With increasing reliance on the capabilities of its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) on the battlefield, the Army is working to bring more effectiveness, efficiency and execution to the programs overall, an official said.
“How to more effectively enable a more capable, a more lethal and more survivable Army,” said Tim Owings, deputy project manager, Unmanned Aerial Systems, at the Pentagon to mark more than 1 million flight hours for the service’s UAS systems.
“Efficiency: how do we do more with the resources we’re entrusted with than we’ve done …and how do we more efficiently deploy assets using fewer human resources,” he said. And how does the program office execute the programs on cost, schedule and products.
Program effectiveness is the most important thing the program office does, Owings said. How the program office builds an architectre for its systems to work together is the key component.
“For the Army, architecture is predicated on the ability to adapt to a multi-intelligence environment to disseminate that information to the broadest and deepest corners of the battlefield and to rapidly ‘cookie cut’ new technologies into our system,” he said.
Army interoperability is built on a three-legged stool.
“The first leg is a common communications architecture,” Owings said. “If you think about your cell phone, if you’re using T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, the call always gets through. That’s the same principle we use for the common communication layer inside the Army.”
The second leg of the stool is common interface protocol. The Army is leading the Defense Department effort in developing interoperability profiles. Those profiles allow the architecture to be opened and, thus, new systems can very rapidly be attached to common ground control stations.
The third leg of the stool is common human interfaces. An Army principle is common life-cycle management of soldiers. So someone can enter the Army as a UAS operator and spend a career that way.
“We also have a principal of handing off systems forward, so you can hand systems between a Shadow component and a Hunter component or a Warrior component. All of that requires operators to be proficient in each of those systems.”
Owings offered a snapshot in time: just last week in Redstone Arsenal, Ala., “we flew the first Shadow with a TCDL–the common communications layer–from the universal ground control station and flew that with near complete compliance with interoperability profiles.”
Meanwhile, in California, the office was integrating DDL, another element of the common communications layer, and already was integrating the same common communications layer into the G-NAV system.
All that was going on simultaneously.
“Simultaneous to that, we were integrating the next generation of One System Remote Video Terminals into the Apache and into the Kiowa Warriors,” he said. “And all of that really enables something that is pretty powerful.”
The office also has just begun a program called TRICLOPS, a back-of-the-napkin idea on the principle of putting more surveillance on single area targets, Owings said. “Because of the open architecture, we were very rapidly able to integrate the three sensor balls, demonstrate in a lab within six weeks of the drawing on the napkin that you can take that configuration, and control one of the balls from a Raven, you can hand one to an Apache attack helicopter and you can control one from the primary controller, or you can control all three from the ground control station,” he said.
Focusing on efficiency, the Army has embraced automation technology and today is working on a high-level effort called Single Console Command and Control.
Today, a single mission is flown by two soldiers, one is the air vehicle operator, the other a payload operator, he said. Under the single console, one operator does one mission. Now one operator can fly two or three missions simultaneously, doubling or tripling the amount of eyes on target without changing the manning.
“In program execution, despite flying 88 percent of the missions in combat, we’ve seen the operational tempo increase by 4,200 percent in the last 10 years, and despite the insatiable desire for not only more systems but more capability, we continue to drive down sustainment costs,” he said.
Sustainment costs are down 68 percent since 2003, and “incidents” have been reduced by 83 percent since 2005, he said.
Logistical sustainment is also moving forward. “Just last week, we tested some software on the Shadow it’s designed to prognosticate and predict failures in advance of their occurrence,” Owings said. “During the testing of this software suite, we identified a failure, landed the aircraft and averted an incident.”
The office is beginning to finalize the testing to roll it out to the fleet.