WIN-T’s New Tactics
ARMY RESTRUCTURES TACTICAL NETWORKING PROJECT TO ACHIEVE BETTER COORDINATION AND FASTER DEPLOYMENT.
In the years to come, the U.S. military will find itself in a state of “persistent conflict,” Major General Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army’s CIO-designate, said at a recent defense industry gathering in Washington.
With land forces being called upon to field forces in a variety of different scenarios and geographies, the Army needs to be able to provide ready bandwidth for those forces wherever they may be and whenever they need it. This, in a nutshell, is the current vision for the Army’s Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T).
The program, conceived of as the Army’s “tactical intranet,” was recently restructured by incorporating the Joint Network Node-Network (JNN-N) into the program as Increment One of WIN-T. With Increment One already up and running, WIN-T is already providing a communications and information infrastructure to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Short-term future goals of the program include enhancing current capabilities as new network elements, such as the Wideband Global System (WGS) of satellites, become available. Eventually, WIN-T is supposed to provide communications on-themove capabilities to the Future Combat System.
The recent WIN-T restructuring, besides absorbing JNN-N, also created three additional increments designed to spiral new technologies out to the force as they become available. The program office also faced a 150-day deadline to report back to the Undersecretary of Defense, Acquisitions Logistics and Technology on the restructuring’s progress.
“The Army has many legacy standalone programs, and they want them interconnected,” said Richard Sterk, a senior defense analyst at Forecast International. “It is like trying to make a Mac talk to a PC. The goal is to get one single system architecture built on a common foundation to make connecting easier.”
Department of Defense officials describe the restructuring as intended to better coordinate activities between the former JNN and WIN-T and to accelerate the introduction of new technologies to the field. Some analysts suggest, however, that the restructuring may also reflect congressional skepticism about the prospects for the program.
FOUR INCREMENTS
The 150-day deadline faced by Colonel William C. (Chuck) Hoppe, the WIN-T project manager in Fort Monmouth, N.J., involved reporting back “what the restructure looks like,” Hoppe said, adding, “The Army moved all those in JNN under WIN-T and also changed out the WIN-T program manager.”
The former manager, Colonel Angel Colon, moved on to another assignment while Hoppe took his place. Hoppe, the former JNN program manager, was chosen because of his familiarity with the program.
“Operationally, the folks in the field won’t see any major difference,” Hoppe said. “What the reorganization really means is that the Army has a better opportunity to synchronize follow-on increments of WIN-T, to make sure they are better integrated with the current force network.”
Under the undersecretary’s directive, which was issued in June, WIN-T has been reorganized along four increments or phases. Increment One builds on the JNNN already used by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan to access communications services, and will add additional radio networking capabilities and security.
The remaining increments are all developmental programs. Increment Two will continue the research, development, test and evaluation of the WIN-T program’s network components to create an initial on-the-move capability and allow for early fielding of mature WIN-T technologies. Increment Three seeks to bring WIN-T components to their full range of network capacity, security, and on-the-move capabilities. It also has the goal of reaching size, weight, power and cooling requirements for Future Combat System vehicles.
Increment Four will enhance WIN-T communications capabilities with greater throughput afforded by the Transformational Communications Satellite (TSAT) system, a program that is still some years out.
The Army recently awarded the General Dynamics-Lockheed Martin Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) team contract modifications valued at up to $921 million to continue development of the WIN-T system and to accelerate delivery of WIN-T capabilities to the current modular force. The $921 million in modifications comprise WIN-T Increment Two and WIN-T Increment Three.
WIN-T Increment Two, valued at $126 million, will deliver an initial on-the-move broadband networking capability using satellite and radio links, with fielding scheduled to begin in 2009. Increment Three, valued at $795 million, will continue development of WIN-T components to meet the full range of network capacity, security and fully onthe- move capabilities for the modular force with limited user testing scheduled to begin in 2011. Increment Three also addresses the size, weight, power and cooling requirements for systems to be hosted in Future Combat Systems vehicles.
JNN BRIDGE
WIN-T was originally intended to replace the Army’s Cold War-era Mobile Subscriber Equipment (MSE) But when operations in Iraq began in 2003, the force soon found that it outran MSE’s range. “The 3rd Infantry Division came back to the Army with a statement of need after the initial run to Baghdad,” said Hoppe. “The idea behind JNN-N was to use commercially available technologies to provide beyond line-of-sight capabilities to the operational force.”
The key enhancement offered by JNN was to provide an Internet Protocol standard for transmitting both voice and data in the Army. IP provides the dual advantages of bandwidth sharing and flexibility.
JNN, therefore, is best thought as the bridge between MSE and WIN-T. “JNN offers pretty good throughput, significantly higher than MSE,” Hoppe commented. “JNN isn’t going away any time soon.”
MSE and JNN provide the Army with communications on the halt, with JNN providing the additional enhancements of internet protocol standards and increased bandwidth. “WIN-T Increment Two will provide a mobile infrastructure as well as the ability to communicate on the move,” Hoppe explained.
If Army communications were a cellular phone service, he added, WIN-T would be like bringing the cell tower infrastructure along with the unit.
The incremental approach now taken by WIN-T is designed to “bring capabilities faster,” according to Hoppe. “This is an acceleration. It is not a delay.”
The idea is to put low-risk, mature technologies in the hands of warfighters as soon as they are available “as opposed to everything coming at once.” As a result, some WIN-T technologies will actually be moved out to the force four years early, according to Hoppe.
Sterk offered a different perspective on the program. “It just doesn’t work,” he said. “It is behind schedule, over budget, and the Army doesn’t even know what it wants anymore.”
The original goal, according to Sterk, was to provide a common platform for all Army communications systems. But that jointness created security problems.
“They figured out you only need to crack one to get into the others,” Sterk said. “Standalone systems have more security but they are lacking in jointness. Whether you need that complete interconnectivity is debatable. It has become a buzzword over the last few years.”
For Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Dakota Wood (Ret.), a senior fellow at the Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments, any lack of jointness inherent in WIN-T will be problematic, especially as the battlefield becomes more complex and operations more joint. “Typically, ground forces are assigned sectors of operation,” he explained. “You’ll have an Army unit given a large piece of territory and it will be split up amongst smaller units within that command. A Marine Corps unit might be assigned adjacent territory. The enemy doesn’t care much about such boundaries and will flow from place to place as it needs to.”
SKEPTICAL CONGRESS
The restructuring of WIN-T also comes amid continuing congressional concern over the scope and speed of the program. The Senate Appropriations Committee in September reduced requested funding for the program in fiscal 2008, and called on the Government Accountability Office to issue a report by next summer assessing “the restructured program’s ability to address its past problems” and other factors.
Lawmakers said the program “remains surrounded by programmatic uncertainty, technological challenges, and is at risk for additional cost and schedule growth.”
The question, Sterk said, is how much more money Congress is willing to allocate toward the program. He noted that $10 billion has been allotted so far, and that estimated total costs through 2025 could approach $25 billion.
“They have spent so much on it already, they can’t afford to drop it,” he said. “They have to show something for the money. So they’ll keep pumping money in until they get a result. No senator wants to say, ‘I gave them $10 billion and it turned out to be a turkey.’”
But Hoppe prefers to emphasize what the program has already accomplished and what it is poised to do. “We have parts of Increment Two in theater right now, such as the Net Centric Wave modem,” he said. “The incremental approach we have taken is a sound approach to get technology into the hands of warfighters sooner. We are moving technology introduction to the left as opposed to the right.”
A competitive contract to be awarded shortly will have all MSE equipment backwards compatible to WIN-T Increment One during the next fiscal year, according to Hoppe. “Units won’t have to worry about toting around extra equipment to be compatible.”
The program is also positioned to take advantage of the Wideband Global System of satellites once those capabilities become available. The first WGS satellite is scheduled to launch in October. The key capability WGS will bring will be to provide increased reliance on wideband military Ka-band communications and reduced reliance on the commercial Ku band.
This capability, part of what is being called WIN-T Increment 1a, is included in a competitive contract that will be imminently awarded, according to Hoppe.
“We’ll start rolling that off and it put in the hands of soldiers by late spring of next year,” he said. “There will be no research, development, test, and evaluation process involved. We just have to integrate a few things when the constellation goes up, and then verify that everything is working properly.” ♦
