Battle Lab Shrinks Army Tactical Ops Center.

Missile-defense command post manages to 'condense' hardware and software

The Army's missile-defense research branch developed a tactical operations center prototype that is much smaller and more easily transportable than conventional TOCs.

A TOC is an assemblage of vehicles and tents that house the computer networks and multitude of radios used by commanders and staffs to plan the battle and to communicate both with soldiers in the field and with national authorities.

A mechanized brigade TOC typically is made up of three or four armored command-post tracked vehicles, which back into a given area and lower their rear ramps. That area--covered with camouflage netting--shelters the workstations, servers and radios. Several dozen operators run the equipment.

The Army Space and Missile Defense Battle Lab, in Huntsville, Ala., is spending $5 million over two years to develop a so-called "advanced warfare environment" that makes it possible to set up a TOG with only two Humvee trucks (the shelter carrier model) and one Drash (deployable rapid assembly shelter). About 12-14 people would be needed to operate it.

Battle lab officials said the Army needs a "force projection" TOG for air-defense operations--one that can be up and ready before other units arrive in the theater. It would be an "early-entry asset" to plan, for example, defensive strategies against ballistic-missile attacks, said Army Lt. Gal. Gregory G. Hoscheit, chief of training and exercises at the battle lab.

He explained in an interview that TOCs can be downsized simply by consolidating tasks that require several bulky computers into a smaller number of commercial PCs, running Microsoft or Windows.

"Our goal is to merge capabilities into one box," he said.

An effort to develop a mobile TOG began about two years ago, at the urging of the former chief of the Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. John Gostello. "He asked us to reduce the logistics footprint," said Hoscheit.

The battle lab's prototype TOC would be transportable by G-130 medium-lift aircraft, he said. It also could move on a truck.

The secret to making a TOC smaller is to have software that provides a single, consolidated picture of the battlefield in a 3-D environment, he said. That eliminates the use of the separate servers typically needed for different combat applications.

The computers in this TOC host the "advanced warfare environment" software, called Aware. The Aware boxes operate autonomously, without servers. They can connect to the Army Battle Command System--a collection of 11 computer systems created for various combat applications--and to the Defense Department's classified network, the Siprnet.

During a summer visit to the Pentagon, battle lab officials briefed Thomas White, the secretary of the Army. "We demonstrated worldwide connectivity via the Siprnet," said Hoscheit. "We were able to show a common operational picture through the Siprnet, without any radios."

Other services appear to be interested in the force-projection TOC. Hoscheit said the TOC was used in an Air Force cruise-missile defense exercise and has been adapted as a command-and-control center for the Navy Seal special warfare units.

The Army's new interim brigade combat teams also are considering the use of these mobile TOCs. The prototype that the battle lab made for air-defense missions, "has the same applicability to armor units," said John W Buckley, a battle lab engineer. There are plans to incorporate the IBCT combat platform, the LAV (light armored vehicle) in the mobile TOC, Buckley told National Defense.

The tests done so fir have been informal, said Hoscheit. Full-fledged operational testing could begin in about 18 months.

He is confident that the technology will work, even in a harsh combat setting. Not every commercial technology is suitable for the battlefield, often requiring modifications, Hoscheit said. One of the TOC computers, for example, was running on the USS Coronado, under a helicopter landing pad. The intense vibration loosened the memory card. Subsequently, the computer manufacturers changed the position of the memory card. The computers are MaxPac 7200 transportable workstations, running on Pentium III processors. They come with a 17-inch high-resolution liquid crystal display. These workstations typically are used for computer-aided design, medical imaging, satellite imagery, military intelligence and streaming video applications.

The TOC'S Windows-based operating environment makes it user-friendly for soldiers, said Hoscheit. It also enables multitasking. "The multifunctional computers are the biggest saver," he said. "You can nominate targets and do other things on the same computer." In the traditional TOC, he added, there are "separate computers which sometimes have trouble talking to each other."

One piece of technology under consideration for the TOC potentially could allow mainstream PCs to receive incoming tactical intelligence data from national broadcasts--a task that now requires a dedicated terminal. The technology is called enhanced national tactical receiver, or ENTR It is a compact four-channel receiver that can be installed inside a PC and allows the computer to pick up any of the major tactical intelligence broadcasts used today. The ENTR technology still is in development by L-3 Communications. A company spokesman said that the Army is "trying to understand the capabilities" of ENTR, which also is being tested by the U.S. Navy.

The TOC could be described as "highly condensed," said Leonard Ingram, vice president of Brown International Corp., in Huntsville. The company is under contract to the battle lab to integrate the computer hardware with the Army vehicles, shelters and various radio systems.

Even though the intended use for this TOC originally was ballistic-missile and cruise-missile defense, it could be adapted to other military operations, he said. "When you have a command-and-control and intelligence gathering package like this, and provide a common display of the ground and air picture, [that capability] is usable by any commander. ... It identifies red and blue forces."

The hardware in the TOC is packaged using commercial switches and routers. "We can route signals easily to various users who need the information," said Ingram.

To cut down on the pieces of hardware in the TOG, he added, the battle lab purchased a digital switch made by Avocent Corp. The switch digitizes video and other data and transports them in Internet-protocol packets over traditional networking connections.

The Aware software developed at the battle lab also has become the foundation for possibly a new command-and-control architecture, said Linda Johnston, Army program manager for advanced tactical communications. Her office uses Aware to develop software that can incorporate Army Battle Command System data feeds into 3-D stereo environments, which would be used for battle planning, for example.

"We also are looking to incorporate artificial intelligence," into the TOG, said Hoscheit. Artificial intelligence in this case means using specialized software, known as expert agents. An expert agent can be programmed to search for specific types of information--ranging from potential threats to vehicle fuel levels. This technology, ideally, would free up human operators, who would have to spend many hours searching for information. An expert agent could do that autonomously.

"With intelligent agents, you can set them up on databases and they can retrieve information that you want," said James E. Saultz, director of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories. The company is not involved in the TOG program, but has been awarded several million dollars worth of contracts by several Defense Department agencies for the development of expert agents.

Under an Army research project called "Agile Commander," logisticians use expert agents to manage the flow of supplies to the battlefield, based on current demand. The system alerts logisticians about supply shortages and other critical information, explained Saultz in an interview.

Using voice-recognition technology, he said, "You can tell an expert agent: 'Find me M-16 rounds."' The system then asks "how you want them delivered, how you want them packaged, when do you want them. It searches the inventory and alerts the supply center."

Airborne Command Post Keeps Information Flowing

An airborne Army command post, built on a helicopter, could help fill the gap in the flow of information that occurs when ground commanders close down and reposition their tactical operations centers, said service officials.

"Every time a TOC [tactical operations center] has to move, the process of shutting down and relocating may take up to 12 hours," noted Lt. Col. Don Hazel-wood, program manager for the Army airbome command and control system, or A2C2S. 'The A2C2S could become a useful tool for Army commanders, because it would provide real-time information while the TOC relocates," he said. A2C2S will "enable commanders and their staffs to maintain digital connectivity while operating from a temporary remote site or moving through the battle space at speeds up to 300 kilometers per hour."

Hazelwood's office developed two mobile command posts on two Black Hawk helicopters. One of the prototypes is with the Arm/s first digitized division, the 4th Infantry. The other one will go to the 101st Airborne Division. Each aircraft has five terminals connected to a host computer, as well as a communications suite of radio terminals.

The Army plans to spend $240 million during the next five years to build more than one hundred A2C2S.

Both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the conflict over Kosovo in 1999 reaffirmed the Army's need for robust communications and command-and-control capabilities that also can be moved quickly around the battlefield, said Maj. Gen. Steven W. Boutelle, the Army's director of programs and architecture, for command, control, communications and computers. He said that the same technology that makes it possible to build a helicopter-sized TOC also could be adapted for ground combat vehicles.

In the future, he explained, the Army could have a TOC in a light armored vehicle, the new combat platform for the Army's new medium brigades.

As a maneuver commander's command post, the A2C2S could support a corps, a division or a brigade. "The commander is on the ground, but is digitally linked to the aircraft," said Boutelle.

"We are trying to make the TOC on the ground go airbome," he added. The airborne TOC's five workstations all feed from a single host computer that has six cards--each running a different piece of the Army Battle Command System software. The ABCS is the Army's battle planning software, which combines 11 different programs. In A2C2S, one 130-pound box replaces six full-size computers.

"We want to take that capability and put it into the LAVs for the [interim brigade combat teams] IBCTs and get away from the big heavy systems," said Boutelle. The LAVs have room for five seats, thus there is no space left for computers, he explained. But there would be enough space for a multiprocessor unit. Each soldier would get a flat-panel screen and a keyboard.

The Army has not yet decided to fund the LAVsized TOC, and currently plans to used traditional TOCs for the brigades.

Raytheon Co., Command, Control, Communication and Information Systems, Huntsville, Ala., received a $1.1 million contract to begin the design and development of a production-version of A2C2S. The value of the contract through 2005 is about $1 10 million. Raytheon beat four other competitors.

Only the Black Hawks that are L models or newer are suitable for A2C2S, said Al Abejon, a program engineer. The system has the standard UH-60L defensive equipment: two machine guns, an infrared jammer, chaff, flare dispenser and radar waming receiver.