The Army posted an article about the TAK Product Center Center’s support for the National Guard’s roll out of TAK for use in their COVID-19 response. There are several nuggets in here that haven’t previously seen print.
Highlights:
- TAK noow has a TAK Product Center in Army Futures Command, under Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC)
- This fielding is for 2,000 soldiers, plus Civil Support Teams
- TAK has 150,000 user across the government and partner nations
- There are 15 D0D programs of record that use TAK
Here’s most of the article:
Army Futures Command (AFC) is fielding a critical communications tool to National Guard units in six states and the District of Columbia in support of the COVID-19 response.
The software tool, known as Team Awareness Kit (TAK), is currently available to all National Guard Civil Support Team (CST) units and is supporting additional units from 12 states. The Army began developing TAK upgrades a month ago that are designed specifically for greater communications during the pandemic response, according to Josh Sterling, director of TAK Product Center at AFC’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC). More than 2,000 Soldiers are fielded with the TAK as of April 29.
TAK is a map-based software application that enables widespread coordination among thousands of users with features such as a mission planning, chat, overlays and the capability to create and view a common operating picture, Sterling said. It’s compatible with Android, Apple iOS and Windows. TAK is not medical diagnostic device.
“A National Guard member stationed at a hospital with an Android phone or Windows-based laptop could quickly and accurately pass data through a secure Army network. Then, the information could be aggregated at a state level and forwarded further to other federal agencies,” said Sterling, who works in the CCDC Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center.
TAK can be deployed quickly over a large footprint without fielding new hardware as the application operates via personal or government-issued devices, Sterling said. Thus, the government saves significant time and money by eliminating the need to distribute specific devices to users spread across the country.
The C5ISR Center has developed an elastic cloud server within the last month that can seamlessly and securely scale to meet user connectivity demands. These developments integrate with awareness, response and geospatial tools already in use by the National Guard to expedite the deployment of this upgraded capability
The C5ISR Center is also integrating TAK within the Contingency Response Situational Awareness/Situational Understanding Tactical Applications Leader Kit (CRSSTALK), which is led by the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier. CRSSTALK delivers a line of map-based, situational awareness software applications across multiple platforms to provide tactical capabilities for military and federal government operations.
Sterling noted that individual states and National Guard units determine how and when they will use TAK. The tool is based upon the Tactical Assault Kit software that 150,000 users across the U.S. government and partner nations have used since 2010. The TAK Product Center is the central development hub for all TAK efforts spanning the U.S. government and international partners, including 15 DoD programs of record.
