As General George S. Patton would say, “I hate paying for the same real estate twice.” That sentiment, as well as an acronym that honors the late general, is at the heart of a private sector alliance, with the government, that its members hope will reduce costs and bring new technology to the field faster.

The PATTON Alliance stands for “Preparing Analytical Tools and Technologies for an Operational Network.” It was formed last year to help move promising technologies from research and development to field deployment. The mission of the PATTON Alliance is to create a channel to the intelligence community for the technologies funded by federal research funds. The PATTON Alliance will advise intelligence agencies on the operational potential of technologies.

If you compare funding for research with efforts to transition these technologies into systems that directly support operations, you’ll see an obvious disparity. Typically, the unclassified budgets of research agents of the intelligence community exceed $150 million annually. The money expended to transition this technology for use in the field is a small fraction of this. This situation creates a narrow funnel that keeps useful R&D outcomes from being deployed quickly to the users that need it, and creates a negative feedback on the justification for additional research.

With the PATTON Alliance, there is a focused effort to identify and rapidly turn promising R&D into products faster than is typical now (nine months instead of three years). Another potential benefit will be reduced licensing costs to federal agencies. Instead of federally-funded R&D, paid for once, leaking into the public sector in order to be licensed back and therefore paid for again, the PATTON Alliance program will enable much more favorable terms to the government. This process will be a win for all parties concerned: the operational field will get needed tools faster, agencies will pay less for those tools, and contractors making the products will have less risk, knowing that federal deployment is assured much faster.

The PATTON Alliance is sponsored by the General Defense Intel Program (GDIP) Center for Excellence in Text Exploitation and Measurement and Signal Intelligence (MASINT), the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) as well as the Energy Department. With more than 15 years experience in deploying and maintaining information exploitation tools across the DOD intelligence information systems community, NGIC has full visibility on the most important needs of the operations community.

For more information about the PATTON Alliance, visit http://patton.digitalreasoning.com . Registration is required. Or send e-mail to: info@digitalreasoning.com.

Max K. Goff is the chief marketing officer at Digital Reasoning Systems of Nashville.

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