ARTICLE

July 2003

‘No Single Solution’ for Army’s Info-Tech Problems

by Sandra I. Erwin

When it comes to battlefield communications technology, the Army has lots of good ideas, but nowhere near enough money to equip the entire force with the most up-to-date systems, said Lt. Gen. Peter Cuviello, the Army’s chief information officer.

A case in point: mobile satellite communications devices, which are coveted items in combat, but always in short supply.

“Trying to field equipment to 1.2 million people is costly,” Cuviello said in a recent interview.

Ground, air and naval forces who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom had more access to satellite-based communications than they normally are used to, because the United States bought an extraordinary amount of commercial satellite capacity, Cuviello said.

“About 80 percent of our capability over there was commercial satellite. ... When [U.S. troops] go back to home station, they don’t have that capability,” he said

The reality is that when the Army goes to war, most soldiers still depend on old-fashioned line-of-sight voice radios with poor sound quality and no ability to send data electronically or to communicate with the other military services.

“There is no single solution that will fix all the Army’s ills in this area,” Cuviello said. However, “there are stopgap measures that can fix certain things. ... But the challenge is that we are not able to buy it all at one time for everybody.”

Among the lessons the Army has learned from the war in Iraq is that its information systems are too stove-piped and that it needs more bandwidth, he said. “We still have soda-straw capabilities out there.”

It is unlikely that things will change in the foreseeable future, Cuviello said, because there are not “enough resources.”

To have interoperability in a digital battlefield, for example, the Army should standardize the software used in tactical applications. “Not everyone is on the same version of software,” Cuviello said. “We know what the answer is: buy one version for everybody. ... The challenge is that there is not enough money in the world to be able to do that.”

He noted that Army units in Iraq—the XVIII Airborne Corps, the V Corps and the III Corps—had different versions of the Army Battle Command System software. That limited their ability to share information. Contractors stepped in to correct the problem, but that was only an ad-hoc fix.

In remarks to an Association of the U.S. Army information technology conference, Cuviello said the Army needs more mobile and lighter communications equipment on the battlefield. In Army camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a proliferation of antennas to accommodate six different satellite bands and four types of radios, Cuviello said. The abundance of antennas often caused systems to jam each other.

Cuviello would like to see the Army employ “multi-band antennas” that can be applied to multiple radio or satellite links.

The ideal scenario, he said, would be for everyone in the Army to be plugged into one global net, accessible from handheld wireless computers.

Cuviello, who retires this month, seems optimistic about the future of military info-tech programs, particularly the Joint Tactical Radio System and the Army’s WINT project (War Fighter Information Network-Tactical).

Both the JTRS and WINT are more likely to get financial support, Cuviello said, because they are tied to the Future Combat System, the Army’s umbrella program to modernize the entire force.

“We have gotten the acknowledgment of the organization that WINT and JTRS are absolutely critical for the success of FCS,” he said. “When it comes time to sit at the table for prioritization, I think we are going to have a lot better chance, because everybody understands that the [communications, command and control networks] are major parts of FCS.”

Near-Term Programs
In the near term, several projects are under way to help improve the Army’s satellite communications capabilities and manage the available bandwidth, said Lynn Epperson, a program engineer who works on Army SATCOM programs.

“There is a significant need by the war fighter for more throughput capability to support things like imagery, video, large data files,” he said.

Until the Defense Department deploys more advanced satellites (called Wideband Gapfiller) later this decade, the Army plans to increase its reliance on the commercial Global Broadcast Service. GBS transponders, carried on UFO satellites, are used for one-way transmission of imagery and video.

“We are working to improve GBS,” Epperson said. The plan is to upgrade the GBS software architecture from the current Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology to Internet-based IP standards. ATM is a technical protocol widely used to send data, video and voice at ultra high speeds.

The IP protocol will help the Army “make more efficient use of bandwidth and capitalize on new technology to reduce the size of the components that go into the receive suites,” said Epperson.

For years, the Army has sought to make GBS receiver suites smaller and lighter. The IP software still is in development and could be ready as early as 2006, said Epperson. “We expect that with IP, the throughput will be increased.”

Improvements to the GBS, however, will not be enough to overcome the Army’s bandwidth shortage, Epperson said. “To do that, we have to improve our satellites, develop more technology in space to compensate for what we are demanding on the ground.” The Army will benefit greatly from the new Wideband Gapfiller satellites, but the program (managed by the Air Force) has been delayed for budgetary reasons.

Before it can make handheld SATCOM devices more widely available to ground forces, the Defense Department will need to make a “significant investment in better satellites,” said Epperson.

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