The U.S. Air Force successfully completed evaluation of Raytheon's new Distributed Common Ground System at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, enabling operational use of the upgraded intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) system.

The network-centric upgrade to DCGS at Ramstein Air Base is an important element of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) initiative to enable seamless, real-time, multiagency intelligence sharing and collaboration.

"The U.S. Air Force ran regular missions using the upgraded DCGS baseline over several weeks and concluded it was ready to use for intelligence tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination," said Mark Kipphut, deputy director of Tactical Intelligence Systems at Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems.

Kipphut was a career U.S. Air Force officer who served as the intelligence director for Pacific Air Forces at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, with responsibility for DCGS sites worldwide.

He also noted, "We expect the system at Hickam Air Force Base to become operational early next year, which will provide warfighters actionable intelligence, regardless of its source, in near-real time."

DCGS is a family of ground stations that support a range of ISR systems, such as military and commercial satellite systems in addition to manned and unmanned aircraft. Because Raytheon's next version of the system is Web-enabled, it can more easily integrate applications and workflow, so that when all Air Force sites are operational, DCGS users will be able to access shared ISR data and applications in a network-centric environment, increasing mission capability as well as capacity.

Also, once sites are federated across the DoD, DCGS will be able to serve as a key part of the enterprise architecture for worldwide intelligence information sharing.