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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

Guard duty

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Army command sends remote sentries to watch over assets

Global deployment of U.S. troops in the last three years has put heavy materiel demands on the Army Surface Deployment and Distribution Command.

It’s up to the command to see that Army materiel ends up in the same place as Army personnel. The command, headquartered at Fort Eustis, Va., oversees the shipment of millions of tons of equipment and supplies each year.
The video camera of a unit standing guard over equipment is activated only when something happens.
Image:
The video camera of a unit standing guard over equipment is activated only when something happens.
Remote-sensing technology is keeping watch over the goods awaiting shipment, said Rose DuBose, the command’s senior IT adviser for North and South America.

“After Sept. 11, 2001, we started activating a lot of reserve units,” DuBose said. Their equipment is shipped from commercial ports, where the command sets up temporary facilities for 30 to 90 days. It currently is operating in Corpus Christi, Texas; Jacksonville, Fla.; Philadelphia; San Diego; and Savannah, Ga.

“When equipment comes in, we don’t warehouse it,” DuBose said. It goes straight onto the pier, where it might wait two or three days before being loaded onto ships.

“I want to reduce that time,” she said. “But while it’s sitting out there on the pier, I’m concerned about the warfighters’ equipment,” which includes everything from boots and food to Humvees and rocket launchers.

To secure the materiel at temporary facilities, the command bought five NetBotz 500 security systems from NetBotz Inc. of Austin, Texas. Three of the systems will be mobile and travel with the command’s rapid deployment equipment to new ports.

“We seem to be operating at three to five ports simultaneously,” DuBose said. “We will use [NetBotz systems] to build a virtual perimeter, so they can stand guard.”

The other two units will be permanently installed at command headquarters to monitor IT and communications systems.

“They are the exact applications we designed for,” NetBotz chief technology officer Mitch Medford said. The NetBotz line automates visual and environmental monitoring of physical environments and has a Web interface for tracking observations.

The NetBotz products, introduced in 2000, secures physical IT infrastructures such as wiring closets, server rooms and data centers. About 80 percent of the installed systems still do those jobs but, Medford said, “more and more are a pure surveillance role” similar to the Army’s use.

The small, mobile systems lend themselves to ad hoc physical security for short periods. The Space and Missile Defense Command Battle Lab used NetBotz for physical security during a recent virtual mission operations experiment at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The site housed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Army equipment for the one-month tests.
Each Netbotz will be locally monitored using an intelligent edge appliance with the power of a small notebook computer
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Each Netbotz will be locally monitored using an intelligent edge appliance with the power of a small notebook computer
NetBotz 500 has three components: an intelligent edge appliance that serves as a base station, a camera and an environmental sensor unit. The camera and sensors can be docked to the base station or connected by USB cables from as far as 340 feet away.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, IT in Action