Historians have characterized these developments as “revolutions in military affairs.” Perhaps best defined by Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment, a revolution in military affairs is “a major change in the nature of warfare brought about by the innovative application of new technologies which, combined with dramatic changes in military doctrine and operational and organizational concepts, fundamentally alters the character and conduct of military operations.”

The nature of conflict in our world today underscores the need for us to look to a different direction for advancements in warfare. Our adversaries are asymmetric and highly adaptive, and look to the sanctuary of ungoverned territories to survive. To anticipate and deter enemy action, warfighters need persistent communications over a wide range of operation—often in areas where line-of-sight communications is not feasible.

In order for our forces to be strategically responsive, any new revolution in military affairs must be predicated on shortening the “sensor to shooter” chain. The network provided by the Airborne, Maritime/Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System (AMF JTRS) will be such a revolution in military affairs.

How will AMF revolutionize military communications? AMF will get the information to the guy in the foxhole. As a key part of the JTRS family of radios, AMF will network warfighters in the air and sea and on the ground, providing seamless, secure, wideband mobile communications. The combat value of our fighting forces will be multiplied through information superiority—the payoff of this “system of systems” that will allow warfighters to locate, target, engage, assess and re-engage with greater speed and efficiency.

Consider this scenario: In the battlespace today, can 100 soldiers take their handheld devices to Afghanistan and pass e-mails between one another? No. It won’t work because the towers, routers, cables and network needed to make it work are not in Afghanistan. AMF provides the technology to interconnect those 100 soldiers to a Global Information Grid (GIG) point of presence using one box.

Such a point of presence may be reached via satellite or a flying relay, thereby bringing all the services of the GIG to the tactical edge. With AMF, those soldiers can talk and exchange any type of information to one another—anytime, anywhere in the world. That is a revolution in military affairs.

AMF JTRS will enable interoperable communications to take place without requiring warfighters to carry multiple radios. Because the communications capability is defined digitally in software, the signal processing is handled by computer, not special-purpose hardware. This, in effect, means that helicopters, ground stations, ships, aircraft or other military platforms with AMF JTRS installed can communicate with each other regardless of the type of communications gear used. Soldiers can board a C-130, deploy and drop into an environment anywhere in the world and be on a network—line of sight or not.

The pilot in the helicopter, the soldier in the foxhole and the commander at the CAOC will have access to the same information at the same time. The instantaneous nature of being able to understand the battlefield and get the information to those who need it will change the way the operator operates. Once forces can interoperate, they exchange information, understand better what is unfolding on the battlefield and respond more quickly to events for greater mission effectiveness.

INSIDE THE OODA LOOP

The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide and act) states that decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle: If I see the battlespace and if I can out-think and out-decide the enemy, I can defeat him. By connecting aircraft, helicopters, submarines, surface ships and ground stations on a common network, AMF will give warfighters insight into the enemy’s OODA loop.

By transmitting much needed intelligence to deployed troops, this advanced communications network will help deter threats, allow warfighters to take decisive actions in combat and, most importantly, save the lives of American servicemembers. The network utilizes software-defined radios—a collection of hardware and software technologies—that will allow new features and capabilities to be added to existing infrastructure via software upgrade without requiring major new capital expenditures, and without requiring new hardware.

The AMF JTRS architecture will simultaneously support today’s legacy waveforms like Link-16 and SINCGARS, as well as advanced IP-based waveforms like the Soldier Radio Waveform, Wideband Networking Waveform and Mobile Objective User System waveform. With these IP-based waveforms, the warfighter can access a wide range of information much like we do when we use the World Wide Web.

With AMF JTRS and the IP-enabled waveforms it will support, users simply join the GIG in real time, and they have the inherent ability to communicate with all participants. AMF JTRS enables higher data rate IP-enabled waveforms that provide greater bandwidth, so the warfighter can receive a clearer picture of the environment, sooner. This means greatly improved situational awareness. This awareness may not provide perfect intelligence, but it will get us inside the enemy’s OODA loop while limiting the enemy’s knowledge.

After World War I, the French built the Maginot Line, a series of defensive fortifications to guard against invasion by Germany or Italy. The French spent a lot of money building it, based upon their linear thinking of the battlefield and experience with World War I trench warfare. Ultimately, it is considered by many to be one of the great military mistakes of all time, since the Maginot Line made little difference in World War II and was fairly easily bypassed by the Germans. I bring up the Maginot Line to bring attention to a capability that our soldiers lack today— joint, networked communications.

When warfighters are in disadvantaged areas, such as an urban canyon, current line-of-sight communications may fail when communications are needed the most. This network provides that direct link the warfighter needs to avoid losing contact with the command post. With AMF, soldiers will be able to connect to the right person, at the right time, to fight the fight.

Too often, units at lower echelons are unable to leverage the power of the enterprise to achieve the synergistic effects promised by net-centric concepts. Tactical units lack the capability to access the information available to higher commands—all at the expense of speed and agility. This produces information that is “too little, too late” for tactical warfighters operating in a fluid battlespace with time-sensitive and specific mission needs.

AMF JTRS will simultaneously run multiple waveforms that support voice, video and data. It supports legacy line-of-sight waveforms simultaneously with next generation IP waveforms. With AMF JTRS, our warfighters will have capabilities similar to what iPod and advanced cell phones with multimedia, GPS, Internet and video capability provide. It all adds up to seamless handoff, wideband networking, clear communications, ease of upgrade and interoperability with all users on the net. And it will do all this in a secure, encrypted radio that is cost competitive with legacy systems.

Imagine a battlefield situation where troops on the ground have limited visibility, but can go online and obtain a view of the entire battlespace—through streaming video from an aircraft pilot, perhaps, or intelligence from a satellite sensor. Warfighters get a much clearer picture of the battlefield and greatly improved coordination between air, ground and surface/subsurface elements. The aircraft that is connected to the network has a real-time view of the battlefield and can connect directly to troops on the ground. This is the technology connection and how the doctrine changes. This is the revolution in military affairs. Warfighters react and respond much, much quicker than the enemy. The result is that lives are saved.

TURNING FROM STOVEPIPES

AMF JTRS is not a radio replacement program, but rather a bridge to the future of truly joint communications. It is a move toward fulfilling the original vision of JTRS as a replacement for legacy radios, helping warfighters to overcome the limitations of many hardware-based, stovepipe systems used today, and providing the leap forward in tactical communications capability needed on the battlefields of today and the future.

But this joint connectivity does not exist today. Many legacy tactical radio systems operate on a single frequency band, are limited to a single waveform, and generally can interoperate only with like radios (mandating multiple radios for weapon platforms and command and control nodes).

In addition, they are not capable of simultaneous voice, video and data operations in the same or other domains. They also require the warfighter to carry multiple radios into combat to communicate, provide interoperability and maintain connectivity. Try to connect ground forces with naval or air support, and the current limitations become glaringly apparent.

AMF provides a vertical extension of the joint ground domain. The ground forces, enabled by the JTRS Ground Mobile Radio (GMR), will establish a critical network for terrestrial operational forces. All too often, the ground domain and airborne domain are characterized as separate layers, each having their own network that requires a strategy to link the two. In reality, it is one network that is enabled by both the GMR JTRS and AMF JTRS working seamlessly to enable the warfighter. Interoperability demands a singular view of a joint network that empowers the soldier, sailor, Marine and airman regardless of their service or combat platform.

AMF JTRS will enable interoperable communications to take place without requiring each soldier to have identical equipment or radios from the same vendor. For years, the emphasis has been on achieving interoperability of systems, but a more appropriate word for today’s thinking is “interdependency.” Interoperability implies systems that are built to work together, creating a fixed, predictable network. Interdependency, on the other hand, reflects an understanding that a broad community’s interests can intersect, and anticipating that a military operation may grow to include different government agencies and coalitions.

First, there is a critical need to decrease the types of tactical radios employed by our joint forces—each for the most part requiring wholesale replacement or expensive modifications to support new operational or mission requirements. This is because they were designed with mutually exclusive non-modular architectures to perform a specific task. They do not comply with applicable information technology standards that embrace commercial open architectures and modular designs to deliver multiple communications means and network functions from a single platform.

Though cheaper initially than developing to the standards, not complying with these standards results in unique systems, consisting of numerous components and parts that require specialized support requirements that create a logistics burden. It also results in systems that are not conducive to the cost-effective improvements and modifications dictated by interoperability requirements, as systems developed to the JTRS and other standards provide.

BRIDGE TO NEW APPLICATIONS

While there may be some who argue that simple upgrades and patches to existing communications equipment and radios can provide a few of the capabilities that will come from AMF JTRS, nothing can duplicate the joint networking capability that this powerful new system will provide. Imagine having to reconfigure your cell phone each time you moved from the line of sight of one cell site antenna into the area of another. Or having to equip your automobile with multiple radios to enjoy FM, AM, satellite or even compact disc-based programming. Instead, we want cell phones that seamlessly hand off from tower to tower as we move about, and radios that provide multiple functions in a compact and affordable unit.

When users have access to applications that deliver clear-cut benefit, it can fuel information demand. When mapping applications first appeared on the Web for travel and directions, people no longer needed to keep maps. They could simply go online, key in where they wanted to travel and obtain the directions. Today, with the growth of the system, you can go to the Web not only to get directions, but also to learn about road conditions and traffic and work alternate routings.

Just as the Internet and smartphones have opened up scores of new applications, AMF JTRS will not only deliver on the government’s key objectives and goals of establishing true joint communications across the services but will also quickly spur new uses that flow from having such an accessible capability. This is why AMF JTRS has been designed using commercial open standards that are flexible and scalable.

Most true revolutions in military affairs are the result of radical rethinking of operational concepts and capabilities. AMF will only become revolutionary if it is recognized as such. AMF JTRS will open up a new era of interoperability, allowing the Army’s AH-64 Apache, the Air Force’s AC-130 Gunship and the Navy’s SSGN submarine and DDG destroyer to communicate seamlessly.

This alone may be enough to convince even the most hardened skeptics that this is a capability warfighters must have. More importantly, AMF JTRS will help save lives by providing real-time situational awareness that no other system, current or planned, can provide. Those who understand it and take advantage of it will enjoy a decisive advantage on future battlefields.

This is a technology innovation that will have great impact on our ability to dominate the future fight. As the world’s leading military power, let us be visionary and recognize the significant power that AMF will provide. AMF JTRS will help us retain America’s information edge. ♦
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Army Colonel Raymond Jones is AMF JTRS program manager.

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