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Aviation Week reports that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin reached an out-of-court settlement agreement regarding recent litigation. The legal battle began after Lockheed jilted its 2002 partner and hooked up with Northrop Grumman to take the contract for the new Block 20 phase of the USA’s Distributed Common Ground Systems (DCGS) program.

What is DCGS, and how does it fit into Network-Centric Warfare?

DCGS is a distributed worldwide network that began as a move to create common ground stations to receive information from aircraft like the U-2, RQ-4 Global Hawk, et. al. It has since grown to include the US Army and the US Navy. With the introduction of DCGS 10.2 capabilities, current intelligence data from many different intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (ISR) platforms is now posted to the network for immediate use, and can be more easily combined with information from other intelligence platforms to improve understanding of what one is seeing.

In short, the upgrade integrates multiple intelligence systems into a single, worldwide network-centric application, and serves as an eventual successor to the older TENCAP program.

Raytheon and Lockheed Martin had teamed up to win DCGS 10.2 in 2002, but Lockheed left the partnership and recently teamed with Northrop Grumman to win the DCGS Block 20 follow-on contract. Naturally, the basis of Raytheon’s lawsuit was “misuse and misappropriation of proprietary information.”

As usual, the impetus for legal settlement was an unfavourable court ruling.

Aviation Week reports that “earlier this year a U.S. district court judge denied Raytheon’s request for an injunction barring Lockheed Martin from working with Northrop Grumman on the DCGS program. Still pending was Raytheon’s request for damages for what it claimed in a June [2005] filing…”

Raytheon said in an Oct. 13 statement that: “While the details of the settlement are confidential, it enables both companies to pursue future DCGS efforts together or with other industry partners and respect the proprietary information agreements between the two companies.”

Additional Readings & Sources

• DID (Nov 15/06) – $113M to Raytheon to Support U-2 Spy Planes. The thing is, DCGS isn’t quite compatible with the U-2s and Global Hawks…

• Aviation Week Aerospace Daily (Oct 14/05) – Raytheon, LM Reach DCGS Settlement

• Raytheon Corporate Release

• GlobalSecurity.org – Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS)

• Raytheon – Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) 10.2

• C4ISR Bulletin (June 13/05) – 30 Top: Net-Centric Systems DCGS ranked #1. Israel’s Tsayad (Hunter) battlefield digitization program, which DID has also covered, ranked #2.
• Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (Jan-March, 2004) – Distributed Common Ground System-Army: focused on the future. There is also a full PDF version of that issue.

• Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, Signal Connections Magazine (May 16/05) – Common Ground Program Sets Sail

• GlobalSecurity.org – Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities (TENCAP)