DARPA's Map-Based Wiki Keeps Platoons Alive

blackbearnh writes "One of the biggest problem that a platoon on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan faces is that when a new unit cycles in, all the street-sense and experience of the old unit is lost. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs, or even which families have a lot of domestic disputes, can spell the difference between living and dying. In response to this, DARPA created TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System. Developed as much on the ground in active warzones as in a lab, TIGR lets platoons access the latest satellite and drone imagery in an easy-to-use map based interface, as well as recording their experiences in the field and accessing the reports of other troops. In this O'Reilly Radar interview, two of the people responsible for the development of TIGR talk about the intel issues that troops face in hostile territory, the challenges of deploying new technology meant for combat areas, the specific tricks that they had to employ to make TIGR work over less-than-robust military networking, and how TIGR is impacting platoons in their day to day operations"

Re:Um... Acronym?

[Snowy_Duck]

We already have a huge network over here called Tigris. It's a locally contracted civilian internet connection that the soldiers can subscribe to for their own private use. They probably didn't want to have a system that contains highly sensitive information called something so similar (if they even considered it). In fact, they probably should have changed it to something completely different.

I prefer

[bornyesterday]

TIGR! TIGR! burning bright
In the desert city night,
With intel at hand and eye
Our foe will surely fear to try!

Re:Wikimapia?

[drakaan]

Doubtful...the original TIGR system was a basic data communications package for intel[ligence]-related stuff that predates most every website in existence today (I first worked with it back in '96, and I know it had been in use for a few years prior to that, and probably under development for a decade). Knowing how the Army, in particular, tends to deploy technology means that they probably created some kind of overlay (probably in Java) to display historical situation reports based on grid coordinates. Nice that grunts outside of traditional intelligence roles are getting to see that kind of data.

Re:This is not good!

[oodaloop]

All joking aside, TIGR Net is not something that will work well if we were to deploy, let's just say, to Angola tomorrow. TIGR is very fast and responsive in remote Iraqi FOBs because of its dispersed servers. Each machine is only pulling from the closest server, which updates itself during downtimes. There are other tools that do similar things to TIGR, but are slower in these remote locations because they pull from servers farther away and through constricted networks.