ATEC'S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION


JUONS efforts are unique. Tough ATEC is still required to plan and execute testing and gather data for reduction into insights, the needs of the community demand that this process be condensed to months versus years. Tis urgency typically requires 18-hour days and seven-day weeks. Teams would start their days at 4:00 a.m., plan, brief and fly several sorties (planned flights with specific routes and data collection objectives) and hope to begin data reduction at 5:00 p.m.


One line of testing, known as bias and jitter, characterizes the performance of a pointer-tracker on the aircraft in terms of operating power and laser movement on target. It is complex, involving thousands of frames of infrared imagery, aircraft time- space-position information, video processing, and data sizes and complexity exceeding the processing capability of ATEC’s tool set.


To make things more difficult, mission requirements dictated testing at multiple test sites across the U.S., most often in areas with limited or no connectivity, meaning that data delivery


involved shipping hard drives back and forth across the coun- try. Not only could ATEC not conduct timely processing of data, but it also took weeks to get the data to analysts and evaluators, resulting in months from test event to informed decision. At a time when the Army and ATEC needed an efficient observe, orient, decide, act (OODA) loop, legacy systems failed the eval- uators doing everything they could to get capability to the field.


To reduce this cycle and meet the needs of the Army, ATEC needed a more efficient means to transport data to analysts, better systems, tools and processes for analysts to work with data sets rapidly growing in size and complexity and serve evaluations and insights to the acquisition community.


As ATEC struggled through the JUONS cycle, 4-6 Heavy Attack Reconnaissance Squadron (4-6 HARS), 16th Combat Aviation Brigade was finalizing a movement from Fort Carson, Colo- rado to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, having deferred many long-term and time-intensive maintenance tasks until after the move. Not yet slated for deployment, but imbued with a


A PATRIOTIC PERSPECTIVE


Then-Capt. Lucas Gebhart, left, and 1st Lt. Matthew DiPinto stand with the American Flag in Erbil, Iraq, in January 2017. Gebhart helped his organization synchronize several years of maintenance with a busy training schedule. (Photo courtesy of Maj. Lucas Gebhart, ATEC)


54


Army AL&T Magazine


Fall 2024


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