For the Army, this may be its last chance of salvaging the surviving pieces of the ill-starred “future combat systems.”
Working to the Army’s advantage is that what remains of FCS is something that soldiers need and currently don’t have: A mobile communications network that can be accessed by everyone on the battlefield, even small units that constantly move around.
Current command-and-control and communications systems in the Army were designed for division- and brigade-level use. Before Iraq and Afghanistan, smaller units were not a high priority and, to this day, have limited means of tapping into the Army’s battle-command networks. Today’s systems also lack enough range or capacity for data to stream down to those small units that are scattered across hundreds of miles.
During the past nine years at war, much of the responsibility for intelligence gathering and counterinsurgency operations has fallen on small units, so commanders have been seeking ways to extend the network down to lower echelons, and even down to the individual soldier.
Troops have voice-communications devices, such as push-to-talk FM radios. But that is not the technology the Army had envisioned for the information age. Army leaders have spoken for years about their desire to provide Internet connectivity to the entire force, and to be able to deliver voice and data from a single device, such as a software-programmable radio or even a smartphone.
The rhetoric, however, has not matched the reality. 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 the others’ 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.
After more than a decade of failed attempts — and billions of dollars spent without achieving results — the pressure is on for the Army to fix this. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said that the “network” is now the cornerstone of the service’s modernization strategy. “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’s answer to Chiarelli’s call comes in the form of a program called Early Infantry Brigade Increment 1, or E-IBCT — the surviving offspring of the future combat systems. Defense Secretary Robert Gates terminated the vehicles that were in development under FCS but directed the Army to perfect the network and focus on the technologies that soldiers need now.
The equipment that is being acquired under the E-IBCT includes hovering unmanned aircraft, small ground robots, a rocket launcher, robotic motion sensors and a network integration kit to send and receive data from these systems.
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. The plan is for more brigades to be equipped with the advanced network later this decade, and to eventually outfit all 73 brigades.
But the project has not gone smoothly by any means. Earlier this year, Army officials were grilled on Capitol Hill over Defense Department test reports that the E-IBCT had failed critical trials and was being rushed to deployment nonetheless. Lawmakers have slammed the program, and as a result, the Army’s $1 billion request for E-IBCT for fiscal year 2011 is in jeopardy.
The negative reviews and poor test results drove the Army into action, and officials are now making an aggressive public-relations push to show that E-IBCT has corrected the problems and remains on a path toward a 2012 deployment.
As part of a celebration at the Pentagon of the Army’s 235th birthday June 14, the Army’s program offices in charge of the E-IBCT brought the hardware and software, and set up live demonstrations at the Pentagon courtyard. National Defense spoke with officials and soldiers who were operating the equipment.
They showed how in the E-IBCT, information collected by ground robots, unmanned aircraft or soldiers’ digital cameras can be piped into a single network, the data can be instantly analyzed and disseminated up and down the chain of command.
The ability to do this doesn’t sound like anything special, “but it’s a capability we currently don’t have in the Army,” said Lt. Col. Michael Murrah, product manager for software integration at the Army’s program executive office for integration.
Units at war today have loads of sensors and computer networks, but they’re isolated “point-to-point” systems, which limits their usefulness.
“If I stumble upon a bad guy, I want to make sure others get this information quickly,” Murrah said. The way it works today, a soldier who controls a robot may find a roadside bomb, but has to manually tell someone what he saw, he said. What the new system offers is a “direct feed into the network,” said Murrah. “Anyone on the battlefield can see what an unmanned aircraft sees, not just the operator.”
The E-IBCT marks the first time the Army is feeding tactical intelligence into a network that is designed to be accessed by everyone in the brigade.
The goal is to “evolve to where the soldier at the lowest echelons is plugged into the network,” said Army spokesman Paul Mehney.
The Army now has only hovering unmanned aircraft in the E-IBCT, but it may add fixed-wing variants too, he said. In the future, the Army may consider including the Shadow and Raven fixed-wing UAVs into the mix, if commanders determine that it’s helpful to bring those aircraft into the system.
In deployments, the brigade’s network gear will be installed aboard 81 armored trucks, the all-terrain mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, or M-ATVs.
Each vehicle will host a “network integration kit,” where the fusion of the information takes place. The kits could be installed in fixed-site tactical operations centers or vehicles. The initial brigade will use the M-ATVs instead of humvee trucks because they’re roomier and more survivable against roadside bombs, Murrah said.
Along with the network integration kits in each vehicle are wideband radios — the joint tactical radio system’s ground mobile variant — and computers that will be running the so-called ICS software (integrated computer systems) that the Army originally acquired for the future combat systems. The “middleware” that brings the data into the terminals also is a technology inherited from the FCS: the “system of systems common operating environment,” or SOSCOE.
What makes the current E-IBCT stand out from previous attempts at deploying mobile networks is that it does not depend on satellite links or wired connections. The radios in each M-ATV create a “mobile ad-hoc network,” or manet, that connects the sensors and the users, said Murrah. Each tactical radio functions like a cell phone tower.
The manet is the “magic trick” that extends the Army’s network to the “last tactical mile,” he said. It provides bandwidth at distances as long as 35 kilometers, he said. “We take our cell phone towers on our back,” Murrah said. Although manet networks do crash from overuse, they “self-heal” rather quickly, said Murrah. The software is designed for that, he said. There are “subnetworks” within the manet that prioritize the bandwidth for different sensors and users. Based on earlier tests, program officials estimated that of the 81 nodes in the network, only 35 would be operating at any one time.
Soldiers would be able to access the network and display data on computer screens that also run the blue-force tracking system that has been in use by the Army for years. The E-IBCT includes handheld radios for troops who leave their vehicles.
Future brigades may be issued sleek smartphones instead of bulky radios, Murrah said. The Army has tested the SOSCOE middleware on seven different cell phone brands, including those made by Google and Motorola. An experimental “detainee” phone application, for instance, allows a soldier to shoot a picture of a captured enemy fighter and send the photo into the encrypted classified Army network.
The cell phone apps, alas, are years away, and will not be part of the setup for the 3rd IBCT, 1st AD deployment.
The next major hurdle for the E-IBCT project comes in September, when it will undergo a “limited user test” at Fort Bliss, where a small battalion will conduct a simulated deployment.
Murrah said the biting criticism from Congress, from the Defense Department’s test and evaluation office and from the Government Accountability Office was legitimate. Many of the gripes echoed the feedback that program officials had received from soldiers during the tests at Fort Bliss over the past year.
Soldiers have complained that the system is too complicated and often not reliable, which makes them not trust the technology, said Murrah. In the past, “We didn’t meet the reliability issues and problems with radio performance. … We’ve gone back and fixed it.”
A Pentagon high-level “defense acquisition board” review is scheduled for November.
Assuming the upcoming tests and evaluations go off without major hitches, there is still one big stumbling block ahead that could threaten this program: Its price tag.
Of most concern is the cost of the radios. The ground-mobile joint tactical radios are currently priced at about $250,000 apiece, according to industry sources. The handheld radio early-production models range from $20,000 to $50,000. Even Gen. Chiarelli has warned that the affordability of these radios could be a problem.
Murrah conceded that the radios are pricey because they are technically far more advanced than any radio the Army has ever purchased. Most of what drives the cost is the encryption and the software development.
But E-IBCT officials are not worried. If the radios turn out to be too expensive and are axed from the budget, the network is set up to function with alternatives. “With the foundation we’ve laid, the tactical middleware, we are not tightly coupled to any transport layer,” Murrah said. “We can adapt without changing the individual pieces.”
An alternative to the SOSCOE middleware is another Linux-based operating system called “command post of the future,” which the Army currently operates at hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually the Army may be pressed to stick to one type of middleware because of the costs of rewriting battle command applications for each operating system.
Unlike most programs in the Army that have closed architectures and are tied to particular vendors or devices, the E-IBCT network was designed to work with multiple radios and computers. “This is a capability we never had in the Army in the past,” Murrah said. In the E-IBCT, “We decoupled ourselves from all these dependencies,” he said. “The current foundation doesn’t marry you to one technical solution.” Whatever funding decisions are made in the future are less likely to devastate the program, said Murrah. “We are approaching the brigade in a fundamentally different way.”
The complexity issue is not as easy to solve, Murrah said. That the system is too complicated to operate is a valid objection, he said. Engineers have tried to automate some features to simplify the work for soldiers, he said. If, for example, a soldier sends three pictures of a suspect, the network will automatically fuse them so that only one icon is presented on the screen, not three.
Still, this is not an iPad.
“I’m not going to make any excuses for the complexity,” Murrah said. “This is a complex undertaking that the Army and the Defense Department have never attempted before.”