Networks to the Edge
ARMY, INDUSTRY LEADERS EXPLORE CHANGES NEEDED TO BRING NET-CENTRIC CAPABILITIES TO JOINT TACTICAL OPERATIONS.
Bringing Army net-centric capabilities effectively into joint tactical operations requires major changes in training, operational doctrine, information assurance and other areas, according to participants at a recent military/industry panel.
The panel, entitled “Army Capabilities Enabling the Joint Fight,” took place at the 2006 LandWarNet Conference, held in August in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Sponsored by the Army Chief Information Office/G-6 in conjunction with an AFCEA Technology Showcase, the conference for the first time consolidated the annual Director of Information Management/Army Knowledge Management conference and Signal Symposium into a single event.
Following are edited excerpts of remarks delivered by panel participants.
BRIGADIER GENERAL RANDOLPH P. STRONG
COMMANDING GENERAL
ARMY SIGNAL CENTER
We have new career paths in the Signal Corps. The old traditional path of platoon, company, battalion and brigade command is essentially going away, as most of our battalion and brigade command opportunities go away as the Army modularizes. We’re going to go down to just 11 active duty Signal battalions. We’re also bringing in new military occupational specialties. We’re bringing in a new military occupational specialty focused on spectrum management. We’re going to produce world-class spectrum managers in the Army. We’ll have a partnership, journeyman/tradesman type of program, where a junior spectrum manager will partner with a more experienced one as they work their way up as world-class spectrum managers.
The issues facing those guys, which used to be making sure we deconflicted our own transmitters, have become incredibly complex as we deal with the proliferation of emitters, both in the commercial sector, such as cell phones, but also IED devices and the jammers we have to defeat the IEDs, and the proliferation of our own systems. It’s incredible the number of new emitters that we’re putting on the battlefield, whether a transport system or a sensor.
We’re also doing homeland defense— that’s another new area of the Signal Corps—and doing all this during a time of war. So these are exciting times at the Signal Regiment.
I was at the Signal Center when we deployed Mobile Subscriber Equipment [MSE] at the Army. We thought that bringing that into the Army was huge. But I can tell you that doesn’t compare to what we are doing today in the Signal Regiment. After the fielding of MSE, the 3rd Signal Brigade was essentially the same as it was before the fielding. We went from one voice-only system to another voice-only system. MSE originally was voice only, although we later added packet switching. But what we’re doing today is changing our force structure—3rd Signal Brigade is going away. We’re going to a combination voice analog/digital to an everything-over- IP environment. It’s a tremendous change.
We are also making a huge commitment to be more joint. It’s something that is critically important to us, now and in the future. Having service-unique networks makes things more difficult. We’ve got to go joint in everything, including training at the Signal Center.
The Army Signal Center is truly a joint center. We are training thousands of Army soldiers and hundreds from the Navy, Air Force and Marines. If you go to Fort Gordon, you will see people from all the services. One reason is that we have an NSA facility, which includes many of the joint folks. But there are also joint training opportunities there. Fort Gordon has world-class training facilities, and we’ve had people from industry come to see the capabilities we have and how we’re training joint.
We’re doing spectrum management training at the joint level, starting with the help of the Joint Staff J6. Having served in two combatant commands, I believe that no one is better at putting together networks in support of tactical operations than Army network planners. We’re taking that expertise and putting together a joint course to share that knowledge and learn from the other services how to put together world-class networks. We’re also working with the Marine Corps, and [Marine Corps Chief Information Officer Brigadier General George J. Allen] has come down to Fort Gordon to see our classrooms and learn what we are doing with distance learning.
Because our technology changes so rapidly, and it is cost prohibitive to bring soldiers back to Fort Gordon routinely to get updated on the latest technology, we are putting together a tremendous distance learning program. On the Web sites for eLandWarNet University, you can get simulators for the Joint Network Node [JNN] program and load them on your PC, and get lots of other distance learning packages, on radios, network management, IA and computer network defense. There’s an incredible capability there, and we’re really beginning to focus it on the joint community.
MAJOR GENERAL DENNIS E. LUTZ
COMMANDER
335TH THEATER SIGNAL COMMAND
The JNN has been in theater about two years, and the soldiers love it. It’s a wonderful capability. Now they want it down to company level. It’s a phenomenal increase. We also have combat service support networks via VSAT. They entered the theater in 2002, and also provide a wonderful increase in capabilities.
Five or 10 years ago, we were happy just to get phone messages. Now I have three phones on my desk—two VoIPs and a DSN phone, and most of the time a couple of computers. Blue force tracking and movement control systems are great stuff, and now our coalition partners want them. Blue force tracking systems now have to be accounted for more closely, because they are so good.
We do a tremendous amount of commercialization on the battlefield. When we started the Iraq war, we were into a war of movement. Our tactical systems overwhelmed the Iraqis in about three weeks. But we have moved from a battlefield of movement to one that is fought from forward operating bases. When you move into a forward operating base, the next thing you want is the same things you had at Fort Bragg on your desk. That brings us to COTS, commercialization, and huge demand for bandwidth.
At some of our bases, we’re looking at populations larger than most of our military installations. Fiber is wonderful thing for us. It doesn’t radiate, it solves our frequency problems, and has huge bandwidth. It’s also slow to put in, nonrecoverable, and costs me about $1 million a mile to install. You’ve heard about frequency management conflicts. The jammers are getting more powerful, but they’re also knocking out our satellites, comm systems and airplane navigation systems.
We must do better at information assurance and protection. Every service has its own program, and sometimes we don’t work together. We have no real good joint network operations to solve the problem. That’s particularly troubling in information assurance. In my opinion, we don’t do joint net ops very well. That’s a challenge for us now, because when we were dealing with voice, that wasn’t a problem. Now we’re dealing with data, and our networks are under constant attack by very smart people.
We now deploy more rapidly, and depend more on data. We have to get our net ops doctrine right, or we will not get the solution from the bottom up.
MARLIN FORBES
VICE PRESIDENT, DEFENSE
AND INTERNATIONAL SERVICES
VERIZON BUSINESS
We’ve deployed a number of commercial systems in support of Southwest Asia operations. Right now we are operating a network, along with the licensed carrier in Afghanistan, in about 48 cities. There’s no terrestrial connectivity yet into Afghanistan, although we’ve been asked to explore that. We’ve been unsuccessful so far in making that happen. So what we do is back-haul all of the commercial communications into our earth stations in Guam, and then we move it across the Pacific through our fiber infrastructure back to the United States. Most of the calls are inbound, from the U.S., but the great thing is to begin to see calls going outbound to the rest of the world, which is what we had hoped for.
We’ve deployed a GSM network in Baghdad. Within five days of landing equipment in Baghdad, we had three GSM cell towers up and operation. Right now across Baghdad, there are 30 GSM cell towers operational. This is probably the busiest cell phone network in the world. It’s amazing the amount of traffic that it carries. The calling patterns are also interesting. As you would expect, the number one destination is the U.S., with the U.K. number two and Iran number three.
We also won a contract to provide a network to support to the training mission of the Multi-National Force-Iraq. Right now we’re up to about 20 locations, mostly over satellite. This is a system that has had to go through a learning curve. Now that the Iraqis are learning it, the call volume is picking up.
We estimate that if we could get off of satellite and onto a terrestrial system [in Iraq], we could address not only latency, but also lower the bill by about 75 percent, while also providing efficient connections to the rest of the world. We understand where the assets of the pre-existing Iraqi system are, but we can’t get to the assets, and the Iraqis are not capable of providing us with the throughput we are looking for. We’re doing some tests on fiber links to Iraq now, but it’s tough to work with a system that doesn’t even have a centralized network operations center. Even so, we’re getting close to getting some significant fiber connectivity out of country.
Every time there is a holiday, we provide free calling [for personnel in SWA] to go back anywhere they want to call. We’ve done about 40 million minutes over the last three years. For example, one warfighter got deployed just before his wife was due to have a baby. We made arrangements so that he could be on a cell phone coaching his wife in having the baby back in a hospital in the U.S. That’s the kind of thing that makes it worth coming to work.
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MAJOR GENERAL MICHAEL R. MAZZUCCHI
COMMANDING GENERAL
COMMUNICATIONS-ELECTRONICS COMMAND
I’d like to provide an update on the changes that we’re making at Team C4ISR and the organizations formerly known as CECOM. We’re near the end of a two-year demonstration of an organizational concept intended to get capabilities where they are needed and supported and sustained in the most effective and efficient way we can. That concept is lifecycle management. In that construct are program executive officers who are aligned with the major subordinate commands of the Army Materiel Command [AMC].
The acquisition decisions are still done through the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. But this concept allows PMs the authority for the first time to execute lifecycle management, in addition to the responsibility. We’ve been working in this concept at Fort Monmouth since 1994, but now it is being codified, and in our planning for relocation under BRAC, we are focusing on the capability domains, as opposed to the traditional stovepipe PMs. An equally important change is ensuring the viability of lifecycle management commands.
Next month, AMC will formally activate the Army Sustainment Command, which has seven brigades, which are the direct lifeline to every installation around the world. They not only reach back to the traditional AMC and the major subordinate commands, but also back into the PMs—to the research and development, logistics and the readiness centers. These brigade commanders are located around the world, and every week we have a worldwide secure video conference where the commanders interface with the PEOs and AMC commanders, and directly address the issues that the field is having.
As a result, the Communications-Electronics Lifecycle Management Command is currently managing more than 130 major defense C4ISR programs. We executed more than 16,000 contract actions last year, with a value of more than $11.5 billion. We conducted more than 1,300 fieldings and 1,200 new equipment training missions. We provide over 253 logistics assistance representatives, and 242 field software engineers and 165 digital system engineers. We manage half the Army’s inventory of National Stock Numbers—almost 56,000—and maintain 215 billion lines of software.
As we go to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, I want to make the PMs virtual, but physical and together, with capabilities aligned along seven business areas: command and control, comms systems, ground-based radars and sensors, navigation, business enterprise, fabrication and power generation, and Future Combat Systems.
Why is this such a big deal? Because the programs individually do the best they can to support the warfighter. But they don’t necessarily understand the impact of the other programs, in dollars, time or possible casualties. We can no longer experiment in the field. Examples of that abound. We’ve done a tremendous job [with anti- IED technology], but we didn’t understand the impact to our comms and situational awareness.
We’ve provided tremendous C2 and intel systems, but there are so many different applications and databases. We’re doing all we can to provide comm systems, but we’re lacking in the ability to manage them. So this business domain capability construct is designed to take every aspect of life cycle management to make sure that we get the capability in an effective way. Until then, the Army Sustainment Command will continue to ensure that the warfighter is supported the best we can.
GERARD J. DEMURO
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT
INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY
GENERAL DYNAMICS
It’s hard to believe that it was only about 18 years ago that we began fielding the MSE program, which was the first introduction of true digitized communications to the battlefield. It’s not that that technology doesn’t work, but that a new warfighting doctrine is required. We have become accustomed in our normal business lines to using information technologies as they exist in the commercial world. That’s all the warfighter is asking for today—give me those same tools so I can rapidly access information, operate inside our adversaries time cycles and execute with great lethality. We want to do this across all of our forces. That’s never been done before, because as you know programs and money are appropriated at the service level, and despite good intentions people execute within their sphere of authority.
Pursuing the speed and efficiency of a fully digitized and open network, with seamless operation from core to edge, is the Holy Grail, because of the speed and efficiency with which we can share information and act upon it. It’s a tremendous force multiplier. The benefits are obvious, particularly as you move out to mobile ad hoc networks, not only in the access and flow of information, but also the investment profile that we have to maintain. If we can leverage technology and the advancements of open IP networks, we get tremendous benefits from the commercial world, which spends far more than DoD ever will. Our ability to leverage IP COTS advances and applications has great benefits.
The beauty of the IP converged network is that all forms of digitized traffic can go on one network, from the Pentagon to the soldier in the field. The Army is making great strides in that. But that doesn’t come without challenges and risks. How do we guarantee delivery across multiple networks? How do we protect the information from attack? These are the key challenges as we get out the tactical edge. ♦
