A group of top defense software companies will pit cutting-edge geospatial technologies against a common simulated enemy during Monterey Cross, a defense and intelligence interoperability exercise at the 2008 ESRI International User Conference.

Monterey Cross will run in the Defense and Intelligence Showcase from August 5-7.  The exercise will demonstrate how 16 ESRI business partners use commercial-off-the-shelf-software (COTS) and shared geography within a simulated operation to solve common defense and intelligence tasks. 

Warfighters require speed and flexibility to get rapid answers to critical questions in order to predict, plan and execute missions in today’s dynamic battlespace.  We will highlight solutions such as C2, ISR, mission planning, logistics, flight operations, rapid mobile data collection, facilities management, range management, and geospatial intelligence analysis.

System integrators can rapidly augment the warfighter’s information technology networks with these configurable and modular solutions.  The standards-based COTS solutions use desktop applications, network servers, web browsers, and mobile devices in a single, integrated architecture to deliver capability to meet mission requirements.  Mobile devices synchronize and interoperate when connected, and stand alone as functional systems with cached information when there is limited or no connectivity.  ESRI business partners’ applications use or interoperate with ESRI core technology.  Because ESRI and partners use a standards-based approach to application design, communication between applications is possible right out of the box.  The network, the core IT technology in the simulation, serves a shared geography to the participants and supports interoperability.  Web services, geodatabases, and web applications form the core of a net-centric, services oriented architecture or SOA.  With such technology, warfighters in the field and commanders in operations centers have horizontal simultaneous access to the information they need to quickly make collaborative and optimal decisions.

In Monterey Cross, all pieces of battlespace management come together:

Intelligence - What are the opposition or enemy forces doing?  Where are the neutral and NGO entities and what activities are they conducting?

Operations - What are the friendly forces doing?  What is their impact?

Mission Support - What is the status of friendly forces?  How do we manage military resources including space management, training areas, installations, environment and logistics? 

Modeling and Simulation - What options do we have? What options do the enemy have? What additional intelligence do we need to collect?

A geospatial team in Monterey Cross provides the shared geography, cartography, geodatabases, web services, publications, and analysis that tie everything together.

Visit the Monterey Cross exercise in the Defense and Intelligence Showcase to see how the current generation of advanced COTS geospatial software solves defense and intelligence problems in a simulated operations environment.  These modern, interoperable, standards-based COTS software demonstrate dynamic, modular  and cost effective solutions for the defense and intelligence community.