The National Guard Bureau (NGB) is responsible
for overall planning, maintenance, and operational readiness
of all domestic Air and Army Guard units, including maintenance
of facilities and capabilities to respond to national and
international emergencies. NGB conducts the necessary background
planning, programming, engineering, and logistics studies
to assure peace-time and mobilization readiness. NGB uses
standard army systems to perform its mission, but requires
capabilities beyond the scope of these systems in order
to increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its
operations. The process of enhancing standard army systems
with new capabilities for NGB requires a great deal of
time and money. NGB also has very limited control of this
process. Timeframes lengthen unexpectedly when higher priority
(and higher priced) changes for the active army take precedence
over NGB changes. At times, the standard army systems are
frozen and no changes whatsoever are permitted for periods
of 18 months or longer. These factors combined with a shrinking
military budget limit the ability of NGB to increase its
capabilities and adapt to a changing environment.
ORNL has broad R&D capabilities in military systems
planning, transportation and logistics analysis, and
automation systems, as well as energy research, development,
and policy analysis programs. The Laboratory is currently
involved in several R&D planning and engineering
programs related to DoD missions, including studies of
readiness and mobilization planning; transportation and
facility analysis; distribution of forces, equipment
and assets; evaluation of fuel requirements; and related
environmental, demographic and supporting study areas.
By applying experience gained in these areas in combination
with leading edge software development technology, ORNL
is able to quickly provide NGB with new capabilities
to increase efficiency. Integrated systems of hardware
and software have been developed from the ground up by
ORNL and installed at NGB at a fraction of the cost of
changing standard army systems.
The OSCAR project is designed to identify and develop
programs which automate requirements not included in
standard army systems. This includes providing automated
interfaces between standard army systems at the bureau
level and at the state/territory level. Project objectives
include accelerating movement of excess assets to improve
the readiness of the Army National Guard (ARNG) while
reducing excess on hand. OSCAR is a client/server system.
The OSCAR client software is written in Visual FoxPro
and runs on a Windows platform. The OSCAR server software
is written in C++ and utilizes a class library to achieve
RDBMS independent data access. The server platform consists
of a Sun Server with RAID storage. It runs the Solaris
operating system and the Oracle database engine.
The initial OSCAR system was installed at NGB in June,
1997. The system has allowed NGB to successfully increase
the combat readiness of the Army National Guard nationwide. |
