A (poorly recorded) video of Raytheon’s demonstration at AUSA of the company’s Counter IED trainer — a full-immersion simulation that the company has developed for squad-level training of troops in a highly realistic, 3-D environment that physically stresses them in similar ways to actual patrols.

Sorry for the quality — this was recorded on an iPod Nano.

Last week, I spoke with Charlie Maraldo, a special projects manager with the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD) at CERDEC about the Lockheed AML test and the other elements of the Persistent Surveillance Testbed. Here’s the transcript:

Charlie Maraldo : Today, we can network disparate types of systems — sensor systems, e/w systems, ISR systems and ingest their data into DCGS A, normalize it on a database that is then accessible via other tools that are out on the data enterprise, and then allowing that information to be either posted or pulled or otherwise sent down to warfighters, you know. right down to the edge. That was our objective, and AML was a part of that, and a big part. So let’s talk about that for a little bit.

So, Lockheed Martin has a CRADA with RDECOM and I2WD, and as part of that CRADA we have an ongoing technical exchange of information with them. They made us aware several months ago that they were developing a testbed capability, which was the AML. It’s a capital asset of theirs — we don’t have any control over or can tell them what to do with it — it’s a solely Lockheed Martin entity. But we talked about ways that we could cooperate using it, and one idea was to have them participate in the C4ISR on the move demo, as a sub element of our Persistent Surveillance Testbed capstone demonstration that we were running at I2WD, which was part of the c4isr on the move e09 demo. So that’s what we did.

We kind of kept tabs… I was involved in monitoring the status of Lockheed’s progress, and brainstorming some ideas on how their system could play into the demonstration. And they came out for five days. Right after their aircraft was complete, and used some of the subsystems that they had integrated into the aircraft. They used their COMINT system to geolocate and map communications emitters that were involved in the E09 exercise. They had an EO-IR imagery asset on their aircraft. And they connected with our ground station via a CDL provided by L3 Comm Systems West in Salt Lake City. Their ground station component, we integrated into our shelter– our testbed trailer, or shelter, and we federated their DIB — their DCGS Integration Backbone.

We federated their DIB with the DIB in our ground station and our DCGS-A. We had a DCGS-A version 3.x in our station, and we were able to ingest their information , and normalize it using some off-the-shelf data manipulation tools, so it was ingestible into the PASS — Post and Subscribe Services, I think that stands for — server at C4ISR On-The-Move, and then that made that data then available however the On-The-Move experiment wanted to use it. So that was sort of our responsibility. Once the data was in an acceptable format in the PASS server, our responsibility sort of trailed off, and PM C4ISR On-The-Move took it up and then conducted experimentation on how that data could be displayed down on other, you know, whether it was FBCB2 or ROVR… they conducted a lot of experimentation with all the data that was flowing over the network. So I don’t have a great handle on exactly how that part played out, but once it was on that server, and the data was acceptable, it was being viewed on their common operating picture, on their COP, and the icons were generated at the appropriate locations and the report data was there, so we declared some success.

So, Lockheed Martin flew their missions at the same time we were flying something called Sledgehammer. Sledgehammer is an airborne EW — electronic warfare — system. It has electronic support, which allows you to locate emitters on the battlefield, and electronic attack which allows you to deny the communications of those emitters. That was also connected to our ground station via CDL, and the same type of actions took place, with regards to normalizing the data, and allowing it to be ingested, displayed and processed by DCGS-A, and passed over the fiber optic network that we had installed between our ground station at Lakehurst, and the C4ISR on the move server and facility at Range 1 at Ft. Dix.

We also flew a Hostile Fire Indication prototype, which detects firing events, meaning gunfire. That information was also , that was on the UH-1 Huey helicopter.

Sean Gallagher: What platform was the Sledgehammer on?

Charlie Maraldo: Oh, I’m sorry. That was on the UH-60A. These helicopters are testbed research and development assets run out of the CERDEC flight activity at Lakehurst. They’re owned by our organization for the purposes of this type of experimentation, research and development work, assisting in the development of QRC capability, anything that involves advancing the state of the art of the different types of technologies that we work on.

Sean Gallagher: Were they operating as a surrogate for a potential UAS platform?

Charlie Maraldo: Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Our architecture was … that was the intent of the architecture and why we remoted the operation via CDL of each of these components, because objectively the architecture will not have users with the payload. They’ll be maybe on a UAS, maybe on a lighter than air airship…so you want to accomplish that sort of architectural design as early as you can in your development, so that’s not what you’re trying to hurdle. But I wouldn’t stretch it and say that they were surrogate UASs. I’d say the architecture is compatible with future UAS development, but probably size weight and power of some of this stuff is not.

So, the UH-1 did not use a CDL. The UH-1 used an L-band data link that is an R&D asset of the space and terrestrial comms directorate here. So we had a lot players, we had a lot of people involved in this. It became a complex little experiment. And that sensor reported the location of firing events, and we reported that as situational awareness data into the C4ISR On-the-move network , onto their enterprise in the same manner. THe data was normalized, it was displayed on DCGS-A, we could display it in concert with other sensor data, and pass the information over to the PASS server at C4ISR On-the-Move.

Sean Gallagher: So you were able to fuse all that data over DCGS-A, and overlay sigint and visual, and firing event data on top of each other on a geospatial display?

Charlie Maraldo: Yes. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate. We were not passing realtime full-motion video through the DCGS-A to the PASS server. We didn’t get that far– we only had a few days to do this integraion. So, there’s nothing that could have stopped us from doing that except for time. We were a little short on time, and Lockheed was only in town for a couple of days. And with just the federation of the DIBs, it would have required some additional integration to get the real time video over. They were able to pass packets, you, know, like clips? Small bits of still-video, and stuff like that. But it wasn’t like real-time video.

Sean Gallagher: So, like, screen grabs of whatever they were getting off the sensor.

Charlie Maraldo: Yes, yes, exactly. And then we also cross-cued. So, using the data from other ISR assets, we cross cued the imagery asset, and , uh, and / or that data was available on the C4ISR on the move network to cross cue other imagery assets that they had playing in the demo. And that allows you then , to, you know, imagery assets are always in short supply; everybody wants a picture of what’s important, what’s going on on the battelfield. If you can tell them where to look instead of having them have to scan over a larger area, and you can use those assets more effectively. So some of the data was used for cross-cuing of imagery assets. So we could take a picture of what we were also hearing, or electronically attacking. So all of that worked pretty well.

Sean Gallagher: So the Lockheed piece was based on a CRADA; were these other projects currently in CRADA mode or…

Charlie Maraldo : No, the other projects were internal to I2WD. So we had a mix of investment by Lockheed Martin on their AML, and then some other projects that the … the Sledgehammer, there’s some interest in some similar capability as a QRC, so we wanted to show the operational benefit of having this capability that’s easily integrated onto a UH-60 helicopter. So we’re trying to reduce the risk of a potential QRC and show its effectiveness. And the Hostile Fire Indicator, HFI, is a prototype that is an early stage of an ATO, Army technololgy objective. So you know, again, we had a mix — we had a very early prototype capability in the HFI, and the Sledgehammer EW system was very mature… you know we’re ready to go in probably a few months with something like that; and AML was a testbed.

Sean Gallagher: Coming out of this experiment, do you see, is there any motion afoot to make any of these a program of record or put them over to a program, move them to the PEO side?

Charlie Maraldo: There is real interest in Sledgehammer as a QRC that would be managed or at least assisted through a PM, but I don’t have any official word on a PM, and I don’t want to jump the gun on that.

Sean Gallagher: Any further testing coming up at this point for any of these elements?

Charlie Maraldo: We continue to demonstrate for target audiences the Sledgehammer. We’re going to continue experimentation with the HFI with different types of weaponry; we’re getting assistance from PM C4ISR On-the-Move, coordinating ground assets at Ft. Dix…So we’re getting help from, I guess that’s a National Guard training center there now, so we’re doing that this month (October). AML, we don’t have anything on the calendar, but we definitely plan on continuing this relationship with them. Lockheed has stated an interest in that, as they had literally just finished the aircraft so , uh. we only used a portion of its potential sensor capability. So maybe next year, that’s up to them…it’s a business development tool for them, so they need to secure funding from their marketing side to go and play in these kinds of experiments. What their real plans are, that’s up to them. But we’ve expressed interest in continuing this type of relationship, and also you know, exploring the possibility of putting third party sensors onto their platform for research and development.

Sean Gallagher: Yeah, I understand the architecture of the aircraft is designed for that purpose.

Charlie Maraldo: Yeah, absolutely. They have a DIB based, service-based architecture, I’m sure they’d like to advertise it as plug and play, and it probably is to some degree. Everything takes some intergration. But I think there’s potential there, and we’ll work with them in the future, as we do with virtually other large, or even not large, contractor. So we have CRADAs with Northrop Grumman, and… well…everybody. Our objective is to help industry and help the services advance the state of the art in all these types of capabilities. And if we can cooperate with them like that, and share information and generate a capability for the warfighter that much sooner, that’s what we will do.

Lockheed Martin's Airborne Multi-Intelligence Laboratory

Last month, Lockheed-Martin brought an independently developed test aircraft, called the Airborne Multi-Intelligence Lab, to the Army’s C4ISR On-the-Move exercise, which took place at and near Ft. Dix and Lakehurst, New Jersey. The AML is a repurposed used Gulfstream III corporate jet equipped with a large radome and commercial electronics racks; the aircraft is designed for testing the integration of multiple sensors and open architecture intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, providing aggregation of multiple sensors right on the aircraft by analysts, who pass that data to operators on the ground.

I spoke with Lockheed’s Jim Quinn, vice president, and John Beck and Mark Wand, both with Lockheed’s business development group. Here’s the interview:

Jim Quinn: A little over 10 or 11 months ago, Lockheed martin made some decisions, investment decisions in particular that looked at where the customer set was going — some of their higher priority needs. This was driven both internationally as well as domestically, and the importance of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in supporting operations around the globe.

We recognized that a lot of the difficulty that our customers were having were trying to take advantage of multiple sensors, and to fuse and correlate that data in a way that it provided meaningful and actionable intelligence to war fighters on the edge. Whether they be war fighters on the edge or a command post or ground station that were trying to turn that information into usable knowledge.

We know that a lot of the platforms and sensors that are in operation around the world do that in a single int. fashion. They are a dedicated platform that collects a single (form of) intelligence, whether it be synthetic aperture radar, or FLIR (forward looking infrared), kinds of electro-optic sensors, or whether it be a sigint (signals intelligence) sensor, and then usually that data is transported by data link to some sort of ground station, and in many cases those ground stations are dedicated to the platform and the sensor that they are affiliated with. So we recognize the value of trying to have at our customers’ disposal and for our own experimentation, a platform that could take and plug-and-play various sensors in a multi-intelligence configuration. That would allow us to investigate how we take multiple inputs from sensors, and then either cross-queue or show the benefit of merging and synthesizing that data onboard the platform, and then pushing it down to the users on the ground. Whether it is a ground station or a user on the edge

So we made an investment, and procured a used (Gulfstream III) in the aircraft market with partners that we worked with in industry, We constructed a first set of sensors, and perhaps more importantly, we put on the aircraft a hardware and a software infrastructure that allowed those sensors over time to be plugged and played — that is, we could configure the hardback of the aircraft and the software infrastructure of it, the ability to take a sensor from various suppliers, whether it be one of our own or from a supplier in industry that was wanting to partner with us, and put it onboard the aircraft, and do that very very quickly.

So the value proposition that we’re delivering to the customer is that they could, say, if I wanted to investigate the ability to take a sigint feed and cross queue it with a FLIR, how would I go about doing that, and where are some of the latencies involved with doing so, etc. So that’s what we went off and did. And the team did an outstanding job in not just accepting the aircraft delivery, but also integrating the sensors, and getting that done in less than 11 months. And so we had our first flight a couple of months ago, and then John Beck was also out there at the C4ISR On-The-Move (exercise) which was the first operational use of that system — operational in that it was in support of a customer event, that they hold every year up in Lakehurst, New Jersey and up by Ft. Dix, where they investigate a lot of the advanced technologies that allow for FCS brigade combat teams, and war fighters, soldiers at the edge, to use equipment that’s emerging, and equipment that’s existing, to look at how do their CONOPS change, and what’s the operational affect of having some of these capabilities inserted into the loop. So we flew out there, and I’ll let John talk a little bit more about some of the specifics of that, but about two weeks after we went live for our first flight, we were up at Ft. Dix and off of Lakehurst flying in support of the C4ISR On-the-Move experiment for the Army.

SG: Let’s talk a little bit about the exercise, and then I wanted to talk with you about where you see it going from there in terms of what the Army’s interests are in terms of that capability to aggregate ISR data and push it down to a ground station in a coordinated way.

John Beck: I was up there at the experiment at Dix and Lakehurst — it was about a month ago this week that we were up there, we had 4 days of mission flights. And it was a very successful exercise for us. We had had the system approximately two to three weeks by that point, so as a first event right out of the door, we were very happy with it. Like Jim said, we worked a lot of the multi. And so in this case, because of the exercise and the threat environment they were portraying on the ground, we worked a lot of communications intelligence, comint, cueing our electro optical onboard sensors to get a real targetable location very rapidly from an initial comint fix, or a direction-finding location.

That worked very successfully in a number of different flight regimes. WE also had a lot of success interacting with the Army ground processing architecture, their Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A). We had both a … a prime area where the interaction was successful is we did what they call federating distributed common ground system integration backbone, or DIB. So we had a DIB operational on the aircraft, we had a ground station for AML with a DIB operating, and the Army inside of the ground area there at Lakehurst had another DIB working. And we were able to federate all those.

So you hear about publish and subscribe, and query, and chat — we were able to work all those common base functions in DCGS integrated into the aircraft into that environment. About 3 weeks of acceptance of the aircraft, we were very, very satisfied with that initial effort. I would say also that we were also very satisfied with the overall system, both its flight characteristics and its mission characteristics, that it executed both normal flight operations — the pilots were impressed with the handling and the performance of the aircraft right out of the modification process out in California, and also the mission system was performing very well for a first time operational use. Finally, we also interacted with other airborne system via the ground stations at Lakehurst that were part of what was called by the Army the Persistent Surveillance Testbed event, that was being run by the intelligence and information warfare directorate (I2WD) at CERDEC. So that was an associated event that we were part of as part of the On-the-Move event. So overall, strong success out the door — we saw a lot of areas where we can build on and work to both reduce risk, and like Jim was saying, to explore things like workload balance, and tactics, techniques and procedures, of how you actually optimize the execution of a multi-int mission. So for us it was both a learning process and some extremely strong results for a first use of the system.

Jim Quinn: I’d like to reinforce one of John’s comments, because it’s very important to the enterprise level view of what we’re trying to do, and that is that seamless interface to DCGS-Army. A lot of dedicated ground stations that have been proliferated over time, a lot of the time it’s been done out of speed and necessity. But a lot of time it’s also driven by proprietary natures of the interfaces. And that’s absolutely the opposite of where we want to go with the AML. We want it to be an open system in terms of being able to accept other sensors and software to do that investigation and risk reduction that we’ve described before, in terms of the multi-Int aspect of the mission. But as important as that is the ability to seamlessly inject the information and the data that we collect off of that platform into the enterprise at large so it can find its way efficiently through the communication networks, and the bandwidth that’s available to the edge users. So John’s comment about that, right out of the box we were interfacing with DCGS-A is absolutely critical and important to the value that this brings to the customer.

Mark Wand: And not restricted to DCGS-A. DCGS in general, and even if you had a customer that wasn’t a DCGS node — a lot of the SOA based development of this thing would facilitate that same kind of data transport even if it wasn’t a DCGS node. What you see on the aircraft is what you see on the ground from a flight following standpoint. To be able to collaboratively work missions with any number of analysts on the ground, and a smaller number on the bird of course, that’s fairly fundamental to what we’re trying to accomplish.

Sean Gallagher: What kind of bandwidth do you have going from the aircraft down to the ground station?

Jim Quinn: We have a variant and flexible communications suite on board the air craft that can be modified based on the customer’s mission. And let me just give you a sense of what those links are. At this point we’re not discussing some of the technical specifications around the products generated, etc. But you can infer quite a bit. We have from a reach back perspective, we have satcom links and antennas that allow us to provide reach over extended ranges to a sanctuary, reach back to a sanctuary to either push or pull data in order to complete the mission. So we have the satcom that enables the aircraft for that, what I’ll call long-haul communication. Then within the AOR that it would operate in, we do have tactical communication data links that provide high bandwidth communications from the aircraft to the ground, and we also have the ability to put tactical radio nets that would allow us to push the data to selected ground users that have a complementary radio set on the ground. And that capability has been demonstrated — in fact the thread that allowed that what I’ll call one-to-many communications are things that we are actively working, and have demonstrated as part of the work up to the exercise.

Mark Wand: The comms and the sensors that are actively onboard are, you know, a representative suite. So, in all cases we haven’t gone to, we need the very best, let’s say, sigint sensor, the idea is to rapidly introduce new sensors for different types of applications.

Sean Gallagher: Have any of the things you’ve been working on here, do they have any impact on the Light armed Airborne Reconnaissance aircraft that you’re working with Beechcraft on?

Jim Quinn: I believe that the project you’re talking about is being worked out of Systems Integration Owego with Beechcraft. It’s a sister organization to us, and we stand ready to support the work that they’re doing, but for the moment our project is not affiliated with that one.

Sean Gallagher: I’ve been following a number of other ad-hoc networking technologies for air-to-ground communications — Raytheon and L3 have been working on using synthetic aperture radar as a communications link. Have you had any conversations with Raytheon about sensors?

Mark Wand: I don’t believe we’ve had any conversations with Raytheon, but we have been working a lot with L3 Communications West. We’re looking at different sorts of air-to-air things, but haven’t discussed the SAR-based one.

Sean Gallagher: As far as feedback from the Army test goes, from the C4ISR On-The-Move exercise, have they, are they looking to do a joint development program with you at this point, or have any of the services expressed any interest in funding ongoing research?

Mark: Unfortunately, we could discuss it as follow-on, but we haven’t talked to those customers about mentioning them specifically. We have been at, in fact the reason I’m late, I was just discussing taking into another service that is very anxious to see the bird. It was at a major US base two weeks ago that had over 30 people coming in to see what could be done, and we think there’s a lot of active interest. And it’s permeating, basically, all the major service branches as well as some other things. But then again, I really don’t have their permission to enter them.

Jim Quinn: We just have to be a little careful about getting a little too far in front of our headlights in terms of speaking about specific customer engagements. But what Mark said is absolutely true– as we show this to the various services, and the various program offices that are affiliated with the venues that we were talking about before up at C4ISR On-the-Move and other customer sets, both domestic and internationally, you can see that immediately the wheels start turning in their mind.

I’ve been to a couple of them with some of our senior customers, and the thought leadership that this platform provided has really allowed our customers to start elevating their thoughts, and the dialog across that customer to industry collaboration is really starting to pick up in almost an exponential way. They say, wow, to the extent that you have this platform, we didn’t realize you were this far, we could see how this would benefit us, not only in terms of analyzing concepts of operations, and tactics techniques and procedures for use, in terms of do you partition functions onboard the aircraft, simplify what has to be done in terms of exploitation and dissemination on the ground, but also then to improve readiness levels. As you know in our business, we focus quite a bit on the technology readiness level, the TRL level, of sensors and not only the standalone nature of those sensors but how do they work in the aggregate and in concert with other sensors.

So that you now have the mission suite TRL level that you could discuss with customers, and being accelerated, and obviously having the risk reduced. So as they think with us on the art of the possible, there’s a lot of dialog going about, “could you do this? What if we were able to explore this particular angle of not just mission, but technology risk reduction?” And we’re peeling down now through the layers of those discussions and seeing what our customers are interested in doing in the short term.

Sean: Did the impetus for this project come from customers, or did it come from internal research?

Mark: It’s sort of a combination of things. We’ve had a number of projects across a very diverse technology set. And a good example is with the DCGS DIB sort of things. We’re rather passionate about SOA-based transportable architectures. At the same time, we’ve got a number of airborne ISR programs, Senior Scout being a particular example. So looking at all these things we have together in conjunction with IRADs, you start to say, Gee, if we can pull all of this together in a package and get out of the kind of “this is my PowerPoint chart” kind of mode, it helps to begin to promote the art and the science of all this. You couple that with what we’re doing in the communications world with the WIN-T kinds of things, and the idea becomes to not say, Gee, we can all do these lightning bolt charts, but we can pull these together quickly and inexpensively and be able to show the art and science of this. A long answer to a simple question, I know…. #00:21:32.0#

Sean: In terms of future tests, do you have any exercises or capability demonstrations scheduled that you can mention?

Mark: We don’t have a particular exercise that we can point at. We’re looking at quite a number of them, and at the base that Jim was just at, there was a number of groups anxious to fly a number of sensors. But we don’t have anything we can talk about right now…it’s not for a lack of opportunities, though.

Still, the changes the Pentagon has announced for the next 16 months will be significant. The heightened role of the NSA will be reflected in a fourth star. From now on, the NSA director will be either a four-star admiral or general, and this person will lead a new U.S. Cyber Command, dubbed CyberCom, wrote Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a June 23 memo to military leaders.

Read the rest at:  Cyber-overhaul – C4ISRJournal.com – Military Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance.

In the demo, Jaime Rubscha, a product manager for the RF Communications Division of Harris, showed how intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data , voice circuits (including Voice over IP phone circuits) and video could all be piped over an IP  network, and bridged between Harris’ Advanced Networking Wideband Waveform (ANW2) and the JTRS WNW waveform. Additionally,  Harris demonstrated that the 117G could be connected via a satellite “hump” to INMARSAT’s Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) in places where line-of-site communications didn’t work (though it was clearly difficult to demonstrate BGAN connectivity from inside the Washington Convention Center).

It was all fairly impressive; handheld and laptop computers running the TIGR tactical intelligence application developed at DARPA, as well as phones, push-to-talk mics, and video feeds were connected to each of the endpoint radios, while one pair of radios acted as a bridge between ANW2 and WNW. The demonstration was Harris’ way of showing that it was already providing the types of data services that WNW and the pending JTRS program-of-record Ground Mobile Radio (GMR) from Boeing and its partners (Northrop Grumman, Rockwell Collins and BAE Systems, with support from Harris Corp.) would provide, at a fraction of the projected cost.

On Tuesday morning, I was briefed by Boeing on the status of the GMR. Boeing’s Ralph Moslener, program director for JTRS GMR, said that the program had finally begun its Formal Qualification Testing, and that code for all of the waveforms has been “frozen” under configuration management (except for the Soldier Radio Waveform, which is being managed by another program of record, General Dynamics C4 System’s Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit (HMS) ).

Moslener spent a good deal of time making the point that Boeing’s GMR is the only radio that will meet all of the JTRS GMR requirements — all 37,298 of them — and that the radio’s expected cost is declining, approaching $25,000 per channel per radio. He offered up a number of direct comparisons to the 117G, noting that it doesn’t have internal traffic routing and retransmission capability of the GMR, and has less frequency range and transmitting power.

When presented with Boeing’s points, Harris representatives agreed with Boeing’s assessment. The 117G doesn’t meet all of the JTRS requirements, which is why it’s available now. The 117G doesn’t have the internal routing and depends on an external router for that task, but the GMR isn’t integrated completely into a single box, and both rigs would have a similar footprint. And since Harris’ design is modular, an external amplifier could get the 117G up to the GMR’s 100-watt transmission strength.

As GMR finally approaches its own formal testing, having been used only in engineering design model (EDM) form in a few Future Combat Systems Limited User Tests (LUTs), the underlying question is whether the JTRS program-of-record radio will be cost-effective enough to be purchased in volume by the DOD. With major RESET re-equipping coming, and thousands of 117Gs already deployed, that’s not exactly guaranteed.

Deployable wind power demo at Oshkosh booth, AUSA

The latest technology for soldiers –and some technologies that are still at best “under development” — were on display in the cavernous expo halls of the Washington Convention Center this week at the Association of the US Army Annual Meeting. Meanwhile, Army leaders discussed the future of the service, including force structure and modernization.

Secretary of Defense Gates spoke on the first day of the conference, praising the Army’s NCOs and outlining the challenge facing the Army going forward.

“The challenge I posed to the Army two years ago was to retain the lessons learned and capabilities gained in counterinsurgency and irregular warfare,” Gates said. “From all I’ve seen, heard, and witnessed, that certainly has taken place. In fact, today’s Army bears but a passing resemblance to that of eight years ago – a force mostly designed to repeat another Desert Storm. The Army we have is a supremely adaptable and flexible force – able to deploy rapidly, operate with more autonomy, and slide along the scale of the conflict spectrum to confront very different types of threats.”

Gates cited the technological changes in the Army. “There have been tremendous advances in our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities – advances that have led to an unprecedented fusion of intelligence and ops on the ground. Other communications improvements have led to much greater command and control, and more tools to improve this further are getting out to the field. The Army has recognized that the most important part of its procurement strategy is the network as opposed to the platform. In coming years, there should be revolutionary breakthroughs in the ability of our troops to see themselves and other allied forces – even if the inevitable fog of war and resourceful enemies prevent us from ever achieving total

The Qinetiq MARS armed recon robot, at AUSA

situational awareness.”

He also pointed to changes in operational concepts that have come from the field. “One of the most important is the Advise and Assist Brigade – the AAB – that has three main functions: traditional strike capabilities, advisory roles, and the enablers and command and control to support both functions. In July, I visited the first AAB deployed to Iraq. I was impressed with the ability to retool a standard brigade combat team in only a few months and with relatively small force augmentation. By the end of next year, we plan for the Iraq mission to be composed almost entirely of AABs, and the expectation is that, some time down the road, the same will be true in Afghanistan.”

Gates also said that the Army needed to institutionalize the view that advisory positions are not “second-tier jobs”. “The advisory, train, and equip mission is a key role for the Army going forward, given that America’s security will increasingly depend on our ability to build the capabilities of other nations. These capabilities are all the more necessary considering the steep human, political, and financial costs of direct U.S. military intervention.”

IAI was just one of several tech vendors showing off STANAG 4586 – compatible systems. But the Twister platform, a commander’s-view console that provides sensor fusion from multiple UAVs,  is part of a SOA-based ground station suite that IAI has built that also includes operator and training capabilities.  All of the data coming out of the ground station could be federated over a SOA backbone (like DCGS, for example.)

The Army Aviation and Missile Command has awarded a contract to perform engine retrofits on the RQ-7 Shadow UAV. The contract, awarded  to AI of Hunt Valley, MD on Sept. 22, 2009, was for  $49,185,103, a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract “over and above work for EFI,” the Army announcement said–that is, replacing the UAVs’ existing carbeurator-based Wankel rotary engines with electronic fuel injection Wankels.

The estimated completion date of the work is  Oct. 31, 2009.

The Shadow is the descendant of the Pioneer UAV, jointly developed by AAI and  Israeli Aircraft Industries — the “mother of all UAVs”.  Iraqi soldiers surrendered to a Pioneer RPV off USS Wisconsin during the Gulf War, after a bombardment of their positions by the USS Missouri.

Full disclosure– I was tangentially involved in Pioneer testing aboard USS Iowa in the late 1980s, as a deck officer on that ship…mostly I stood ready with a motor whaleboat to recover the bits of the aircraft we were recovering if it splashed rather than getting caught between the “goalposts” (see image below).

The Shadow's predecessor, the Pioneer, being retrieved aboard USS Iowa (BB-64)

The Shadow’s stats:
General characteristics

• Length: 11.2 ft in (3.41 m)
• Wingspan: 14 ft in (3.87 m)
• Height: 3.3 ft in (1 m)
• Empty weight: 186 lb (77 kg)
• Gross weight: 375 lb (170 kg)
• Powerplant: × 1 Wankel UAV Engine 741, 38 hp (28.5 kW) each

Performance

• Range: 68 miles (109.5 km)
• Endurance: 6 hours
• Service ceiling: 15,000 ft

The main sensor on the Shadow is an electro-optic/ infrared camera in a gimbaled ball on the underside of the UAV.  The Army was reportedly investigating possible signals intelligence sensors for the Shadow in 2008.