Mil-Tech

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.

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.

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.

SASC/HASC F-35 And Acquisition Hearings

Yet another important matter to probe with Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Ashton Carter when he testifies to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Thursday, March 11, 2010 (tomorrow) is his view of the “Aircraft Investment Plan” for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. A DOD-wide document, it was surely approved by Carter; he should not have. Straus Military Reform Project Director Winslow Wheeler explains why this plan is a true disaster in a recent commentary published in The Huffington Post.

This Thursday, March 11, Congress will hold two separate hearings at the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate. In the morning, the Senate committee will hear the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Ashton Carter, and another Pentagon official talk about the hugely problematic F-35 “Joint Strike Fighter.” In the afternoon, Carter and other top officials will testify to the House committee on how they are managing he Pentagon’s thoroughly broken weapons acquisition system. If these hearings go anything like they usually do, the committees will hear stale bathwater from Under Secretary Carter at both hearings. Everything, he will say, is under control; he’s fixing a few minor problems on the F-35 and he is the cutting edge of reform of the Pentagon’s weapons buying system.

What rubbish this will be. There are fundamental and widespread problems in the design and acquisition of the F-35 that remain unaddressed by Carter’s sloppily applied band-aids, and the Pentagon’s acquisition system continues to hurtle down the road of ruin at ever increasing cost. Both of these problems are only a part of the malaise in our decaying armed forces – a deterioration that is especially pronounced in our combat air forces.

Rarely does a government department write its own swan song as clearly, and without apology, as Carter and the Pentagon do today with respect to the Air Force and the air components of the Navy and Marine Corps. It is all made obvious in an obscure and mostly ignored document that accompanied the new defense budget in early February and that was almost certainly approved with verve by Under Secretary Carter. I refer to the “Aircraft Investment Plan, Fiscal Years (FY) 2011-2040.”

This plan envisions the next thirty years for the Air Force and the aircraft for the Navy and Marine Corps. It is the road map to the future for the military arm that has most dazzled Americans since the unconditional victory its advocates assert it won in World War II. From the new high tech drones they see finding and destroying the Taliban’s and al Qaeda’s leadership to the wonder-weapon airplanes imagined to keep all future powers like China and Russia forever cowed because they can never catch up, the aviation plan lays out the future of what many Americas ardently believe is our premier arm of military power. The cutting edge of how we should, nay will, do things in the future.

It is not a road map to a more glorious future; instead, it charts the rot that people like Under Secretary Carter plan to impose on our military forces. Contrary to what politically driven dilatants might allege against the Obama administration, the plan is not to ruin our aviation forces with less money, but with more. Contrary to what the weapons dilatants might fear, it does not oppose “high tech” (rather complexity) in our air power, but advocates some of the most complex, costly, and stupid weapons ideas since the Imperial Japanese Navy’s super-battleships of World War II, long ago sent to the bottom of the Pacific.

Without even the cognition to note it, the aviation plan starts out with the smallest and oldest Air Force and naval aviation inventory we have had since the end of World War II. The cause is not a lack of money, which today is higher in inflation adjusted dollars for the Pentagon than at any point since 1946. Nor are the Air Force or the Navy and Marine Corps being starved within the larger budget; their current spending is significantly above what they averaged all through the Cold War when their aircraft inventories were far larger.

Rather than a total combined fighter and attack aircraft inventory of over 8,000 aircraft in the 1950s and ’60s, today we have just 3,264. The new DOD vision is to shrink the force even more; down to 2,929 in 2020 – a 10 percent reduction. While the inventory goes down, the budget goes up: the combined Air Force/Navy tactical (combat) aviation budget would grow from about $12 billion today to roughly $17 billion in 2020.

Shrinking is also the recommended plan for other whole categories of aircraft. From today to 2015 the combined inventory of support intelligence and command and control aircraft will go down to 527 from the current 580, but the budget to buy them goes up from approximately $5 billion to about $8 billion. The inventories of cargo aircraft and air-refueling tanker aircraft will stay roughly constant, while spending for them out to 2020 goes up, sharply in the case of tanker aircraft. The same is true of long range bomber aircraft.

While the plan skates over the issue of inventory age without a single mention, it is obvious that problem will worsen as well. Remarkable are the numbers of aircraft that the new plan retains out to the year 2040. The “legacy” fighters (the F-15s, F-16′s, F-18s, and A-10s that were originally designed in late 1960′s) will be hanging around until 2040. In other categories, the plan mumbles vaguely about “modernization” but nowhere do we see funded in the plan actual replacements for already antiquated manned command and control, surveillance, and intelligence aircraft, and some cargo and tanker aircraft.

We get this shrinking and aging aviation force for a 32 percent increase in money: the plan would up the $22 billion we spend in 2011 to $29 billion in 2020.

It does, however, get worse. Notable about all of the above is that it all assumes flawless implementation. Not a penny of cost growth beyond that reluctantly, but unavoidably, conceded today is accommodated. The plan proudly proclaims that it envisions the new – higher – cost estimates for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, but in fact it does not. Under Secretary Carter has just finished truncating the cost growth and plan delays that a courageous, internal Joint Estimating Team (JET) predicted last fall for the F-35. Many more billions for that program alone (resulting in reductions of the planned buy) are virtually guaranteed. Moreover, last year the GAO found $295 billion in cost growth throughout DOD acquisition since 2001. To expect that the next ten years in aviation acquisition will not see at least as high a rate of cost growth as the last ten years is to live in a fool’s paradise.

The advocates of phony reform in Congress and the Pentagon would rush to point out how the new acquisition reform act, enacted last year, will do away with most, no all, of that. However, a quick tour through the gigantic loopholes of the act – already exploited by Carter to avert the cost growth and schedule delays found by the JET for the F-35 – informs any but the most clueless that the cost the Air Force and Navy predict today to shrink and age their own air forces is woefully understated.

This aviation plan will also likely start off a new round of bureaucratic infighting between the Air Force and Navy. The plan effects a Navy scheme against the Air Force: with just 30 percent of aviation forces, the Navy ends up with 50 percent of the procurement funding and actually gets more in the early – more likely to occur – part of the plan. We have not heard the last of this; budget-share is the most prized jewel in the Pentagon’s bureaucratic rivalries. The Air Force and its leadership surely intend for this Navy raid on their family jewels to not stand.

The one category in all of this mess to see real increases in numbers is for pilotless drones, or as the authors of the plan like to call them “Unmanned Multirole, Surveillance and Strike Aircraft.” These will grow from 72 vehicles today to 476, a more than 600 percent increase. The money will grow (commensurately, they optimistically predict) from just over $1 billion today to almost $7 billion in 2020 – just under a 700 percent increase.

Even more remarkable than the assumption that future drones will be built without the geometric increase in cost we have witnessed in manned aircraft is the bureaucratic warfare yet to be fought out over drones. All the planned spending increase will be in the Navy budget; Air Force drone spending would actually decline. In reality, the total spending will be far, far higher, and the Air Force will never permit itself to fall so far behind.

Literally beyond belief is the schedule and performance that technology-fantasists in the Navy think they will get for their money. No sprightly, little model airplane, the envisioned X-47B now in development is a 15 ton, 62 foot wingspan, tail-less, and ultra-stealthy (of course) replacement for manned aircraft on the Navy’s carriers. Rushing to catch up with and surpass the Air Force, the Navy envisions testing this beast on a carrier in just two years and deploying it in five. No mere vehicle for cameras, radars, and infrared gizmos to go out and search, the X-47B will not just pretend to find all the targets on a theoretically fogless battlefield but attack them as well with two tons of guided bombs.

Notice how well we are doing just that with first generation Air Force and CIA drones (using very much the same sensor technologies the X-47B will have) in Afghanistan, Yemen and especially Pakistan today. Attempting to decapitate al Qaeda and the Taliban, Predator and Reaper drones have been more successful at killing civilians (and at least one US citizen, the CIA boasts), infuriating the previously uncommitted population in favor of our enemies, and deluding Americans to think we can conduct remote control-warfare on other peoples’ homeland with nothing but their obeisance as a consequence. The renewed attacks against America from al Qaeda and its growing, not exactly decapitated, infrastructure would tell us otherwise.

Secretary Gates’ and Under Secretary Carter’s aviation plan is a prescription for a foolish, unaffordable vision that embraces bureaucratic conflict and real decay in our military forces. Listen closely on Thursday as Carter testifies to Congress. Will he address any of these issues – the decay in our aviation forces and the plan to make it all worse – in either the specific F-35 forum at the Senate Armed Services Committee, or the more general acquisition reform forum in the afternoon at the House Armed Services Committee? If Carter initiates a discussion about any of this, you’ll be able to knock me over with a feather. If any of his questioners bring any of it up, I will also be astonished: at both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, they rarely, if ever, probe into the darker recesses of our fundamental defense problems.

The Future For UAVs in the U.S. Air Force

When the Air Force recently mapped out a game plan to 2047, its report contained a big surprise: Fewer pilots and more robotic planes acting on their own. Will the airman-centric service accept a future with fewer cockpits? And are we ready for UAVs that can fire their weapons without human permission?

Like its waterfowl namesake, the Heron unmanned aerial vehicle has the excellent vision of a hunter. Today, the 27-foot-long Israeli UAV is making a rare flight over the United States, using a high-definition video camera to track a speedboat buzzing across the Patuxent River in Maryland. The camera shares space with an infrared thermal imager and laser rangefinder inside a 17-inch sphere mounted under the aircraft’s nose. The camera and the UAV both turn automatically to track the boat below, no satellite-linked joysticks required. On the Patuxent, a Coast Guard crew in a shallow-water patrol boat uses a real-time video feed from the Heron to locate the speedboat.

Less than 5 miles away, several hundred spectators watch the camera’s feed on a massive color television monitor. The crowd of defense officials, defense industry wonks and military aviation buffs—many with bumper stickers on their cars that say “My other vehicle is unmanned”—is thick here at Webster Field, an auxiliary naval airfield in Maryland. The Heron is just one of about a dozen UAVs making flight demonstrations. As each one sweeps overhead, an announcer gushes over its abilities with the over-enthusiasm of a county fair emcee describing a prize sheep.

The crowd watches on the massive screen as the two boats converge and the Coast Guard crew completes the mock interception. The image of the river scene wheels as the Heron banks away from the boats and returns to the airfield. The UAV glides into a smooth, autonomous landing and as the Heron taxis, the goofball emcee coos over the PA speakers: “Aw, isn’t that just pretty?”

The day is a spectacle of flying robots. A unit of Textron shows off an aircraft that it is pitching to the Marine Corps. It has a 12-foot wingspan and a pusher propeller mounted between its fuselage and inverted V-tail; it can be launched from a moving vehicle and is recovered by flying it into a net. The U.S. Army also has a marquee UAV to demo, the MQ-8B Fire Scout. The 3150-pound unmanned helicopter, the Army’s first, may soon scan battlefields for chemical weapons, minefields and radio transmissions. And the showstopper, even while remaining earthbound, is the Navy’s Joint Unmanned Combat Air System, a sleek, blended-wing aircraft with the maw of an air inlet placed almost mockingly where a cockpit would go. It sits like a resting bird, its 31-foot-long wings folded up for better storage on a warship. It is scheduled to perform an autonomous takeoff and landing from an aircraft carrier deck this year.

Unmanned aircraft are the biggest thing to happen in military aviation since stealth geometry, and the Air Force’s leadership is dramatically increasing the UAV fleet this year. However, the service is still struggling over how the technology can be maximized in the future. “Today, the evolution of the machine is beginning to outpace the capability of the people we put in them,” Air Force chief of staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said late last year in a speech to the Air Force Association. “We now must reconsider the relationship.”

Under his direction, the Air Force is trying to become the Pentagon’s leader of future UAV development. Schwartz’s primary tool is the “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan, 2009–2047,” a comprehensive look at how the U.S. military can expand the use of UAVs over the next 38 years. The Air Force is proposing to use next-generation unmanned aircraft in a slate of new missions, including air strikes, aerial refueling, cargo transport and long-range bombing.

But how much freedom will the Air Force be willing to grant unmanned airplanes? Its airmen are only now coming to accept UAVs—they fly them every day over Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and other hot spots—but the service has articulated a way forward that not only marginalizes pilots, it also promises to replace many UAV ground-control crews with automation. Today’s highly trained airmen may not embrace this vision of the future. One Air Force officer working with unmanned aircraft would only say he supports the report “because it’s a plan. And having a plan is better than not having a plan.

Astrium and EADS Defence & Security selected by the European Defence Agency (EDA) to study integration of UAVs into civil airspace

The European Defence Agency (EDA) has selected an Astrium and EADS Defence & Security (DS) consortium to lead a six-month study to demonstrate that by using satellite communications it is feasible to integrate UAVs into civil airspace. DS has more than 30 years of expertise in UAVs, and Astrium, Europe’s largest space company, will determine how and what satellite-based services are needed to operate the UAVs safely in civil airspace.

Today UAVs are only operating in segregated airspace for military operations. Integrating UAVs safely into civil airspace would enable them to be used to assist in a variety of civil and para-civil applications. These include maritime patrol, border surveillance, agricultural monitoring, weather/atmospheric data collection, and high-altitude geological and infrastructure mapping.

As part of the six-month feasibility study, the consortium will meet key European civil and military stakeholders. The purpose of these meetings will be to receive their endorsements on safety and regulatory policy, and on future applications. On completion of the study, EDA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are expected to jointly fund a demonstration programme.

In preparation of this demonstration, DS will investigate the possibility to fly a MALE UAV that will be controlled via a satellite communication link provided by Astrium Services. The two companies already collaborate in Afghanistan, where a Harfang UAV, developed by EADS Defence and Security, is being operated by the French air force.

The consortium comprises 11 members including Astrium, DS, QinetiQ, ISDEFE as well as IABG and combines the industrial capabilities of the leading specialists in UAVs, space-based telecommunications and air traffic management in France, the UK, Spain and Germany.

Military computer – DRS Technologies

It’s an extreme world out there.  DRS is proud of its heritage of extreme, battle-tested solutions.  We are a leader in deployed military computing hardware, and we’ve engineered and manufactured a range of solutions to operate in all kinds of environments.  Therefore, we have fielded more computing systems in extreme rugged environments than any other company, allowing us to gain unique insights through lessons learned on how to make the computing systems survive and perform in extreme environments.  In the sections below you will see how our mission-critical systems evolved from these lessons so that quality and reliability to the joint warfighter are ensured.

THE JV-5 STORY

As the sole source provider of vehicle computing systems to the US Army’s FBCB2   (Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below) / BFT (Blue Force Tracking) programs, DRS has fielded over 80,000 systems to joint forces.  The objective of the Army’s FBCB2 and BFT programs is to deliver a digital battle command and control information system that will provide commanders and soldiers at tactical units, from the brigade level to the individual soldier, with access to real-time information, allowing for better command and control decision making and enhanced situational awareness.  These digitization programs provide tactical units with information superiority through situational awareness, and therefore, a battlefield advantage.  For the past 7 years, DRS has delivered 3 generations of product, each providing new levels of capability and reliability to the warfighter.  So much so, Soldiers refer to the unit as ‘Ole Reliable’.  This is due to the level of ruggedness that is designed into the system, from the board level up, that keeps it working regardless of temperature, vibration, shock, dust and water and other elements that can cause lesser systems to fail.  Don’t take our word for it.  Read what our users have to say below.

 “FBCB2 provided soldiers an intangible confidence of knowing where their buddies were on the battlefield.  My unit patrolled an exceptionally dangerous part of southern Mosul, Iraq.  Our operational plans necessitated having units in the battlespace 24 hours a day.  Using FBCB2, patrols operated with a higher degree of confidence than they would have without the system…” SBCT CDR, OIF III.

Keeping Cool.  In the deserts of Iraq, we learned to overcome extremes in temperature.  Our JV-5 rugged vehicle computing system is a vehicle mounted system engineered to operate at temperatures that are routinely found in some of the world’s hottest climates.

Keeping Relevant.  Over the years, DRS has learned that leading edge technology is needed in the battlefield.  Therefore we have made vast improvements to the system’s capability at little cost to the customer via an aggressive technology roadmap.  The JV-5 vehicle computing system includes new technologies such as multi-core processors, increased memory, greater data storage and expansion capability to allow for future technology improvements. These enhancements provide the computer systems with better graphics processing, data handling and system networking capabilities.

Keeping Compatible.  Bringing new technology to the field has its own sets of obstacles.  At DRS, we have learned that whenever new technology is introduced into field environments, backwards compatibility with existing infrastructure is a necessity.  The JV-5 computer system was designed within the same size, weight and power (SWaP) constraints of the previous version computer and display System. Therefore, the upgrade of the system to the JV-5 is a significant improvement in terms of maximizing the capabilities that can be provided by the legacy SWaP parameters, while simultaneously providing for “future proof” SWaP performance. 

THE MRT STORY

In June 2005, DRS Tactical Systems acquired WalkAbout Computers.  As a result of this acquisition, DRS had a speed-to-market advantage in military tablet computing based on the initial work WalkAbout performed on their MRT (Military Rugged Tablet) and a contract to deliver the MRT to the USMC.  Since then, DRS has fielded over 2,000 systems and expanded the capability of the product to include internal communications (SAASM GPS, and TacLink or PCIDM modems), dual core processing, and ultra-rugged reliability in the field.  But don’t take our word for it.  Read what our users have to say below.

“This is the first execution of a fully digitally-aided Close Air Support (CAS) mission…  This is monumental and represents a new era in CAS execution.  …we are leading the way towards the future of warfare.  As of 5 Aug, that future is here.  Talk about exciting times…” USAF, AFMC, Major speaking about the use of the MRT for CAS

Keeping Common.  The MRT is a joint product that is already qualified, in production and widely fielded.  DRS has learned from our MRT programs of record that commonality across platforms is an important advantage to the joint warfighter.  Therefore, DRS utilizes the same design and manufacturing teams for all configurations and customers of the MRT product line. 

Some of these programs and customers include:

US Air Force Tactical Air Control Party (TACP)
US Army Intelligent Munitions System (IMS)
USMC Target Locator Data Handoff System (TLDHS / Strike Link)
US Army Mortars, Fire Control System
Keeping Connected.  Communications is key to the dismounted warfighter.  Because of this, DRS has integrated secure and unsecured comms into the MRT product line.  For example, in Afghanistan, Forward Air Controllers in varying weather conditions use laser-equipped binoculars and the rugged DRS MRT tablet equipped with GPS and a SatCom uplink to designate enemy locations and then pinpoint, on screen, both their location and the enemy’s.  This visual screen data provide dismounted soldiers with situational awareness and information superiority that is vital to mission success.

 
THE MRC STORY

The DRS MRC (MDACT Replacement Computer) is the result of a joint effort between the USMC and US Army.  Due to the necessity of joint operations between the Marines and the Army, there was a need for transparent communications between the forces.  As a result, the USMC ordered modified JV-5 computer systems via the Army’s contract.  These modified systems incorporated a modem TacLink card and allowed the Marine Corps to use the DRS-manufactured systems in their Mobile Data Automated Communication Terminal (MDACT) program, the USMC program of record for blue force situational awareness/blue force tracking, and allowed Marine Corps FBCB2-equipped vehicles to directly communicate via SINCGARS radio. 

During the development process, both the Army and Marine customers were members of the design IPT and in just 8 months, DRS produced a redesigned, fully-qualified unit to the Marine Corp, which was a tremendous success story for our Engineering and Production teams.  But don’t take our word for it.  Read what our customer had to say below:

 “This was the best example of teamwork I’ve ever seen in the industry.”
Project Manager, USMC (Commenting on the MRC project)

Keeping Joint.  The MRC is a perfect example of providing joint capability to the warfighter; therefore meeting the DoD’s goal for joint interoperability and commonality.  This product provided DRS with a new customer and a new set of customer requirements.  From our experience, we knew that listening to the customer and their problems was key to the development and fielding of a product.  Therefore, we ensured that all parties were involved during the development process so that once fielded, U.S. joint military forces were connected.

THE BOWMAN STORY

Prior to the acquisition by DRS, DRS Tactical Systems was Paravant Computer Systems, which won the BOWMAN contract to supply rugged computing equipment to the U.K. Ministry of Defense.  The BOWMAN program is the British Army’s tactical communications system and comprises secure voice/data radio and intercom equipment, computers, a tactical internet and system management software for blue force tracking.

One of the major reasons for our win was the DRS modular design of the product which consisted of discrete modules that directly plugged together, or interconnected through cables.  This design provided a physical architecture that facilitated the maintenance concept and provided for cost effective infusion of future technology.  Since then, DRS has fielded over 13,000 systems which include various form factors such as a notebook computer, tablet PC, processing units and displays.

Keeping Secrets a Secret.  Our work with the British Army on the BOWMAN communications infrastructure program helped us develop privacy measures that protect against unwanted detection of key strokes or data sent wirelessly, and hard drive encryption schemes to protect important intelligence should hardware fall into enemy hands.

Ahead of the Pack in Afghanistan

Alex Hawkes: The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) recently ordered 110 of the Supacat-designed weapons-mounted 4×4 patrol vehicles known as Jackal 2. What enhanced capabilities do this latest-generation model offer the army’s operations in Afghanistan?

Sean Limbrick: There are a number of factors that have contributed to the improvement in performance of these vehicles. In terms of how the Jackal 2 is superior to the original design, it has a much stronger platform provided by our latest-generation chassis which offers increased capacity. When the order was first made from the MoD, the vehicle’s capacity was 6.5t but this has since risen to 7.6t, which means they can carry more fuel provisions, ammunitions and armour.

Another significant improvement is to what we call the ‘hamper’ – this is the part of the vehicle the soldiers use to operate weaponry. We have now moved the gun ring to the middle of the Coyote which has allowed for 360° fire. Before, the user was not able to fire forward for fear of the impact on the driver and commander sat in the front of the vehicle.

The vehicle’s main form of protection – be it from ballistic or improvised explosive devices (IED) – lies in its enhanced mobility and firepower.

AH: So the vehicle’s real strength lies in its ability to defend through attack?

SL: Exactly. The role of this vehicle is not to carry troops from A to B, but to engage in combat with the enemy and in order to do that the weaponry needs to be effectively configured.

“The Coyote is very similar to the Jackal 2 but it is configured in a 6×6 drive train.”AH: And how does the design of the Jackal 2 differ to Supacat’s new 6×6 ‘Coyote’ tactical support vehicle (light) (TSV(L)), which the MoD also placed an order for?

SL: In many respects the Coyote is very similar to the Jackal 2 but it is configured in a 6×6 drive train. This means it can carry significantly heavier payloads. So whereas the Jackal 2 has a payload of 7.6t, the Coyote can carry 10.5t.

The first Jackal was originally designed in 2001 for the UK Special Forces. We have been developing that vehicle design for customers worldwide since and many of the developments made in that time have been combined on the Jackal 2.

Most of the latest developments found on the Jackal 2 are also embodied on the Coyote but at the moment the MoD has embargoed us from issuing too much information about the latter model.

AH: Were both the Jackal 2 and Coyote designed specifically with the Afghanistan terrain in mind?

SL: The terrain in Afghanistan has certainly had an impact on the later alterations of the design but neither was originally designed specifically for Afghanistan.

The ability of the vehicle to use terrain off the beaten track is, however, particularly applicable to the situation in Afghanistan. The Taliban know where there is going to be traffic and they can pre-empt military forces passing through a particular place. Obviously if you are able to take the vehicle off-track then you change the rules of engagement. The threat of IEDs or mines is therefore very much mitigated by the ability to travel off-road and at speed.

AH: What are some of the latest armouring solutions incorporated into the design of both vehicles?

SL: The armouring solutions on the Jackal 1 and Jackal 2 are very similar. We have learnt a lot from the experiences of Jackal 1 but that has only led to subtle amendments rather then any full-scale changes to the basic armouring solutions.

“The Coyote vehicle is now capable of
360° fire.”Hard-steel armour blast plates are located throughout the vehicle’s floor and composite ballistic armour is located at the sides. As the vehicle is open in its design, the degree of protection is obviously limited by its operational use. Within that compromise, however, we have installed ballistic protection panels around the vehicle, which reduce the secondary effects of detonations.

AH: What technology has been implemented onboard the vehicles to provide soldiers in battle with updated information?

SL: There is a strong focus on communications onboard the Jackal 2 and Coyote, which unfortunately I am not allowed to talk too extensively about. The MoD has invested heavily in augmenting the vehicles with systems that enable soldiers to be updated with as much information from as many sources as possible.

At the moment they carry radio systems on many different operating levels and depending on the user, may also have other systems onboard that offer rolling maps or strategic battle information.

Supacat has been placed in charge of providing computer entry systems rather then basic data platforms onboard the latest vehicles. The MoD was originally responsible for integrating the systems onboard our vehicles, but on the Jackal 2 we have provided a data platform that ensures all systems work effectively and integrate with the vehicle.

AH: What refuelling capabilities have been incorporated into the design of the vehicles in order for them to operate in remote areas?

SL: These are primarily long-range vehicles designed for patrols. The Jackal 2, for example, carries a main fuel tank, an auxiliary fuel tank and significant space for additional jerry cans to be carried on the hamper. Cross-fuelling systems are provided on the vehicles that integrate all those options.

Depending on what supplies are carried onboard, the vehicles can generally last a full week on patrol. Essentially they can travel 700km-800km on the main tanks and then using the additional jerry cans they could last anything up to 2,000km. They operate using either diesel or jet fuel.

AH: How does Supacat plan to meet the MoD’s £55m order of 110 Jackal 2 and 70 Coyote vehicles on time and on budget?

“The first Jackal was originally designed in 2001 for the UK Special Forces.”SL: Supacat is responsible for the design, development, prototyping, integration and overall programme management. We have a strong alliance with our production partner Babcock, which is responsible for detailed production planning, purchasing and manufacturing at their Devonport dockyard facility. There is also a single project office located at Dunkeswell in Devon which provides overall control and ensures that the vehicles are being produced at the rate required.

Essentially the strength of this programme will be down to our close partnership with Babcock and we are both working towards the same end result – which is to deliver to the vehicles to the MoD in Afghanistan by the end of 2009.

Because of the timescale of this particular project, we have also tried to work around including as many of the latest improvements to the vehicle as possible. We are therefore running a constant development policy with Babcock, whereby the MoD is able to suggest minor or sometimes significant improvements to the vehicle and we will be able to respond accordingly. That level of feedback from the MoD will continue to be a prominent feature of the programme as we go forward.

Troops deserve best technology

Your recent article (“Military and police work together to subdue a volatile corner of Afghanistan,” News, March 10) pointed out that the 17,000 extra U.S. troops we are sending to Afghanistan will face a growing insurgency that could grow more deadly than the one we left in Iraq.

So as the Obama administration places Pentagon programs on the chopping block, it should remember that cuts to programs like the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program would delay the delivery of new high tech reconnaissance tools that could save countless lives in Afghanistan–by uncovering ambushes before they happen.

For a soldier on patrol, each ditch in Afghanistan might hide a deadly ambush. To survive, our troops need the best technology to see around these dangerous corners: fog lights for the proverbial fog of war. Each platoon in an FCS brigade will have remote-controlled aerial and ground robots providing live video reconnaissance of insurgent activity directly to troops on the ground. The networked vehicles and digital soldier gear can access up-to-date electronic maps of the area, color coded with friendly units and potential insurgent strongholds, thus allowing our soldiers to take the battle to the enemy on our own terms. Combat veterans testing this equipment say our troops need it now.

When critical body armor and armored vehicles failed to arrive in Iraq on time, thousands of soldiers died. We must ensure that this type of critical equipment for our combat troops never suffers another needless delay.

–George Autobee Cpt. (Ret.) Director of Government Affairs, American GI Forum of the United States

Washington, D.C.

TS2 Satellite Technologies

TS 2 is the prime Internet Provider for US Army soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of all active customers are Polish and US Army soldiers, but TS 2 solutions have been implemented also for private companies and organizations. TS 2′ network in Iraq and Afghanistan has over 15 thousand military users of local broadband satellite connections.

TS 2 specializes in providing global satellite access services. They core business is broadband access to the Internet in areas with poor telecommunications infrastructure and mobile satellite phones communication. The main medium of used transmission is a two-way satellite transfer system, which provides good access to the satellite network in even the least accessible areas. It not only provides a broadband connection but also a wide range of additional data and voice services.

TS2’s satellite networks are available in Al Taqaddum Air Base, Bagram AF, Balad Base, Baquba Airfield, Brassfield-Mora, Cob Adder, Cob Speicher, Camp Al Asad Airbase, Camp Bucca Basra City, Camp Buehring, Camp Charlie Basra, Camp Eggers, Camp Fallujah, Camp Grizzly, Camp Korean Village, Camp Liberty, Camp Mejid, Camp Ramadi, Camp Slayer, Camp Stryker, Camp Taji, Camp Victory, Fob Bagram, Fob Brassfield Mora, Fob Delta Al Kut, Fob Diamondback, Fob Falcon, Fob Garryowen, Fob Gardez, Fob Ghazni, Fob Kalagush, Fob Kandahar, Fob Lagman, Fob Mchenry, Fob Marez, Fob Normandy, Fob Rustamiyah, Fob Summerall, Fob Sykes, Fob Salerno, Fob Torkham, Fob Warhorse, Fob Warrior, Herat RTC, Jallaabad Air Base, Kabul Airport, Kabul Camp Eggers, Kandahar Air Base, Lsa Anaconda Balad, Sather Air Base, Q-West Base Complex and Tallil Ab Lsa Adder. [2]

TS2 delivers telecommunication services also for Police Transition Teams in following locations: West Ramadi, Warrar, Tal-Aswad, Saqlawiyah / Saqlawiah, Rutbah, Rumanah, Ramadi District HQ, Qatanna, Mulaab, Kubaisa, Khaladiah, Karmah, Jazeera, Hit, Haqlaniyah, Hamdiyah, Habbaniyah, Forsan, Ferris, East Ramadi, Barwannah, Anah, Ameriayah and Al Qaim. [3]

Military customers in Iraq and Afghanistan

Before end of 2007 year, the TS 2 solutions have been implemented for e.g. US Marine Corps (USMC), US Army Corps of Engineers, Australian Defence Force (ADF), Command of Polish Navy, Special Military Formation GROM, 1st Special Commando Regiment, Polish National Police, Polish National Headquarters of the State Fire Services, Border Guard (Poland), World Bank Group, Lockheed Martin Information Technology, Halliburton Energy Services, KBR, General Dynamics Information Technology, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., L-3 Communications Vertex Aerospace, US Naval Research Laboratory, ITT Corporation Aerospace / Communications Division, Technest Holdings / EOIR Technologies, North Eastern Aeronautical Company (Neany), EchoStorm Worldwide, Jorge Scientific Corporation, Erinys International, Aegis Iraq, American Heart of Poland and more others.

TS2′s military services are used by soldiers from 1 BCT 101 ABN DIV, 1-151 CAV HHT, 1-161st FA A-BTRY, 1-206 Field Artillery Battalion, 1-25 SBCT, 1-5 INF B Co, 1-61 CAV SQDN, 1-76 FA, 1/402nd AFSB STRYKER LNO, 1038th HCC, 10TH MTN DIV, 1710 Transpotation company, 184th Ordnance Battalion, 189 CSSB, 18th EN BDE, 1AD 2BCT / TF 1-35 AR, 1AD STB/Datapath, 1BCT, 1STB 1BCT 4ID, 1st BCT 101st Airborne Div., 1st Intel Bn P&A Co AFP, 1st PLT C Co 3-21 IN, 1st Space BDE / MNC-I, 2 BCT 1ID JSS H2, 2/25 DET 1 WPNS CO MAP 3, 2/25 Det 1 H&S Comm Plt, 201st Engineer Bn., 215th ASMC Phipps Clinic, 259 CSSB 155 ICTC, 25th Signal BN, 269 TH MP CO, 269th MP CO, 27th BCT, 3/10 MPCO, 3/4 WPNS CAAT-2, 324 NSC, 330th Military Police Detachment, 345th MI BN, 351st MP CO, 368th Finance DET 4, 370th En Co 54th En Bn, 3ACR, 3D RADIO BN, 401st AFSB MRAP, 41st Fires BDE, 455 EOG/ Spawar/ ATM, 4ID, 4SB 1BCT 4ID, 4th BAT. 101st AB, 4th BCT, 504th MP BN, 527th MP CO, 527th Military Police Company, 542nd SMC, 55th EN CO, 561 MT company, 589th BSB, 58th mp co 1st plt, 5th ANGLICO HQ Det/1st BDE, 5th EN BN, 5th Eng Bn, 6-17 CAV 1-1 ARB, 715th MP CO, 752nd OD CO, 772 Military Police Company, 776 Maintenance Co., 812th MP CO, 836th Engineer Company Sapper, 84th EN BN 643 EN CO, 84th Eng Bn 643rd En Bn, 87th Eng Co, 926th EN BDE, 937th Engineer Company, 97th Trans Det 3, A 2-20 FA, A CO 1-5 IN REGT, A TRP 1-152 CAV, A co. 4SB, A-4/320th, A-BRTY 2-44 ADA, A-CO 1-21 INF, A/2-211 AVIATION, A/CO 1/21, ACO TF 1/35 AR, ALPHA TROOP 1-152, Aco 1-153 INF, Alpha Company, B 4-320th FA, B Btry 3-4 AMD Battalion, B CO Task Force Odin, B CO. Bldg 3455/CH, B Co 1-6 IN, B Co 2-112th, B Co 2-4 GSAB, B Co. Bldg 3455 / CH, B Co. Bldg 3510 / CH, B Company 1-18 Infantry, B co 1-35AR, B co 2-6 IN, B co 563D ASB, B co. 404 ASB CAB 4ID, Bco 1-184 IN L, Bco 1-21, Bco. 2-4 GSAB CAB 4ID, Bco.404 ASB, Bravo Co. 1-184th, Bravo co. 3-159 ARB, C 1/158 fa bn, C BTRY 2-5 FA, C Btry 2-8 FA 1/25 SBCT, C Co 1-12 CAV 1CD, C Co 1-24 IN, C Co. 1/168th GSAB, C Co. 4-4 ARB, C co. 4-4 ARB CAB 4ID, C trp 1-303d Cav 81st hbct, C-Btry 1/158 FA, C/Trp 6-17 CAV, CAB 4ID, CAB 4th ID, CAFFT TAJI, CAV. 2nd PLATOON, CJTF-101 CJ3 Biometrics, CSTC-A CJ6 CSC, Co. B 146 ESB, D Co 2-27 IN/ 3rd PLT, D Co. 2-327 Inf., D. Co. 1/114th INF, D/123 AVN 6-17 CAV, Delta Company 1-151, Delta Company 1-151 Warlords, Delta Troop 7-17 CAV, E CO 3-1 AVN REGT, E Co. 1-161IN, E. CO 1-66 AR, E/FSC 1-22IN 1BCT 4ID, EOD Company 1/3, F Co. 2-10 AVN, GLS/L-3/Titan, HHB 1/6 FA, HHB 2-20 FA BN, HHC 1-24 IN, HHC 1-87 INF, HHC 2-7 CAV 4 BCT 1 CD, HHC 2/327 INF Olsen Medics, HHC 25th STB 25ID G2, HHC 3-103 AR, HHC 3/2 SCR LST, HHC 51st Signal Battalion, HHC 56 SBCT, HHC 5th Engineer Battalion, HHC 710 BSB 3BCT, HHC 783rd MP BN, HHC 84th Engineers Battalion, HHC 949 BSB, HHC BTB, HQs/ 561st MP Company, HSC 834TH ASB, JCCS-1, JTF Paladin / COIC, KAF NSE Force Protection 1 Platoon, KAIA ISAF Kabul Afghanistan, KBR B4 Services, KBR/LSI C7A McHenry, L-3 Communications Iraq, L3 Vertex Aerospace Iraq, L3/GSI, NSWLOGDET TQ US NAVY, PM BIOMETRICS FWD/BAT, TF 5-09 Canadian Forces, TF Centaur, TF Fighting, TF Phoenix, Task Force 1-6 S6, Task Force ODIN, Task Force Wings and USAF FET in FOB Salerno. [5]

TS2 will provide satellite services for the Marines new bases in Afghanistan in first months of 2009 year. The government contract concerns establishing and maintaining full communication in new locations for two years for all soldiers stationed there. The USA are going to transfer 4.5 thousand Marines from Iraq to Afghanistan as early as at the beginning of 2009.