A few decades ago, military laboratories were the source of much of the technology that emerged in the consumer world, the most famous example being the Internet, which began as a communications network designed to function in the event of a nuclear strike. Today, some in the military believe the opposite is true, at least in terms of communications and data networking. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, with some modifications, could provide what the military is, in some cases, trying to develop on its own.
Telecommunications have transformed modern society. Many carry mobile phones, use Internet connections and play sophisticated video games. Go to any military conference today, and many attendees can be seen tapping into their Blackberry e-mail devices during speeches. Military commanders, though, covet all these technologies that are taken for granted by teenagers. Officers discussing battlefield operations often mention their wish for a kind of military personal digital assistant that permits individual soldiers to easily access information about the position of friendly forces, intelligence on the enemy and more. These are in fact being introduced into the field, and not coincidentally, are COTS solutions. The general populace may not be buying rocket launchers, tanks, or fighter aircraft, but it certainly drives demand for new applications like voice over Internet and instant messaging.
UK forces in Iraq must be alert to explosive devices which are often detonated by cell phones and garage door openers.
(UK Ministry of Defence photo)
The US military is notorious for having rigid practices for acquiring new technology. There are some efforts to change this, through programs like the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, but observers wonder to what extent the military overall is willing or able to capitalize on commercial innovation because of long-standing practices.
Why would the military be interested in COTS software for voice and data networking? The US Defense Department and other countries as well, including the UK, Australia and Germany, see the concept of “network-centric warfare” as central to making fighting forces more quickly deployable and maneuverable, and network-centric operations are already widely in use by many commercial businesses, from IBM to Wal-Mart. Their form of command-and-control may be stocking shelves with toilet paper rather than directing the position of army squadrons or fighter aircraft, but the principle is the same: move assets about efficiently and as quickly as possible.
Network-centric operations lie at the heart of modern warfare. If military operations are more likely to be civil wars in poor countries like Liberia or Haiti, military intervention requires extreme care not to injure or kill innocent people and destroy civilian property. Even if larger, more uncontrolled warfare should erupt against a major power, precise weaponry and better coordination among deployed forces should compensate for more lightly armored tanks and other assets. All of this depends on greater speed and more accurate targeting of forces, which themselves depend on fast transmission of information. The sooner military forces can receive intelligence, the faster they can act on it. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for instance, the US would look for Scuds, find them, send an asset out to bomb them, but often too late — they would be gone. Better data networking will permit quicker reaction, so targeting becomes a matter of seconds rather than hours, and forces can capitalize on enemy weaknesses and coordinate the movements of forces and their missions.
Team Effort
The problem with existing military communications is that they often do not permit very convenient joint communications — that is, between different services like the Air Force and Army, or different components of the same services, such as aircraft and ground forces. For instance, the radios of many countries’ ground forces lack compatibility with the aircraft that put troops into the field and — they hope — will take them out again. Moshe Markowitz, a retired brigadier general and former chief signals and electronics officer for the Israeli Defense Forces, who is now vice president of business development for Tadiran Communications (Holon, Israel), said that to establish ground-to-air communications, Israel and the armies of other countries usually just give ground forces UHF equipment. “They have extra radios for officers if they need to talk to the air force. It’s usually for voice only and does not enable a higher rate of data communications, and cross-band or cross-network transmission are not permitted,” Markowitz said. “It is what we call a very poor communication.”
Military exercises focus on sharing data among different locations. The best data networking technology comes from the commercial sector.
(US Army photo)
Aircraft have similar problems. A bomber flying from the US to somewhere overseas on a mission may along the way have to use a number of different radios and frequencies to keep in touch with air-traffic and command control. Say the plane leaves from a base in Missouri; to communicate with air-traffic control in the United States, it uses various UHF or VHF frequencies, with frequency changes based on the controller’s location. As it passes over the ocean and loses line-of-sight with ground antennas, it switches to HF for air-traffic control and either HF or satellite communications for command and control. Once in Europe, the plane must switch to different frequencies again and again as it passes over individual countries that may each employ different parts of the spectrum for different civil and military uses. To handle each of these modes, a plane on such a mission today typically carries a number of radios onboard: VHF, UHF, SATCOM and perhaps more besides. To communicate with aircraft from other nations or with army forces on the ground, whether they be those of the same country or another, more radios might need to be installed, or upgrades made to existing radios, before the plane takes off. It would be far better to have one radio that works on many frequencies and can be up-dated to handle different types of waveforms, so that, among other things, communications can be encrypted in different ways, preventing enemies from listening in.
The key to this approach is the software within the radios. Software-programmable radios are flexible and can store different modes. For example, if German ground forces know they are going on a mission with US ground forces and the Germans have the FEM93 mode of EPM, they can develop a software program for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS), load this into their radio and, in their combined mission, are able to talk to their partners. Nations might continue to use special waveforms among their own forces — some Far East countries use the Rohde & Schwarz-developed SECOS waveform, for example — but software-programmable radios would allow them to easily add Have Quick II or SATURN on their radios as well, diplomatic treaties permitting. Among the countries that have begun acquiring such radios is the Brazilian Air Force, which has been taking delivery of the software-programmable M3AR from Rohde & Schwarz.
A soldier programs radio frequencies into the communication systems of an Abrams tank prior to a mission in Iraq.
(US Army photo)
Radios that combine different frequency ranges have actually been around for 10 years or so — the SINCGARS radios in the US, for example — so that one radio is able to operate in both the UHF and VHF bands and can bridge the gap between ground and air, allowing the soldier to lighten his load. But given the frequency limitations inherent in SINCGARs, as well as the system’s inability to easily switch among different waveforms — used, among other things, to encrypt communications so that enemies cannot easily listen in — the US is now in the midst of an effort to develop the software-programmable Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program, which will permit different services to communicate with one another, using the same radios, whether they be on land, at sea, or in the air.
But the JTRS program has run into a lot of problems. Developing the technology is proving far more complex than some planners expected, and the result has been program delays. Department of Defense officials, disappointed at the pace at which the JTRS program is advancing, actually issued a “partial stop-work order” for the program early this year. The program is divided into various “clusters,” each focused on groups such as Special Forces and Army aviation, and none of the JTRS-based radios in development are expected to enter limited production until 2007 at the earliest, which for troops already deployed and fighting on the field, seems far away indeed.
Besides the problem of interoperable radios, the US military must deal with other types of networking problems. For instance, a general lack of networking capabilities leads to problems in situational awareness. The Air Force may not be aware that a coalition partner is operating on the ground within the battle theater and drop munitions that put the coalition member’s troops in harm’s way. “Overall, the US is spending some $6 B on developing network-centric operations,” said US Army Major General Dave Bryan (ret.), an executive at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, “yet people continue to have to sort through mountains of information to get what they want.”
Wasted Effort
Mainly, the US military has set in motion programs to develop new communications and networking programs that, while they could have employed COTS software, essentially are technology programs begun from scratch.
Commercial software is being used in military space applications such as the European Galileo Satellite Navigation System.
(European Space Agency image)
As it does in the area of communications, the tendency by the US government to build from the ground up instead of buying commercially available products also prevails in the area of mission-planning software, said Gene Colabatistto, CEO and president of Xvionics (Vienna, VA), which provides mission-planning software for the Israeli and Hellenic Air Forces and is trying to crack the US market as well. Things have changed over the years, Colabatistto noted. The US Army now buys Fords and other commercially produced vehicles, when they used to have their own special types of vehicles built (Jeeps, for example). Even 15 years ago, the government awarded contracts for computers specially designed for the military, rather than buying commercially available personal computers, as it does today.
“People are saying the right things, but it takes a while for organizations to change,” said Colabatistto. “You can buy something for $1 M that provides 80 percent of what you are looking for, or you can buy something for $100 M that provides 100 percent. Consumers make this choice all the time, and they choose the option that makes sense economically.”
Whether or not the military does decide to purchase COTS software and do some modifications of it instead of develop its own software, they may well find themselves faced with adversaries who do buy products on the commercial market, and given the type of computer and networking equipment available commercially, that can be quite a threat. Take, for example, cryptographic products. Dr. Michael Kurdziel, chief cryptographer at Harris’ RF Communications Division (Rochester, NY), said that the spread of cryptography is difficult to stop. University professors write papers on how to compromise algorithms, and that information becomes publicly available. Dealing with this security problem, including the difficulties it could create in intercepting enemy communications, probably will entail the military turning to the commercial world as commercial providers say it might, given that corporations like banks and other keepers of sensitive data need to be on the cutting edge of network security, if only because failing to do so could lead to major financial losses and legal problems.
Judging by a number of presentations at the TechNet International trade show, held May 17–19 in Washington, DC, military officers generally agree that the nature of warfare revolves around new forms of technology that are pervasive in the consumer world, from mobile telecommunications networks to video games that can serve as excellent training platforms.
Commercial software is being adapted to train soldiers to fight in various situations.
(Meta VR image)
Often, it is the young enlisted members of the forces that know the most about the benefits of technologies, as opposed to the older, old-fashioned officers. “The 38 year-old majors may not be so used to using these things, but the people who have just joined certainly are, and they expect to have them,” said US Marine Corps Col. John Toolan, currently director of the Marine Corps University Command and Staff College.
In addition, corporate approaches to managing organizations — and by extension, training organizations to use new technology — seem to be seeping into the military ranks. For example, Gen. Benjamin Griffin, commanding general of US Army Materiel Command, during a presentation at the conference, repeatedly mentioned the use of Six Sigma methodology, which General Electric and other corporations have popularized, making their workforce more efficient. Indicating the interest that the military has in corporate practices, one panel of speakers at the TechNet show consisted of executives at a number of large corporations, including IBM Federal, Bank of America and Ryder, who discussed how their organizations had implemented better “network-centric operations,” which is precisely what the US and other militaries are aiming to adopt to make their fighting forces faster and more precise.
But talk about “network-centric warfare” is one thing. Getting the US military to acquire the technology for it fast enough is quite another, whether it is COTS software or something developed by the military on its own. “Not wanting to wait for new kinds of communications, in some cases during Operation Iraqi Freedom, US servicemen, prior to deployment, were known to buy equipment off the shelf at places like Radio Shack, because the acquisition process is not working fast enough,” said US Marine Corps Col. Eric Rolaf. Could part of the problem be that the government still feels it can develop its own communications systems, such as JTRS, from scratch? An executive at one major commercial manufacturer of telecommunications infrastructure equipment, Ericsson, said that much of what the US military aims to construct with its JTRS program already exists in the commercial world, yet it has basically chosen to build a network anew, with proprietary radios, as opposed to simply adapting something from the commercial world.
US Air Force Maj. Gen. Timothy A. Pepper (ret.), currently president of the Greater Hampton Roads Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association, said that in the case of the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), based in Suffolk, VA, commercial businesses interested in proposing new ideas for the military frequently run into dead ends. “JFCOM needs to tell the industry where to go, and I do not believe that has happened in the past,” General Pepper said.
Representatives of JFCOM said they are working hard to address such complaints, and General Pepper noted exceptions like the US Marine Corps which, he said, in the last nine months has developed some 170 new technological capabilities because of the service’s willingness to acquire technologies commercially “off the shelf” as opposed to requiring modifications that may make the technology a bit more suited to its own use but significantly slow down the acquisition process. But overall, while military planners seem to know the benefits of COTS software, the reality seems to be a sluggish DoD that — because of official technology requirements prior to the process of acquisition, various rules about ensuring sufficient competition for contracts and other rules — often unintentionally stifles acquisition of technology that its services need to improve their effectiveness.
“The laws the US DoD must follow regarding competition serve as a kind of barrier to innovation,” said US Air Force Maj. Gen. Donald F. Hoffman, director of requirements for Air Combat Command Headquarters at Langley AFB, VA. Such laws may have helped address problems notorious in the 1980s, but are not without their drawbacks. “I do not know how many times we have reformed the acquisition process since then, but at this point, it ought to be damn near perfect,” said Maj. Gen. Hoffman, who described the Defense Department as seeming like a monolithic structure to commercial businesses, intimidating because of its Byzantine acquisition practices. “If I were on the outside looking in, I do not know if I would want to get involved with the government, to be honest. A small company, with a good idea, has a very hard time flourishing in an environment like this.”
Practice Tests
Progress is being made in introducing new technologies and practices to the military, of course, as many officials recognize the benefits of commercial technology and want to take advantage of it as much as possible. Exercises that test new technologies in various military situations occur regularly. For example, looking to solve communications networking problems, as well as improve other aspects of coordinating combined operations, whether among different military services, other countries, or domestic law enforcement and other civil agencies, the US Department of Defense on June 13-23 held its latest annual Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (CWID), hosted this year by US Northern Command in Colorado Springs, CO, and managed by US Joint Forces Command in Suffolk, VA. Two basic types of scenarios formed the basis for this exercise: one focused on multi-party responses to fictional domestic crises — the derailment, near Washington, DC, of a train carrying chlorine gas was one of the situations — and the other testing the international response to a crisis involving the fictional, oil-rich, African country of Lumbia, where two civil factions were attempting to destabilize the government.
In all, CWID 2005 connected five US and 11 international sites for the purpose of testing 41 different types of systems or software for sharing information or communications, with sites including Hanscom AFB, MA, the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, VA and sites in New Zealand, Norway and the UK, among other countries. One of those 41 applications was a commercially developed, homeland-defense-type system called the Incident Commanders’ Radio Interface (ICRI), designed to serve as a go-between for incompatible radio and communications equipment. Following the crash of commercial aircraft into the World Trade Center, thousands of fire fighters, police officers, and other New York City law-enforcement and emergency personnel rushed to help, but the response was chaotic. Effective command and control was absent, radio communications among different departments was often ineffective, and more people than expected may have died as a result. It is exactly this type of situation that the ICRI is designed to aid, said participants at the Dahlgren, VA, Navy site of the exercise. What will be the result of this and other trials of technology that took place during CWID and other similar exercises? They may or may not be developed into larger programs and put in the field, organizers said. Such is the point of such trials: to determine whether the technology shows promise, and to provide an opportunity for testing new technological solutions, whatever their origins, commercial or government.
Ted McKenna lives in Washington, DC, and is senior editor for the defense publications eDefense Online and the Journal of Electronic Defense. Previously, he was staff editor of Telecommunications, Norwood, MA, and news editor for the Internet dotcom publication TelekomNet, Boston, MA.
