Defense Intelligence Agency’s POSTMAN Coming This Year

By the end of the 2024 calendar year, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) will deliver an initial tasking, collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination (TCPED) system for the entire open source defense intelligence enterprise and others in the community.

The system, which is known as POSTMAN (Primary Open Source Tasking Management Aggregation Network), will provide a single architecture for open source intelligence collection and dissemination, setting new standards and significantly enhancing military intelligence capabilities, according to Alan MacDougall, who leads the Science and Technology Directorate at DIA.

“In the course of the next couple of months, we’ll begin a test and evaluation process. But our intent is to deliver this calendar year the first instantiation on our high-side system. We’ll then progressively work toward the future iterations and the full functionality at an unclassified level as well as a secret level. We’re well down that road and delivering a critical piece of architecture for the community,” MacDougall recently told SIGNAL Media.

The version arriving at year’s end will be considered an initial operating capability.

“POSTMAN will take us about three years to fully deliver its full functionality, but we’ll be turning it on at the end of this calendar year, and there will be opportunity to improve and enhance the tool development,” he reported.

The system will fully integrate intelligence TCPED capabilities across the open source defense intelligence organizations and with the four other so-called Five Eyes nations — Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — who work closely with one another and the United States on intelligence matters.

“This will be the first time the enterprise will be fully integrated. And by the way, this will also extend out to our Five Eyes partners. We are purpose building this as a Five Eyes system from the get-go, rather than having to kludge on disparate systems,” MacDougall said.

MacDougall described POSTMAN as a major accomplishment that will dramatically impact the intelligence community.

“It will, frankly, fundamentally change the ability of the Defense Intel Agency and enterprise writ large — in concert, by the way, with the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence], Open Source Intelligence Executive and CIA, where they are responsible as the open-source functional manager on behalf of the intelligence community to ensure visibility on all of the requirements, a collection occurring, and the standards by which it’s applied, which means there’ll be less redundancy. More importantly, we’ll identify capabilities to align against key collection needs in that arena, that mission domain.”

Executed under a task order with Leidos, POSTMAN will apply industry-leading data science methodologies to provide a fully integrated, next-generation solution for open-source intelligence collection orchestration management, DIA spokesperson Vanee’ Vines said in an email exchange following the interview. 

“DIA is setting the standards for defense [open source intelligence] and by developing the technical architecture that every other intelligence discipline already has. We are integrating requirements, tasking and data into the first standardized, enterprise-wide tasking, collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination capability solution,” she added.  

The DIA Science and Technology Directorate is home to the Open Source Intelligence Integration Center, which recently awarded a $143 million task order to Leidos. The new task order builds upon the agency’s ongoing success with the National Media Exploitation Center’s Data Discovery Platform, which enhances the processing and enrichment of petabytes of unstructured, heterogeneous multimodal data from across the Department of Defense, intelligence community and partners. This enables discovery, retrieval and sharing of vital intelligence data across multiple federal agencies, according to a Leidos press release.

The science and technology director touted continuing work with the Machine-assisted Analytic Rapid-repository System (MARS) as another success story.

MARS is a cloud computing-based system that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically sift through reams of data, performing mundane analysis and freeing up intelligence analysts to perform more complex analysis. In 2021, DIA released the Order of Battle module, which provides information on foreign troops, their associated equipment and how they fit in the larger hierarchy of a military organization.

“A key accomplishment is the alignment of the output, the product of the tech services here, day in and day out, to the agency’s foundational military intelligence holding known as MARS. The MARS program is essentially the repository for the all-source authoritative holdings … for defense, the intel enterprise in support to the Department of Defense’s planning, acquisition and operational communities,” MacDougall said. “We have aligned our processes in reporting the knowledge bases to meet the standards for interoperability associated with that program. It’s still a work in progress, but frankly, that makes the product here all the more relevant outside of DIA to the user community and the Department of Defense.”

He also noted the importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning to DIA’s mission of providing intelligence on foreign militaries.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning really are about applying the technologies associated with very agile compute to identify patterns in data.  When you do so — because the computers operate much faster than certainly my brain — it can really enhance the efficiency by which we both collect the data and interpret the data, as well as the effectiveness, in other words, the relevance of the data or the insights it can provide against targets or threats of interest to us.”

Additionally, MacDougall noted that the COVID pandemic highlighted the importance of biotechnology.

“The ability to design algorithms to understand the biological materials, perhaps the naturally occurring threat vectors in that regard, have been applied to understanding what’s in the environment itself. That also can be applied, in some respects, to potential threat vectors by a foreign military or security service and the like.”

The DIA Science and Technology Directorate’s mission is to provide cutting-edge scientific and technical collection and exploitation capabilities to address “some of our nation’s most challenging intelligence gaps on foreign militaries,” MacDougall explained.

He listed five priorities as director:

• to deliver relevant and actionable technical intelligence
• to continue to build the Science and Technology Directorate and posture it for the future challenges ahead
• to operationalize partnerships across the DIA and the broader intelligence community
• to invest in tradecraft, or toolkit, including sensors, algorithms and exploitation techniques “to make sense of the data we collect and turn it into the relevant intelligence data for our user community
• to “always be looking ahead, to both develop and leverage the development of next-generation technologies.”

MacDougall will moderate a fireside chat during TECHINT 2024, a July 9 event co-sponsored by DIA and AFCEA.