By Geoff Fein

The Navy is turning to an open architecture model to rapidly upgrade systems designed to counter remote controlled improvised explosive devices (RCIED), a service official said.

As Marines and soldiers in theater started seeing more advanced IED initiators, such as cell phones, service personnel working the issue here in the United States recognized that from a technology standpoint, they had to get out in front of the enemy, Capt. John Neagley, Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)/ Counter radio-controlled Improvised Explosive Device Electronic Warfare (CREW) program manager (PMS 408), told Defense Daily in an interview this week.

As a result of those more sophisticated ways of setting off IEDs, the Navy stood up the Joint CREW (JCREW) program office. Personnel looked at rapid acquisition of technologies to counter IEDs, which led to the fielding of systems such as the CREW Vehicle Radio Jammer (CVRJ), of which there are 12,000 deployed to theater, Neagley said.

Six other systems were fielded in a short period of time in an attempt to stay ahead of the threat, he added.

“Our challenge, as you look at where commercial technology can go, [is] that commercial technology can be used as a way to initiate IEDs,” he said. “You think of how rapidly technology evolves, we are going from fairly simple remote controlled devices to more sophisticated networked kind of devices to cell phones, to networked cell phones.”

All those types of devices demonstrated the pace that technology changes, even in the hands of adversaries, Neagley noted. “That is really the challenge we face.”

Since 2006, the Navy did a series of rapid acquisitions to try and stay out in front of the IED threat. Neagley said it is an inefficient way to do it.

“It was the right thing to do at the right time, but the architectures do not really support trying to stay in front of that threat by doing technology insertions into one particular baseline. We recognized that was our challenge,” he said.

“So, our program of record, the CREW system, which is JCREW 3.3, is really based on having an open architecture approach, because the threat drives us there,” Neagley added. “It just changes so quickly if you don’t have that approach you’ll never stay out in front of it.”

The Navy began looking at how to lay out that architecture so it could do incremental changes on some standard time line, Neagley said. At the same time the Navy wanted to make sure it had the ability to rapidly respond if there was a need for a quick engineering change to increase the capability of CREW systems.

“We are doing open architecture because we have to, we have to,” he said. “[It is] the only way we can stay in front of the threat.”

The CREW system has been quite effective in the two theaters of operations, Neagley noted. “If you look at where we were in 2006, the number of IEDs initiated by radio, RCIED events is what we were going after, and where they are now, [it has been] a substantial drop off.”

But the enemy is very adaptive, Neagley said. “He is always looking at ways to change–change techniques and procedures change his technology, to get around [counter measures].”

The intelligence community, the technical community and the EOD/CREW office formed a very tight decision loop to understand where the threat is now, where it could go and how do to stay one step in front of it, Neagley added.

“All of those are wedded together when we look at the open architecture approach for [JCREW] 3.3,” he said.

Neagley said data comes from theater on what new techniques are being employed to detonate IEDs. When that information is gathered, the first thing the EOD/CREW folks do is assess the current CREW system against the new technology–looking at any capability gaps, at whether the counter IED systems are still suppressing the threat at ranges, and whether there needs to be any changes made to employment techniques and procedures.

“We work through all that. If it turns out we really have to go after a material solution to really tweak those [systems], it can be a software change which we can do very, very quickly,” he said. “We work really closely with federally funded research and development centers (FFRDC) like John Hopkins APL, Lincoln Laboratory, people who do software work for us.”

The Navy has a pretty regular refresh cycle for CREW systems software, Neagley said. That cycle is referred to as “load sets.” It is the software that supports how a CREW system operates, he added.

“You can do a lot in terms of countering the threat based on techniques you provide in that software, so having agile software architecture is important because that is what part of open architecture is,” Neagley said

If a material solution is required, for example a change in a component within a CREW box, Neagley said that kind of work is a little more challenging. Open architecture provides the ability to do that, he added.

“The way we structured open architecture 3.3 allows you to do fast technology insert. We wanted to work early on to adopt commercial standards and protocols as part of the reference architectures the company is building to.

In Oct. 2009, ITT [ITT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] were each awarded contracts for JCREW spiral 3.3 developments. On May 3, 2010 the Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to continue developing the JCREW 3.3 system of systems, the company reported.

The Littoral and Mine Warfare (LMW) domain will conduct a JCREW 3.3 Milestone C review in FY ’11, according to the Navy’s eighth open architecture quarterly report to Congress (Defense Daily, April 8).

According to the report, LMW will leverage open architecture design features to implement an “open business” technology insertion/refresh strategy.

The commercial standards are well known, Neagley said. Having that information available makes it easier for people who come to the table to bring capability and adopt it into JCREW, he added.

“A lot of up front work went into laying out what those open architecture standards are and to working with industry to describe them to the level so other folks can come to the table with capabilities,” Neagley said.