The Army said Monday it has completed a two-year effort to transition over to a single hardware and software baseline for mission command platforms, a key step required to field the force’s future command post mission system.
Officials said the 25-month process required removing 86 different aging hardware and software solutions from the field to move streamlined technology backbone required to run the next-generation Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE).
“If we had not executed this baseline reduction, units being fielded CPCE would not have seamless interoperability with adjacent units operating on older versions of software,” T.C. St. Clair, the Army’s deputy product director for strategic mission command, said in a statement.
CPCE is the Army’s effort to field a single mission command suite and accompanying server hardware to provide a more intuitive common operational picture capability to soldiers.
The system is currently being fielded with the Army’s 82nd Airborne division with plans to roll it out to the 1st Cavalry Division in the near future.
Soldiers had an opportunity to provide feedback on CPCE last October at the Network Integration Evaluation Event at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas, as the Army finalized plans to vastly reduce its number of mission command systems into a single platform in order (Defense Daily, Nov. 1 2018).
“The Army is changing how it fields and sustains these systems, necessitating a move to a single baseline while the Army moves into fielding CPCE as part of the service’s Common Operating Environment line of effort,” Col. Troy Crosby, project manager for Mission Command, said in a statement.
CPCE is intended to replace the Army’s Command Post of the Future (CPoF) by hosting an improved common operating environment through web applications enabled by the single software and hardware configuration.
Systematic received a contract in 2017 to provide its SitaWare software as the backbone for CPCE.