Navy to Upgrade UAV Tactical Control System: planned modifications focus on interoperability with Air Force, Army.

The U.S. Navy is continuing development and testing of the Tactical Control System for unmanned aerial vehicles. The TCS, which allows the simultaneous control of multiple UAVs and their payloads from the same control station, was conceived as a joint-service program but never was adopted by the Air Force or the Army.

The program is likely to survive, however, as a Navy-only system that eventually could be modified to accommodate UAVs from additional services, experts said.

The concept for TCS came about in the mid-nineties, when a number of UAVs were being developed, including the Air Force Predator and the Navy Pioneer.

"They wanted to have a ground station, so that they did not have to build one for each UAV," said Capt. Dennis Sorensen, the program manager for Navy UAVs at Patuxent River, Md.

So far, approximately $200 million has been invested in the program. The funding for this year is about $20 million. For fiscal year 2004, the program requested $37 million. The prime contractor for TCS is the Raytheon Company.

According to an industry source who works closely with the program at Joint Forces Command, "there is no definitive plan or date at which a fielded TCS capability would exist." A Raytheon spokesperson declined to answer questions about current TCS capabilities.

The Joint Forces Command is backing the continued employment of TCS and is running experiments through its Joint Operation Test Bed System (JOTBS). "JFCOM supported [TCS] from a joint perspective, because it allowed the joint commander to get information more quickly," said Sorensen.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department is asking the services to develop common UAV interoperability standards. The TCS technology would have to undergo significant modifications to become interoperable with other services, sources said.

The program office already is working on those modifications, said Sorensen. "TCS is based on interoperability standards. ... We are moving now toward a common standard. As the technology evolves, we are looking at standard-based methodology for achieving interoperability."

TCS also is the architectural basis for the NATO Standardization Agreement--STANAG 4586--for the UAV control system, he said. When adopted, this will enable interoperability between TCS and NATO UAV systems.

"It was implemented to allow different countries and different companies to build interoperable UAV systems to facilitate sharing of information across platforms and across systems and it is a method to migrate to a more open system," Sorensen explained. Two NATO countries, the United Kingdom and Canada, are currently using TCS.

STANAG could be the initial point for redefining commonality standards, Sorensen said. "It is going to change the program as we are moving towards the common standards and there are a few changes that we will need to make to accommodate STANAG."

He said that a joint task force at the office of the secretary of defense is currently reviewing standardization issues and looking at STANAG as a potential solution. However, he added, "there has been no clear guidance provided at this time."

According to a JFCOM source, the command is "co-chairing that particular effort, but the standards integrated product team is trying to come up with an agreement on what those standards ought to be," he said. "Once those standards are approved, then all future UAV developments would have to occur within those standards."

It would have to be determined what would happen to legacy systems, whether they would be retrofitted or not. However, TCS is running at a disadvantage, the JFCOM source said. "One of the mistakes that was made when the TCS original requirement was written, was that TCS could not enforce or require any changes to the air vehicles with which it was going to interoperate," he said. "That lay a burden on the TCS and that is a significant reason why the program has suffered. ... The standard-based approach could be the way out of this quagmire."

Technical Details

The core piece of TCS is the air vehicle standard interface, or AVSI, that basically means that the functions the ground stations perform are all the same.

"The important part here is the AVSI, and that you do not have to change anything in the vehicle to make that happen," Sorensen said. "You only have to change the Datalink Control Processor (DCP) to add a new vehicle." He calls both AVSI and DCP "middleware" with a unique capability that allows them to "speak to the vehicle in its native language, [that means] in the electrical signal that the vehicle is expecting," he explained.

So far the DCP is both hardware and software, but eventually, once the technology matures, it will just be software, "like a driver for windows that you would load in a disk," Sorensen said.

The program started out with Block 0 as the baseline capability. Block 0 demonstrated the use of TCS with the Air Force Predator. Block I then demonstrated the capability with the Army's Shadow 600, a bigger version of the Shadow UAV that the Army is currently buying.

According to the JFCOM source, the Army has fast-tracked the Shadow program and made a decision that "they were not going to hold up Shadow procurement, while the issues of integrating TCS into the system were solved."

An Army UAV expert told National Defense that at one point the service was considering using TCS, but "nothing happened to back up the talk." There are no plans to use TCS in the Shadow ground control station, which eventually will be interoperable with Army Hunter UAV and a future aircraft, called the extended range multi-purpose UAV.

"The Army does not want TCS-specific capabilities, but is looking at Shadow ground stations that could work with TCS," said the JFCOM insider.

The Navy is now moving towards TCS Block II, which is focused on the Navy's Firescout Vertical Take Off and Landing UAV, and "formalizing the architecture for future plug-and-play," said Sorensen.

The Navy cancelled the production of the Firescout program, but the development continues. The manufacturer, Northrop Grumman Corp., is marketing the Firescout to the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard and international customers.

"The Navy is trying to resurrect the program with different requirements," said the JFCOM source. "They would not go back to the original Firescout performance requirements." International sales, he said, may eventually revive the program.

According to Sorensen, by the end of this fiscal year, the Navy will have five Firescout vehicles and four TCS ground stations to conduct experiments at the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center in Nevada.

In the future, TCS will operate an upgraded version of the aging Pioneer UAV. JFCOM will fund the integration of TCS with the Air Force Predator as part of JOTBS.

According to Capt. Dan Duquette, the Navy's UAV requirements officer, there will be a demonstration in 2005 where TCS will operate a couple of "naval" Predators.

One of the key add-ons, will be the Navy's new Global Hawks. The Navy is planning to buy two, said Sorensen.

The Global Hawks are being considered as part of the Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program, intended to perform Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) queuing, strike support, SIGINT, and communications relay. BAMS aircraft will operate independently or in direct collaboration with other manned, unmanned and space-based platforms.

Eventually, TCS is going to be used in the BAMS program, said Sorensen.

"The Global Hawks are under contract as we speak, and will be delivered in the second quarter of fiscal year 2005 for Fleet Battle Experiment Mike" he said. Sorensen's office intends to tie the Global Hawks to the other unmanned systems through the Global Hawk Maritime Demonstration Program.

"The intent would be to maintain inreroperability with the Air Force, so that you do not have a stovepipe system," he said. "It would not reflect well on us to have another stovepipe system."

The Air Force chief of staff, Gen. John P. Jumper, hinted at a recent media breakfast meeting, that the Air Force and the Navy may use the Global Hawks together in conjunction with other war fighting technologies.

"I predict that we are going to see a lot of Global Hawks out there one of these days," he said. "I think that they are going to do much more than reconnaissance and surveillance missions."

The Air Force, however, has been an instrumental force in the TCS failure to become a joint program. The official stance of the Air Force to this day is that the service is not considering TCS as a program.

When the TCS operational requirements document was reevaluated in January 2000, as the program was reaching its second milestone (milestone B), and JFCOM started working on lead capabilities, the services had a fallout. "There was some service reluctance to many of the capabilities that TCS was going to provide in terms of interoperability," said the JFCOM source. "That created some friction with the Air Force and what the real requirements were that they were willing to support."

He said that the Air Force is opposed to the idea having other services control its UAVs. Joint requirements subsequently got relegated to "objective" status, which means that they no longer are mandatory and "can be pursued later on as additional funding is available. Nice to do, but not essential."

Remotely Piloted Vehicles

As UAVs become more pervasive in the battlefield, the Air Force is requiring experienced pilots to be at the controls of the UAVs, whereas the other services have not expressed such a requirement.

An Air Force spokesperson told National Defense that the Army and the Navy have different systems, in terms of interoperability standards. "We have qualified pilots to fly the UAVs," the spokesperson said.

Further, UAVs such as the Predator, equipped with the Hellfire missiles, now are being named "remotely piloted vehicles" or RPVs.

"If you are going to take the Predator in high-threat situations, there are certain tactics that you will have to do to keep it alive," said Jumper. "Being able to deal with things like proper over speed, fuel pump failure, those sorts of things are things that humans have to be in. In the case of the U.S. Air Force, [for] anyone who is going to be in a decision loop that ends up putting weapons on a target or ends up putting humans on the ground at risk, I am going to insist that we have someone who is experienced doing that also as a pilot in the air."

Sorensen stressed that TCS is not necessarily intended to control other services' UAVs, but to help them share information more frequently.

The reason the Navy theoretically can do that with TCS is because the system allows for different levels of control for the UAVs. Level II enables the receipt of imagery. Levels III and IV provide command and control of the air vehicle and its payload, as well as imagery. Level V provides complete C2, payload control, imagery receipt and flight control--the ability to take off and land.

These levels of control, in a sense, allow the Navy to be interoperable with other services' systems.

However, "when I say that we are interoperable it may be that [for] those UAVs that are sending info to their ground stations, I can receive that info without interfering with their operations," said Sorensen.

The Marine Corps is planning to integrate TCS with its Dragon Eye UAV. Regardless of what happens with TCS, both maritime services are concerned with the limited amount of space already available on ships and the logistics burden of having several ground stations to command their unmanned vehicles.

"The ship does not have a lot of room to put additional ground stations and it was important to work on areas already onboard the ship," said Sorensen.