TAUNTON, Mass. – Recent criticism from lawmakers aside, the Army’s battlefield network not only is fielded but has established a baseline communication backbone capable of constant technological upgrades needed for future fights where battle happens as much in virtual world as on the ground, sea or air.
The Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, or WIN-T, program came under fire at a recent Army budget hearing by Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) for taking more than 10 years to field, among other concerns.
“That’s one of my concerns: that it’s not going to get fielded. It’s already been in development for 10 years. A lot of this stuff is already out of date,” McCain told Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley during a SASC hearing in May. “So the entire acquisition approach, especially in information technologies, we need to review that. It’s one thing to build homogeneous steel and guns and tanks and vehicle systems. But the technological speed of advance in the commercial sector on information technologies is far more rapid than anything that the government’s acquisition system is capable of handling.”
Engineers and executives at General Dynamics [GD] Mission Systems, which holds the contract to manufacture WIN-T, recently explained why the system is designed specifically to accomplish what McCain is concerned it is failing to do.
WIN-T is not simply a satellite-based communication network over which commanders and soldiers can talk. It is a mobile intranet that, under most circumstances, allows mission command on the move and for individual soldiers in a war zone to communicate all the way back to the continental United States, according to Bill Weiss, vice president and general manager of ground systems at GDMS.
“It’s an IP-routed intranet that very flexibly allows applications to plug into it and those applications can change over time responsive to new operational needs, threats, whatever,” Weiss said. “From just the communications standpoint … if operational needs change, the threat environment changes, certain pieces of the communications part, the radios and SATCOM part needs to change, then they can readily change without changing that core network.”
“It is a logical place to improve rather than just starting over,” Weiss added.
While WIN-T is in fact a 10-year-old program, the technology it has fielded has been consistently upgraded over the past decade, Weiss said.
Increment 1, which started delivering in 2004, was already being reset and refreshed two years later. As units equipped with WIN-T returned from deployments, GD takes their gear and either cleans it up and resets it to its original condition or refreshes the hardware and software with more up-to-date versions.
“Since 2006 we have been keeping that technology up to date,” Weiss said. “We still continue to do that for units that are equipped with Increment 1. Even though, from a functional standpoint, Increment 1 hasn’t changed appreciably since it was first fielded in 2004, the technology is state of the art.”
Weiss explained the open-architecture design of WIN-T by comparing it with the relatively closed-off, single-purpose Blue Force Tracker system. Where Blue Force Tracker simply provides location information of friendly forces, the WIN-T enterprise network can host voice, video and data transmissions and is ready to accept new capabilities and functionality.
“Blue Force Tracker is a very narrowly focused stovepiped network to support a very limited service and capability,” he said. “What WIN-T is, it’s an open standards-based [internet provider] network. Just like the enterprise network that support a building, just like the Internet, whatever services can run over that network are permitted over WIN-T.”
An added benefit of Increment 2 in particular is that is can accept new capabilities not originally specified by the Army. As threats to a dispersed battlefield network grow or change, WIN-T2 can be tweaked, hardened or altered to address those issues, Weiss said.
“We’re always having to put in additional protections against cyber threats,” Weiss said. “That’s a very routine thing that we do regularly.”
GD also is working to provide precision navigation and timing through WIN-T as a backup positioning system should the Army lose GPS in a future fight. Near-peer adversaries are expected to attack GPS connectivity, if not also the constellation of satellites themselves future wars where the electromagnetic spectrum is contested.
“There still is engineering work that is being done from a couple of key standpoints,” Weiss said. “We need to make sure that commercial gear that we buy is sufficiently rugged to withstand the expected environments.”
Relying heavily on commercial-off-the-shelf technologies, GDMS is constantly addressing capability gaps and improving the established functionality of WIN-T. GDMS uses networking software provided by commercial companies like Cisco [CSCO] and Juniper Networks [JNPR] and hosts it on ruggedized computers it manufactures for use on military vehicles. In “environmental labs” at its Taunton, Mass., facility, GD tests the resilience of commercial components in temperature chambers and on shake tables that simulate a system riding atop a Humvee over rough terrain.
“It’s not a one-off for them,” Weiss said. “It is something that they will continue to support as a commercial product, but we get the advantage of being able to run these commercial networking functions on rugged computing that we’re providing and that allows us to make things a lot smaller, which is very important for what we’re doing.”
Over time, GDMS has dramatically reduced the size and deployability of WIN-T components. The size of the WIN-T tactical communication node (TCN) – the main communications relay used by a division, brigade or battalion command post – initially required a 5-ton truck to haul it around. The new version, called the TCN Light, can be installed on a Humvee. The TCN Light is undergoing tests at Fort Campbell, Ky., and will soon move to Fort Bliss, Texas, to field with the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division during the Network Integration Evaluation in July.
A more-mobile WIN-T “point of presence” (PoP) – which functions as a remote satellite relay from battalion or higher to dismounted troops – currently takes up two racks on the back of a Humvee.
The system has been redesigned to fit in a single rack, which frees up half the space it used to take up for other gear needed to set up a mobile command post. Particularly in Europe, the Army is interested in making command posts more mobile because a stationary communications hub is a sitting duck for modern sensors and artillery.
“Aside from WIN-T, what a command post is, is computing infrastructure that runs applications,” Weiss said. “Now the computing infrastructure to support command post operations can be installed right together with WIN-T into one, which more readily supports expeditionary operations.”
“The cost roughly follows that,” Weiss said. “There, about a third of the cost that comes out of it as well.”
Bob Lennox, a former Army three-star general who is senior vice president for Strategy and Customer Engagement at GDMS, said WIN-T could be upgraded and improved to satisfy the Army’s need for a more-mobile command post.
“You don’t need a separate command-post program,” Lennox said. “You can get that capability with WIN-T by just adding a couple of boxes” to the back of a Humvee.
WIN-T also is able to “fall-upon” other standard-based systems like the Vehicular Integration for Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance/Electronic Warfare Interoperability, or VICTORY, architecture. VICTORY is the baseline network software configuration for tactical vehicles. Having both it and WIN-T designed as open-architecture systems allows the network to dual-purpose some component like GPS receivers or processors, which saves space in tightly packed combat vehicles.
The current Increment 2 kit forces the removal of two seats in a Stryker wheeled combat vehicle. THe new half-size version is installed behind the seats and allows for replacement of the two spots lost with the previous version. The new version is not yet fielded with Stryker brigades because the next unit to be outfitted with Increment 2 is not scheduled to rotate through depot maintenance until 2019.
“The Army could choose to retrofit Stryker units that already have WIN-T but they haven’t chosen to do that yet,” Weiss said.
At the May hearing, Milley told McCain he had concerns over WIN-T’s resilience and reliability in a contested environment
“There are some significant changes and improvements that must be made in the short-term on our ability to have assured communication. I’ll just leave it at that,” Milley said. “The communications architecture of the United States Army, and I would argue the United Department of Defense, is a critical capability and at the same time a critical vulnerability.”
GDMS contends WIN-T Incrrement 2 is more survivable that the first iteration. It also is working to address connectivity issues with networking radios that connect to WIN-T at the tactical edge. One near-term solution for extending the range of a radio-to-WIN-T connectivity is through the Mobile User Objective ultra-high frequency SATCOM system. GD also has experimented with using unmanned aircraft as expeditionary, short-range communications relays to extend the range of networking radios.
“Strictly speaking, how do you extend communications, it’s very viable, technically,” Weiss said. “It’s not particularly difficult. We’ve demonstrated it a number of times. It’s just a matter of a decision to apply resources to it and work out the operational issues.”
McCain called for a review of the Army’s tactical network modernization strategy and was seconded by Milley, who has ordered a report on the issue by mid-July so its recommendations can be incorporated into the service’s fiscal 2018 budget request.
Lennox said that review likely will spawn new requirements for WIN-T from Training and Doctrine Command.
“That will generate all the changes of resourcing and the PEO actually sending out a request for information on how to improve the system,” Lennox speculated. “We don’t wait for that, generally, as you saw with the size, weight and power changes that were made … Those requirements don’t exist that we are allegedly not meeting.”