Take the tour: Lockheed Martin’s NextGen cyber lab

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Defence IQ was recently given exclusive access to Lockheed Martin UK’s NexGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Centre (NCITE) at its hub in Farnborough. There to meet us was John Plumb, NCITE UK Manager, who gave us a tour of the cyber lab while discussing the role of NCITE and how the Centre’s work is becoming increasingly important in this network-centric age.

What is NCITE?

NCITE, previously known as Swift until a rebrand in January 2011, is part of Lockheed’s Integrated Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS) division, which focuses on three predominant sectors: Defence, Civil and National (also referred to as Security).

“When this Lab was set-up in 2006 it was really about showcasing what Lockheed had to offer but in 2009 we expanded to specifically undertake F-35 operational analysis,” Plumb explained.

Since changing name to NCITE last year, the Centre has also altered its focus and its role is now evolving within the Lockheed Martin NextGen Innovation framework.

“Because we support the whole of Lockheed Martin UK we get to see everything. We’ve become a catalyst for horizontal integration,” Plumb said. “We often bring parties together and we play a technology consultancy role by default.”

The facility in Farnborough is home to over 200 Lockheed Martin employees, with around 15 of these dedicated to the NCITE lab.

….Excite at NCITE

We asked what NCITE did and about some of the activities it undertakes on a day-to-day basis.

“We host events and technology demonstrations; we have facilitated collaborative workshops, like MTDS (Mission Training via. Distributed Simulation) with NATO industry partners … and we provide facilities for other people to do training,” Plumb explained. “We have a large data repository, which has for example intelligence reports, open source data, such as Jane’s information, and full motion video which we generated using modelling and simulation tools.

“We also provide consultancy on project management and conduct rapid prototyping with scenario generation,” Plumb added.

Elaborating on the bigger picture, Plumb said: “We’re an IS&GS lab so we support IS&GS and their strategic thrust within the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and we’ve also undertaken some work for countries further East like India. Those strategic thrusts aren’t just defence; our Civil division deals with air traffic control, the postal sorting, and it recently did the UK census for example.”

Breaking it down, around 60% of NCITE’s capabilities are directed towards R&D, with 30% being event hosting and the remaining 10% consultancy work. Focusing in on the main aspects that underpin NCITE’s role, Plumb explained that collaboration and research and development (R&D) were the driving forces.

“The big thing about this place is collaboration, it’s not just about using Lockheed Martin’s expertise but it’s also focused on bringing in partners and working with them to build customer solutions … that is one of the major thrusts for NexGen.”

Emphasising the collaboration aspect, Plumb said that “We look for best-of-breed capabilities, if we don’t have it we will get a partner who does.

“We aim to do joint R&D, that’s the vision.”

Plumb said that since becoming NCITE last year there was a “much greater emphasis on research and development now.” However, the lab’s role is again evolving as it seeks to integrate further into the supply chain.

 “After concluding the R&D phase we tend to hand-over to deliver teams, although the CONOPS (Concept of Operations) that was revised at the end of last year for NexGen suggested that we should now grow our research and development to a higher state of maturity so that we may actually go on to support the delivery. We haven’t done it ourselves yet, but that is an important shift I think.”

Shifting from Swift, to NCITE, and now looking ahead…

Discussing the future for NCITE UK, Plumb explained that “there’s been a change in emphasis recently; cyber is really being driven heavily by IS&GS now.” Also based in Farnborough is the UK Security Intelligence Centre (SIC), which is dedicated to the detection, identification and response to information security incidents. NCITE works in close collaboration with the SIC, which was only opened in December, to develop Lockheed Martin UK’s cyber capabilities.

Last year was the year cyber threats suddenly became very real, with Lockheed joining a long list of other corporations like Sony, Booz Allen Hamilton and RSA to have been targeted by hacking groups like LulzSec and Anonymous. Plumb was reluctant to go into the details of the incident but it is clearly playing a formative part of the company’s drive for cyber hygiene. Part of NCITE UK’s role is to help develop these cyber capabilities in collaboration with other labs and IRAD.

At the opening of the UK SIC Giri Sivanesan, Lockheed Martin UK Head of Cyber, said: “In the future we will be looking to support more customers in the public and private sector through advanced cyber defence solutions and training customer staff in the latest cyber tradecraft.”

Aside from cyber, Plumb talked through a number of other initiatives that NCITE UK is looking at in the future.

“The other thing that we want to do more of is replicating communication links, for example modelling tactical data link protocols and modelling bandwidth constraints so that you can stress the system to see where the choke points are. They are real-world issues. We’re hoping to get more capability in to do just that.”

Much of the work NCITE is involved with centres around aerospace applications, but Plumb and Simon Russell, NCITE UK's Chief Engineer, were quick to underline the significance of NCITE’s work across the defence spectrum as it becomes increasingly net-centric.

“The demand for data and information exchange is going up. In the future customers will need to put in the requisite measures to actually ensure that they can mange that information exchange, that it increases and still be secure, which is quite a big challenge across the land, sea, maritime and space domains.”

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Contributor:   Andrew Elwell

Andrew graduated from The University of Nottingham with an MA in History in 2003. After graduating Andrew started his career with a niche armour systems manufacturer, which provided ballisitic and blast armour products for the international defence market. His first major undertaking was to project manage a UOR up-armour programme for an in-theatre MoD vehicle. After completion of the contract, Andrew headed up the research and development department at the company. This involved designing, developing, testing and presenting new armour solutions to defeat customer specific threats to all major European and International ballistic and blast standards.

Following this Andrew moved behind the desk and became Senior Editor at a news and data provider, offering proprietary analysis, intelligence, market research and data on the global security and defence industry. The role offered the chance to write widely on the industry, exploring new technologies and getting to grips with corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions and debt and equity fundraisings.

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