Raytheon Intelligence & Space to Continue Supporting Air Force Geospatial-Intelligence Mission

Virginia-headquartered Raytheon Intelligence & Space announced that it was awarded a five-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to continue geospatial-intelligence system mission support and training for the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground System and Air National Guard locations worldwide. The deal calls for the leveraging of its mission domain knowledge to ensure high mission availability to support end-to-end operations, RI&S said Thursday.

The contract will see RI&S providing mission support and engineering services for the current DCGS weapon system baseline and partnering with the Air Force to facilitate the transition to an open architecture DCGS.  The range of services the company will provide encompasses mission planning for an airborne sensor, data collection, processing, and data discoverability for the DCGS Analysis Exploitation Teams in support of theater and the National Command Authority.

David Appel, vice president of C2 Digital Solutions, Space & C2 Systems at RI&S, said the latest award paves the way for the continued partnership with the service in facilitating the migration of GEOINT mission support and real-time sensor control to hub-based, open architecture enterprise operations.

On its website, the USAF described the DCGS as its primary intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and dissemination weapon system. Also referred to as the AN/GSQ-272 SENTINEL weapon system, it employs a global communications architecture that connects multiple intelligence platforms such as the U-2, RQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper aircraft.