An experimental U.S. Navy technology that links “black boxes”—used
to collect and process intelligence aboard ships and aircraft—is helping
fill the gaps that have made it difficult for the military services to share
and distribute information about enemy targets in real time.
The technology does not come neatly packaged in a single box, but is rather
an intricate architecture that connects elements from three other programs that
the Navy, Air Force, Army and Marines use today to collect, analyze and distribute
tactical intelligence.
The project—known as Joint Fires Network—started out as a Navy-only
effort to compress the target engagement cycle, from hours to minutes. In Pentagon-speak,
the JFN is about “time-critical strike.”
In August, the Air Force unofficially signed on to the program, which also
has limited Army and Marine Corps participation. That was when the Navy changed
the name of the program from Naval Fires Network to Joint Fires Network.
The different pieces of the Joint Fires Network collectively help expedite
the gathering, processing and fusing of imagery and other intelligence from
national and tactical sensors, so the operators aboard a ship or aircraft, for
example, can quickly analyze the information and translate it into targeting
data that can be delivered to fighter pilots or naval gunners, all within a
10-minute cycle.
One way to understand JFN is to view this technology as “everything that
has to take place, before you pull the trigger,” said Capt. James Phillips,
head of the Navy’s surface warfare division warfare systems branch.
Another way to look at JFN is as the hardware and software that help eliminate
“all that eats up time, causes confusion and makes the entire [target
engagement] process take longer,” said Phillips in a speech last fall
at the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Warfare conference.
A deluge of information available to commanders is not necessarily helpful,
unless the data are digested and packaged into a usable format, he explained.
In other words, JFN is a much-needed tool in the age of “chat-room decision
making,” Phillips said. “I don’t know whether it’s good,
bad or different, [but] we are making chat-room decisions across these networks.
... We need decision tools to help us out.”
Until the Navy and the other services can come up with common standards for
JFN, the system will remain a mix of disparate technologies that have been forced
to talk to each other via “middleware,” or software interfaces.
Three basic systems, all of which have existed for many years, make up the
basic JFN setup: the JSIPS (joint service imager processing system), the GCCS
(global command and control system) and the TES (tactical exploitation system).
JSIPS is a shipboard system that can receive, process, exploit, store and disseminate
digital imagery fed from national (spy satellites) and tactical sensors aboard
aircraft, for example. The Global Command and Control System is a multi-service
network mandated by the Defense Department. TES, developed by the Army, is a
ground station that receives, processes and disseminates intelligence, surveillance
and reconnaissance information.
Responsible for the overall management and development of JFN is Navy Capt.
Kenneth W. Deutsch, recently nominated to rear admiral. A naval aviator, Deutsch
previously ran the communications and computer networks division at the Joint
Staff.
For the Navy and the other services to be able to execute “network centric
warfare,” they need the Joint Fires Network, Deutsch said in an interview.
“We are trying to take those things critical to time-sensitive strike
and network centric warfare, and putting them under one hat,” he said.
“The JFN is a promise to the war fighter that we are going to get the
data you need, when you need it, now.”
Responding to a call for fire within minutes would mark a vast improvement
over the technology available just four years ago, in Operation Allied Force.
At the time, Navy war planners aboard carriers in the Mediterranean could expect
to wait at least two hours for data collected by U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
to be processed back in the United States and sent back to the ship.
“A two-hour turnaround was not quick enough to engage a moving target,”
Deutsch said. “Now, you want minutes.”
The JFN is only in its embryonic stages, but recent exercises and battle-group
experiments have yielded encouraging results, he said.
Last month, the Navy’s Seventh Fleet tested JFN in the western Pacific,
aboard the USS Blue Ridge, an amphibious command ship. An Air Force officer,
the joint force air commander, operated afloat. Typically, the air commander
would work ashore.
Intelligence gathering and processing systems aboard the Blue Ridge collected
data on a possible target and fed them to the joint air operations center, at
Hickam Air Force Base, in Hawaii. The JAOC evaluated the data, prepared a targeting
matrix and transmitted a weapons launch approval back to the ship.
Specialists aboard the Blue Ridge used the Navy’s TES display to sort
imagery received from a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and to direct the Predator’s
search to find potential targets of interest. Information such as target tracks
and imagery from the Navy’s portion of the Global Command and Control
System were fed into the TES database and exchanged between Blue Ridge and the
JAOC.
For the time being, the plan is to deploy JFN aboard carriers and big-deck
amphibious ships. Only big-deck platforms can host the people and equipment
needed to process and analyze massive amounts of data. Ideally, every ship and
aircraft in a battle group should have this technology, but that is not realistic
due to the cost of buying and installing the systems, as well as bandwidth constraints,
Deutsch said. “You’d like to have JFN on every shooter ... The problems
are bandwidth and having the intelligence analysts on board.”
When operators are trying to download imagery from satellites, reconnaissance
drones and other systems, “the bandwidth challenges are tremendous,”
he said. “That is why we are only concentrating on big decks. Eventually,
we can go to smaller platforms, once we figure out a way to get the bandwidth
requirements down.”
As is the case throughout the Navy, “we are all facing resource issues,”
he noted.
The expenses associated with JFN do not end after the hardware and software
are onboard. Each platform not only requires a huge amount of bandwidth, but
also additional training for the operators. Aboard carriers that have JFN today,
for example, only highly-trained intelligence specialists, many of whom require
top-secret clearances, run the equipment. The bandwidth management alone is
a full-time job aboard carriers.
Each JFN suite costs about $12 million, plus nearly another million dollars
apiece for the installation. The priciest component is the TES terminal, which
costs about $7 million.
“When you talk about going on all the shooters, you see a huge bill,”
said Deutsch.
Besides the cost, the JFN program is wrestling with a more fundamental problem:
how to meet the ambitious goal set by the Marine Corps of a 2.5-minute response
for a call of fire. That is significantly faster than the 10-minute requirement
set for the Navy and the Air Force.
Fast Response
The Marines set a high bar for JFN, but a 2.5-minute goal is not unreasonable,
given that Marines are on the ground, in close proximity to their targets, explained
Lt. Cmdr. Rob Thompson, JFN program manager.
Calling for fire and getting bombs on target within 2.5 minutes is unlikely
to be achieved with the current technology, Phillips said. Further, the national-level
intelligence takes too long to arrive. Only tactical on-board sensors can provide
the intelligence fast enough, he noted.
“If you are depending on national-level intelligence to get to the 2.5
minutes, you are not going to get there,” he said. “It takes too
long to get the stuff. ...You have to get the information onboard and process
it.”
In the JFN program, he added, “all we’ve done is draw an envelope
around this stuff.” Inside that envelope, “there is redundant and
conflicting information. ... All that eats up time, causes confusion and makes
the entire process take longer.”
The most desirable course in JFN is to develop an entirely new architecture,
one that is designed specifically to be interoperable among the services and
to meet the stringent requirements for fire support of land forces on the ground,
Phillips noted.
“We are spending a whole lot of money on ... families of systems. I think
this is a dysfunctional family,” he said. “In my opinion, we are
polishing the dirt. It’s a mess.”
Just being able to make disparate systems talk to each other is not enough,
when the “guys on the ground are looking for responsiveness” within
2.5 seconds, he said. “No matter how you employ the family of systems,
it’s not going to get you [2.5] seconds,” he said. “We are
going to have to do something different.”
Phillips said he is hopeful that the Navy will “demonstrate leadership”
in bringing this program to fruition.
Part of that leadership will be put to the test in the months ahead, as the
Navy, the Air Force and the Army attempt to collaborate on a multi-service architecture
that could become the foundation for the next generation of JFN.
The only way to have “true” interoperability is to have common
hardware and standards for displaying information across the services, Deutsch
said. “The interoperability problem is largely solved when you have the
same equipment, same architecture.”
A significant step in that direction is the so-called Distributed Common Ground
Station, a program that seeks to develop common standards for intelligence processing
and an acceptable format for the display of information that all the services
can agree to. “The Navy and Air Force are the major players right now”
in the DCGS project, said Deutsch. “The Army and Marines have similar
equipment, but not a similar architecture.”
An industry competition currently is under way for DCGS. Among the companies
in the running are General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman Corp., Lockheed Martin
and Raytheon.
The DCGS is much broader than JFN, he explained. It’s a combination of
hardware, software transmit/receive devices and data links. But the technology
could go a long way toward realizing the Navy’s JFN vision, Deutsch explained.
“If we go in that direction, we can save money with a larger buy, and
we would have more commonality, guaranteed interoperability by the fact that
you are purchasing the same systems.”
Further exacerbating the problem are the “contractor stovepipes,”
said Deutsch, referring to the reality that vendors sell hardware that is not
interoperable. But he said that having incompatible equipment can be overcome
by joint training. “When you train side by side with other services, you
typically can work out the differences in the equipment,” he said. “If
we come to a common DCGS, if we make that a joint answer, then we will have
solved interoperability.”
Under the JFN architecture, he added, there would be room for “service-unique
applications, but [operating under] common core systems.”
The definitive standards—which will have to be approved by the Defense
Department—have not been determined, said Thompson.
The JFN will follow the “spiral development” approach that the
Defense Department now is advocating. It means that the Navy will incrementally
add new features and upgrades and test them at sea, rather than wait until the
technology is fully developed. Spiral development makes sense in this program,
said Deutsch, because the technology changes rapidly and the integration is
so complex.
Several ships already have put JFN to use in recent exercises and operational
deployments. JFN-equipped ships include the carriers USS Lincoln, USS Kitty
Hawk and USS Stennis, the Blue Ridge, the USS Coronado flag ship, the USS Essex
and USS Belleau Wood amphibious assault ships. The Navy’s 5th Fleet command
center in Bahrain also has a JFN suite, as well as the Air Force, in four undisclosed
locations, and one Army unit.
Roxana Tiron contributed to this report.