Mil-Tech

Harris antennas helping soldiers

Satellite antennas made by Harris Corp. in Palm Bay are a crucial part of a data transfer system that allows soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and other locations to transmit and gather video information.

In December, United Launch Alliance orbited the last of three satellites from Cape Canaveral, completing the Wideband Global SATCOM constellation, helping soldiers transmit video to and from the battlefield and allowing video to be transmitted from unmanned drones. Three additional satellites are scheduled for launch beginning no earlier than December 2011.

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Each $300 million, 7,600-pound, Boeing-built satellite carries 10 Harris phased array antennas that can be pointed at specific parts of the battlefield.

“The system is performing extremely well. The data rates achieved by the satellite during on-orbit test were two times the requirement,” said Bill Gattle, vice president of Space Communications Systems, Harris Government Communications Systems. “The performance of the Harris antennas plays a large role in those results.”

Boeing compared going from the previous Defense Satellite Communications spacecraft to the WGS satellites to going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection.

“Wherever our troops go, they can now depend on this vital capability,” Air Force Col. Don Robbins, Wideband SATCOM Group commander, said in an interview with Boeing. “When you’re out in the middle of nowhere, that’s a pretty critical lifeline to have.”

As the fighting in Afghanistan depends more on surveillance and attacks from unmanned drones, fast satellite communications will remain crucial. Communications links in the field have gone from truck-mounted systems to terminals in suitcases.

The high-speed Internet connection provided by WGS allows troops to share full-motion video and sensor data gathered by the military’s growing arsenal of unmanned surveillance aircraft. Harris also has developed tactical radios that allow connection to satellite signals and lets those video signals be shared within a radio network.

Boeing awarded the WGS antenna contract to Harris in 2001 and the Melbourne-based defense company has already shipped the steerable, solid graphite offset antennas for Block II.

Internet and e-commerce industry in Iraq

We are to consider today Internet and e-commerce industry of one of the Arabic countries, located in Western Asia, Iraq. This Muslim country is spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert. Iraq is bordered by Jordan to the west, Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south. The economy of the country is dominated by the oil sector, which has traditionally provided about 95% of foreign exchange earnings.

As for the country’s telecom market, it has undergone much repair and development since the end of hostilities. Until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Internet access was tightly controlled and very few people were allowed to go online.

Thus far, the most developed and mature appeared to be mobile sector, with four operators sharing the market. But Zain of Kuwait’s subsidiary Zain Iraq has much the largest market share, with well over 50% share. Actually, boom in mobile sector can be partially explained by the lack of any significant fixed-line market, with infrastructure almost non-existent outside of the capital, Baghdad. There is also a great lack of fibre-optic backbone infrastructure, both nationally and for international connections. With better backbone infrastructure mobile Internet services could probably be successful but as yet 3G/HSPA services are not available.

Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Internet access has become commonplace. At present, the stress is making on developing the network, with the national regulator launching a tender for wireless local loop licenses. The major development has been the establishment and rapid growth of mobile services from a zero start following the award of three temporary mobile licenses.

Several Wireless Local Loop licenses have been awarded and operators have launched services using CDMA networks but they have not as yet made much impact.

The incumbent Internet services provider, Uruklink, used to be the sole Iraqi ISP. However, currently the leading operator faces competition from other ISPs, including broadband satellite Internet access services from both Middle East and European VSAT hubs.

The premier military telecom service provider competing the national incumbent appeared to be TS2, an Internet Provider for US Army soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite most of all active TS2 users are Polish and US Army soldiers, the operator’s solutions have been implemented also for private companies and organizations. Before end of 2007 year, the TS2 solutions have been available for numerous NATO military entities. Since 2009 TS2 started advertising satellite Internet services for the US Marine Corps in Afghanistan. At present, TS2′s network in Iraq and Afghanistan has over 15 thousand military users of local broadband satellite connections. TS2 also delivers telecommunication services for Iraq-based Police Transition Teams.

Since 2006 several other companies were launched their services, offering cheaper services and smaller bandwidth affordable for single users such Advanced Technology Systems-Iraq. As of 2010, the top 4 ISPs in the capital of the country operate:

• Rose Telecom, delivering speed up to 4/0.7 Mbps in off-peak times and 512/128 in peak times
• Halasat, offering speed up to 3/0.5 Mbps in off-peak times
• Earthlink, targeting home/single users
• ATS-Iraq, also targeting individual users

Among other ISPs operating on the Iraqi market successfully, according to ostamyy there are:

• Afaq Link Technology – offers communication and Internet services by providing satellite system and wireless services in Iraq.
• Baghdad Telecom – provides infrastructure solutions in the areas of wireless, security and other IT solutions to small, medium and large entreprises in Iraq.
• Nashita – represents a leading ICT US-based ICT Company providing Satellite Internet in Iraq since 1999 and now provides both dedicated and shared VSAT satellite internet service in Iraq.
• Iraq Satellite Internet Services – delivers high-speed Internet connectivity in Iraq with our high-performance Galileo satellite network.

Interestingly, because of the disappearance of phone lines since 2004, all the Iraq’s ISPs uses the Wi-fi Technology to deliver Internet connection. The Iraqis are waiting for the current government to start repairing the phoneline to provide them with the cable/DSL Internet.

Internet access, limited prior to the war, has grown quickly since then due to the availability of satellite broadband access and the opening of Internet cafes. Nevertheless, Iraq has the lowest in the Middle East penetration level, with 1.1% Iraqis connected, as says www.internetworldstats.com. In order to compare, we are to note, that only 0.1% of people in Iraq, or 12,500, were subscribed to the Web. At present, mainly Iraqis get Internet access at Internet cafes with satellite connections.

Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Iraq is .iq, administered by Network Information Center of Iraq. Registrations are mainly available at third-level domains beneath following second-level categories:

• gov.iq – Governmental entities
• edu.iq – Educational Institutions
• com.iq – Commercial entitites
• mil.iq – Military Institutions
• org.iq – Non-profit organizations
• net.iq – Network Service Providers

Importantly, .iq domain name had previously been in limbo for years, as the delegated manager was imprisoned in Texas on charges of alleged connection to Hamas for which he was later convicted in 2005. Some talk of redelegation and relaunching began taking place at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and in 2005 a redelegation to the National Communications and Media Commission of Iraq was approved by ICANN.

As for e-commerce sector in Iraq, it’s eventually on the initial stage of its development due to the imperfection of Internet infrastructure in the country.

However, more and more businesses are launching their websites; and business cards are now displaying e-mail addresses.

Besides, there was launched a new Iraqi Business Center that represents a partnership between the CPA and the Iraq Ministry of Trade and provides on-site business counseling for the local Iraqi business community.

The Center is located at the Convention Center in Baghdad and has an informative website at www.iraqibusinesscenter.org, which however, is temporary under construction. The Iraqi Business Center website provides a database of Iraqi companies seeking subcontracts and international partners for work in Iraq.

The sites like this, or some others like, for instance, the US Department of Commerce Iraq Reconstruction Task Force website, target to promote the present and future use of the internet by businesses wishing to do business in Iraq.

Importantly, the US Commerce has one of the best websites for obtaining Internet information regarding business opportunities in Iraq.

An international business center was recently opened in Kirkuk. It is operated between the local government, Coalition forces, the Kirkuk Chamber of Commerce, and the Kirkuk Contractors Union. One of the prevalent goals is to facilitate coordination between local and international businesses and to facilitate unsolicited bids for reconstruction work.

Since 2003 the Central Bank of Iraq has authorized Iraq’s private banks to process international payments, remittances and foreign currency letters of credit. However, national banks are still not offering on-line banking services and transactions. Thus far, Iraqi banks need to do e-business in order to provide security. This would include authentication, data integrity, confidentiality, payment gateway.

As for the e-government page, since 2003 Iraq has been in transition and led by the US Coalition Provisional Authority. Future goals for the Iraqi and other e-governments include a national ID, health care database, and e-voting.

However, some barriers still exist in Iraq for successful e-government deployment. Among them, like in other countries in the region, there are: societal rigidity, weakness in ICT education, unfair income distribution resulting in lack of access to ICT education and technology. Iraq faced brain drain when thousands of Iraqis fled the country or were forced to leave during Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Well, despite this Muslim country cannot boast about the high level of ICT progress and as the result of e-commerce sector development, some good signs of future success in this sphere are obvious.

ViaSat gives war effort a boost

Airplanes passing silently over enemy territory in Iraq and Afghanistan record and transmit videos in real time back to intelligence experts in the United States with the help of Carlsbad satellite communications company ViaSat.

Because those videos help inform military decisions, picture quality is extremely important, said Larry Taylor, the head of Government Satellite Communications Systems at the company.

“When you’re looking for intelligence on the ground, you would like to be able to look at a person and see if he is carrying a gun or a broom,” he said.

To boost the resolution and speed of these videos, ViaSat recently doubled the data rate its equipment can transmit, from 512 to 1024 kilobytes. This upgrade was made at the request of the Department of Defense, one of the company’s biggest customers, Taylor said.

“Everyone wants a higher speed, because the more we use video, the more demanding speeds we require,” he said. “The same thing is true in the Department of Defense.”

The company also recently improved military planes’ ability to send data back to the ground.

“Traditionally when we think of Internet access, we think about a simple mouse-click to load a complex Web page, which is a lot of data going out to a remote facility, but very little coming back,” Taylor said. “But with the Department of Defense, they are actually creating the data as videos or other intelligence information collected on an airplane, and that information has to be relayed to analysis centers on the ground.”

Giving an airplane a wireless connection is like hitting a moving target, because the plane’s antennas are never in the same place. ViaSat accomplishes this task with a network of 13 hubs on the ground connected to 13 satellites, which create a “worldwide footprint” of wireless connection, Taylor said.

“You can fly an airplane under any footprint virtually anywhere in the world and have a connection,” he said.

Boosting the planes’ data speed will allow them to send videos with higher resolution and more frames per second, both of which are important for military intelligence activities, Taylor said. Greater resolution means the video’s screen can be enlarged without creating a pixilated, or blurry, image, and increasing a video’s frames makes it smoother.

“Slower frame speeds mean the video has a jerky, flickerlike motion,” Taylor said. “If you were watching a movie, you wouldn’t stand for jerky motion, and for the military, a smooth video is even more important.”

Although ViaSat originally only supplied its satellite connection technology to commercial vehicles, including business jets and trains, the Department of Defense asked the company to adapt its technology to military airplanes.

ViaSat’s satellite antenna and software are installed in more than 100 military aircraft and more than 100 business aircraft, Taylor said. The company is also expanding its reach into boats, and plans to have software in more than 750 maritime craft soon.

The average cost to equip military planes with the antenna and software to transmit videos is about $350,000, and ViaSat also has government contracts to work on upgrading the planes, he said. The company brings in about $50 million a year between its commercial and military customers, but Taylor said that number is expected to grow.

The company’s data rate from the air to the ground is also expected to grow to 2 megabytes “and beyond,” he said. It plans to transition to higher frequency bands and launch a new satellite next year.

“We have a very aggressive road map to get higher and higher data rates, and to reduce the cost and increase the speed of our services,” Taylor said.

Israeli military confronts new foe: the Internet

The security obsessed Israeli military is confronting a new adversary — trying to control what its own soldiers post to the Internet.

Facebook, along with YouTube and other popular sites, is turning into a formidable nuisance for the army, as young recruits in this tech-crazy country post embarrassing and potentially sensitive information online, circumventing tight military controls.

The issue exploded onto the national agenda this week when a young ex-soldier posted pictures of herself in uniform, posing in front of handcuffed, blindfolded Palestinian prisoners on her Facebook page under the heading “Army — The Best Time of My Life.”

The controversial posting, along with a series of other recent gaffes, highlights the challenges facing Israel’s high-tech military — known, among other things, for its shadowy electronic-warfare units — as it struggles to keep up with the ever-shifting sands of the Internet.

Last month, a video of Israeli soldiers dancing to the drunken party anthem “TiK ToK” during a patrol in the West Bank emerged on YouTube, earning them a reprimand.

Around the same time, a secret intelligence unit launched a Facebook group for its members that divulged details of the secret base where they served. The site was removed several days later after the army found out.

And, in perhaps the most serious breach, a military raid in the West Bank had to be called off earlier this year after a soldier posted details about the upcoming operation on Facebook.

Such incidents illustrate “how difficult it is for the military to operate, stick to policy, and keep people in line in light of the new communication realities,” said Sheizaf Rafaeli, director of the Sagy Center for Internet Research and the Study of the Information Society at the University of Haifa.

That’s in stark contrast to the traditional media, over which Israel’s military censor has long maintained tight control.

Both Israeli and international news outlets are required to submit reports with potentially sensitive material for review, and the censor’s office often returns them with words or even entire sections blacked out. Access is severely limited to military personnel, from field soldiers to the army’s top echelons, and it can take weeks to line up an interview with key commanders. Once approved, there are tight restrictions — quotes often must be run through the army spokesman’s office and soldiers frequently can’t be named or photographed.

The emergence of the latest pictures dominated Israeli news shows Tuesday, drawing tough criticism from the army and receiving heavy coverage in the Arab media.

Palestinians, along with Israeli human rights groups, denounced the photos as a cruel symbol of Israel’s four-decade occupation, and the Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera interspersed its coverage with pictures of Abu Ghraib, the notorious U.S. prison in Iraq where American soldiers tortured inmates.

The former Israeli officer, Eden Aberjil, struck a defensive tone in interviews with Israeli media, insisting she did nothing wrong and saying she was surprised she had offended anyone.

“I have nothing to say sorry about. I treated them really well, I didn’t abuse them, I didn’t curse them, I didn’t humiliate them. I merely took a picture near them,” Aberjil told Channel 2 TV.

She said the men were civilians from the Gaza Strip who had been caught trying to enter Israel, apparently in search of work, and she posed for the pictures because she had never met anyone from Gaza.

Aberjil, who the army said is in her mid-20s, denounced any comparisons to Abu Ghraib as “delusional,” saying she was astonished by the attention she had received and accusing the army of abandoning her. She claimed similar things take place in the army “every day.”

She did, however, say she was sorry if the pictures, taken in 2008, had hurt anyone’s feelings. She said she removed them after learning that others felt they were inappropriate.

Asked whether the posting violated Facebook’s code of conduct, the company said “it appears that the girl in question removed the photos from her account on her own — and we were not involved in the removal of these photos in any way.” It declined further comment.

The army said it permits soldiers to utilize social-networking sites, but only to upload unclassified material. It said all soldiers are taught about the guidelines.

One officer, speaking on condition of anonymity under military guidelines, said the censorship office has ways to monitor the Internet and make sure sensitive information does not appear online.

However, in cases deemed embarrassing but not a threat to security, such as the Aberjil pictures, “there is nothing anyone can do,” he said.

Capt. Barak Raz, an army spokesman, said the issue was about morals, not security.

“I’m not concerned with the fact that photos were uploaded. As the military, we’re concerned that such photos were taken to begin with, which are a gross violation of our ethical code,” he said. “This isn’t who we are as a military.”

Because Aberjil is no longer in the army, it’s unclear whether she can be punished.

Rafaeli said that while the military would like to curb the use of social media for the purposes of secrecy, PR and internal control, it is “probably up against an insurmountable challenge.”

Before, soldiers would have words censored out of letters that were sent home, but because of the Internet and social media, this is “no longer feasible,” he said.

Social networks are a part of everyday life for today’s generation of American military service members as well.

Many keep in touch with friends and family using Facebook, and they are savvy users of YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. A YouTube video featuring Afghanistan-stationed soldiers re-enacting Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” music video, for example, gained viral popularity earlier this year.

Recognizing the reach of these services, the Pentagon announced earlier this year that everyone from troops in the field to the highest brass and civilian leaders will be allowed to use social networking sites on the military’s non-classified computer network.

The policy followed a seven-month review in which the Defense Department weighed the threats and benefits of allowing the wide use of Internet capabilities. It permits commanders to cut off access — on a temporary basis — to safeguard a mission or reserve bandwidth for official use.

With the decision, the army unblocked YouTube, MySpace and more than a dozen sites that had been closed in May 2007.

More US-NATO Military Bases: US Armed Forces in Central Asia

The US plans to build military training centers in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. First these plans were announced last year and they received a wide response because earlier it had been announced that a Russian military base would be built in the south of Kyrgyzstan. Now Pentagon is not going to confine itself with Kyrgyzstan and plans to build military facilities on the territory of five states of the region. It implies the redeployment of part of military infrastructure of the US from Afghanistan to the former Soviet Central Asia and Kazakhstan and also the construction of NATO facilities there.

According to “EurasiaNet” (an internet-portal financed by George Soros), US Central Command’s counter-narcotics fund was to allocate more than $40 million for the construction of military training centers in the cities of Osh (Kyrgyzstan) and Karatoga (Tajikistan), a canine center and helicopter hangar near the city of Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan) as well as for the strengthening of border check points in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Pentagon estimates the construction of each border check point at $5-10 million. The location of the US border check point in Uzbekistan is not disclosed out but the location of the check points in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan is quite remarkable. The Serahs check point (Turkmenistan) is on the border with Iran and the Kyrgyz check point (where the modernization of electricity supply and water supply and sewerage system is planned) – near Batken. Both check points are of geo strategical importance – first in case of a war between the US and Iran and second – in case of destabilization of the political situation in this part of the Fergana Valley like it was in 1999-2000 during the invasion of Islamic movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

In Kazakhstan the US plans to build a new helicopter hangar near the city of Alma-Ata, a canine center and a center for inspection of transport vehicles, with the total construction costs amounting to $10 million. In Tajikistan the Americans plans to build a military training center in Karatoga (not far from the capital of Dushanbe) for Tajik servicemen. There they plan to practice combat actions in city conditions of a city and to train sharpshooters/spotters. The construction costs are estimated at $10 million. A similar center worth $ 5.5 million for practicing different kinds of combat actions in the course of border and counterterrorist operations should be built in the Kyrgyz city of Batken.

It has been known about the US plans to strengthen its military presence in Central Asia since last autumn when the Northern supply route through Russia began to function alongside with the transport route from Pakistan. It is known that Pentagon is working on the plan to deploy elite units of its special troops in Central Asia namely four battalions of the 3rd Special forces (airborne) group which has a long experience of fighting in Afghanistan.

In addition to Central Asia the US plans to deploy its forces in Southern Caucasus – in particular early warning radars in Georgia. It is expected that besides the radars Pentagon may locate a land military base and a naval base in Georgia with 25,000 servicemen.

Finally Pentagon is to build a special operations complex in Afghanistan near the Uzbek border worth $100 million. The complex with the area of 6 hectares will be located in Mazar-i-Sharif, 275 km north-west from Kabul and 56 km south from the Uzbek city of Termez. In 18 months the Americans are to build a united operational center, residential blocks, a communication hub, a center for tactical operations, storage facilities, a training center, a medical center, repair facilities a center for logistics, a canteen, recreation facilities and a doghouse. They plan to put the complex into operation in late 2012 early 2012. In longer perspective 2012-2016 the US Central Command plans to allocate another $3.8 billion on the construction of military facilities in the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Even a brief look at the deployment of the US military objects shows that it almost fully repeats the geography of “the Eurasian Balkans” of Z. Brzezinski, who gave this geopolitical region a decisive role in fighting Russia on “the Grand Chessboard”. By locating its special troops, surveillance equipment and other forces in Central Asia and in the Caucasus after the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan in 2011 the US will ensure its military presence right besides Russia’s “belly” near the northern border of Iran and the western border of China. Here the Americans plan to deploy an intelligence network which will ensure control over the situation in the most important points of Eurasia.

Army Under Pressure to Bring Broadband to the Battlefield

The Army has more radios, computers and advanced networking technology than ever before. Soldiers at war, alas, are information-deprived.

Despite an information-technology buying spree over the past decade, the Army has yet to figure out how to sate troops’ gargantuan appetite for information and ever-growing needs for battlefield intelligence. Current battlefield networks are accessible by divisions, brigades and battalions. But smaller units remain digital orphans, even though they lead the day-to-day fighting in current wars. The squads, platoons and companies require high-bandwidth connectivity so they can share information and gain instant awareness of what is happening on the ground, Army officials said.

Help appears to be on the way. In the Army’s 2010 modernization roadmap, the “network” is billed as a top priority. After more than a decade of failed efforts and billions of dollars spent, the pressure is on for the Army to deliver a battlefield network that supports small, mobile units. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli characterized the network as essential to the future Army. “It will require an open architecture that will allow further plug-and-play development in the future as our network grows and matures,” Chiarelli said at an industry conference last year.

The Army since the early 1990s has made several attempts at building a battlefield Internet, but the technology has leapt way ahead of the military procurement bureaucracy. The closest the Army has come to having an IP network at the squad level is in the “land warrior” system — an ensemble that includes a communications and navigation computer-radio suite. In the land warrior network, each member can pinpoint other soldiers’ locations by simply looking at a display. But this is only a niche solution and does not solve the larger problem of connecting every element of a deployed brigade.

Visions of broadband connectivity in the field and smart phones that can be constantly updated with new applications, from a technical standpoint, are realistic, experts said. But they will never be realized as long as the Army continues to buy IT the same way it acquires tanks and helicopters. It simply takes too long to move technology to the field, and by the time it gets there, the market already has moved on.

The Army’s chief information officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, said at an industry conference that the service since 9/11 has tripled its inventory of radios to more than 900,000 and increased its ability to transmit data within U.S. Central Command networks from 46 megabytes per second to about 10 gigabytes per second.

Similar capabilities have not trickled down into the small units that don’t have access to the high-tech command centers and need mobile equipment they can operate from their trucks. Platoons and squads have line-of-sight radios — whose signals are blocked by buildings or mountains — with low-bandwidth and they are unable to chat online or transmit images. Soldiers at a typical forward base in Afghanistan using line-of-sight radios travel only a few miles down the road before they lose their connection to the base.

Under a program called Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team Increment 1, or E-IBCT, the Army is piecing together its most advanced information technologies into a deployable network that would allow soldiers to not only stay connected to each other but also to capture intelligence from unmanned sensors and disseminate it throughout the brigade. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in 2012, will be the launch customer for the new technologies. Soldiers from the brigade are testing the systems at Fort Bliss, Texas. If the Pentagon approves additional funding, more brigades could be equipped with the advanced network later this decade.

With this technology, the “company commander becomes the network quarterback for the Army,” said Lt. Col. Darby McNulty, deputy program manager for network systems integration. The future company “command post” is being designed to link all soldiers in a company and below, and also to connect the company with higher echelons and with national intelligence databases via satellite. The command post could be set up in a fixed site or could be installed in the cab of a large armored truck.

The nearly 1 million radios that the Army currently owns, however, are not part of this setup. The E-IBCT program is building the network with new software-programmable radios that were developed by the Defense Department’s “joint tactical radio system” or JTRS program. The radios can be programmed to operate a variety of software communication applications that are called “waveforms.”

JTRS program officials said that current radios cannot deliver the high bandwidth that deployed forces need and cannot run the required software applications.

For the company command post, three waveforms are required: The soldier radio waveform (for narrowband communications within a company), the wideband networking waveform (for broadband data transfer) and the network centric waveform (for satellite-based communications). The soldier radio waveform capacity to pass data is about 500 to 600 kilobits per second. The wideband networking waveform transfers five megabytes per second.

JTRS hardware includes a family of radios — a half-pound device for small robots, a two-pound handheld “rifleman” radio, a 14-pound “manpack” and a four-channel command-post system. The entire JTRS program includes nine waveforms not just for the Army but for the other branches of the military as well.

For the first time, the latest advances in radio communications are being brought together in a live exercise, McNulty said during a conference call with reporters. The recent tests at Fort Bliss proved that JTRS is an essential piece of the Army’s future network, he said. “It’s something you absolutely want to stick with.”

For the exercise, mobile company command posts installed aboard armored trucks were outfitted with “network integration kits,” which are the network hubs connecting the terrestrial and satellite layers of the network to one another. Each NIK consists of a command-and-control terminal, called the “integrated computer system,” a four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio and a blue-force tracker display screen. Dismounted soldiers carried either a JTRS rifleman radio or a manpack radio.

The radios in each vehicle create a “mobile ad-hoc network,” or manet. Each tactical radio functions as a cell phone tower. At the tests in Fort Bliss, engineers extended the range of the network by adding an “aerial layer” made up of unmanned aircraft and helicopters that were outfitted with small JTRS radios. “We were able to extend sensor and position data beyond 20 km, in some cases up to 40 km,” McNulty said.

The four-channel JTRS, made by The Boeing Co., runs the soldier radio waveform, the wideband networking waveform and the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or Sincgars, waveform, which allows the commander to talk to all the vehicles in the unit. Sincgars is the most commonly used radio net in the Army.

Details about how the network will be organized and what specific equipment will be acquired are still being hashed out, said McNulty. “We need to better understand who needs what information at what level so we can better optimize the network,” he said. “If you can eliminate extraneous information you can improve the quality of the network, if you send everything to everyone all at once the quality of your service decreases exponentially.”

Tests will continue over the next several months.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this program is under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon’s senior acquisition officials will be reviewing test results this fall, and will determine whether the program will continue to receive funding. A separate evaluation is under way within the Army. This “network capabilities portfolio review” will examine the entire litany of Army IT programs and nominate winners and losers. It will look at whether the Army can afford to acquire new equipment, whether it should stick with “legacy” systems or, a most likely outcome, whether it should have a mix. Overseeing this review is Chiarelli, who has expressed concern about the “affordability” of current programs and famously brandished his iPhone as an example of the low-cost apps-friendly IT that soldiers need but the Army’s plodding acquisition system is unable to provide.

Another contentious issue in the ongoing reviews is whether JTRS can make up for lost time and deliver hardware at prices that are competitive with other radios. JTRS has been in development since 1999 and originally was scheduled to be fielded by 2006. Delays dogged the program as the slippages coincided with the war buildup, when billions of dollars were being appropriated in emergency war budgets to purchase new radios. When it became clear that JTRS was not ready, the Army poured billions into other radios. The result is today’s inventory that has tripled in size.

JTRS program officials now are forecasting that the models that the Army needs — the JTRS HMS (handheld/manpack/small form-fit) radios will be ready for deployment by 2011.
“These radios provide digital connectivity, networking down to the soldier level. That has not been done before,” said Army Col. John V. Zavarelli, program manager for JTRS HMS. Orders of up to 215,000 HMS radios are expected, he said in an interview. “We believe they could increase to 250,000 based on service needs.”

Zavarelli said he was not familiar with the Army’s network review and could not comment on the affordability of JTRS. He said all the services have been funding their share of JTRS research and development expenses. “I’m not sure the costs are an issue,” he said. “I certainly haven’t been told it in that way.”

About 750 pre-production radios have been purchased so far from prime contractor General Dynamics. Once the radios are cleared for full-rate production, the JTRS program office will solicit competitive bids from vendors for each variant. The assumption is that competitors will challenge General Dynamics and help to drive down prices, Zavarelli said. Several industry sources told National Defense that current JTRS HMS handheld radios cost upwards of $75,000 each, but Zavarelli said he could not confirm or discuss prices.

“We are on the edge of operational testing and limited rate production decisions in the next year,” he said. “We’ve offered some alternatives for accelerating [the development] and are waiting for a decision.”

Radio suppliers are watching these events closely as they seek to position their products for future JTRS business. Several executives interviewed for this story said they fear that the JTRS program is too rigid in that only radios that strictly meet the technical specifications of JTRS will be allowed to compete. That means none of the radios that exist in the military’s inventory today are acceptable. Under that scenario, the Army would be in a position of having to replace hundreds of thousands of radios that already are paid for and installed. A radio installation kit for an average Army vehicle costs more than the radio itself. When JTRS was conceived in the late 1990s, it was assumed that the radios would be installed in new Future Combat Systems vehicles. But when the FCS vehicle program was terminated last year, some Army officials sounded alarms about what this meant for JTRS. “By losing FCS a lot of the Army’s network and communications programs seriously unraveled,” said a retired Army officer who was closely involved in FCS.

Ripping out existing radios and installing new JTRS systems across the Army’s fleets of vehicles would be an exorbitant expense, several industry sources said. They don’t see how the Army will go along with such a plan when the services are under pressure to cut costs and find $100 billion in savings across all defense programs over the next five years.

Officials from one of the Army’s major radio suppliers, ITT Corp., have for years been trying to sell the idea that its Sincgars combat radios could be modified to run the soldier radio waveform (SRW) so the Army would not have to replace them with more expensive JTRS systems. ITT is the prime contractor for the SRW software and also the manufacturer of the Sincgars radios that the U.S. military has been using since the early 1980s.

ITT has delivered more than 500,000 radios, nearly half of them during the past two years. War funds paid for a huge expansion of ITT’s manufacturing plant so it could ramp up production from 1,000 to 6,000 radios per month. The Army Science Board, an advisory panel, recommended in a 2007 report that the Army “stop buying Sincgars immediately” so it could invest the money in “future, not legacy hardware.” But Congress continued to fund Sincgars purchases, and production continues to this day, although Army orders are scheduled to end in a couple of years.

With such a large inventory in the force, it is hard to see how the Army can toss it and buy all new hardware, said David Prater, ITT vice president for network communications.

“We’ve proposed adding a single channel SRW [to current Sincgars] to keep the cost down,” he said. “For $10,000 to $15,000 you’d get a two-channel radio that does Sincgars or SRW,” compared to a $75,000 two-channel manpack that does those two waveforms plus perhaps one or two others,” Prater said.

“The Army is wrestling with this,” he said. The timing has worked against JTRS. “In the meantime you’ve got all these Sincgars radios,” Prater said. “JTRS kind of missed the war. A lot of [non-JTRS] equipment was bought” during the past eight years.

Zavarelli insists that none of these options meets the requirements of JTRS.

“Some radios by design are incapable of hosting narrowband and wideband waveforms,” he said. ITT has suggested adding a “sidehat” data radio to Sincgars that could run the SRW waveform, but Zavarelli is not convinced that it would work. “That’s a separate entire radio that’s added to the Sincgars. I have a requirement for SRW radios and that’s what we are doing.”

Other vendors also have questioned the radio-procurement strategy as well as the Army’s larger game plan for acquiring information technology.

The Defense Department spent the better part of a decade developing JTRS and during that time the industry has moved on to other products and the technology landscape has changed, said Steve Marschilok, president of defense business at Harris RF Communications.

Any company that competes for JTRS production contracts will have to build a custom radio that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the marketplace, Marschilok said.

“You can’t procure IT the way we always have,” said Dennis Moran, vice president of Harris Corp.’s government communications systems division. The Army is stuck with an “antiquated requirements process that goes from Fort Gordon, to Fort Monroe, to the Pentagon,” Moran said. “You can’t force technology to adapt to requirements that are out of touch before ink is even dried on paper at TRADOC [Training and Doctrine Command] headquarters.”

In the case of JTRS, the government could have saved billions it spent on development by purchasing off-the-shelf products, Moran said. That is how U.S. Special Operations Command does business these days, he noted.

Harris has supplied more than 120,000 radios to the Defense Department. The company is a JTRS contractor for single-channel radios and expects to compete for future production contracts for the JTRS rifleman and manpack systems. It plans to offer variants of its existing radios even though the program office says none of today’s commercial radios meet the JTRS requirements. Harris also is expected to bid its PRC/117G radio against competing systems from BAE Systems and Rockwell Collins for the four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio.

A commercial approach to building the Army’s networks would save billions of dollars, said Moran. If JTRS were to be canceled, “ITT and Harris radios could give you an extremely powerful architecture at a much better value than potentially the Defense Department has budgeted for JTRS,” he said. Still, JTRS is an important program for the Defense Department because it can help guide industry investments, he said. “We need the program to develop the standards, to ensure interoperability,” Moran said. “You want waveforms to be seamless to the soldier. We don’t want the program killed. But is there a better way to invest the dollars? Maybe there is.”

Paul D. Mueller, vice president of Motorola’s federal government market, said the military has failed to tap the commercial sector for new technology and remains bogged down in “programs of record” that take too long to deliver products. Defense Department IT users demand unique levels of security for information networks but there are ways to bridge their needs with commercially available technology, Mueller said.

“We’re excited about the adoption of the smart phone technology” for the U.S. military, he said. “That looks like a good bet for us.” There is growing interest in Motorola’s Android smart phone because of its open system and its potential for the military to be able to run its own software applications. Smart phones are regarded as the ticket to information sharing on the battlefield.

The Marine Corps has been ahead of the Army in modifying commercial radios and wireless networking technology for tactical communications, he said.

Motorola has designed a “gateway” box that would bridge cellular, Iridium satellite and land mobile radio networks so users of different cell phones and radios can talk to each other.

The JTRS waveforms could be installed in current radios such as the Marine Corps’ P-25 handheld devices as a low-cost alternative to the HMS radios, said Mueller.

Marines in small units communicate on the battlefield and back to their ships with a mix of commercial and military systems. The “distributed tactical communications system” employs military radios and Iridium commercial satellite services. They also have a terrestrial mobile network built by Trellisware, a commercial supplier of wireless systems.

DARPA eyes space-based Internet for persistent battlefield data communications, surveillance, and satellite control

Satellite communications experts at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are taking the next step in developing broadband data communications links to orbiting satellite constellations, not only to establish persistent SATCOM capability for fighting forces in the field, but also to enable real-time control of satellites from military theaters of operation.

The ability to control clusters of satellites from military theaters of operation like Iraq and Afghanistan not only could help establish predictable, round-the-clock satellite communications links for forward-deployed warfighters, but also has the potential to help establish controllable, persistent surveillance capability for the military commanders in the field who need it most.

DARPA awarded an $18 million research contract Friday to Inmarsat plc in London for the Persistent Broadband Ground Connectivity for Spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit program, which seeks to enable near-24/7, very-low-latency, on-demand broadband connectivity between ground satellite terminals and spacecraft in low earth orbit (LEO).

This capability could help establish a persistent communications system for LEO satellites for time-sensitive spacecraft control for defense maneuvers, rapid transmission of critical mission data such as space weather events, direct-from-theater control of spacecraft, and direct-to-theater data delivery with a small ground-based transceiver.

Researchers from DARPA and Inmarsat will use the Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) service from Inmarsat’s I-4 satellite communications constellation to help develop and demonstrate technology for this program. The BGAN service is the fastest mobile data link available that uses a portable terminal and offers on-demand connectivity with global coverage that could extend to LEO orbital altitudes, DARPA officials say.

The BGAN network, which serves land-based, shipboard, and aircraft satellite communications, provides 492-kilobit-per-second full-duplex, full-channel bandwidth over about 600 spot beams with 588 channels per beam.

A space-based BGAN terminal for LEO use appears to be technically feasible by making modest adaptations to the airborne terminal involving Doppler compensation, radiation hardened components, and software changes for rapid beam-to-beam handover without loss of service, DARPA officials say.

For the Persistent Broadband Ground Connectivity for Spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit program, Inmarsat engineers will design a space-based BGAN terminal, modify the BGAN, perform hardware-in-the-loop tests of a space-based BGAN terminal, and integrate the space-based BGAN terminal with the System F6 fractionated spacecraft demonstration cluster.

Army Under Pressure to Bring Broadband to the Battlefield

The Army has more radios, computers and advanced networking technology than ever before. Soldiers at war, alas, are information-deprived.

Despite an information-technology buying spree over the past decade, the Army has yet to figure out how to sate troops’ gargantuan appetite for information and ever-growing needs for battlefield intelligence. Current battlefield networks are accessible by divisions, brigades and battalions. But smaller units remain digital orphans, even though they lead the day-to-day fighting in current wars. The squads, platoons and companies require high-bandwidth connectivity so they can share information and gain instant awareness of what is happening on the ground, Army officials said.

Help appears to be on the way. In the Army’s 2010 modernization roadmap, the “network” is billed as a top priority. After more than a decade of failed efforts and billions of dollars spent, the pressure is on for the Army to deliver a battlefield network that supports small, mobile units. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli characterized the network as essential to the future Army. “It will require an open architecture that will allow further plug-and-play development in the future as our network grows and matures,” Chiarelli said at an industry conference last year.

The Army since the early 1990s has made several attempts at building a battlefield Internet, but the technology has leapt way ahead of the military procurement bureaucracy. The closest the Army has come to having an IP network at the squad level is in the “land warrior” system — an ensemble that includes a communications and navigation computer-radio suite. In the land warrior network, each member can pinpoint other soldiers’ locations by simply looking at a display. But this is only a niche solution and does not solve the larger problem of connecting every element of a deployed brigade.

Visions of broadband connectivity in the field and smart phones that can be constantly updated with new applications, from a technical standpoint, are realistic, experts said. But they will never be realized as long as the Army continues to buy IT the same way it acquires tanks and helicopters. It simply takes too long to move technology to the field, and by the time it gets there, the market already has moved on.

The Army’s chief information officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, said at an industry conference that the service since 9/11 has tripled its inventory of radios to more than 900,000 and increased its ability to transmit data within U.S. Central Command networks from 46 megabytes per second to about 10 gigabytes per second.

Similar capabilities have not trickled down into the small units that don’t have access to the high-tech command centers and need mobile equipment they can operate from their trucks. Platoons and squads have line-of-sight radios — whose signals are blocked by buildings or mountains — with low-bandwidth and they are unable to chat online or transmit images. Soldiers at a typical forward base in Afghanistan using line-of-sight radios travel only a few miles down the road before they lose their connection to the base.

Under a program called Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team Increment 1, or E-IBCT, the Army is piecing together its most advanced information technologies into a deployable network that would allow soldiers to not only stay connected to each other but also to capture intelligence from unmanned sensors and disseminate it throughout the brigade. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in 2012, will be the launch customer for the new technologies. Soldiers from the brigade are testing the systems at Fort Bliss, Texas. If the Pentagon approves additional funding, more brigades could be equipped with the advanced network later this decade.

With this technology, the “company commander becomes the network quarterback for the Army,” said Lt. Col. Darby McNulty, deputy program manager for network systems integration. The future company “command post” is being designed to link all soldiers in a company and below, and also to connect the company with higher echelons and with national intelligence databases via satellite. The command post could be set up in a fixed site or could be installed in the cab of a large armored truck.

The nearly 1 million radios that the Army currently owns, however, are not part of this setup. The E-IBCT program is building the network with new software-programmable radios that were developed by the Defense Department’s “joint tactical radio system” or JTRS program. The radios can be programmed to operate a variety of software communication applications that are called “waveforms.”

JTRS program officials said that current radios cannot deliver the high bandwidth that deployed forces need and cannot run the required software applications.

For the company command post, three waveforms are required: The soldier radio waveform (for narrowband communications within a company), the wideband networking waveform (for broadband data transfer) and the network centric waveform (for satellite-based communications). The soldier radio waveform capacity to pass data is about 500 to 600 kilobits per second. The wideband networking waveform transfers five megabytes per second.

JTRS hardware includes a family of radios — a half-pound device for small robots, a two-pound handheld “rifleman” radio, a 14-pound “manpack” and a four-channel command-post system. The entire JTRS program includes nine waveforms not just for the Army but for the other branches of the military as well.

For the first time, the latest advances in radio communications are being brought together in a live exercise, McNulty said during a conference call with reporters. The recent tests at Fort Bliss proved that JTRS is an essential piece of the Army’s future network, he said. “It’s something you absolutely want to stick with.”

For the exercise, mobile company command posts installed aboard armored trucks were outfitted with “network integration kits,” which are the network hubs connecting the terrestrial and satellite layers of the network to one another. Each NIK consists of a command-and-control terminal, called the “integrated computer system,” a four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio and a blue-force tracker display screen. Dismounted soldiers carried either a JTRS rifleman radio or a manpack radio.

The radios in each vehicle create a “mobile ad-hoc network,” or manet. Each tactical radio functions as a cell phone tower. At the tests in Fort Bliss, engineers extended the range of the network by adding an “aerial layer” made up of unmanned aircraft and helicopters that were outfitted with small JTRS radios. “We were able to extend sensor and position data beyond 20 km, in some cases up to 40 km,” McNulty said.

The four-channel JTRS, made by The Boeing Co., runs the soldier radio waveform, the wideband networking waveform and the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or Sincgars, waveform, which allows the commander to talk to all the vehicles in the unit. Sincgars is the most commonly used radio net in the Army.

Details about how the network will be organized and what specific equipment will be acquired are still being hashed out, said McNulty. “We need to better understand who needs what information at what level so we can better optimize the network,” he said. “If you can eliminate extraneous information you can improve the quality of the network, if you send everything to everyone all at once the quality of your service decreases exponentially.”

Tests will continue over the next several months.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this program is under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon’s senior acquisition officials will be reviewing test results this fall, and will determine whether the program will continue to receive funding. A separate evaluation is under way within the Army. This “network capabilities portfolio review” will examine the entire litany of Army IT programs and nominate winners and losers. It will look at whether the Army can afford to acquire new equipment, whether it should stick with “legacy” systems or, a most likely outcome, whether it should have a mix. Overseeing this review is Chiarelli, who has expressed concern about the “affordability” of current programs and famously brandished his iPhone as an example of the low-cost apps-friendly IT that soldiers need but the Army’s plodding acquisition system is unable to provide.

Another contentious issue in the ongoing reviews is whether JTRS can make up for lost time and deliver hardware at prices that are competitive with other radios. JTRS has been in development since 1999 and originally was scheduled to be fielded by 2006. Delays dogged the program as the slippages coincided with the war buildup, when billions of dollars were being appropriated in emergency war budgets to purchase new radios. When it became clear that JTRS was not ready, the Army poured billions into other radios. The result is today’s inventory that has tripled in size.

JTRS program officials now are forecasting that the models that the Army needs — the JTRS HMS (handheld/manpack/small form-fit) radios will be ready for deployment by 2011.
“These radios provide digital connectivity, networking down to the soldier level. That has not been done before,” said Army Col. John V. Zavarelli, program manager for JTRS HMS. Orders of up to 215,000 HMS radios are expected, he said in an interview. “We believe they could increase to 250,000 based on service needs.”

Zavarelli said he was not familiar with the Army’s network review and could not comment on the affordability of JTRS. He said all the services have been funding their share of JTRS research and development expenses. “I’m not sure the costs are an issue,” he said. “I certainly haven’t been told it in that way.”

About 750 pre-production radios have been purchased so far from prime contractor General Dynamics. Once the radios are cleared for full-rate production, the JTRS program office will solicit competitive bids from vendors for each variant. The assumption is that competitors will challenge General Dynamics and help to drive down prices, Zavarelli said. Several industry sources told National Defense that current JTRS HMS handheld radios cost upwards of $75,000 each, but Zavarelli said he could not confirm or discuss prices.

“We are on the edge of operational testing and limited rate production decisions in the next year,” he said. “We’ve offered some alternatives for accelerating [the development] and are waiting for a decision.”

Radio suppliers are watching these events closely as they seek to position their products for future JTRS business. Several executives interviewed for this story said they fear that the JTRS program is too rigid in that only radios that strictly meet the technical specifications of JTRS will be allowed to compete. That means none of the radios that exist in the military’s inventory today are acceptable. Under that scenario, the Army would be in a position of having to replace hundreds of thousands of radios that already are paid for and installed. A radio installation kit for an average Army vehicle costs more than the radio itself. When JTRS was conceived in the late 1990s, it was assumed that the radios would be installed in new Future Combat Systems vehicles. But when the FCS vehicle program was terminated last year, some Army officials sounded alarms about what this meant for JTRS. “By losing FCS a lot of the Army’s network and communications programs seriously unraveled,” said a retired Army officer who was closely involved in FCS.

Ripping out existing radios and installing new JTRS systems across the Army’s fleets of vehicles would be an exorbitant expense, several industry sources said. They don’t see how the Army will go along with such a plan when the services are under pressure to cut costs and find $100 billion in savings across all defense programs over the next five years.

Officials from one of the Army’s major radio suppliers, ITT Corp., have for years been trying to sell the idea that its Sincgars combat radios could be modified to run the soldier radio waveform (SRW) so the Army would not have to replace them with more expensive JTRS systems. ITT is the prime contractor for the SRW software and also the manufacturer of the Sincgars radios that the U.S. military has been using since the early 1980s.

ITT has delivered more than 500,000 radios, nearly half of them during the past two years. War funds paid for a huge expansion of ITT’s manufacturing plant so it could ramp up production from 1,000 to 6,000 radios per month. The Army Science Board, an advisory panel, recommended in a 2007 report that the Army “stop buying Sincgars immediately” so it could invest the money in “future, not legacy hardware.” But Congress continued to fund Sincgars purchases, and production continues to this day, although Army orders are scheduled to end in a couple of years.

With such a large inventory in the force, it is hard to see how the Army can toss it and buy all new hardware, said David Prater, ITT vice president for network communications.

“We’ve proposed adding a single channel SRW [to current Sincgars] to keep the cost down,” he said. “For $10,000 to $15,000 you’d get a two-channel radio that does Sincgars or SRW,” compared to a $75,000 two-channel manpack that does those two waveforms plus perhaps one or two others,” Prater said.

“The Army is wrestling with this,” he said. The timing has worked against JTRS. “In the meantime you’ve got all these Sincgars radios,” Prater said. “JTRS kind of missed the war. A lot of [non-JTRS] equipment was bought” during the past eight years.

Zavarelli insists that none of these options meets the requirements of JTRS.

“Some radios by design are incapable of hosting narrowband and wideband waveforms,” he said. ITT has suggested adding a “sidehat” data radio to Sincgars that could run the SRW waveform, but Zavarelli is not convinced that it would work. “That’s a separate entire radio that’s added to the Sincgars. I have a requirement for SRW radios and that’s what we are doing.”

Other vendors also have questioned the radio-procurement strategy as well as the Army’s larger game plan for acquiring information technology.

The Defense Department spent the better part of a decade developing JTRS and during that time the industry has moved on to other products and the technology landscape has changed, said Steve Marschilok, president of defense business at Harris RF Communications.

Any company that competes for JTRS production contracts will have to build a custom radio that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the marketplace, Marschilok said.

“You can’t procure IT the way we always have,” said Dennis Moran, vice president of Harris Corp.’s government communications systems division. The Army is stuck with an “antiquated requirements process that goes from Fort Gordon, to Fort Monroe, to the Pentagon,” Moran said. “You can’t force technology to adapt to requirements that are out of touch before ink is even dried on paper at TRADOC [Training and Doctrine Command] headquarters.”

In the case of JTRS, the government could have saved billions it spent on development by purchasing off-the-shelf products, Moran said. That is how U.S. Special Operations Command does business these days, he noted.

Harris has supplied more than 120,000 radios to the Defense Department. The company is a JTRS contractor for single-channel radios and expects to compete for future production contracts for the JTRS rifleman and manpack systems. It plans to offer variants of its existing radios even though the program office says none of today’s commercial radios meet the JTRS requirements. Harris also is expected to bid its PRC/117G radio against competing systems from BAE Systems and Rockwell Collins for the four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio.

A commercial approach to building the Army’s networks would save billions of dollars, said Moran. If JTRS were to be canceled, “ITT and Harris radios could give you an extremely powerful architecture at a much better value than potentially the Defense Department has budgeted for JTRS,” he said. Still, JTRS is an important program for the Defense Department because it can help guide industry investments, he said. “We need the program to develop the standards, to ensure interoperability,” Moran said. “You want waveforms to be seamless to the soldier. We don’t want the program killed. But is there a better way to invest the dollars? Maybe there is.”

Paul D. Mueller, vice president of Motorola’s federal government market, said the military has failed to tap the commercial sector for new technology and remains bogged down in “programs of record” that take too long to deliver products. Defense Department IT users demand unique levels of security for information networks but there are ways to bridge their needs with commercially available technology, Mueller said.

“We’re excited about the adoption of the smart phone technology” for the U.S. military, he said. “That looks like a good bet for us.” There is growing interest in Motorola’s Android smart phone because of its open system and its potential for the military to be able to run its own software applications. Smart phones are regarded as the ticket to information sharing on the battlefield.

The Marine Corps has been ahead of the Army in modifying commercial radios and wireless networking technology for tactical communications, he said.

Motorola has designed a “gateway” box that would bridge cellular, Iridium satellite and land mobile radio networks so users of different cell phones and radios can talk to each other.

The JTRS waveforms could be installed in current radios such as the Marine Corps’ P-25 handheld devices as a low-cost alternative to the HMS radios, said Mueller.

Marines in small units communicate on the battlefield and back to their ships with a mix of commercial and military systems. The “distributed tactical communications system” employs military radios and Iridium commercial satellite services. They also have a terrestrial mobile network built by Trellisware, a commercial supplier of wireless systems.

Military Strives to Shrink Carbon 'Boot Print'

From solar-powered water purification systems in Afghanistan to a Navy jet fueled in part by biofuel, the U.S. military is taking a lead role in shrinking America’s carbon “boot print”, an independent report informed.

The Department of Defense accounts for 80 percent of the U.S. government’s total energy consumption energy needs, and most of the energy it uses currently comes from fossil fuels, the report by the Pew Research think tank’s Project on National Security, Energy and Climate says.

But moves are afoot in all branches of the military to change that.

The Army and Air Force have several bases that are partially powered by solar energy, one of which – Fort Irwin in California – is expected to be able to stop taking energy from the public electricity grid within a decade.

The navy has set itself a key goal of getting 50 percent of fuel used ashore and afloat from non-fossil sources by 2020, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told a telephone news conference after the report was issued.

The navy will also test-fly this week its “Green Hornet” F-18 fighter jet, which runs on a mix of biofuel made from camelina, a plant in the mustard family, and aviation fuel, he informed.

“Unlike first-generation corn ethanol, camelina is a plant that can be used in rotation with things like wheat instead of letting the land lie fallow. So it doesn’t take food out of the supply chain, but it does provide American farmers with another crop they can grow,” Mabus informed.

And the Marine Corps, working with the army, has applied energy efficient foams to temporary structures in Iraq which reduce energy consumption by up to 75 percent.

With its history giving the world transformational technology like the Internet and GPS systems which help car drivers to navigate, the report predicts that the steps the U.S. military is taking now to beat back climate change will lead to a raft of innovations that enhance energy efficiency for the military and the general public.

Those could include new alternative fuels, advanced energy storage and more efficient vehicles on land, in the air and at sea, it said.

Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew’s climate and energy program, called on lawmakers to back what the military is doing on the climate change and energy efficiency fronts by passing comprehensive climate change legislation.

“It should put a price on carbon, invest in energy innovation and help deploy renewable energy,” she stated.

“Doing so will make us more prosperous, reduce pollution, and enhance our national security,” she said.

China’s Cyberpower

China’s cyber capability came into sharp focus recently when a report, issued coincidentally at the start of S M Krishna’s maiden visit to China, publicised that Chinese hackers had accessed and ‘stolen’ voluminous classified information from computers in sensitive government offices in India. The report, entitled ‘Shadows in the Cloud’ issued on April 6 by the Munk School of Global Affairs of the University of Toronto jointly with other organisations, informed that a number of computers in Indian establishments had been compromised. Launched specifically to investigate the extent of penetration by Chinese hackers of computers in the Dalai Lama’s offices, researchers detected that computers in 10 Indian embassies including Afghanistan, Russia, UAE, and USA, as well as in the Indian High Commissions in Nigeria and the UK had been compromised. Sensitive establishments targeted included the National Security Council Secretariat, a couple of MES establishments, the 21 Mountain Artillery Brigade, two air force stations, the Army Institute of Technology, Pune and the Military College of Electronics and Mechanical Engineering in Secunderabad. Computers of defence-related think tanks, like the IDSA and of academics and journalists working on defence issues were also compromised.

The Munk Centre and two researchers from the University of Illinois and Cambridge respectively, had in March 2009 issued similarly disturbing reports highlighting China’s cyber espionage attempts. It revealed that 1,295 computers in 103 countries were affected; 30 per cent of the affected computers as high value targets with many belonging to foreign governments and the Dalai Lama’s offices in India, Brussels, New York and London. A NATO computer, one in the Indian embassy in Washington and computers in nine other Indian embassies in UK, US, Germany, Serbia, Cyprus, Belgium, Italy, Kuwait and Zimbabwe were identified. The infected node stretched in an arc from India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Brunei, Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
All the reports identify China as the source of the cyber attacks. The latest report identifies at least one hacker as based in Chengdu, capital of China’s Sichuan province and as associated with officially-tolerated hacker organisations like NSFocus and Eviloctal. Both these have links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Another hacker was linked to the University of Science and Technology in Chengdu.

All these reports reveal that India has been subjected to sustained cyber attacks. While unlike in the US there is no official quantification of cyber attacks in India, estimates are that these were quite high last year. It is evident that computers of specific officials in sensitive establishments have been targeted, suggesting that a large number of computers were surveilled before a target was determined.

The reports are particularly disturbing since China views cyberspace as the battleground of the future. The military dimension to China’s interest in cyber technology was enunciated in a quasi-official book published in 1999, by two PLA senior colonels and entitled Unrestricted Warfare. Cyber warfare is suited to asymmetric warfare as it affords stealth, speed and deniability. Today, especially in advanced nations, Internet is a critical part of the operating infrastructure of public utilities like water works and electricity grids, transportation networks, financial institutions, health services, etc. The effort to merge Internet and mobile telephone networks will increase this vulnerability. After China’s President Hu Jintao in 2007 stressed the importance of cyber capability or ‘informationisation’ of the armed forces this became an area of intensive research and capital investment.

China formulated its cyber strategy in the early 1990s. The objective was to secure and control assured supplies of scarce essential resources, acquire dominance in the produce of hardware, gain the lead in cyber and wireless technology, and achieve indigenous capability and sophistication in software design. China developed an overarching policy encompassing civil and military applications. It declared rare earth metals a secret national priority in the mid-1980s. These metals are irreplaceable and used in hundreds of technologies ranging from mobile phones, BlackBerrys to low-light energy bulbs, missile guidance systems, superconductors and computer hard drives. In 1997, Deng Xiaoping observed that ‘China would be for rare earth metals what the Middle East is to oil’ and within 20 years China acquired virtually monopolistic control over the supply of rare earth metals. China’s ministry of industry and information technology demonstrated this when it recently proposed a total ban on the export of certain rare earth metals and recommended limiting the export of others to 35,000 metric tonnes a year. Japan, which alone needs over 38,000 metric tonnes, has accused China of treating rare earth metal exports as a ‘21st century economic weapon’.
China’s experimentation with cyber espionage and attacks coincided with the advances made in its cyber strategy. Official US estimates in 2008 noted that Chinese hackers mainly targeted US defence computers and systems and downloaded 10-20 tetrabytes of data. Chinese hackers are assessed as downloading intellectual properties estimated at $40-50 billion each year from the US.

China’s hostile cyber activity has attracted international attention because of the dominant military component in its cyber capability. Hundreds of Chinese nationals are being trained in cyber-warfare, many in academies run by the PLA, like the ‘informationisation’ military courses offered in Wuhan University. The PLA has, since 2002, steadily augmented its cyber-capable Information Warfare (IW) militia units. The distinction between civilian and military cyber applications has been deliberately blurred, as many militia units comprise personnel from the commercial sector and academia. This has widespread implications as a number of China’s Internet and wireless technology companies, like Huawei and ZTE, are going global. International concern has predictably generated debate on the appropriate response to a cyber attacks. The US and Western nations favour a military response including precision missile strikes.

India too will have serious concerns. Estimates are that China’s cyber force has at least 50,000 hackers targeting India and the Dalai Lama’s establishment and they are based in the Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region. With India and its armed forces getting increasingly ‘wired’ enhancing cyber security must be a priority. This has to be combined with the capability to trace and disable the source of cyber attacks.