The Army is soliciting bids from contractors for a high-tech grid
of weapons, sensors and command stations that would enable soldiers
to lay clusters of anti-tank munitions in the forward areas of the
battlefield, leave them unattended and control them remotely from
the rear.
This is the basic idea behind a program called Raptor, an “intelligent”
combat outpost consisting of a suite of munitions, sensors, a communication
system and a control station. The munition for Raptor would be an
upgraded version of the Hornet, also known as the wide-area munition.
Hornet is a smart weapon that detects, classifies, tracks and engages
ground armored vehicles.
In the future, the system could be adapted to accommodate other
anti-tank munitions, non-lethal weapons or demolition obstacles,
said Lt. Col. James Childress, division chief at the Army’s
program office for mines, countermine and demolitions, at Picatinny
Arsenal, N.J.
Several functions are envisioned for Raptor—to guard flanks
or screen a unit’s front, as an outpost or a listening post
for combat intelligence gathering, as a forward observer, cueing
and directing fires.
The munitions would be hand emplaced—about 50 kilometers
forward of the brigade’s tactical operations center. Subsequent
upgrades of Raptor will provide for other forms of delivery, via
artillery or aircraft, Childress said in an interview.
The requirement for Raptor originated at the Army’s Engineer
School, about a decade ago. Combat engineers were interested in
an intelligent minefield that could be controlled by the brigade
commander at the tactical operations center.
But Raptor is more than just a minefield that can be remotely controlled,
Childress explained. The system would have command-and-control nodes
programmed with a set of instructions, based on what the sensors
report. The munitions would be programmed to execute instructions
autonomously, based on what the sensor perceives, or to take orders
from the operator. If any nodes are destroyed or disabled, the network
triggers a “self-healing” mechanism.
The Army issued a draft solicitation for Raptor last year and hosted
an “industry day” in December 2001. Doreen Chaplin,
project officer for Raptor, said that the Army will award two contracts
in late 2002 for initial concept designs and component development.
That phase will last about 30 months, at the end of which one contractor
will be selected to continue the development work. If the program
is successful, Raptor could become operational in 2010, she said.
Contractor proposals for the first phase are due in July. Chaplin
said that the solicitation does not specify what type of hardware
contractors should use—it only asks for “functionality.”
The Hornet munition is treated as “government-furnished equipment.”
For the Raptor concept to come to fruition, meanwhile, the Army
needs to successfully develop a new version of the Hornet, called
Advanced Hornet. The current variant, or the basic Hornet, would
be useless in the Raptor network, because it only has one-way communications,
Childress explained.
At the core of the Advanced Hornet is a two-way communications
and networking system, said Jay Johnson, director of Army programs
at Textron Systems, in Wilmington, Mass. The company finished production
of the basic Hornet and now is working on the development of the
advanced version.
The basic Hornet only has a one-way radio, so a soldier can instruct
it to turn on or to self-destruct. But the soldier never really
knows whether the munition ever got the signal, Johnson explained.
A two-way communications system would allow the soldier to not
only send instruction signals to the munition, but also to verify
that the munition is doing what it was directed to do. The Hornet
can engage targets from a standoff range of about 100 meters. Typically,
early-entry forces would field Hornet to protect the flanks at the
end of the line.
The Hornet’s main body is a 35-pound cylinder (8-inches in
diameter, 13-inches tall). It deploys legs to maintain stability
on the ground. It comes with three kinds of sensors. Acoustic devices
listen for vehicle sounds. The base has a seismic sensor, which
feels the vibration of a vehicle. The basic Hornet has a single
infrared sensor in the submunition that looks for engine heat. In
the Advanced Hornet, there are two sensors in the submunition: infrared
and laser-radar, which tracks elevations. When it locates the target,
the submunition fires an explosively formed penetrator.
If the program proceeds as planned, the Army will start buying
the Advanced Hornet in 2004. Its warhead would be the same copper
submunitions used by the Air Force in the so-called Sensor Fuzed
Weapon. “That saves the Army a lot of money,” said Johnson.
The networking module and the secure data link in the Advanced
Hornet were developed by Harris RF Communications, in Rochester,
N.Y.
The company is about half way through the development cycle for
the networking module, which uses the same technology found in Harris’
VHF handheld radios, said Andy Adams, director of product management.
The challenge, he said, was to make a unit small enough that it
would fit into a sensor or a munition and operate off a small battery.
The company also developed wireless tactical networking protocols
to help manage the bandwidth in the system. “Key to wireless
communications is channel access,” Adams said. “When
you have a bunch of munitions trying to access the same channel,
the key is to figure out who can talk when. Our technology centers
around doing that efficiently, so we can pass around more data.”