The Air Force is sending a lightweight wireless communications device to combat units next week for the first time that will allow its ground personnel who call in air strikes to have a live overhead image of the intended target and its surroundings when they are dismounted from their tactical vehicles and coordinating an attack, service officials said last month.

Weighing only four pounds, the ruggedized, small mobile television set will allow these combat controllers, while on the go, to receive real-time, full-motion video from the cameras on unmanned surveillance aircraft and the targeting pods on manned strike platforms, they said. With this improved situational awareness, the controllers will be able to track enemy personnel until the optimum time comes to strike them with a minimized chance of injuring civilians or friendly ground troops or inadvertently damaging unintended structures.

While the combat controllers already have gear called the ROVER III wireless video-transmission system that allows them to receive this imagery for coordinating close air support for ground operations ranging from the squad to brigade level, the current equipment weighs about 27 pounds and is much more difficult to haul on the go, especially in rugged terrain like these airmen currently face in Afghanistan, they said.

“What we needed was something that we could go dismounted with,” Lt. Col. Greg Harbin, a senior forward-air-controller and currently an adviser to the Secretary of the Air Force in the Pentagon, said Dec. 20 when discussing the device during a briefing that he and three additional Air Force officers hosted on Air Force acquisition initiatives.

“It is a revolutionary way to communicate,” Harbin said of the new device, noting that its per-unit cost is about $15,000.

“You talk about big bang for the buck. This is money well spent,” he told Defense Daily after the briefing.

The new device’s fielding is occurring only several months after the project’s go-ahead, representing just one example of the Air Force’s ability to respond promptly to urgent requests from warfighters for material solutions to address capability gaps in the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Harbin and his colleagues said. Applying flexible acquisition initiatives has allowed the Air Force to deviate from the traditional acquisition processes that require much more time to deliver products.

“It couldn’t have been done any faster, I don’t think,” said Harbin, citing the 62 days from the time that the Air Force settled upon the hardware design of choice until the first order was placed.

An initial shipment of 10 units will head out to combat units next week, Harbin said. These 10 devices are part of the initial order that the Air Force places for 110 units, he said. The ultimate number of them ordered “will probably exponentially increase” since not only Air Force personnel but also Army, Marine Corps and Navy personnel are expected to get them as well, he said.

The new device, which features a multi-band antenna to communicate with a variety of manned and unmanned aircraft, is an accessory to the ROVER III kits, Harbin said. The ROVER, which stands for Remote Operations Video Enhanced Receiver, was fielded in its first iteration shortly after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in late 2001 (Defense Daily, July 16).

The current ROVER III setup includes a main receiver, two antennas, three hefty batteries and a ruggedized laptop computer with software for displaying the imagery and a classified database for generating GPS targeting coordinates.

“For dismounted ops [operations], this replaces all of that other stuff,” Harbin said of the new device.

Allowing the combat controllers to shed 23 pounds of gear when on the go is a welcomed change since their current battlefield kit weighs around 110 pounds when factoring the body armor, dagger, radios with batteries, satellite communications equipment and laser range finder, Harbin said.

Beyond the new ROVER device, the Air Force is also fielding a satellite communications (satcom) link for the ARC-210 radios on it’s A-10 ground-attack aircraft under a separate response to an urgent warfighter need, Lt. Col. Ralph Hansen, director of A-10 requirements within Air Combat Command, said at yesterday’s briefing.

The Air Force began installing the ARC-210s on its A-10s last year, replacing the aircraft’s 1970s-vintage radios that had performance limitations and poor voice quality (Defense Daily, Aug. 22). The service fielded the new radios under an agile acquisition initiative.

“We got the money in 2005 and before the end of 2006 it was flying in theater,” Hansen said.

“The feedback from the warfighter has been nothing but outstanding,” he said. “They love it. In fact, I don’t know how we ever did without it.”

Indeed, he noted, pilot feedback has indicated that, without the ARC-210, the effectiveness of the A-10s would go down to about 10 percent of what it is today.

But due to the urgency of fielding the new radio, the Air Force deferred the inclusion of a satcom link for it for beyond-line-of-sight capability, Hansen said. Lacking this makes it impossible for the A-10 to communicate with ground troops when it is operating in mountainous areas such as in Afghanistan, he said. An interim solution using Iridium cell phones had limitations, he noted.

Accordingly, the service is pursuing a new satcom link and expects to have it ready for use next May on A-10s that are deployed in theater, he said.

With it, he said, “we will be able to talk to pretty much anyone anywhere on the battlefield.”

The satcom link was set for flight testing yesterday at Nellis AFB, Nev., Hansen said.

The A-10 fleet is also in the process of getting the Situational Awareness Datalink that gives pilots the ability to see the locations of friendly ground troops and enemy formations as well as other aircraft displayed on the cockpit moving map, Hansen said.

This capability, too, was pursued under a quick-response initiative to meet an urgent warfighter need that surfaced in May 2005, according to the Air Force.