Friday, 19 May 2006

By Timothy L. Rider

Due to a series of meetings now underway, the military term for being aware of friendly troop locations, ‘blue force tracking,’ may turn a shade, ‘purple’ -- another military term that describes the branches of military service joining forces.

Combat system developers and engineers from the Army, Air Force and Marines began discussion in December to unify the tracking of battlefield platforms, a task that is now accomplished by different military organizations using different systems that are afforded varying levels of interoperability, according to Col. Alan M. Mosher, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command capability manager for platform battle command and combat identification.

What may result from the discussions is a ‘purple’ version of the Army’s Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) re-designed to meet a broader set of requirements, according Col. Ray Montford, FBCB2 project manager.

The participants in the initiative met to draft the Joint Battle Command-Platforms Capabilities Development Document, created to establish standards to achieve interoperability among land platforms, which includes ground vehicles, helicopters and dismounted Soldiers, Marines and Airmen.

Interoperability between the systems will help commanders and troops achieve what military members call, “situational awareness (SA),” which Mosher describes as, “everything you need to know to operate in an environment.”

Mosher breaks situational awareness into the three categories: Blue SA, which is the location of friendly forces; observed SA, what troops report about enemy, neutral or unknown activities; and geo-reference SA, which includes terrain, weather, obstacles, minefield locations, etc.

While the term situational awareness may be a newer addition to the military lexicon it has always been a military necessity, according to Mosher. Commanders need to know where their forces are so they can control their operations; troops want to know where other “friendlies’ are so they don’t mistakenly fire on their own forces.

Being able to track forces better than an adversary is an advantage a commander can use to achieve victory. “It’s like the old saying, ‘information is power,’” said Montford. The saying is especially true on the modern battlefield where simultaneous ground, air, logistics, fire support, air defense and intelligence operations require close coordination.

Technology for tracking forces can be as simple as climbing a hill to get a good view. During the Civil War, high ranking officers attained battlefield awareness based on information from fleet-footed messengers, horseback or telegraph, marking locations on what few maps were available. Printed maps were more widely available through the World Wars I & II as radios gained wide use as a means to get updates on troop movements. By Desert Storm in1993, command centers were equipped with bays of squawking radios and had staff members receiving reports and marking troop locations on sheets of clear acetate covering large paper display maps. “Near the maps were 40 or so Soldiers drawing copies of it on the cardboard from a C-Ration box and running it back to their unit,” said Mosher.

With the availability of Global Positioning Satellite systems, and technological developments in computers, communications and other information tools, gaining situational awareness has entered a markedly different era marked by computerized map displays and the distribution of positioning data driven by Internet technology.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom the Army installed more than 1,200 of its Blue Force Tracking (BFT) systems on Army, Marine and United Kingdom vehicles. Each equipped vehicle had a computer map display with their location pinpointed on the map as well as the location of other BFT-equipped vehicles. Each system fed data via satellite transmission into secured Internet servers so that various command centers could display current troop locations. Troops with the system, command centers, even the Pentagon, thousands of miles away, had a minutes-old computer displays that marked approximate locations down company-sized combat units, according to Montford.

A number of other devices with similar functionality were also used in OIF. The Army’s logistics community used the Movement Tracking System (MTS) to track the locations of supplies and supply vehicles. Marines relied on the Mobile Data Automated Communications Terminal (M-DACT) and the Command and Control Personal Computer, while the Air Force used its initiative called Talon Reach. Other commercially available products were also in use, according to Mosher. FBCB2, used by units in III Corps, has software nearly identical to BFT, although its communications systems are based on line-of-sight radios rather than satellite.

The systems accomplished more than just battlefield tracking. Additional capabilities allowed troops to send and receive free-text and formatted-text messages, and share graphical representations to mark the locations of various observed activities as well as minefields, routes, boundaries and others symbolic representations.

Because of differences in software, message formats, security levels and network architectures, however, interoperability between systems has seen a number of limitations. Examples include: Marines using M-DACT unable to see the locations of or communicate directly with BFT systems; MTS users unable to see the locations of and communicate with BFT users; BFT users seeing the locations of FBCB2 users but unable to send certain messages because of differences security classification levels, according to Montford.

Warfighters could compensate by operating multiple systems simultaneously or by having engineers create ‘patches’ that allowed data from several systems to be displayed in command posts, according to Montford, but the fixes did not always meet the timeliness and accuracy of information exchange desired in the modern battlefield.

Prior to OIF, system developers weren’t required to engineer interoperability into their systems and instead they, “stayed in their lane and focused only on their charter,” said Montford, meaning they built systems to meet only the requirements of a specific role. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced change. “We have a lot of lessons learned that say we need to be able to fight as a combined arms or a joint team,” said Mosher.

The new initiative is a, “wholesale change and a new paradigm,” said Montford.

“The Joint Battle Command-Platforms Capabilities Development Document articulates the operational requirements for a platform (mounted, dismounted, aviation) command and control and situational awareness product to be used by joint warfighters,” reads the executive summary for the JBC-P CDD that emerged from the December meeting.

“That means we’re changing the program and bringing all the users from all walks of life together so we can identify all the requirements into a single document, the CDD,” said Mosher. “The CDD is the guiding document for us to build the JBC system.”

“It (the CDD) will serve as an operational requirements document,” said Montford, describing a document that project mangers use to set aside federal funds to develop systems.

Striving to achieve interoperability doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will use an identical system – the functional needs of the user and the individual platforms will drive system components and available capabilities. “What we would like them to do is to decide to use the FBCB2 JBC-P software,” said Montford.

Guiding the document’s progress will be Mosher’s office – the first of its kind ever establish under TRADOC, known as a TRADOC Capability Manager. Normally, systems are managed by TRADOC systems managers. The subtle name change belies the paradigm shift: “Instead of a focus on managing one system there will be a focus on managing capabilities, or in this case a family of capabilities: combat identification and situational awareness.”