TAMPA, Fla.—By the time the Army decides on its next-generation of handheld and portable biometrics collection devices in the coming years, the choice will probably be for items that have already been developed and can be acquired commercially, the chief of the Defense Department’s Biometrics Project Management Office said this week.
Biometrics technology has advanced so rapidly and industry is demonstrating and offering solutions now that are better than currently fielded capabilities and will continue to be improved upon by the time a new program is ready, Col. Don Hurst, project manager for PMO DoD Biometrics, told Defense Daily in a Sept. 21 interview at AFCEA’s annual Global Identity Summit.
Hurst said the biometric collection technologies that he saw exhibitors displaying and demonstrating at the conference suggests that when the next-generation of devices are procured they will be non-developmental commercial-off-the-shelf.
The one “trepidation” Hurst said he has with some of the technologies he viewed at the conference was the appropriate level of ruggedness to meet warfighter needs. When the Army decides to buy new systems, it will be acquiring thousands of devices and they need to last, he said.
The current biometrics collection system being used by the Army in combat zones is the Biometric Automated Toolset-Army (BAT-A), which was developed as a Quick Reaction Capability after the United States military began operating in Afghanistan and Iraq to deny enemy insurgents anonymity. The BAT-A system consists of a SEEK 2 handheld device for tactical operations and a kit that includes a laptop computer and peripherals such as a Guardian livescan fingerprint capture device and camera for face and iris capture. The multimodal SEEK 2 biometric capture device and the Guardian livescan fingerprint capture device are supplied by Crossmatch.
The PMO DoD Biometrics has the authorities to continue maintaining BAT-A through FY ’22, Hurst said. In the meantime, he expects the Army to make a decision within the next two weeks on moving forward with an Analysis of Alternatives on exploring the path forward for a new tactical biometrics capability.
The forthcoming analysis will likely take eight to 12 months, although Hurst said he’s hoping it can be accomplished sooner. Once it is finished, that will help clear a path for decisions on how to proceed toward a new acquisition program, he said. Hurst expects it will be at least FY ’19 before a Request for Proposals is issued for the new tactical collection capability.
The Army is referring to the new biometric collection system as the Next-Generation Biometric Collection Capability (NXGBCC).
Will Graves, the chief engineer for PMO DoD Biometrics, said during a defense biometrics panel presentation on Sept. 20 here that future requirements could include additional biometric modalities. The current DoD biometric repository, called ABIS, includes fingerprint, face, iris and palm print records.
Brian Likens, the project lead for BAT within PMO DoD Biometrics, said during a separate panel on future requirements that the BAT system needs to be replaced given advances in the state-of-the-art in biometrics technology in the years since the system arose in response to urgent battlefield needs.
“The soldier deserves a far better system,” Likens said.
Likens also said that going forward there will be demands for new biometric modalities beyond fingerprints, face and iris images.
“There’s so much more that can be done in the world of collecting biometrics and how we share and how we talk,” Likens said.
Although the Army is beginning to move forward on replacing the BAT-A, Likens said that acquiring the NXGBCC isn’t going to happen “in the near future.” He noted that resource battles will also be a challenge.