By Michael Sirak
The Air Force is pursuing a series of initiatives to modernize the aging infrastructure at its test ranges so that it can accurately evaluate new types of sophisticated weapons and share test equipment among ranges, according to senior service officials.
“The equipment is just about worn out at our test ranges,” Judy Stokley, deputy program executive officer for Weapons, said last month during her presentation at the 33rd Air Armament Symposium in Ft. Walton Beach, Fla.
New weapons, such as extended-range cruise missiles, miniature satellite-guidance-aided bombs and directed-energy devices, present challenges to the test community as they are designed to be much faster and have far greater reach than past systems, Stokley and her colleagues said.
“The safety footprints of these new weapons are pretty huge and we are going to have to figure out ways to keep those safe and on the range.” Maj. Gen. David Eidsaune, the Air Force’s program executive officer for weapons, told Defense Daily during an interview in October.
Further, the demands for data that weapons systems place on testers to be evaluated accurately is outstripping the collection capabilities of the time, space, position information (TSPI) instrumentation at the test and evaluation ranges.
“We are filling up the spectrum in a very fast method,” said Eidsaune. “We are starting to max out the data we can collect and what we can pass over the airwaves.”
Additionally, some of these new weapons, like the Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), are meant to be employed simultaneously in large numbers in combat while tied into battlefield information-sharing networks, and accordingly, must be tested in similar scenarios, adding complexity that poses additional challenges, they said. For directed energy systems, such as high-powered microwaves and lasers, there is no robust infrastructure in place to understand their full effects, they said.
“We need to be able to better flush that out in warfighter terminology,” said Col. Gary Plumb, commander of the 46th Test Wing at Eglin AFB, Fla., at last month’s munitions symposium.
One program to address these issues is the Common Range Integrated Instrumentation System (CRIIS) that is designed to replace the 1980s-era Advanced Range Data System (ARDS) in place for TSPI collection at Air Force, Army and Navy test and training ranges.
“The growth in the complexity and accuracy of advanced air-, sea-, and land-based weapon systems is surpassing the TSPI capability of the ARDS,” the Air Force wrote in the CRIIS statement of objectives that was issued last month. “The lack of system accuracy is impacting mission capabilities.”
The Air Force says CRIIS will be an open-architecture system that offers enhanced data-transfer flexibility, control, and transmission capabilities and increased TSPI accuracy and faster data update rates. It will also provide new encryption technology for better security, standardized interface protocols, and component miniaturization and modularity for better options to mount test instrumentation internally on the munitions or host platforms.
The goal of CRIIS is also to create airborne test and training interdependence among the services, Stokley said.
“We want ranges across all of the services that are interoperable,” she said.
“Right now there are many ranges across the country that belong to the different services and you can’t use one piece of equipment on all of the ranges,” she told Defense Daily. “They grew up differently through different evolutionary paths and so sometimes to test something, we have to build that test equipment to handle that data for one range and then we have to alter it or build another system for another range.”
CRIIS, she continued, “is to get everything interoperable, so, for a given system, you build one piece of equipment and you can go test on any of the ranges.”
Stokley said CRIIS is a “fully funded program” that the Air Force plans to field in three affordable increments, with the initial system eyed for activation between 2014 and 2016.
Increment one will concentrate on joint airborne testing for ground troops, while the second increment will deal with supporting today’s generation of fighters and missiles, she said. The final increment will accommodate “higher data rates for aircraft and missiles that are faster and more maneuverable than today’s,” she said.
The Air Force issued the CRIIS request for proposals Oct. 22 and intends to award a contract around May 2008.
Another initiative that the Air Force would like to launch in the next several years is the Joint Directed Energy Evaluation Program.
Eidsaune said will help educate the Air Force’s test community on how “to fire [lasers and high-powered microwaves] safely and collect information on them.”
The Air Force, said Plumb, wants to be able to accurately measure the effects that an adversary’s directed-energy systems could have on friendly equipment and facilities. The service also wants to be able to gauge precisely the impact of lasers and microwaves on an adversary’s equipment, similar to the manner in the past in which the Air Force tested conventional munitions on Soviet weapons that it acquired, he said.
“Right now, I don’t think that we as a community are able to do that, so this program will hopefully take us toward those ends,” he said.
There is also the desire to examine how the use of directed-energy systems could inadvertently affect other friendly systems, he said.
“Are we going to toast our own equipment? We need to look at that as well,” he said.
Plumb said his wing is also exploring the infrastructure necessary to support network-centric weapons test and training needs.
The SDB program, for example, has a key performance parameter that calls for about 90 of these mini bombs to be in the air simultaneously.
“How do you test those?” he asked. “We are going down that road to try to figure that out.”
Another initiative, said Plumb, is to field a Subminiature Flight Safety System, a tiny, modular flight-termination system that could fit on small bombs or missiles and be made available to contractors for easy integration of it on their munitions that are undergoing tests.
“It is essentially an order of magnitude smaller than the flight termination systems that we now have,” he said. “With the smaller weapons that we are developing now, we need something like that.”
The system would also have some excess bandwidth for downloading data on the weapon, he said.
Currently, the Air Force is funding a study to investigate options for the mini flight-safety system, Plumb said. It would like, as the next step, to conduct a demonstration of one using the Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser as the host, he said.
Eidsaune said the Air Force also intends to build some mock-ups of urban areas to use as “real-world target sets” in testing and evaluating some new munitions.
“It used to be that we would go out and bomb one tank, but now, in this war on terror, we are finding that we need actually to bomb in crowded cities, so we need to build up some more realistic targets sets to do that in,” he said.
One munition coming down the pike, for which such an urban mockup likely would be applicable, is the SDB Increment II system, he said. It is designed to attack moving targets accurately via a tri-mode seeker and datalink for receiving updates on the target’s position while en route to strike it.