The Marine Corps has finished fielding its Common Aviation Command and Control System (CAC2S) Phase 1 and is moving forward with its contractor-run Phase 2 to bring advanced battlespace awareness to the Marine air control community.
The program office finished fielding the first round of upgrades earlier this month, wrapping up the two-year installation and training process at the Marine Air Control Squadron-24 reserve unit in Virginia Beach, Va.
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| The Marine Corps’ Common Aviation Command and Control System will combine information on air and ground assets into a single battlespace display for better air operations planning. Photo courtesy U.S. Marine Corps. |
“This Phase 1 going into MACS-24 reserve unit was huge because it really represents full operating capability for the first part of CAC2S,” David Branham, a spokesman for the program executive office for land systems, said in a Sept. 20 interview.
With the first phase of CAC2S fully fielded, the Marine Corps gains several things.
“Probably the biggest thing that CAC2S brings to the MACS community is really that common hardware,” Phase 1 Product Director Maj. George Seegel said in the same interview. “What that does, that enables the Direct Air Support Center and the Marine Tactical Air Operations Center to basically have the same plate of equipment.”
Both gain enhanced situational awareness by seeing both air and ground assets in near real-time. And that, Phase 1 Engineer Mark Lamczyk said, “provides them the ability to do things more efficiently, safer, and prevent fratricide” by the air operations planners knowing where their own ground troops are.
Lamczyk said that having common hardware and software among the planners of anti-air warfare, air support operations, medevac operations and more “synergizes training, reduces the logistical footprint.”
The upgrade also helps the Marine Corps become more compatible with the joint community. Other services are already using Raytheon Solipsys’s [RTN] Multi-Source Correlator Tracker, the processing engine that gathers information on ground and air assets and fuses them together in a Tactical Display Framework.
Phase 1 provides the software upgrades and network improvements for Marine Air Support Squadrons and Marine Air Control Squadrons, with only minor hardware changes to remove obsolete equipment. Working within the existing communications infrastructure, communications systems were modernized and integrated in a “low-cost, low-risk initiative,” Lamczyk said. On the ground command and control side, combat operations centers fielded during operations in Iraq were “revamped” so the networks could integrate with air control networks.
“All we had to do was address the capability gaps–the enhanced network, processing capability, a lot of redundancy,” Lamczyk said.
The Marine Corps itself took care of Phase 1 work and will sustain the equipment and systems through its Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany in Georgia.
Phase 2 will be where Marines will see more new hardware, meant to upgrade to real-time integration of sensor data and tactical data link. To coordinate this complex effort, the Marine Corps competed the work to industry. After four companies participated in a demonstration of real-time data infusion, PEO Land Systems awarded a contract to General Dynamics C4 Systems [GD] in November 2012. Program officials traveled to the GD site in Scottsdale, Ariz., last week for a tactical review, Lamczyk said.
All the hardware will be replaced in Phase 2, though Lamczyk noted this works well with the typical tech refresh schedule, which replaces computers and other equipment every three to five years to avoid obsolescence. Rather than going through tech refresh, Phase 2 will replace the hardware and add new capabilities.
Phase 2 will go into its developmental testing in 2014, Lamczyk said, which should take 12 to 15 months. Operational testing will take place in fiscal year 2015, and the program should move into limited deployment capability in FY ’16.