becomes more and more important as budgets get tighter to put an emphasis on adhering to standards," said Klinger.

What’s the connection between standards and interoperability? Klinger said it’s a case of "1+1=3." For him, it amounts to being able to take a specific source of information that may have run its course of usefulness on its own right, but when knitted together with other sources, it may allow analysts to look at the data in an entirely different way.