INternational Distributed Unified Reporting Environment (INDURE) V1.1 Concept of Operations

Air Force Research Laboratory

29 pages
February 26, 2010

This Concept of Operations (CONOPS) identifies and describes the use of International Distributed Unified Reporting Environment (INDURE) Version 1.1 on the World Wide Web Internet domain. Under the guidance of the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) Theater and Under Secretary Defense – Intelligence (USD-I), the need for INDURE was scoped and funded. INDURE will be fully interoperable with the Combined Information Data Network Exchange (CIDNE) (which resides on Secret and higher classification networks) and will be able to exchange data with CIDNE. The Secret-to-Unclassified exchange will require data to be air-gapped between the systems due to the classification of the information domain CIDNE resides on and will require FDO and/or release authority to move data between domains.

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1.3 Background

1.3.1 INDURE History

The National Security Council (NSC) established the need for INDURE in June 2009 as a
result of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Tribal Knowledge Base (APTKB) effort and directed
CENTCOM to provide a capability to bridge information gaps between military and
civilian entities operating in the same battlespace. The Afghanistan theater of operations,
to include the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region, is the focus of the INDURE initial
operational capability. INDURE was envisioned and funded to provide a standardized
way for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), United States Agency for
International Development (USAID), and US Department of State (DoS) Provincial
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to report information on observations and analysis outside
of DoD networks as well as provide releasable DoD information back to those
organizations for force protection and planning purposes.

As the need to collect, analyze and formulate decision points of Civil Capacity, Civil
Information of Concern, and Socio-Cultural information in the current operational
engagement becomes more prevalent, so does the need to have a standardized and
distributed manner to store the data. It is essential that a common database be made
available to facilitate better coordination between organizations and agencies operating in
the same geographic areas. This forum is critical to ensure not only that the proper
foundations are established, but that these foundations are well-understood and
coordinated. Providing a relational data model for INDURE that shares a similar
ontology with CIDNE, a CENTCOM-directed reporting capability, is the logical first step
forward for INDURE.

As of September 2009, both the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of operation have stated a
profound need for this capability and would like a Jan 2010 initial operational capability
of INDURE. While the focus for IOC is Afghanistan, the INDURE Government Off-
The-Shelf (GOTS) software will be made available to US Forces-Iraq (USFOR-I) by
CENTCOM for fielding in Iraq (architecture is TBD).

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2.1 System Purpose and Objectives

The purpose of INDURE is to provide a data repository into which non DoD communities
like NGOs, USAID and others involved in civil capacity, socio cultural information, events of
significance and engagement data can all can input, share, extract and analyze data in concert
with DoD entities. INDURE provides these communities with standardized reporting tools
that span significant activities (SIGACTS), Civil Capacity information, Socio Cultural and
Engagement disciplines.

The objectives of INDURE are to provide tools that allow the analyst to:

● Input data for access by the military, USAID and the NGO community via
standardized report formats
● Analyze and visualize multi-source data
● Store and query data about events, places, organizations, people, and resources
● Publish data in the INDURE database for use by external organizations
● Input standardized reports that are custom-designed for each functional reporting
area, yet available to all interested user communities
● Provide mechanism for ISAF and USFORA to release vetted information to
support USAID and NGO operations in Afghanistan

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