Fusion Center controllers played a vital role in supporting consequence management for the Global Positioning System end-of-week rollover Aug. 21. The EOW rollover occurs every 20 years, or 1,024 weeks, making this the first EOW rollover since the system's internal clock began Jan. 6, 1980.

"The GPS system uses composite readings from 230 atomic clocks around the world to track absolute and relative time down to a nanosecond," said Bill Lubera, Air Force Materiel Command Year 2000 Program Office. GPS receivers, he explained, are used for everything from local- and wide-area networks to bank automated teller machine systems, public utilities, radar nets and cellular phone towers to synchronize transactions and transmissions.

If GPS users worldwide detected any anomalies, they reported them to controllers at the GPS User Support Center, Colorado Springs, Colo., and the GPS Joint Program Office, Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif., who then passed the information to the Air Force Fusion Center at Standard Systems Group here, for correlation with other information being received from other Air Force units.

The 45-person Fusion Center battle staff met their challenge head on. With numerous systems integration contractors and SSG troops busy finalizing construction of the new 16,000-foot Fusion Center, and continuing systems installation and integration, controllers were collecting, recording and reporting GPS data to the Air Force Operations Center at the Pentagon.

These reports gave Air Force decision-makers at the AFOC near real-time visibility of the global event, explained Fusion Center Program Manager 1st Lt. Todd Butler.

Working around the clock as the central point for data collection, Fusion Center operators monitored communications networks and customer issues throughout the Air Force, consolidating and transforming the raw data into useable information for the AFOC, according to Butler.

The operations tempo was low, explained Col. Robert Glitz, chief of SSG's Software Factory Customer Support Division, with only minor GPS-related incidents reported and no major mission impact. But, because of similarities between the GPS EOW and Y2K, the colonel said the weekend provided invaluable training that will be applied to Y2K consequence management.

"We've been preparing for this as well as for Y2K and the time and effort we've invested really showed in how well we handled the GPS EOW rollover," Butler said. "But, this hands-on experience was priceless."

Stakeholders were on site representing various Department of Defense agencies including the Coast Guard, U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Space Command, Air Force Communication Agency's Hammer Ace and the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center.

The center was fully staffed with 45 operators working each 12-hour shift to ensure they could handle the worst possible scenarios. As expected, GPS users didn't experience any significant problems, but Glitz said this weekend was an excellent training opportunity for the controllers in the Fusion Center -- a sort of "dress rehearsal" for Y2K.

"Train, organize and equip," he said. "That's how you win wars."

Although the center was christened during the GPS EOW rollover, the Air Force Fusion Center will not be officially open for business until Sept. 1.

This new facility will provide long-term benefits to the Air Force as an information operations cell, explained Maj. Kenneth Hirlinger, one of the Fusion Center's officers of the day.

Long after the world has recovered from the millennium bug, the Fusion Center will provide collaborative capabilities to allow senior Air Force leadership a location to conduct detailed planning sessions and consequence management in a classified environment, Glitz said.

The Fusion Center is a dedicated branch of the Electronic Systems Center's consolidated around-the-the-clock customer service desk. SSG and the Fusion Center are elements of Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., and Air Force Materiel Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

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