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home > May 26, 2008 issue > article
Linking up first responders
By David Walsh
Special to Defense Systems
An industry group is trying to drive interoperability between
civilian first responder agencies and the military services, suggesting
they use vehicle tracking and credit card technology
as models.
At a briefing April 22, the Network
Centric Operations Industry Consortium
(NCOIC) presented those technologies as part
of the organization’s promotion of the concept
of “Everything over Internet Protocol,” or
EOIP — a communications architecture
that’s finding a home in Defense
Department systems, as well.
NCOIC is a nonprofit corporation
that represents the military,
defense industries, civilian
and nongovernmental organizations.
The organization’s spokespersons see its EOIP initiative as
crucial, because few of the nation’s 100,000 first responder organizations
are real-time linked and technical and network upgrades
and training are costly.
Terry Morgan, director of network-centric operations for Cisco
Systems’ Global Government Solutions Group and NCOIC’s vice
chairman, said he was not seeking to make the entire country netcentric.
“EOIP can transmit voice, video, data and text to devices
and software applications they own and operate now,” he said. “In
[our] network-centric approach, responder systems can find out
who has the vital information and who is allowed to send or
receive it. We’re not talking about building a new network or asking
responders to abandon their radios.” Analog-to-digital signal
converters can enable many changes, he added.
Morgan also called for creation of a nationwide, map-defined
electronic registry that would comprise all emergency response
organizations and a system to confirm response organizations’
identities and authorization to “send and receive various kinds of
information.”
Another NCOIC vice chairman, David Aylward — also director
of the COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance, a nonprofit first
responders’ advocacy group — said IP-based templates exist in corporate
America and should be replicated by emergency responders.
He pointed to bank ATM cards. With them, “there’s ... instantaneous
data interoperability across systems that are owned by
banks that hate each other, that
compete every day. And yet data
moves.” Cardholders, he added,
can withdraw funds anywhere.
Aylward explained, “That’s
because we transformed our
commercial economy into a
strong information-based, supplychain
based, standards-based,
Internet Protocol-based system.”
He said the U.S. military successfully
employed such models (for
example, the IP router-enabled
SIPRNET and NIPRNET),“and
emergency response needs to
copy it as well.” But a “huge
problem,” he added, is that although the military “has a need to
interact with [civilian] agencies…the agencies can’t talk to
themselves.”
Aylward also cited OnStar, an automobile tracking system, and
electronic data-retrieval systems that swiftly advise which medications
people need after an accident. Remarkably, however,
Aylward said, “Not one 911 center in the United States that can
receive that data today.” Optimally, “all those entities would be
connected through IP so…we could share that data,” Aylward
said.
Instead, “sharing emergency information takes a series of
phone calls, a lot of duplication and precious time that responders
can’t afford to lose,” he said.
“Without an organizational registry and [the management of
users’] rights, what we call ‘core services,’ emergency communications
in the future would be like using a telephone system without
a phone book and having all responders on one big conference
call,” Aylward said.
He stressed that first responders include military service members,
fire and rescue services, and police, along with employees of
hospitals, schools, transportation departments, public health centers,
shelters and the Red Cross.
“Every single one of them needs to be connected to the emergency
response inter-network.”
Morgan and Aylward called for a joint military/civil approach,
because although crisis mitigation has long been led by the civilian
sector, the military increasingly shared overlapping missions —
especially in the logistics area.
However, the first step was to get agencies to “think net-centric,”
Aylward said.
Morgan was asked about other impediments to interoperability
such as institutional inertia, turf wars and professional jealousy. He
acknowledged the problems, but said, “If we can solve the technical
issue then we’ve eliminated the first excuse” for not being
interoperable. “It can be done.”
EOIP, the organization said, is “a near-term solution to problems
that challenge all categories of emergency responders —
including the U.S. military when its support is required — in disasters
or in day-to-day response.”
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