By Ann Roosevelt
The recent Multi-National Network Experiment 3.0 (MNE 3.0) was successful in passing information and firing data between the U.S. and U.K. systems as part of the continual efforts toward more effective communication between coalition partners, officials said.
Brig. Gen. Lee Price, Army Future Combat System (FCS) deputy program manager Networks, said in a roundtable yesterday the experiment was about more than situational awareness.
“It’s about our ability to do calls for fire and to reach out and touch our coalition partners is why we’re doing this,” she said. “Irrespective of the recent announcements, we’re still going to further our ground tactical network capabilities and we’re doing that in an incremental manner so that we can drop in the capabilities…the Future Combat System spin-outs are critical to be able to meet the war fighter needs. We feel that’s a method where we can balance today’s needs with tomorrow’s technologies so we can leverage the best of both areas.”
The program relies heavily on soldier feedback from the Army Evaluation Task Force at Ft. Bliss, Texas, which is examining the most mature of the FCS equipment that soon will be fielded to the Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCT).
It’s all part of Army’s brigade combat team modernization.
MNE 3.0 brought together the Army’s Future Combat System of Systems Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE) and U.K. Bowman equipment passing data and fire control data back and forth at company, battalion and brigade levels.
“Within FCS, I thought it was extremely successful,” Maj. Troy Crosby, joint assistant product manager Network Integration, said: “We actually did more than I thought we were going to be able to in these experiments. We achieved all our objectives, met all of our goals.
Lt. Col. David Raleigh, Royal Signals, U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD), said: “The experiment went very well…but overall I think, in a way surprised us, that we managed to do as much as we could.”
Raleigh said “operating as a unified force as the U.S. and U.K. have done in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last years is not going to be effective unless the two countries share information. Without effective communications, we’re not going to be able to operate effectively in current and future ops.”
On interoperability, Crosby said, on the FCS side, the interoperability services of SOSCOE were able to handle and translate all the U.K. MoD messages nearly seamlessly.
While there were some “hiccups,” he said the accuracy rates were extremely high. “We were able to take in all their messages and distribute them within the network.”
Those SOSCOE interoperability services give the FCS network a flexible tool to plug in other services or multinational partners and get the message traffic, he said.
The teams are now mining experiment data, collecting lessons learned, conducting post-execution analysis and getting set to consider MNE 4.0.
Within the FCS program, Crosby said he’s charged with building in coalition interoperability as the program is developed so it doesn’t have to be worked out later in the program.
MNE 3.0 continues prior U.S.-U.K. efforts that earlier focused on exchanging situational awareness on friendly and enemy forces between the United States and United Kingdom.
The U.S. partnered with the Joint Tactical Radio System Joint Program Executive Office (JTRS JPEO), which was the lead for the development of the JTRS-Bowman waveform, the transport waveform that the United States and the United Kingdom used during the experiment.
PM Battle Command at Ft. Monmouth, N.J., was also involved, assisting with the integration of two of their major battle command systems.
“The major milestone was the utilization of the JTRS-Bowman waveform, which was hosted on a U.S. Soldier Radio, coupled with a common, Type 1 cryptology utilized by both the U.S. and the U.K., and on the U.K. side, they used their Bowman Radio Systems,” Crosby said.
This allowed the use of a common waveform and common cryptology that enabled communication and the passing information across U.S. and U.K. organizational lines.
For example, a battalion headquarters on the U.S. side could send information directly to a U.K. battalion organization within their network. That could happen at brigade, battalion and company level. The experiment did not go down below company level.
The experiment used the latest FCS SOSCOE 2.5 release, and the interoperability and communications services suites.
The interoperability services allowed SOSCOE to be “extremely flexible” in taking information not only from U.S. and joint C4ISR systems but also from the U.K. MoD systems, Crosby said.
Basically as different types of message sets came into the network, the SOSCOE interoperability services translated each message into something that could be distributed within the FCS network.
The communications services suite leveraged information assurance, a lot of the network management and data passing went through the suite, mainly to assure that proper transmission and receipt of the information occurred on both sides, he said.
SOSCOE performed “rather well,” Crosby said. There were no issues at all bringing in the U.K. message sets. There was great accuracy in translating the information and seamless dissemination of information within the FCS network, he said.
The experiment also brought in the Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) system and the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) applications from the Army Battle Command System program office.
The experiment leveraged FBCB2 applications for situational awareness, and leveraged the AFATDS system for call for fires.
As an example, the U.S. sector would initiate a call for fire, he said. That call would go up through the FCS brigade combat team. Within the experiment, notionally the U.S. could not execute that target, so it was transmitted to the U.K. network where U.K. forces would take the mission, execute it and strike the target.
This added complexity to the experiment showed “the power of the dissemination of data at that lower tactical brigade and below level of being able to utilize either nations indirect fire and call for fire support within a battle space environment,” he said.
The biggest challenge, Crosby said, was getting data efficiently and accurately through at the company level without overtaxing the smaller throughput pipes there at that lower tactical level. Battalion and brigade levels have larger throughput.
While MNE 3.0 was between the United States and United Kingdom, the FCS program has several other project agreements.
For example, there is also an agreement with Canada and Australia, where the program office will start to ramp up some initial experimentation efforts.
Another agreement is with the five powers: the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France. This agreement is still in phase one, gathering requirements, determining what systems nations have and where the proper interoperability and interfaces should properly be done.
The United States and United Kingdom are examining the possibility of MNE 4.0, tentatively targeting the summer of 2010. Experimenters are looking to moving out of the lab and into a relevant operational environment to “truly wring out” the systems.