Joint 'Air Picture' fractured by Long-Standing Rivalries.

Inter-service and company rivalries increasingly are coming into play in a Defense Department program that aims to create a common air picture for U.S. military forces. A common air picture, officials said, helps coordinate operations in joint warfare, so that, at any given time, Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine units in the battle zone can detect and track all airborne objects, discriminating friend from foe.

A Pentagon program called "single integrated air picture" was established three years ago to try to bring together disparate data collection and tracking systems from each service and figure out how to make them work together. The SIAP program, which received $20 million in fiscal 2002, has achieved some progress so far, but it has a long way to go, said Navy Capt. Jeff Wilson, who is in charge of the project.

During a SIAP conference in Arlington, Va., Wilson explained that the key to having a common air picture is to capture the information stored in "stovepiped" databases used by the military services and U.S. intelligence organizations.

The reasons why the Pentagon needs a SIAP, Wilson said, are to reduce fratricide, to exploit the capabilities of long-range weaponry and to help U.S. forces "go after emerging targets," such as cruise and ballistic missiles.

In the SIAP office, "they are learning how difficult it is to make the services cooperate," said Stephen R. Woodall, an industry consultant who directed a study called "Roadmap to the Single Integrated Picture," sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association Strike, Land Attack and Air Defense Committee. (National Defense, November 2001, page 14)

"Prescribing interoperability is still much more an art than a science," said Woodall. "At the service level, program managers generally do not have technical criteria for interoperability. It's usually designed after the system is built."

He said that, nonetheless, he is optimistic about the SIAP program. "It can be done," Woodall asserted.

The primary command-and-control communications network used today by all the services to create an air picture is the Joint Tactical Interoperability Distribution System, known as Link 16.

The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, has a technology called Cooperative Engagement Capability that can provide a common air picture for carrier battle groups. CEC is a sensor-netting system that consolidates the data from various ship-based and aircraft-based radar and creates a composite track of each target. The tracks are distributed to the members of the network (ships and aircraft), which share a common picture of the airspace.

The CEC prime contractor, the Raytheon Company, has promoted the notion that CEC is the obvious fix for the Pentagon's SIAP problem. According to the company's proposal, if the CEC network were adapted and extended to other service platforms, it would help create a so-called Joint Composite Tracking Network, a term used by the Defense Department to describe the technology needed to create a SIAP. The JCTN originally started as a cruise-missile defense initiative, hut its scope later grew to encompass the entire spectrum of air threats.

JCTN could be defined as a "deliberate evolution of CEC, to incorporate joint requirements," said Tony Gecan, a senior engineer at Raytheon. He noted that JCTN is a much more complex endeavor than CEC and it would require that CEC change the way it reports target locations from "relative" coordinates to "absolute" coordinates.

According to the Defense Department's original requirements document for JCTN, the goal is to have a network of 120 participants that could manage as many as 2,400 target-data tracks, for both aircraft and ballistic missiles. CEC currently is not capable of accommodating that many participants, but Gecan explained that the technology is "extensible." In his opinion, CEC is a natural fit for the JCTN requirement, because it creates "only one track number per target." This means that targets will not be double-counted or misidentified as friendly or enemy.

"To get to the SIAP ... all the nodes [must] have the air picture and the ID for each object [and] only one track number is assigned to one object," he said.

Raytheon officials have stressed that CEC is not a direct competitor to Link 16, because each has a different mission. These officials also made a point that Link 16 alone cannot achieve a SIAP.

While Link 16 is a single-sensor data link, CEC consolidates multiple sensor data into a single composite track, Gecan explained. The problem with Link 16, he said, is that it is not "stable enough to achieve SIAP" Link 16 creates more than one track per object, a phenomenon called "dual track," Gecan said. Sometimes, Link 16 tracks get swapped, potentially leading to target misidentification.

Gifford Clegg, Raytheon's director of advanced programs, said Link 16 has a cycle time of 12 seconds "or worse." That means that, every 12 seconds, "you can get in there to send or receive a message."

In a recent rest using a CEC-satellite linkup with Inmarsat, he said, it took six or seven seconds to transmit the CEC picture over a radio-frequency network, "so even those who are not on the CEC network can see the same picture." This makes CEC, said Clegg, "useful for situational awareness."

Woodall noted that Link 16 has fallen short of expectations in how far it would advance interoperability in joint warfare, even though the technology has been proven in combat and gradually is being incorporated into more weapon platforms.

"Link 16 was going to be our saving grace," he said. It did not turn out that way, because each service implemented the technology following different standards, Woodall said. "The services took the same criteria for interoperability and designed the systems in different ways, with different features. That is what SIAP office is trying to fix."

Kelly Ortberg, vice president and general manager for communications systems at Rockwell Collins, said there is a project underway to improve the standardization of Link 16 across the entire Defense Department. The company worked on the design and development of Link 16.

"There has been some concern about the host computer implementation," Ortberg said. "The radios typically are the same radios going into any service platforms, but there is a whole bunch of post processing that is done on the information that comes out of a terminal." The military services, he said, "are trying to get more standardized in the way they process and present that information, to enhance interoperability."

During a briefing to reporters, Gecan showed charts produced by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon-funded think tank, which suggested that potential enhancements to Link 16 algorithms and messaging capabilities would not be sufficient to achieve a SIAP. The notional goals set by the IDA study required a minimum of 1.2 tracks per target or less and the ability to maintain a track on the object for a minimum of 20 minutes.

One chart showed that, in a simulated theater of operations in Southwest Asia, with 33 platforms sharing Link 16 data, only 2 percent of the objects in the air space could be observed by all the participants. An improved Link 16 system could boost the SIAP to 5 percent. The addition of CEC would boost the SIAP to 22 percent, said the IDA study, because CEC tracks combine data from the others sensors in the theater. "If we send those tracks out and put them our on the data link, then you go up to 22 percent SIAP," said Gecan.

Another chart, titled "Alternate Acquisition Paths to Achieving SIAP," said that the 22 percent SIAP would soar to 95 percent if every platform in the theater were upgraded with a CEC-based Joint Composite Tracking Network. Key to this surge in capability is the inclusion of an AWACS (airborne early warning and control aircraft) equipped with CEC. "Because the AWACS flies high, it sees a lot of volume," he said.

The numbers in the IDA charts seem convincing enough, but, in turf-conscious defense programs, CEC is far from being universally embraced as the solution to the SIAP problem. The Navy fully supports CEC and plans rouse it in combat in the near future. The first CEC baseline, called version 2.0, was certified in October as an operational system and the Navy expected Pentagon approval this month to award Raytheon a full-rate production contract. So far, the company has received $112 million in CEC work.

Tough Sell

Outside the Navy, meanwhile, CEC has proven to be a tough sell. Additionally, there is a brewing rivalry between Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, which is under contract to develop a new baseline of CEC, version 2.2. Lockheed officials expect to challenge Raytheon for future CEC contracts.

Last year, Lockheed proposed that the Navy evaluate an alternative sensor-netting technology to CEC, called the Tactical Component Network. TCN was developed by a small company named Solipsys. The Navy, however, decided to continue along the CEC path and chose to not fund a competing program for the time being.

Lockheed officials have backed away from promoting the TCN technology, at least until the Navy charts a definitive plan for future CEC upgrades and for the long-term acquisition and implementation of CEC.

"We are not pushing it [TCN] aside," said Mark Trenor, director of naval command-and control programs at Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems. "It's another technology that is out there that bears a fair amount of evaluation."

Trenor, however, is supportive of CEC as a "piece of the SIAP," rather than as the only solution.

"SIAP comes in a lot of different flavors," he said. "You have real-time, and you have time-late information (near real time) that comes across the various links in ships and aircraft." All those different layers of information have different attributes, different information models and need to be reconciled, he said, "so you get a coherent picture to the tactical operator in a consistent manner across the force."

The CEC contribution to the SIAP, he said, would be in "improving the links standards and how people comply with those standards. ... SIAP is nor going to be solved by one technology.

Outside the Navy, Trenor said, the services are looking at different technologies and other ways of netting sensors.

Woodall noted that there are no other fielded systems that do "exactly" what CEC does to improve the SIAP, "but there are a few other capabilities which do network and synthesize sensor information, and offer promise to do things similarly to CEC to clarify the battlespace ... or build toward a JCTN."

The Army, for example, is working on a single integrated ground picture," said Woodall. "With sufficient communications bandwidth, they can handle the ground picture digitally down to the level of individual troops."

The Patriot missile-defense system is among the Army weapons that could be considered as a candidate for CEC.

Paul Lemmo, director of business development at Lockheed Martin, said that the Navy is working with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab to try to identify "targeted platforms" in the Air Force and Navy that could benefit from CEC.

The Air Force already is participating with Raytheon and the Navy in simulated tests where four F-15E Strike Eagle fighters are connected to an AWACS using CEC.

The fact that CEC is a "Navy product" sometimes weakens its appeal to other services, but that could change in the future, said Gecan. "The argument among the services is beginning to bubble up," he said. To make it a joint system, "there has to be some freedom to personalize [CEC] for the Army and the Air Force."

In the meantime, Raytheon continues to pursue an upgraded version of CEC, baseline 2.1, which is targeted for amphibious ships and aircraft carriers. Clegg said this version will have 'increased data throughput" to support a larger network and possible the AWACS aircraft.

Baseline 2.1 could end up competing head-to-head with Lockheed's baseline 2.2. Lockheed officials said that their company's version of CEC will be able to operate with the Navy's latest upgrade to the Aegis combat system, called baseline 7 phase 1C.

In February 2002, the Navy will review baseline 2.2 and decide how it can be used to "enhance engagement coordination for theater ballistic missile defense," said Trenor. The system will be limited to area defense only, but it's being designed with "theater-wide [capabilities] in mind," he said.

Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin opened a new high-tech facility in Moorestown, N.J., designed to test the integration of CEC and Aegis in a simulated theater of operations. Lemmo said he is hopeful that this facility will help smooth our interoperability problems earlier in the development cycle. "We can conduct a battle group test before going to sea, which reduces the risk."