Сетецентрическая парадигма ВС США (Network centric warfare)

This article first appeared in the Mar-Apr 2018 issue of DB magazine. It has been made available for non-subscribers following its shortlisting by the 2018 Defence Media Awards.

Despite its huge budget, the US Army has struggled to keep pace with the rapid developments in networking technologies. As peer adversaries increasingly threaten the electromagnetic environment, will increased spending and acquisition reform give the service back its edge?

The US Army is currently embarking on one of its biggest organisational reforms for four decades, with the establishment of a new Futures Command, slated to achieve initial operating capability (IOC) this summer. The aim is to bring modernisation ‘under one roof’ and streamline the lengthy and bureaucratic acquisition process for new equipment. This new command will focus on six key areas of modernisation: long-range precision fires; next-generation combat vehicles; Future Vertical Lift platforms; air and missile defence; soldier lethality; and networking.

For network modernisation, the army has outlined its need for ‘sufficient’ mobile and expeditionary hardware, software, and infrastructure that incorporates assured positioning, navigation and timing (A-PNT) capability so that it can be used in environments where the electromagnetic spectrum is denied or degraded. It is the latter that has army leaders particularly worried as peer adversaries – China and Russia – continue to build formidable EW and cyber capabilities.

Each prioritisation area is being led by one or two cross-functional teams (CFTs) – eight in total – that include experts from the acquisition, testing, resourcing and capability development communities, which directly report to army senior leaders. The two CFTs under the networking banner are dedicated to the network itself and to A-PNT respectively.

Although the US Army’s WIN-T project has absorbed $6 billion in funds, it has effectively been cancelled and funds allocated elsewhere in FY2019, as the service looks to trial new technologies. (Photo: US Army)

Starting afresh

With the new Futures Command and standing up of CFTs, the army is hoping to move away from large and expensive programmes that take years to field and, owing to the time taken to get into the hands of soldiers, are often no longer the optimum solutions for that requirement.

Last year, one of the service’s premier networking projects, the Warfighter Information Network – Tactical (WIN-T) was effectively cancelled and money allocated elsewhere for just this reason; it no longer met the army’s needs and was riddled with problems, including the inability to function in contested environments.

Networking is seen as one of the fundamental capabilities for the army, as it has applications across every facet, from linking together various air defence assets to communications and situational awareness for dismounted troops and everything in between. To this end, the army is executing a strategy known as ‘halt, fix and pivot’, halting current programmes that do not meet operational requirements, fixing existing efforts to meet operational shortfalls and pivoting to a new acquisition and requirements process.

For WIN-T, the army will stop procuring kit at the end of FY2018 and continue fielding to FY2021 to ‘level-set’ the army to a common baseline using feedback from operational commanders, Maj Gen Peter Gallagher, head of the network CFT, told reporters recently. ‘A lot of people associate WIN-T with the network. It’s a very big portion of the network, but it includes other aspects as well. So, our intent is to baseline ourselves on WIN-T,’ he said.

‘WIN-T gives us a “backbone”, but it’s not everything we need against a peer adversary. We have to continue to modernise and augment that network over time as quickly as we can,’ Gallagher continued. ‘We cannot afford not to. We have to be able to ensure our soldiers can move, shoot, communicate and protect themselves against a peer adversary. The network is foundational to every one of those other modernisation priorities.’

For the near future, that will include integrating the communications ‘on-the-move’ advances of Increment 2 to the formations that need it the most, without creating a ‘readiness burden’ that stems from WIN-T’s inherent complexities. This will include the continued roll out of the Tactical Communications Node (TCN) and Network Operations and Security Center (NOSC), the ‘lite’ (-L) versions of which went through initial operational testing at the Network Integration Evaluation 17.2 last July at Fort Bliss, Texas.

According to the army, the TCN provides satellite and line-of-sight (LOS) network connectivity, both on the move in a convoy, at the quick halt and to the stationary command post, enabling mission command and advanced communications. The NOSC is used to monitor, manage and provide enhanced security to the entire tactical network.

For Gallagher, the only way to move forward with the ‘pivot’ element of the network strategy is to reinvest money allocated to WIN-T elsewhere. ‘What we are looking at right now is purposed capabilities that are aligned with the type of unit where it makes sense,’ he added.

Financial planning

When the army’s FY2019 budget was delivered to Congress, funding to continue procuring WIN-T had been zeroed out – a $420.5 million drop over the FY2018 request. In total, the army has spent a massive $5.8 billion on WIN-T from its inception in the mid-2000s.

Now, as part of the new army network strategy, funds initially allocated for WIN-T will instead go to other programmes. One industry source, commenting on the budget, said the army was backing up what it wanted to do with networking and ‘putting its money where its mouth is’.

A total of $469 million has been allocated for the Tactical Network Technology Mod in Service (TNT MIS), which, according to budget justification documents, will procure and field a mission network for various unit sizes – division, brigade combat team (BCT) and corps – and Regional Hub Nodes and a Tactical Network Management System.

Part of this funding will now cover the management costs of the networking on-the-move (NOTM) assets acquired under WIN-T Increment 2. This money will also support the rollout of TCN-L and NOS-L to infantry BCTs (IBCTs), as well as a ‘technology refresh’ for four IBCTs, one Stryker BCT (SBCT) and two divisions that have networking on-the-move capabilities.

In addition, the army has requested $62.7 million for a line item known as the Situational Information Transport. This realignment of funds supports the fielding of WIN-T Inc 2 capabilities to two IBCTs and one SBCT, as well as supporting the ‘cascade’ of TCN-Heavy and NOSC-Heavy capabilities to one SBCT.

Under the refresh and modernisation plan, FY2019 funding would be used ‘to ensure the army’s tactical network maintains its security posture and compliance with new Information Assurance policies’. Dollars allocated to TNT MIS will also go towards a five-year refresh for NOTM and a seven-year technical refresh for networking at the halt.

‘Tech refresh reduces life-cycle costs by reducing size, weight and power through collapsing and converging capabilities that previously resided on individual hardware components into virtual servers, and leveraging common COTS solutions across various programmes,’ the document reads.

When the army crafted its FY2019-23 budget, however, it made assumptions that will change in the coming months and will be reflected in the FY2020-24 budget, Gallagher said.

‘What we are trying to do going forward is to look at FY2019 [and ask]: “Does it adequately meet what we think we’re going to need to do or not?”’ he explained. ‘If not, we’re going to have to make some recommendations to the senior leaders, and then we’re really putting a lot of effort and a lot of energy on the [20]20-24 [programme objective memorandum].’

Strategic response

As part of its current strategy, the army has identified four modernisation lines of effort for networking:

1. Creating a unified mission command network;

2. Building a common operating environment (COE) for all mission command systems;

3. Improving interoperability among army elements and with the joint force, while providing network access to coalition and mission partners;

4. Modernising command posts’ expeditionary mobility and capabilities (for full-spectrum operations).

For mission command network modernisation, the army wants to facilitate the rapid insertion of new technologies, especially through leveraging commercial systems ‘not specifically designed to exact military-grade standards’ that could reduce overall costs and significantly bring down acquisition timelines, instead of the current system that can often see systems being deployed decades down the line from the original requirements phase.

‘By the time you’re done, you’re fielding yesterday’s technology tomorrow, and that’s not something anybody is interested in,’ said Maj Gen David Bassett, the new director of Program Executive Office Command Control Communications-Tactical (PEO 3CT), in a recent army release.

The approach the service is taking to the ‘fix’ aspect of modernisation has been described as ‘find-try-adapt-buy’ – effectively meaning that the army will continuously evaluate technologies with operational units and then adapt and buy the best of those solutions and modify TTPs to leverage this new equipment.

To support this, PEO C3T will enhance current programme efforts to enable expeditionary mission command with agile command posts. It also wants to achieve uninterrupted mission command from home stations to deployment through scalable connectivity and common applications, known as a unified network. Network initialisation, configuration and management will be simplified through technology and training initiatives.

The office will also look to create a ‘common, intuitive’ network experience across locations and formations, while aiming to beef up the network against cyber and EW threats.

As part of its requirement to possess a converged mission command network that ‘operates seamlessly worldwide in any environment’, the army has identified two components: unified transport and network-enabling functions.

The former component will converge the service’s current disparate networks into a single framework. According to PEO C3T documentation provided to Shephard, this will require the creation of a ‘standards-based network architecture that effectively integrates enterprise and deployed network capabilities across domains and environments, and features a unified transport layer that permits “plug and play” for specific network capabilities’.

Meanwhile, networking-enabling functions will provide ‘core network capabilities’, including unified network operations and A-PNT. It will also fully incorporate cyber and EW capabilities, thereby positioning the network to ‘serve as a weapon system’.

The common touch

A key objective for the US Army will be the COE, which aims to utilise different mission command ‘apps’ on a common interface – giving a similar look and feel across mission systems. This will be rolled out to command posts and eventually expanded out to mounted and handheld applications. The service currently has 17 different mission command systems that function on their own hardware (including servers and computers), software and operating systems – with data then having to be fused for a common operating picture (COP).

The COE is utilising the ‘adapt-buy’ approach with a COTS solution and will field an initial version in FY2019, known as the Command Post Computing Environment (CP CE). This will shrink the technical and physical footprint of the CP infrastructure – which includes the new single tactical server infrastructure – allowing commanders to see a single COP and enable greater data-sharing capabilities.

As CP CE achieves IOC, the army will divest four standalone systems: Command Post of the Future; Command Web; Tactical Ground Reporting; and Global Command and Control System-Army. Additional warfighting functions will then migrate onto the CP CE baseline, with near-term efforts focusing on the integration of fires and intel function capabilities.

In 2017, Systematic won a multi-million-dollar contract with PM Mission Command – part of PEO C3T – to provide its SitaWare product for the CP CE, winning out against several key primes and even a protest bid from Raytheon. President Rafael Torres told Shephard that SitaWare HQ will provide the ‘backbone’ architecture that will give a COP while allowing growth with third-party applications and integrating other networking programmes of record.

‘[We] provide the customer with the ability – through our application programming interface and software development kit – to utilise current technology and… provide a roadmap that will bring in third-party capabilities as they mature,’ he said. ‘This will provide the commander with more capabilities with less of the footprint.’

According to Torres, the army has also pivoted to adopt Systematic’s mobile product known as Frontline – part of the scalable SitaWare family – that will become the C2 backbone to the Mounted Computing Environment. This means a common infrastructure with CP CE, which will be integrated on the mounted family of computer systems, along with the Android operating system framework for applications hosting and simplified user experience.

This approach to network modernisation – principally through open application programming interfaces (APIs) and third-party ‘apps’ – could redefine the way the DoD does business with industry, said Torres: ‘This gives them the ability to open the market and make it a little more competitive so that even the smaller organisations that may have a niche capability now have the ability to latch onto our API and come back to the government and say: “Hey, I have a product that works.” The warfighter can test that very quickly and then either adopt it or move on.’

That aligns with US Army thinking, particularly with the likes of the network CFT. ‘The status quo is not what we need. We all know that,’ Gallagher told Shephard. ‘If you can bring a capability to the table that we can put into our network architecture going forward that is going to give our soldiers and leaders capabilities to help us fight and win, that is what we are looking for.’

‘We don’t want to be boxed in where we can’t constantly adapt. We want to have the ability through a coherent and flexible architecture to be constantly adaptive,’ he continued, adding that the service did not want to be stuck with legacy solutions that could not meet emerging threats. He stressed, however, that he was not fully against the idea of a proprietary technology if it gave a significant capability advantage on the battlefield.

The US Army’s networking efforts have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with officials finally admitting in 2017 that its key modernisation programme, WIN-T, is not up to scratch. (Photo: US Army)

Gauging possibilities

For the moment at least, as the army steps up Futures Command, the CFTs are engaging with industry to explore the ‘art of the possible’ to address the threat of a peer adversary. With the service’s goal of developing and delivering faster, there is a renewed emphasis on testing prototypes and concepts earlier – especially innovative commercial technologies – allowing the army to ‘fail early’ and ‘fail cheaply’, therefore increasing the probability of success. Simply put, the army doesn’t want another billion-dollar boondoggle.

The idea will be to push out ‘problem sets’ to industry, allowing them some flexibility as opposed to giving them detailed requirements, said Lt Gen Paul Ostrowski, the director of the Army Acquisition Corps, during a recent Senate Armed Services Committee meeting on army modernisation. That is something that industry is already seeing evidence of from recent army documents.

‘We are not just seeing that in words. We are seeing that in action in some of the ways they have written RfI and RfPs that have come out recently,’ said Jeffrey Kroon, director of product line management at Harris Tactical Communications, one of the main providers of tactical radios to the US Army.

‘We have offered several different solutions and ways of looking at the architecture that would help simplify it, including recommendations on how to standardise on some of the ways the network interconnects, and we are glad to offer up our own view of what that looks like,’ he added.

The company currently provides radios at the lower, mid and higher tier. This includes the soldier-level Rifleman Radio, as well as the mid-tier networking vehicular radio – which did not receive FY2019 funds – and the two-channel HMS manpack for dismounted and vehicular integration (mid-tier). The company also provides a ‘significant component’ of WIN-T in the Highband Networking Radio (HNR), a high-speed LOS networking radio that provides connectivity between the satellite’s services provided by the WIN-T architecture.

Harris has also been in discussions with the army on how its extensive library of waveforms could be utilised to formulate solutions to the service’s networking challenge, many of which are software-more than hardware-related. ‘More importantly, we’ve been working with the army to look at how the architecture all comes together and what the different elements are that would make it a cohesive architecture, rather just than a Rifleman Radio at the bottom and an HNR at the top,’ Kroon said.

Working together

Another key contributor to the US Army’s communications and networking modernisation is Thales, which has provided its AN/PRC-154A for the service’s Rifleman Radio requirement and is now contracted to the tune of $37 million to deliver enhanced two-channel AN/PRC-154C radios for the service’s newly established security force assistance brigades.

The army was expected to award its first contract for new mounted and dismounted dual-channel leader radios (LRs) – supporting both legacy waveforms and the newer soldier radio waveform – in February, with Harris and Thales competing.

Aaron Brosnan, VP of business development at Thales Defense and Security in the US, told Shephard that there will be an ongoing requirement for dual-channel radios when it comes to modernisation. ‘The performance of these new mobile, ad-hoc networking waveforms really has to be persistent and pervasive. For the network to actually work, it’s like your Wi-Fi hotspot, you always need to have connectivity. But you’ll still have enduring legacy requirements for coalition interoperability purposes and more robust point-to-point communications. But you can’t have those interrupting your networking connectivity.

That’s where the two-channel concept comes in.’ Brosnan added that Thales had leveraged commercial technologies to develop its radios, sometimes partnering with smaller companies to develop solutions. ‘We’ve had to go off on our own, and invest our money to develop new capabilities leveraging some of this [commercial] technology. You can’t really get there on your own, so you have to share investments and co-develop with partners to deliver capability quicker,’ he explained.

The introduction of the new LR is, however, just one example of the current state of army acquisition when it comes to this type of technology. Thales first introduced dual-channel capabilities in 2012, and despite it being a ‘recognised need’ then for army, will only come under contract six years later.

There are also concerns that army leadership is still not properly scouring the market for alternative technologies, despite its insistence that it wants to prototype innovative systems. In 2017, New York-based company Persistent Systems – makers of the MPU5 MANET radio – protested the terms of the LR RfP to the Government Accountability Office on the grounds that it was ‘unduly restrictive of competition’ and favoured the big communication primes. That protest was denied in January 2018.

Whether the army’s attempts at modernising its network and its overall reform agenda, will be a success remains to be seen. The service is clearly on the right path with the stepping up of a Futures Command and emphasising the need to rapidly prototype and test new technologies, speeding up acquisition timelines – and ultimately, when it comes to network modernisation, as Gallagher stressed: ‘We can’t afford not to.’

https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/digital-battlespace/us-army-networking-stepping/