Positive identification of friends and foes is a matter of life and death for U.S. troops and local citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mistake an enemy for a friend, and a terrorist gains access to a crowded U.S. base or a secure town. Mistake a friend for an enemy, and a supporter is lost or an insurgent is created.
Helping U.S. and coalition service members and Iraqi and Afghan security forces quickly make these life-saving decisions was a critical need in Iraq and Afghanistan. A small Army center in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., led the effort to find innovative biometric technology and field it fast to create identity databases that help Soldiers and Marines tell friend from foe quickly on the ground.
During a live CGI Initiative webinar on Tuesday, December 14, Kathy DeBolt, Deputy Army Training and Doctrine Command Capabilities Manager for Biometrics and Forensics at the Army Center of Excellence Language Technology Office, explained how her team and a group of innovative companies collaborated to rapidly put game-changing biometrics capability into the hands of security forces.
You can view the archived version of the webinar here.
Ms. DeBolt is a former Army officer. She developed the concept and material solution for the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT), the Detainee Information Management System (DIMS), and the Multilingual Autmated Registration System (MARS), all currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She developed her biometrics expertise in service of U.S. peacekeepers in Bosnia. “We needed to ID people of interest and track them, not by using paper, but something unique to them and that would stay with them,” Ms. DeBolt recalls.
When troops deployed to Iraq in 2003, her team was charged with helping U.S. soldiers deny the enemy anonymity so insurgents could not easily blend into the local population. Beginning with prisoners and expanding to members of the local populace, U.S. forces now have collected biometrics on more than 3 million people in the two conflict zones. Because biometrics have been so successful in identifying enemy combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan, deploying units now receive training in collecting and using biometric information.
To develop biometrics and forensics solutions efficiently and cost effectively and to speed capability to the field, Ms. DeBolt uses rapid prototyping and agile development methods. She says she learned from her Bosnia experience to involve users in developing solutions from the very beginning. She takes programmers to Iraq to observe how soldiers are using the Biometric Automated Toolset to gather fingerprints, voice recordings, retina scans and facial images from prisoners and members of communities.
Continuous interface with users enables contractors to adapt the systems quickly. For example, when a soldier in Iraq suggested that it would be easier to search the biometrics data using an index of names by sound, a programmer added the capability overnight, Ms. DeBolt says.
Sending programmers to the field also builds buy-in and a sense of urgency among her team members, she says. Though Ms. DeBolt works with Army employees, a prime contractor and two or three subcontractors, their sense of ownership of the work drives mutual commitment to rapid, practical mission results. Direct experience with soldiers in the field binds the team, DeBolt says, and enables her to create delivery contracts with team members. She meets regularly with them to track whether they are on target to meet delivery dates. “If they are not there, they will put in extra hours because they were involved in setting the terms of the contract,” she says.
Ms. DeBolt also maintains an open door to requests for necessary resources and conducts peer reviews of all software. Regular scrums keep all team members apprised of problems, new developments, and their role in each step of each project. Ms. DeBolt sums up the key elements of successful agile delivery of mission-critical biometrics and forensics capability as:
- Rapid prototyping with continuous user interaction
- Engineering tied to validated requirements
- Team buy-in and ownership with a sense of urgency
- Resources allocated to processes
- Widely understood processes
Challenges
Ms. DeBolt cites obtaining sufficient funding and the urgency of delivering life-saving capabilities to the field as her principle challenges. She notes the difficulties associated with supplying an overseas contingency operation. For example, the decision to mount the surge of U.S. forces in Iraq brought an unanticipated need to quickly deploy large numbers of biometrics and forensics support personnel and equipment.
Cultural differences among coalition partners mean that some refuse to require local nationals to provide biometric information. Such sensitivities also add requirements, such as having only women collect biometrics from women. Challenges to collection also have grown as enemy fighters have come to understand the effectiveness of biometrics and forensics and have begun to avoid or even target biometrics collection stations.
Ms. DeBolt says her team sometimes has problems procuring promising technology and software because companies don’t have existing federal contracts or their products do not comply with federal standards, such as the FBI’s requirements for fingerprints, to enable government wide information sharing.
Despite the challenges, however, biometrics and forensics have won an enthusiastic following in the military services. In addition to using the data to track bomb-makers and those who have left fingerprints at enemy encampments, analysts now are studying trends, for example, which tribes enemy combatants are from and whom they often visit. In the future, this kind of information will allow U.S. forces “to laser in on the right person or group” and to prevent collateral damage that could injure vital relationships with the local population, Ms. DeBolt says.
Ms. DeBolt also is exploring ways other U.S. government agencies can use biometrics. Border patrol agents could use the capability to identify gang members attempting to gain entry to the United States, for example, and the military also could share data collected in Iraq and Afghanistan with homeland security and immigration agencies.
Key Takeaways
- Industry-government collaboration is critical to success on the modern battlefield.
- Policy and standards must keep pace with the speed of development and emerging technologies.
- We must be able to exploit new technologies even when they are nonstandard.
- Industry must help customers find and understand which contract vehicles to use to most efficiently meet mission requirements.
Additional Resources
Defense Department Biometrics Identity Management Agency
U.S. Defense Department Expands Biometrics Technologies, Information Sharing
Biometrics Automated Toolset (BAT) ID system sniffs out hidden threats in Iraq
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