When the Army’s Peter Chiarelli, then a major general, took command of the 1st Cavalry Division in 2003, he had a daunting task. The war in Iraq was in its initial stages, and Chiarelli was in charge of operations in and around Baghdad. The 1st Cavalry, scheduled for deployment to Iraq in early 2004, was in need of command and control technology that would let soldiers in different locations collaborate in real time without traveling through dangerous areas to meet in the same physical space.
Months before, Chiarelli saw a demonstration of a prototype system, Command Post of the Future (CPOF), that was in the works at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. At the time, Chiarelli said that in 32 years of Army service he had “never seen a single system that would have a greater impact on our Army and our entire joint force than CPOF.” Convinced that this distributed C2 would serve his needs in the field, Chiarelli persuaded Army brass to let his unit be the first to run CPOF in an operational environment.
Today, CPOF is revolutionizing military C2 in Iraq, letting C2 centers exist wherever commanders are, without the need for a fixed geographic location, and enabling warfighters to employ adaptive tactics. Currently, there are more than 200 CPOF systems in use in Iraq and the number is growing rapidly. In fact, when Chiarelli returned to Iraq earlier this year, now a three-star general and the top commander of U.S. ground forces, he requested that the Army field CPOF to the entire Multi-National Corps–Iraq.
In the post-9/11 operational environment, CPOF epitomizes the transformational technology that DARPA is developing for the global war on terrorism. Networks are becoming as important as weapons. When the Defense Department achieves the full capability that network-centric warfare systems have to offer, the network will be as important to the warfighter as any other weapons system on the battlefield, says DARPA director Tony Tether.
Since 1958, DARPA has sponsored high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and potential military use. Best known for creating in the 1970s what would later become the Internet, DARPA in recent years has focused on secure self-forming networks as a strategic research initiative to support DOD’s transformation to network-centric operations.
“The promise of network-centric operations is to turn information superiority into combat power so that the United States and its allies have better information and can plan and conduct operations far more quickly and effectively than any adversary,” Tether says. “At the core of this concept are networks—networks that must be as reliable, available and survivable as the weapons platforms they connect, if not more so. They must distribute huge amounts of data quickly and precisely across a wide area. And they must form themselves without using or building a fixed infrastructure.”
America’s warfighters operate in an increasingly mobile operating environment in which there is no fixed systems infrastructure. Usually, they don’t have the luxury of repositioning to establish communications links. DARPA is trying to provide tactical forces with interconnectivity that exceeds anything available in the commercial market.
New Tech Team
To that end, DARPA in July established the Strategic Technology Office, focusing on technologies that have a global or theaterwide impact and that involve multiple services. STO consists of programs drawn from DARPA’s Advanced Technology Office and Special Projects Office. It focuses on space and near-space sensors and structures; strategic and tactical networks; counter underground facilities; chemical, biological and radiological defense; maritime operations; small-unit operations; and information assurance.
“The majority of our effort has been on the mobile, tactical side because that’s where the need has been the greatest,” says David Honey, director of the new STO. “Tactical warfighters in the field today have to carry their infrastructure with them or operate in what we call an infrastructure-less environment.”
DARPA recently ran a series of projects to develop a network management control scheme that works in a mobile, ad hoc environment, where there is no fixed infrastructure for the warfighter to tap into. The agency pioneered self-forming networks in which radios handle the functions of assigning addresses, forming networks and bridging between LANs.
DARPA’s Small Unit Operations Situational Awareness System demonstrated DOD’s first tactical-level, self-forming radio network, which has since been adopted by the Army as the Soldier Radio Waveform in the Joint Tactical Radio System, and WolfPack, a distributed, autonomous, unattended electronic warfare sensor network, capable of signal intelligence, geolocation and even jamming operations.
Defending the Network
Although mobile, ad hoc networks are not widely deployed within Defense, DARPA wants to defend those networks. Worms, in particular, are a potentially serious threat.
DARPA’s Dynamic Quarantine of Worms (DQW) program is an integrated system of detection and response to quarantine zero-day worms and stop their spread to U.S. military networks. According to DARPA, the ever-growing sophistication of the malicious code threat has surpassed the ability of industry to address the problem. Through the DQW program, DARPA has created a prototype capability to automatically detect and respond to worm-based attacks against military networks, provide advanced warning to other DOD enterprise networks, study and determine the worm’s propagation and epidemiology, and provide off-line rapid response forensic analysis of malicious code to identify its capabilities, modalities and future behavior.
“In the future, the DOD network will be just as important as any other weapons system and must be defended as rigorously as any other weapons system,” Honey says.
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