Army intelligence says it needs good cloud computing to save lives in Afghanistan

Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Rowan Scarbourough.

The U.S. military’s main battlefield intelligence processor, so crucial to the war in Afghanistan, still lacks an element common to civilian computer networks — a cloud. A cloud computing architecture would give intelligence analysts at different locations simultaneous and wider access to all sorts of data, be it satellite imagery or reports on Taliban informants.

In theory, faster, more thorough intelligence products lead to success on the battlefield, such as identifying and disrupting insurgents planting improvised explosive devices — the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Army’s $28 billion “cloudless” processor — the Distributed Common Ground System, commonly called D-Sigs — has prompted congressional criticism. Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican and a Marine Corps war veteran, has pressed the Army to turn to commercially available computing products to address the deficiency and, in his words, “save lives.”…

The Army tested a cloud system dubbed “UX,” then stopped it last month and is focused on a program called Red Disk. The Army says its goal is to have D-Sigs matched with a cloud in its third iteration, or “release 3,” sometime after 2014, when most U.S. troops are set to be out of Afghanistan…

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