Military Streamlines Biometrics Science Spending

Signal, Sep 2008 by Boland, Rita

The Pentagon is leading the creation of a document to encourage organizations to use their development dollars while directing that funding toward the most necessary efforts.

The U.S. Defense Department is creating a biometrics science and technology plan to help the services and other component organizations spend their money in ways that will fill warfighter capability gaps. The document will inform stakeholders of current resources and needs in the defense biometrics community, with the goal of producing solutions through both standard and unconventional means. The plan is part of a larger effort to formalize biometrics strategies and efforts within the military community.

The science and technology plan will serve as a reference for researchers and acquisition officials in the biometrics field. The document will identify technologies necessary for warfighter success in an attempt to eliminate duplication of efforts and focus work in the right areas. "It's been necessary for a while," Thomas Dee, director of defense biometrics within the Pentagon Defense Research and Engineering office, says.

The document is designed to fit into a larger Defense Department enterprise strategy for biometrics. At the top level is the department's overall strategy plan, followed by science and technology guidance from Dee's office. One level of detail down is the science and technology plan. Finally, a road map will outline specific, near-term activities organizations can take.

The fiscal year 2008 science and technology funding line served as a catalyst to coordinate all the department's biometrics efforts. Various pieces of the military have ad hoc biometrics programs supported through supplemental funding, and the department wants to pull all the efforts together as a more formal program based on requirements. This new arrangement will go beyond responding to urgent needs coming from the theater to conducting full analysis of positions and needs to identify requirements and gaps. Officials want to emphasize biometrics as a capability for many mission areas such as information assurance and base access. "The science and technology plan is just one way we're doing that," Dee explains.

All the military services and other defense organizations such as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Biometrics Task Force (BTF) are involved in the plan's development. Representatives from the U.S. Department of Homeland security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have participated in workshops to provide input from their perspectives. "This is really the first attempt to have a comprehensive biometrics science and technology plan for the department," Dee explains.

The BTF had primary responsibility for drafting the document, along with private industry partner MITRE, and will create the department's biometrics road map. MITRE and the BTF worked closely with representatives from the science and technology community to ensure the document fits within the larger Defense Department biometrics planning. Within the plan, the military is seeking biometrics technologies in four main, though not new, areas: intelligence, physical and logical access, forensics and architecture. The final category addresses the capability to transmit biometric information to the appropriate parties.

To assist the effort, the U.S. Joint Forces Command conducted a capabilities-based assessment (CBA) to explain what the military really needs from biometrics in the futurewith the understanding that the solutions may not be technically possible now. At the same time, the military began holding science and technology workshops to create acquisitions objectives and understanding of technology maturity. The workshops also devised plans to develop technology to the point necessary for transition to fulfill the gaps anticipated in the CBA.

In the past, biometrics science and technology was outlined only as technology objectives in service plans, or in studies, reports, lessons-learned documents or urgent-need statements. The new document builds on internal and external biometrics studies, such as the August 2006 National Biometrics Challenge, that addressed technical gaps in the military, but did not delineate how the government can fill the requirements. "This plan that we're drafting is complementary to that National Challenge document, but will go beyond that," Dee says. The new plan will address how the department will fill the gaps and develop necessary technologies.

Additionally, the plan will explain what the department wants to do in the future, even if such capabilities are impossible now. "We also want to be able to address the technology push," Dee states. Whether tools are developed internally or by academia and industry, the military wants to remain in tune with research to potentially transition those technologies to the department for defense use. "Our interest, of course, is solving DOD [Defense Department] capability gaps first, being able to predict future capabilities we need, identifying gaps and solving those gaps," Dee explains. "But in some cases you may not anticipate anything. There may be technologies being developed for an entirely different purpose by their activities and having tremendous utility for the DOD, so we want to be able to figure out how to bring those into our DOD technology plans and develop those efforts."