By Ann Roosevelt
Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) is moving far beyond the original concept of a situational awareness tool toward a battle command system, a company official said.
Recent advances include the next-generation software, called Joint Capabilities Release (JCR), that is undergoing formal Army testing.
“Our experiences in Iraq underscored the importance of creating a joint FBCB2/BFT solution acceptable to the Marine Corps and the Army,” Joe Taylor, vice president of the Ground Combat Systems operating unit within Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems sector, said. “The services reached an agreement on a common set of requirements almost five years ago. To converge on JCR is a pretty big deal. Once they go through this fielding process then you’ll have both organizations on the same system.”
JCR offers a significant increase in network bandwidth, allowing the system to move more information to more users within seconds rather than minutes.
It is also compatible with all the FBCB2 BFT tracking equipment that’s out there, some 85,000 systems now worldwide.
The JCR will continue planned tests through 2010, fielding in conjunction with the newly-awarded production contract for an improved Blue Force Tracking 2 (BFT2) transceiver with full encryption and lower latency.
Additionally, this summer, the Army awarded Northrop Grumman an $18 million increment of a potential $300 million contract to provide encryption devices to upgrade the communications security of FBCB2-BFT. The software is fully compatible with JCR.
“It’s a new way of utilizing the satellite that allows much, much lower latency and much higher bandwidth,” Taylor said.
“The FBCB2-BFT evolution began with the first Gulf War, where U.S. forces maneuver had navigation difficulties, making the best of a variety of GPS devices,” he said.
“I think it was that experience which drove home the importance of knowing where we are individually and collectively–and display that somehow–then that would be a powerful combat multiplier for us going forward for us,” Taylor said.
This gave impetus to FBCB2 development at about the same time the Army was redefining its role in the world. That experimentation was embraced by the Army through the Force XXI experiments leading to the FBCB2 acquisition decision.
“It became pretty clear that situational awareness was key to the maneuver battle,” he said.
Leading up to the next war in Iraq, the Army planned a move to satellite, because FM communications were very limited.
“You’re maneuvering so fast and over such great distances that you had real trouble maintaining those communications,” Taylor said. “It was a reliable mechanism to connect all of these maneuvers forces.”
The messaging capability of BFT became a powerful tool.
“As soon as you start doing message traffic over a situation awareness tool, it’s really becoming a C2 tool…What has happened subsequent to the war, the new developments, JCR, JBCP are all designed to make this satellite-based situational awareness tool an evermore complete command and control mechanism for battle command,” Taylor said.
That argues for an open architecture, Northrop Grumman’s concept to create a system of systems open architecture that would allow plug and play of communication means, sensor arrays, and interoperability with other software systems.
“The creation of a software design based upon core assets, easily exploitable by other applications, was as important as the decision to go joint,” he said.
For the future, the drivers are bandwidth, latency and flexible software, he said.
The future for FBCB2 BFT is the Joint Battle Command Platforms (JBCP), being developed by the Software Engineering Directorate (SED) in Huntsville, Ala. This could incorporate mounted, dismounted and aviation forces into FBCB2-BFT.
“If our past is any guide, we will do a lot of modifications to JCR as JBC-P is being developed,” he said.
Going forward, there are questions for the Army to consider. Flexibility in managing the bandwidth and adapting to available communications will be important.
“The key to any of the most useful software designs, is the extent that you can make it integration and communications agnostic,” he said. “The more agnostic you make it, the greater the likelihood you can deal with any mission in the time available.”
For more than a decade Northrop Grumman followed this development model on FBCB2, “moving over a few short years from FM to satellites to software defined radio systems required great flexibility and adaptability; it had to be agnostic from the jump,” Taylor said.