Boeing and the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command (SMDC/ARSTRAT) have launched a joint research-and-development effort to coordinate and fuse multiple types of sensor data in a secure environment for Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) and space situational awareness concept exploration.Boeing and the SMDC/ARSTRAT signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) on Feb. 24, and today the two organizations met to exchange preliminary technical information at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville.

"This agreement effectively allows the SMDC/ARSTRAT's Data Fusion Distribution Center to exercise and examine Boeing's multilevel Security modeling and simulation capabilities using actual government data," said Michael Schexnayder, Deputy to the Commander for Research, Development and Acquisition at SMDC/ARSTRAT. "Through this joint effort, our teams will develop a collaborative, net-centric, open-source environment to support the analyses of a multitude of space and IAMD issues."

The CRADA will benefit from a Memorandum of Agreement between SMDC/ARSTRAT and the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) to provide expertise, tools and information to enhance the final desired outcome of the CRADA: an effective Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that may be used to validate ballistic missile defense concepts using modeling and simulation.

"Boeing is proud to partner with SMDC/ARSTRAT on research and development that supports a national need for secure, cross-domain data exchange," said Dave Pope, director of Boeing Command and Control Enterprise Solutions.