Photo By Lt. Col. Deanna Bague | The Warfighter Information Network-Tactical equipment is set up during the Network...... read more read more
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WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. – Military officials say the tactical network is the centerpiece of brigade modernization.
“It’s going to be a lot more like what we have in commercial industry, a lot more capability down at a lower level,” said Maj. Gen. Alan R. Lynn, commanding general of U.S. Army Signal Center of Excellence and Fort Gordon. “So a soldier can see more, know more and act more quickly,” said Lynn.
The Army is using a series of semi-annual network integration evaluation exercises, to integrate and mature the Army’s tactical network, added Lynn.
NIE 12.1, currently taking place at Fort Bliss, Texas, and White Sands Missile, N.M., is establishing a baseline – a base capability for the Army’s tactical network, said Brig. Gen. Randal A. Dragon, commanding general for Brigade Modernization Command, Army Capabilities Integration Center, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
“The tactical network is a capability that allows us to deploy a unit and then establish communications that pass data, voice and video over multiple means – satellite, terrestrial and line-of-sight systems are all key components,” said Dragon.
Satellite communications provide the ability to pass information over great distances. Terrestrial systems provide an ability to transfer large files from one location to another across great distances, said Dragon. And lastly, the establishment of local communications allows smaller networks for companies and battalions to talk and pass information; the tactical network allows soldiers to talk from top to bottom and bottom to top, added Dragon.
“What we want here is to get the soldier’s candid feedback,” said Dragon. “What does it do for the soldier on the ground? It allows him or her to see the same picture that the soldier left or right is seeing. It enables him to see where those soldiers are, know where he is, see where the enemy is, and then helps him make decisions on how he is going to fight as part of the greater team to accomplish the unit’s mission.”
More than 3,800 soldiers from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, are evaluating network components as part of an integrated network in operationally-relevant terrain designed to replicate both the environment and realistic combat scenarios in Afghanistan.
Army officials said testing components as part of an integrated network and not as stand-alone devices enables upfront integration and prevents or reduces integration challenges or failures from being discovered in theater.
“I want to see how the different systems here are integrating together and how the soldiers are reacting to the new systems – whether it’s how they’re training on them or the way they are using them,” said Lynn. “What we’ve found in the past is that soldiers are very adept at using technology and changing it more to their purposes, so we learn a lot from the soldiers out here.”
Soldiers said they are eager to evaluate new technologies and network capabilities in an operational environment. Spc. Don Johnson, an intelligence analyst from 1st Battallion, 6th Infantry Regiment, 2-1 AD, said from the junior enlisted point of view, he wants to know whether the systems function, what they can do for him and if he can depend on them.
“So far, the answer would be for some of these systems – yes,” said Johnson. “Being able to use some of those systems enhances the capabilities of the mission and the soldiers to fulfill their task and the commander’s intent.”
Johnson said the Blue Force Tracking, which is part of the Force Battle Command Brigade and Below system, called Joint Capabilities Release, prevented him from losing complete communications. Developers say the FBCB2 is a situational awareness and command-and-control system, and the BFT is a high-tech, high-speed force-tracking satellite-communications network.
“When we came out here, one of the things we were able to do was not only talk here but also back at Battalion,” said Johnson. “We were able not only to call back on our SINCGARS, but also with our BFT we were able to do a chat [almost like a text message].
“We set up a mission yesterday where the teams went out for a raid, and we set up a relay and a retransmission and were able to pull up the net ops and see that all our systems were in the green,” said Johnson. “We were able to talk to everyone and use all of our systems, which hadn’t been achieved to date. Having achieved [this] was great and greatly contributed to capturing a high-value target that night, by having all those systems up.”
Officials say some systems that will deliver key connectivity and capacity are still years out from being fully matured, but the system that is being used in the interim is referred to as the “bridge” network. As the Army continues to mature and evaluate those systems, it moves closer to the “objective” network, which is the network that contains technologies that are fully mature and ready to be fielded.
“The ‘bridge’ concept allows us to move from where we were to where we want to go,” said Dragon. “So it is a step toward what we call the ‘objective’ network, which is where we want our tactical network to be.”
NIE 12.1 involves industry participation for the first time based on gaps identified by Training and Doctrine Command. Officials say industry involvement will mature over time.
By employing the Agile Process, the Army is able to keep pace with industry and technological advances accelerating the pace of network modernization to a rate previously unachievable by traditional acquisition strategies.
“We tell industry, ‘Here’s what we need; here’s our biggest gap,’” said Dragon. “In the case of the network, which is designed to help us with command and control, our industry partners come back and say, ‘We’ve got a technology that can meet that requirement and potentially fill that gap.’ And so they go through a process that allows us to select the most mature technologies and the ones that best meet our needs, and then we bring those and put them in the soldiers’ hands [and] train them. Once they’re trained [we bring them] here to the field portion of the Network Integration Evaluation, where they can put [the technology] through a series of tactical missions with their fellow soldiers and see how well it performs and how well it improves their capability – their effectiveness.”
| Date Taken: | 11.14.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 11.14.2011 19:16 |
| Story ID: | 80040 |
| Location: | WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO, US |
| Web Views: | 595 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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