“In Afghanistan, details matter,” said Fontanella. “Wall heights, widths of roads in congested areas, an understanding of how compartmentalized terrain is, slopes and vertical obstructions for helicopters – all those things matter. And they matter so much that you really need to have this kind of capability to collect high-fidelity data.”

“In Afghanistan, details matter.”

The AGC makes BuckEye data – and data from a host of other AGC products, including the Border Zone Tactical Planner, the Urban Tactical Planner, and Water Resources Database – available to customers through its public key infrastructure (PKI)-enabled website and the Common Map Background (CMB). CMB is a library of the latest and best available data from both the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and AGC. The CMB provides a Web-based portal to these data holdings, allowing customers to place an order and have it delivered via FTP or shipment on a DVD or hard drive.

 

Supporting USACE

The AGC’s own Hydrologic Analysis Team, the Army’s data source for water resources information around the globe, designed the Water Resources Database to be a logistical support tool for commanders and engineers around the world – and especially in Afghanistan. “It’s pretty important, if you’re going to go out and build a structure,” said Fontanella, “that you’ve got access to water, either surface or subsurface, nearby. And this database, combined with some of the other work we do, really helped Army well drillers increase their success rate from something like 30 percent to around 95 percent. That’s one of the ways we support USACE. We’ve collected petabytes and terabytes of data from Afghanistan and Iraq, super high-fidelity data.”

AGC’s expertise has also proven useful for USACE’s civil works projects, inland waterways navigation, and civilian disaster relief. The National Inventory of Dams, maintained by USACE, documents information on 84,000 dams around the nation. The National Levee Database, first rolled out for public access in October 2011, displays levee systems on a map with real-time data from other sources, providing important geospatial information to agencies and individuals, including floodplain managers, emergency management agencies, and people who live or work near levees. USACE has also developed the Inland Electronic Navigational Chart Program for much of the 8,200 miles of waterways in the U.S. inland river system. The charts offer a real-time display of vessel positions relative to waterway features as well as a system of overlays making targeted, detailed information for specific customers such as dredgers, hydraulic engineers, environmental planners, and others.

“The long-term objective is to facilitate this net-enabled Army Geospatial Enterprise, with a database that is distributed both horizontally and vertically.”

The ability to share such geospatial data, along with the AGC’s mission-critical military applications, over a stable, proven geospatial network promises to transform the way the Army – and the nation as a whole – do business. “The long-term objective is to facilitate this net-enabled Army Geospatial Enterprise, with a database that is distributed both horizontally and vertically,” Fontanella concluded. “The efficiencies we’ll gain will be dramatic. We’ll reduce duplication. We’ll smooth transfers of authority. We’ll minimize overhead, because we won’t go out to collect data over and over again. We’ll ensure interoperability and synchronization, not just with the Army, but also within joint interagency, intergovernmental – and in very many cases – within the multinational community.”

This article first appeared in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Building Strong®, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces 2012-2013 Edition.