DGCS Progresses Toward Network Centric Reality

Raytheon Company (NYSE:RTN) has been awarded a U.S. Air Force contract to continue evolving the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Integration Backbone (DIB), a web-based system facilitating the sharing of near real-time, actionable intelligence information among warfighters. DIB 1.3, also known as the 'next-generation DIB', will improve the system's ability to use and share commercial computing technologies.

Under the roadmap developed by Rayteon for the DIB, version 1.3 will integrate the latest commercial products with Solaris 10, Oracle 10g and Weblogic 10 software infrastructure applications. The software will enable need-to-know capabilities, security domain federation, network-centric enterprise services security, automatic discovery and federation of DIBs. The system upgrade will also address unique U.S. Air Force, Army and Navy requirements.

DIB was launched as the infrastructure of Raytheon's DCGS 10.2 which recently passed factory acceptance testing at the company's facility. During the test, a series of on-site evaluations was conducted with representatives from the U.S. Air Force exercising the system and evaluating the results. In the next phase, Raytheon will deliver the DCGS 10.2 system to the first of several planned core sites, DGS-2 at Beale Air Force Base, Calif. There Raytheon will complete installation, integration and checkout in preparation for the site acceptance testing. When fully fielded, DCGS Block 10.2 will be a worldwide distributed, network centric enterprise architecture that enables collaborative intelligence operations and production. Its environment provides for both the physical and electronic distribution of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data analysis and tools.

Raytheon's DCGS 10.2 upgrade will be capable of continuous on-demand intelligence brokering that will enable U.S. and coalition forces to get the information they need to take action and influence events in a significantly shorter amount of time.