The US Army granted a technical direction letter worth $1.9 million to Centreville, Virginia-based Parsons Corporation for the acquisition of biometric mobile and static collection devices, including software, in support of the US Army’s Next Generation Biometrics Collection Capability (NXGBCC).
Expected to be fielded in 2025, NXGBCC will replace the Army’s Biometrics Automated Toolset-Army (BAT-A), which the Army says, “is old and obsolete.”
NXGBCC will gather, analyze, and share fingerprints, facial, iris, and voice biometrics, and is the first time Army personnel will use a capability that is software-based rather than tied to unique hardware that must be maintained, according to the Army.
The technical direction letter’s period of performance is through April 2025 and will combine the devices with the Ares Gateway Transaction Manager, according to Army Program Executive Office–Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors.
Parsons Corporation offers the Ares Gateway Transaction Manager as part of its identity management and biometrics solutions, which include fingerprint matching, facial recognition, and iris scanning. The Ares Gateway is a centralized system that manages biometric collections and transactions. It receives biometric submissions from collection devices and automatically sends them to national databases. It also returns biometric matches to operators and administrators, who can then send them back to collection devices.
The Ares Gateway automatically submits collections to authoritative national back-end databases. Biometric matches are returned and flagged for Gateway operators and administrators and can be automatically sent back to collection devices in near real-time.
The Army recently completed field tests of its $28.3 million NXGBCC hardware and software at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri under the Fort Leonard Wood Soldier Touch Point initiative. The goal was to collect important feedback from soldiers on the effectiveness of the still in-development NXGBCC system. The soldiers completed tasks involving mobile biometric collection centered around a laptop for static operations.
This is the first time the Army is deploying a capability that is software-based, with added voice modality, and not tied to unique hardware that must be maintained. The Army says NXGBCC “is more integrated” with the Department of Defense’s biometric enterprise and unified action partners.
The system was field-tested by the Army in late 2019 and was chosen for further development.