By Ann Roosevelt
Keeping tabs on the work being done on the Future Combat Systems (FCS) around the country is aided by the use of information technology and teleconferencing, according to program officials.
FCS, managed by Boeing [BA] and SAIC [SAI] as Lead Systems Integrator (LSI) for the Army, is comprised of 14 programs such as sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles, robotics and weapons tied to each other and soldiers by a network.
Last week, the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) annual report on FCS recommended Defense Secretary Robert Gates ensure criteria are set out to judge the program against its 2009 milestone review. Gates should also look for alternatives to the current plans. Separately, a GAO report on the program’s software development said after five years it is not clear if the program’s core–the network–can be developed built and demonstrated, and recommends Gates stabilize program requirements (Defense Daily, March 10).
Today, the FCS program has about 500 partners and suppliers across the United States, and is using virtual connections to rapidly communicate.
“We’ve gotten very good at virtual,” Gregg Martin, Boeing vice president and program manager, FCS, told Defense Daily in a recent interview. “We have 50-60 people that converge every morning at 6:30 and we know exactly where every vehicle is in Spin Out 1.”
Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, Army FCS program manager, and Martin know at every level what they need to do to execute the program, he said. “We have teams everywhere distributed across the expertise, whether it be LSI or government or One Team partner. They know what we know; we keep them informed. And wherever they are, if there’s a problem and we need them down at [Ft.] Bliss, they’re on a plane that afternoon and they’re working that night or next morning.”
Dan Zanini, SAIC senior vice president and deputy FCS program manager, said the virtual world works in management and also works in how program pieces are tied together–take for example, the FCS System of Systems Integration Lab (SoSIL).
“The mother node of the SoSIL is in Huntington Beach, Calif., he said. “But the SoSIL is really virtual. So it links from Huntington Beach down into Ft. Bliss in El Paso [Texas]. It goes into Sterling Heights [Mich.] and Santa Clara [Calif], and across the team.”
General Dynamics [GD], with a facility in Sterling Heights, teams with BAE Systems, with a site in Santa Clara on the FCS manned ground vehicles.
“So we can work the software in Huntington Beach in the integrated lab, pass it virtually down to Ft. Bliss, get it loaded up on the vehicle, shake it out and then pass it to Sterling Heights and Santa Clara and then off to Aberdeen [Proving Ground, Md.] for Safety Certification,” Zanini said. “And all of that in a virtual world.”
In another specific virtual example from Feb. 28, Cartwright said: “We did a manned ground vehicle meeting this morning at 6:30. We had five different sites tied on. We hung up from that one and did a [Joint Tactical Radio System] JTRS meeting, and one of the PMs was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; one of them was in San Diego. We could have never moved from those kinds of different meetings if you couldn’t do virtual because it’s the best of industry and government across the United States.”
In pre-computer days, platforms such as Paladins, M113s and Bradleys could and were built in one place, he said. However, “As we’ve looked at the information technology and networks being integral to platforms, it has driven us to a completely different environment.”
The virtual world in itself is good and bad, Cartwright said, because you miss the personal. “But you look at our society and the generation coming now, staffers, young leaders, they understand the collaborative environment. They can flip five or six different [screens], that’s their thought process. I grew up with a pencil…today it’s Blackberries and a collaborative environment decision process. This year alone I’ve written no memos,” he said.
With the collaborative process and the network in development, the days of manual crew drill are gone, he said. “We build platforms to load weapons–just like Napoleon–but machines do what they’re good at, heavy loading, physical work, precision work, and put humans in the decision cycle which is really the collaborative environment…one moment maybe helping you build something, the next moment down the street I’m in a different situation; it’s that switching of decisions and switching of situations.”
Zaninni said the Army’s new FM 3.0 Operations puts the soldier back in the center of operations. “That’s the essence of 3.0. It both demands FCS and is enabled by FCS. Because for years and years we put vehicles in the centerpiece and we tried to link them together and we trained soldiers to operate the vehicles. What we’ve done now, and what 3.0 does, is to put the soldier back into the center of that. FCS gives us the means to be able to connect the soldier to the information he needs to the effects they need in order to determine the outcome of the decisions they make, and it allows them to be protected and projected.”