I-COP Quantico Marine Corps

QUANTICO, Va. - --

A tool that critical infrastructure protection specialist Michael Lisovich developed over the last year and a half in the basement of Lejeune Hall is now in use at Quantico Marine Corps base and generating interest across the Department of Defense.
 
The product is the web-based Installation Common Operational Picture, a sort of living “super map” that combines a slew of information about the base — from emergency dispatch and crime reports to potholes and the weather — and changes in real time, as conditions change on the ground.
 
I-COP went online at Quantico on Feb. 1 and is now being used by the Operations Division, the Logistics Division, the Facilities Division, Security Battalion, Mission Assurance Branch, Range Management Branch, the fire department, some area commands and others.
 
“You can’t name a section, division or staff member that couldn’t use this tool for something,” said Pete Streng, the base director of operations. The main idea of the tool, which is accessible via the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, is to maintain up-to-date situational awareness of everything happening on the base to help command make fast, informed decisions, Streng said.

Lisovich, who works in the Mission Assurance Branch, said he got a call from Streng a couple of years ago saying he wanted a way to better depict the state of critical infrastructure on the base. In the old days, Lisovich said, generals used layers of acetate to superimpose various battlefield conditions over a map of the theater of war.

“He wanted something like that to show critical infrastructure. So I looked around and determined that [Graphic Information System] would do that,” said Lisovich.
 
GIS provides the basic map for I-COP, over which about 500 layers of data, and counting, can be superimposed.

To determine what information the map should include, Lisovich consulted various staff heads and drew on his own experience as a former antiterrorism officer and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear officer. He then created web portals through which the various branches could carry out their everyday work and united them under a larger portal, I-PRMRR — short for Integrated Planning Remediation, Mitigation, Response, Recovery — which he built to feed that information to I-COP.

“By them doing their day-to-day work and operations on the system, it keeps the information relevant,” he explained.

The system also pulls information from outside sources, such as the Homeland Security Infrastructure Program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, the Pacific Disaster Center, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control.

Thus, on a base level, Streng says he plans to have all the base’s fire hydrants mapped and then color-coded according to when they were last replaced or tested, while I-COP can also display current and historic drought or earthquake data from the other side of the world. It includes points of contact for each building aboard Quantico, and it can also warn of disease outbreaks on other continents.
 
“A big part of this is not just emergency response, but also planning,” Lisovich said, explaining that commanders want to know what’s happening in the parts of the world where they’re sending people.
The ability to access data regarding weather, natural hazards and Homeland Security infrastructure allows command to better plan for and respond to emergencies, Lisovich said. If an earthquake were to occur near an installation, the system would generate a shake map showing the projected damage to a given area, and commanders could see if there was any hazardous material storage site or nuclear power plant that could be damaged, and they could determine the threat to the installation.

“There’s really no limit to what you can do with it,” Streng said.

In the case of a snowstorm, for example, the roads on the map would all turn red and then revert to normal as they’re plowed, he said. Mapping of crime reports may result in the discovery of specific crime trends. As the buildings on base begin to use “smart metering,” automatically reporting energy consumption or power outages, that information will feed into I-COP, Streng said.

Each division or branch that is connected to the I-PRMRR portal has a certain set of data that it can see on I-COP, on a need-to-know basis, and certain data that it can alter, based on the office’s everyday tasks, Lisovich said.

“You wouldn’t want someone in G-5 dispatching an ambulance,” he explained.

Available to most people with a common access card, however, is the Emergency Operations Center Situational Awareness map, which doesn’t display “things you don’t want the bad guys to see,” Lisovich said. “This is the sanitized version of the I-COP for the public.”

In the event of an emergency, everyone on base could pull up the EOC screen to see what was happening and what they should be doing. For instance, in a hazardous material accident, a few mouse clicks could generate the hazard plume on I-COP, showing command which buildings and activities were affected, Lisovich said. The commander could then show the hazard plum on the EOC map, where he could also depict roadblocks, evacuation routes and a decontamination site, and post instructions for the occupants of different sets of buildings.

“So now, instead of everyone trying to call in and find out what’s going on, everyone has access to what the situation is,” Lisovich said.

“This is basically the 1.0 of something that has the potential to be used Marine Corpswide, and even DOD-wide,” said Streng. And others have taken notice.
 
About two months ago, Lisovich started helping to set up pilot I-COP programs for Marine Corps Installations West and Pacific, and is now in the process of bringing one up for MCI East. Over the last month, Navy and Army leadership were briefed on the technology.
 
“A lot of the other bases have seen and heard what Mike is doing down there, and they want in on it,” said Ken Herbert, section head for antiterrorism in the Security Division of Marine Corps Plans, Policies and Operations. He said I-COP is one of several tools being beta-tested for use in conjunction with a Marine Corpswide version of the Navy’s C4I suite. C4I is a larger common operational picture tool that the Navy has been using for about six years, and the Corps is in the process of developing its own version, Herbert said.

“The C41 suite is the high-level solution, and I-COP is one of the potential street-level solutions,” he said. “It’s a really useful tool, and some of the things it does would be good for us to apply on a larger scale.”
In the next two to three months, the system is being deployed in support of 21 installations and regional command and emergency operations centers, as well as the Headquarters Marine Corps Command Operations Center. It is also being ported to the SIPRNET to support the Corps’ critical asset management system.

The system can also be used for more humble purposes, such as checking the weather forecast. Or when planning a jog, one can plot the course on the EOC map, and it can calculate the distance and show an elevation profile.

“All these tools, we had to put on there for mission assurance analysis, but they seemed useful to other people, so we put them on their screen, too,” Lisovich said. “We tried to put some other tools in that make people want to use it.”

Editor’s note: Reprinted from the Quantico Sentry.