Incompatible battle-command systems: there's no easy fix.

The accepted wisdom at the Pentagon today is that the planning and execution of a war would be far smoother if the military services had compatible command-and-control systems.

The "transformation" of the military force, as envisioned by the Bush administration, to a great extent depends on the ability of the services to work together in a joint command-and-control structure.

In the arcane world of battle management command and control, however, defining interoperability is almost as tricky as describing transformation.

The basic premise of interoperability is that any military commander or unit in the field should be able to plug in their computers and see the same picture of the battlefield, as well as share the information. When their systems are not compatible, the situation is akin to Internet users surfing the Web with different browsers, none of which shows the pictures or the script in the same way.

Having a common picture of the combat zone, officials said, would help commanders pinpoint targets mote accurately and faster than is now possible. The services are showing improvements in their joint efforts, but much remains to be done, experts said in recent interviews.

According to the Pentagon's official definition, interoperability is the "ability of systems, units or forces to provide services to and accept services from other systems, units or forces and to use the services exchanged to enable them to operate effectively together."

The lack of interoperability is not a new problem, by any means. But, as the services become more dependent on computers and digital information to run their weapons systems and to execute "network-centric warfare," having incompatible systems creates problems for commanders in charge of multi-service forces, operating on the ground, in the air and at sea.

Some experts blame the lack of interoperability on inter-service rivalries and turf-conscious weapon developers. But, for the most part, the services designed their own "stove-piped" command-and-control systems purposely to be as difficult as possible to penetrate. They were not meant to facilitate information sharing.

Last October, the services received marching orders from the Pentagon to make their systems interoperable. An October 12 memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowirz set a 2008 deadline to make all military C2 systems interoperable.

The Pentagon official responsible for enforcing Wolfowitz mandate is V. Garber, the Defense Department's director of interoperability. He reports to Edward "Pete" Aldridge, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

Garber's office was created to "champion initiatives that would contribute to effective joint and combined operations for the combatant commanders," he said. "Our task is to provide executive level oversight."

Ideally, the Pentagon would like for joint task force commanders to have a single picture of the battlefield, but that is not possible today, because they operate a cornucopia of battle management command-and-control systems, Garber explained. Having a reliable picture, showing friendly and hostile forces, for example, could help prevent fratricide.

One cornerstone program that Garber oversees is called the Family of Interoperable Operational Pictures, or FIOP, which sets guidelines for the services to make their stove-piped BMC2 systems communicate and share data with each other.

A number of programs were started in recent years to bring about interoperability among the services. Among them are the SLAP (single integrated air picture), sponsored originally by the Missile Defense Agency but thea expanded to all the services. Other service-specific interoperability programs indude the Navy's Force Net and the Army/Marine Corps Single Integrated Ground Picture. In June, Garber kicked off a new program, called Blue Force Tracking.

During the next five years, the services will spend at least $36 billion in various BMC2 systems, and that (loes not include the cost of maintaining the current technologies, he noted. Garber wants to ensure that the services spend those funds on technologies that enhance interoperability. His office budgeted about $140 million for fiscal years 2003-2008 to help fund the integration of the disparate systems.

But Garber conceded that these funds alone won't be enough. The Joint Chiefs of Staff Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) contributed $15 million a year for "initial conceptual systems engineering work," mid Garber. Additionally, the services are expected to help fund the FLOP effort.

The Air Force was designated "executive agent," in charge of managing the FLOP work, Garber said. But all services are expected to participate. "We have agreed to a virtual management organization, where each service has a cell." Heading this effort will be Air Force Lr. Gen. Leslie Kenne, the service's deputy chief of staff for integration.

Garber predicted that Wolfowitz' 2008 deadline can be met, with caveats, nonetheless. "We told the secretary that we'll make major progress by 2008." Attaining this goal is tied not just to making current systems interoperable but also to improving operator training and to the deployment of new generation systems--such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the Joint Tactical Radio System--which are software-based and thus make interoperability much easier than older systems.

The SIAP program is showing the most promise among the current interoperability projects, Garber said. "SLAP is leading the way for the family of interoperable pictures." The project focuses on achieving "one track per target" so commanders can figure out the exact location and identity of incoming aircraft or missiles. "This will reduce fratricide by reducing operator confusion," he said.

Garber's office is working with the Joint Staff and the assistant secretary of defense for C31 (command, control, communications and intelligence) on ground combat identification issues, "where we are the weakest," he said. The Joint Staff is preparing a so-called "Joint Combat ID Ground Study," with the intent to create a systems architecture and a companion investment strategy.

"Combat ID is like interoperability," said Garber. "We will always want to do better."

In addition to Garber's office, the Pentagon's C31 shop, the Joint Chiefs and the individual services, there is the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which also plays in the inreroperability business.

"One of the things we're tasked with in Joint Forces Command is the interoperability piece," said Army Gen. William E Kernan, commander of JFCOM.

JFCOM oversees 2,000 people who write "operational requirement documents" for weapon systems, Kernan said during a Pentagon news conference. These ORD writers make sure that the interoperability needs are addressed.

"When we write the operational requirements document, [we] make sure that the key performance parameters of interoperability and those information exchange requirements are designated ahead of time," mid Kernan. "We've trained over 2,000 people who write those operational requirements documents. ... And we reviewed now over 800 documents to assure that, up front, those parameters, those standards are identified and incorporated into new systems."

The process is not uncomplicated, he added. "We're still a little bit of a Mr. Fix-It."

A case in point is the Army's maneuver control system and the Marine tactical control operations, which the two services use for situational awareness, to track the location of friendly forces.

These two systems "were built almost in parallel, but weren't interoperable," Kernan said. In recent months, JFCOM built software that allows the MCS and the TCO to share information.

'Old-Fashioned Thinking'

For all the optimism coming out of Garber's office, there are critics who question the wisdom of the Pentagon's interoperability strategy. One critic, who declined to be quoted by name, pointed out that Garber's office is duplicating work being done else-where, and that projects such as SLAP have not produced anything other than "lots of paper."

This critic, who has worked for more than 20 years in military interoperabiity programs, said that projects such as the FIOP are based on "old fashioned thinking" about warfare, namely the notion that the "operational picture" should be divided into air, sea and ground.

That stove-piped way of thinking must change, in order to conduct network-centric warfare, said the source. "As opposed to having an air picture, sea picture, ground picture, we should think about data," he said. "Data needs to be moved, accessed as needed by each user. If we continue segmenting these things into individual-type pictures, we are not helping the process or moving towards a network-centric environment.

The key to breaking the status quo, he said, is to influence spending decisions. "Until someone has the power and the authority to drive the services to buy [interoperable] technology that they all support, nothing is going to happen. ... Power comes through budget controls."

Garber, meanwhile, noted that the services are getting better at working together. "We have finally gotten service buy-in," he said. In recent months, "the services took ownership of FIOP."

At the FlOP meetings, he said, there are more than 100 participating organizations, which "have identified over 100 initiatives in the services and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in different stages of development." Each organization, he said, offers "Band-aid solutions." The problem is that "most of these people don't know what the others are doing."

One reason that interoperability and information sharing are difficult for the military services is their desire for tight security, said Taylor Lawrence, vice president and general manager of Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems.

The more fundamental technologies that will help improve interoperability are wideband communications and data-sharing protocols that are also secure, Taylor told reporters. The services need "technologies that allow rapid dissemination of information with appropriate security controls," he said.

The reason they have stove-pipes is because they make it easier to control the information, Lawrence said. In multi-service or multi-nation operations, that creates problems. "Nobody else can get there," he added. A possible solution would be for the Defense Department and the services to come up with new protocols that all can agree on, and that offer both an open environment and security.

The current obstacles to interoperability, he said, are not necessarily attributable to technology hitches, but rather to cultural and policy issues.

The industry source who criticized the Pentagon's interoperability strategy also said that the 2008 deadline mandated in the Wolfowirz memo could be achieved, "if we get focused." Nevertheless, he said, "It's an artificial goal."

RELATED ARTICLE: Air Warfare's Holy Grail: A 'Single Integrated Picture'

The Defense Department is spending several hundred million dollars yearly on programs designed to produce a so-called "single integrated air picture." The elusive SIAP would make it possible for all U.S. military services and allies to share a graphic representation of the airspace around the theater of war.

A SIAP would provide a single track for each enemy target, using data generated by multiple surface and air sensors and broadcast via Link 16--an information distribution system for communication, navigation, and identification data.

A common air picture for all the services is not difficult to realize, experts said. One problem, however, is that the services have yet to agree on what SIAP-related technologies best meet their needs.

These experts agreed that, in the SIAP world, things are improving thanks to the increased use of Link 16.

To gather raw data about the quality and the "jointness" of the air picture, the Defense Department conducts an annual exercise called the Joint Combat Identification Evaluation Team (JCIET).

At JCIET, commanders see a variety of air pictures. One may be from the Army's Patriot air-defense system. Another may be the air picture from the Air Force AWACS air-traffic control aircraft. At the 2002 exercise, two Navy cruisers, a Marine Corps radar and a Navy reconnaissance aircraft relied on the air picture generated by the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), a sensor-netting system.

Each platform participating in JCIET tracks and identifies friendly and enemy aircraft, as well as incoming cruise missiles. Ballistic missile defense is not part of the drill.

During the exercise, analysts figure out when an incorrect ID is made and determine whether that led to friendly fire. During the past decade, eight large-scale JCIET events were held to assess how well combat ID and air picture information are shared among the services.

There are two parts to achieving a SIAP, explained Bruce Behrens, a JCIET analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses. "First, aircraft must be detected and identified. Then that information must be shared with the rest of the service and coalition participants.

"One reason the air picture has improved over the years is the increasing proportion of PPLI-equipped aircraft," Behrens said. PPLI stands for precise participant location and identification. Aircraft with PPLI identify themselves as friendly and report their own position, he said, "making it much less likely that they will be incorrectly identified as hostile. ... Distinguishing between neutral and hostile aircraft is probably the hardest combat ID challenge, because even when the aircraft type can be identified, the intent of the pilot may have to be considered."

Another improvement in recent years, Behrens added, is the replacement of "legacy Link-11 systems with native Link-16 systems." The new systems speak the same language, allowing more data to be shared more accurately.

The Defense Department's SIAP office has spent at least the last two years working on the integration of the Link 16 data. The problem with Link 16, experts said, is that sometimes it produces dual tracks or multiple tracks for the same target. CEC advocates, meanwhile, claim that CEC fixes the problem by creating a single track that makes it easier for commanders to pinpoint the target and figure out how to defeat it A JCIET official said that the ships equipped with CEC potentially end up with two different pictures: the Link 16 picture and the CEC picture.

"Links have dual tracks, they swap tracks, they drop tracks," said Tony Gecan, senior systems engineer at Raytheon Co., the prime contractor for CEC. While trying to maintain combat ID on targets with data links, Gecan said, "Operators spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they are looking at."

During JCIET, he explained, Raytheon merged the CEC tracks with the data link tracks via a "fusion engine that can suck out duals from the data links." The end result, he said, is a "very clear picture."

The CEC collected information from AWACS, over Link 16 and from Patriot, over commercial FAA radar. "We fused that into one track, one ID per target. That's the SIAP," said Gecan. "The Navy then distributed the ID over Link 16 to all the other users." The users would not necessarily know whether it's a Link 16 or a CEC track.

But one JCIET official noted that, no matter what technology is being used, combat ID always involves a "judgment call." After 9/11, for example, nobody will want to assume that every commercial airliner is necessarily friendly, he said.

Sandra I. Erwin

Companies await guidelines for next generation of cec

Defense Department acquisition officials are expected, this fall, to reveal new details of what could be a multi-service version of the Navy's Cooperative Engagement Capability.

CEC is a sensor-netting technology designed to defend naval battle groups from incoming aircraft and cruise missiles. The Navy touts this technology as the cornerstone of the Defense Department's plan to develop a "single integrated air picture," or SIAP, for joint commanders. (See related story)

An April memorandum by Undersecretary of Defense Edward "Pete" Aldridge calls for a future competition for the development of CEC Block II. Aldridge suggested that the Defense Department would prefer that the next generation of CEC be joint, so all services could share the air picture. The CEC technology currently only in operation with the Navy.

The Pentagon's director of interoperability, V. Garber, said that, even though the SIAP is a top priority, it is not realistic to expect all the services to accept a Navy technology that was not conceived to meet everyone's requirements. "CEC is very appropriate for operations in the battle group," Garber said in an interview. "It's the only place where we are really fusing in real time all the sensor data. We'd love to take data from that output and use it in other areas."

Aldridge directed the services and the Joint Theater Air and Missile Defense Office to develop, by this fall, multi-service requirements for CEC Block II. An industry competition could begin in 2003.

Raytheon, the incumbent CEC contractor, will be facing formidable competition.

A rival technology, called the Tactical Component Network (TCN) will be proposed as the next generation of CEC, for all the services. A small company in Laurel, Md., named Solipsys, owns the TCN technology but is looking to team with industry giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing for the CEC competition.

The "CEC or TCN" choice is equivalent to having to decide whether to use Microsoft Windows or Apple Macintosh, said Vice Adm. Timothy W LaFleur, commander of the U.S. Pacific Naval Surface Force.

"CEC and TCN are very comparable," LaFleur told reporters during a July roundtable. But, in his opinion, TCN is easier to use. "CEC is pretty complex. It was the best in its time TCN is simpler to operate, has a simpler language and operating system."

Asked whether he thought that the Navy should convert from CEC to TCN, LaFleur said, "We have to figure out where ... does it make sense to stop all the investment with CEC and move to TCN or whatever other system."

Whatever system the Navy chooses, he said, should have an "open architecture that allows you to reload your mission with software upgrades, instead of changing the hardware."

Having invested at least $2 billion in its development, the Navy fully is behind CEC. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) nevertheless awarded Solipsys more than $70 million in contracts recently to demonstrate the TCN technology at sea, with the Navy's 7th Fleet.

These contracts will help to "investigate TCN not just as an alternative to CEC but also as a sensor networking solutions that the joint services have been looking for," said Warren Citrin, president of Solipsys Corp.

Citrin was one of the original developers of CEC, when he worked at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. The lab now serves as a technical advisor to the Navy's CEC program office.

Under a $49.7 million, five-year contract, Solipsys will test TCN in the 7th Fleet. The company also received a $21.5 million 18-month contract for the design, development, and testing of TCN servers for SPY-1 and APS-145 radars on two East Coast Aegis cruisers and on an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft.

These tests will "prove that TCN can meet the CEC requirements and SIAP requirements," said Citrin.

The $49.7 million contract, he said, also will show the application of TCN in a global network hub.

"Conceptually, the TCN is made up of two pieces: the global network and the local network," said Citrin. The local network looks like CEC--it uses radios and communicates with the members of the battle group nearby. The global network uses Iridium satellites for real-time sensor integration among combatants all around the world, using a hub-and-spoke structure. "Ships can be a mile apart or 10,000 miles apart and it doesn't make any difference. They can share information."

During the 7th Fleet Foal Eagle exercise earlier this year, said Citrin, combatants were able to integrate their sensor data to create a single picture, regardless of their relative locations. Sensor data received from a given combatant was processed and routed back out to other TCN-equipped combatants. The 15,000 mile round trip, including hub processing time, was typically less than one second, since the Iridium constellation of satellites is in low orbit, he explained.

Lockheed Martin is under contract to Solipsys to integrate TCN into the 7th Fleet's Aegis cruisers and Northrop Grumman was contracted to install TCN in an E-2C aircraft, in a CEC-like network

Citrin is confident that TCN will have a chance to win the CEC Block II award, because it has wider cross-service appeal than CEC. "The Air Force completed rejected the current CEC construct, for many reasons," Citrin said. "They have purchased a number of TCN components for the NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense] contingency suite for homeland defense."

TCN has found more favor with the Air Force and Marine Corps than with the Navy, he said. "The Navy is invested in CEC."

One of the reasons that ONR became interested in TCN, he said, is that it appears to be a "more acceptable structure to the joint services."

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing have expressed interest in teaming with Solipsys for the CEC competition, in a consortium that will bid the TCN against the Raytheon/APL team, said Citrin.

"Solipsys does not plan to choose just one partner. Our feeling is that the best result will come from a team that includes as many participants as possible.

"Buying a network foundation is different than buying a radar or a ship. For a network, you ultimately need agreement among the different players that this does not upset their business interests and that it's an acceptable standard for Boeing's AWACS, Lockheed's Aegis, Northrop's E-2C," he added. "Our intent is to form a consortium with all three large firms."

Raytheon is under contract to deliver up to 60 more CEC shipboard units during the next two years, said Clifford Clegg, the company's director of business development. That would bring the total number of CEC units deployed to about 120, he said. Assuming that the Defense Department awards a contract for Block II in 2004, deliveries of the new system would begin in 2006.

As far as Block II goes, Clegg said that Raytheon plans to make CEC hardware "smaller and lighter" for the Army and the Air Force. An airborne suite for CEC today weighs 800 pounds. "That's too doggone heavy for the Air Force," Clegg said. "It should be less than half."

Gecan stressed that the potential changes that CEC would undergo for Block II will remain nebulous, at best, until the Defense Department defines its needs. "Everybody likes smaller, cheaper, lighter. ... Beyond that, ft's hard to say what they will require."--Sandra I. Erwin