‘Information Fusion’ Key to Winning Wars
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by Lawrence P. Farrell, Jr.
When Air Force Secretary James Roche was asked recently what he thought was
the most effective platform in the war on terrorism, the answer may surprise
a lot of people. Roche said the most helpful system was not an airplane or a
combat vehicle, but the “air operations center.”
What made a huge difference in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said Roche, was
the fusion of information. The ability to take information—from sensors
aboard satellites, Joint Stars, Predator, Global Hawk—integrate it, and
use that intelligence to cue weapon systems is what gives a joint commander
a critical edge.
The commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, aggressively
exploited the fusion of information. He built an integrated command center in
Qatar that has come to exemplify what warfare will be like from now on. Franks
could see a picture of the battlefield as events unfolded. That truly changed
the way the war was fought. Network-centric operations had ceased to be pie-in-the-sky
concepts and had become part of the reality of war.
A network-centric approach to military operations is affecting not only strategy
and tactics, but also the way the Defense Department funds research, development
and procurement programs.
The services, which traditionally have been averse to sharing information and
making systems interoperable with others, slowly are defining their programs
and shaping their budgets around network-centric concepts. The bottom line for
the services is that every platform must be treated as a node in what the Pentagon
calls the “global information grid.” If a system can’t plug
into the GIG and play with other systems, it is unlikely to survive budget drills,
where programs increasingly are being measured by their contributions to joint
capabilities. The GIG is being designed as a standards-based, open “system-of-systems”
that will rely heavily on industry solutions.
Each service, as expected, has come up with its own strategy to implement their
vision of how to integrate into the GIG. The Army calls it LandWarNet, the Navy
FORCENet and the Air Force Command and Control Constellation. Vigilance is necessary
to insure these systems can exchange information easily. Exercises and experiments
now being organized by the Joint Forces Command will be key to ensure net-centricity
across the defense enterprise.
The Defense Department already has launched an effort to make the GIG even
more capable, via a program called GIG-BE, for bandwidth expansion (1,000 times
more capable). This upgrade—combined with the Transformational Satellite
System and the Joint Tactical Radio System—should provide the interoperability
and bandwidth necessary for net-centric operations. As the Air Force Chief John
Jumper has reminded us, we need more machine-to-machine communication to free
up time for decision-making in our command centers. We need good integration
of all of this to support the “family of interoperable operation pictures,”
which the enterprise badly needs.
The obvious question then becomes: what does all this mean for the defense
industry? The answer is that companies must continue to change the way they
do business.
Much change already is happening. Boeing, for example, is no longer just an
airplane manufacturer, but a “lead systems integrator” for the Future
Combat Systems, a linchpin of the Army’s transition to network-centric
operations. Meanwhile, the nation’s industry giants—including Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon—are working to set common
standards and architectures to facilitate interoperability.
“Companies have had a very platform-centric orientation,” said
Ernie Snowden, director of business development at Northrop Grumman. That culture
quickly is changing. To make their programs relevant, companies are focused
on “optimizing” platforms to extract better war-fighting capabilities,
Snowden said. They also are developing Web-based “publish and subscribe”
operating environments for commanders to exchange information and provide updates
as events unfold on the battlefield.
Adapting to the network-centric paradigm is no easy task, both from the management
and technical standpoints. As Snowden pointed out, implementing this vision
requires a different approach to systems engineering.
Clearly, net-centric operations require industry to adopt a different perspective.
NDIA has led several efforts in this arena. The Systems Engineering Division
is actively involved in bringing government and industry together to solve interoperability
issues, leading an industry effort in support of the “joint battle management
command and control roadmap” being developed by JFCOM, due out this month.
AFEI, our affiliate association focused on enterprise integration, is driving
industry input into the Defense Department’s “net-centric enterprise
services program” (NCES) and pushing architecture convergence through
the Net-Centric Operations Industry Forum. Last year, the NDIA C4ISR Division
worked with major suppliers of unmanned air vehicles on a study addressing common
and standard UAV architectures. That study has been forwarded to a Defense Department
UAV task force that currently is working to engender cross-service cooperation.
In the end, what matters is what the war fighter needs to achieve success.
As Operation Iraqi Freedom showed, net-centric capabilities are key. As joint
operations cease to be the exception and become the rule, the challenge for
both military and industry leaders is to help define and deliver those capabilities
through systems—like the ones described above—that exchange information
in a seamless and transparent manner.
Please email me your comments to Lfarrell@ndia.org