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home > February, 2007 issue > article
Embedded connection
By Dawn S. Onley
Special to Defense Systems
Tactical vehicles linked by on-board software will help guard warfighters' flanks
The Defense Department has glimpsed the future of tactical vehicles, and it looks smart, integrated, transformative.
The Navy’s DDG-1000 surface combatant ships will be largely autonomous. Many of the tanks and tactical aircraft in the Army’s proposed Future Combat Systems (FCS) program will be unmanned. The Air Force’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, considered the most technically advanced plane ever built, will come standard with a wide range of automated features.
The source of the intelligence that will power these smart vehicles? Embedded software.
Not the individual platform technology that drives today’s stovepiped tactical vehicles, operating in isolation from other platforms. But integrated, embedded software built on open architecture standards that will link ground, air and sea forces and become nodes on DOD’s vast computer network: the Global Information Grid.
“You can make everything that flies, drives and sails part of the network,” said Pat Ryan, director of Defense initiatives in Cisco Systems Inc.’s Global Defense, Space and Security division.
“Immediately, you can have a communications command capability.”
From electronic sensors, optical targeting and automatic tracking to laser rangefinding, unattended munitions and millions of lines of software code, next-generation’s fleet of high-tech tactical vehicles is aimed at helping the Defense Department meet its goal of bringing interoperability and net-centricity to its weapons systems.
“Everything’s going to be connected to the GIG,” said Dan Risacher, associate director for information policy in the Office of the DOD CIO. “They might use different data formats, but actually my life got a little easier because they will all be connected to the same network.”
The interconnection of tactical vehicles to the Global Information Grid wasn’t always a welcomed thought with the services, Risacher conceded.
“If you go far enough back, the idea that all of your systems are going to be interconnected would be controversial,” Risacher said.
Since then, there’s been a significant philosophical and cultural shift, officials say.
Complex challenges
The software development and engineering work needed to create such a farreaching, interconnected communications network is not easy. And it’s far from a done deal. Gen. William Wallace, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, announced last month that because the Army recently decided to scale back the number of unmanned aerial vehicles under FCS, the service is reconsidering whether also to adjust the numbers, types and functions of the program’s planned unmanned ground vehicles.
The Navy also recently halted work on one of two ships under its $1.3 billion, Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program because of escalating costs.
Whether the military services ultimately can pull off the integrated, synchronized embedded platforms remains to be seen, said Inder M. Singh, chairman of LynuxWorks Inc., San Jose, Calif.
“I think the biggest challenge is just making more and more complex systems actually work,” said Singh, whose company is involved in some of the Future Combat Systems’ software integration work. “It is very ambitious. Now they have to carefully stage it and only use [technologies] that are mature and tested. I’m as concerned as anyone else about how it all comes together. We are making sure our piece works out well.”
In the past year, the Government Accountability Office has slashed funding from several such integration programs, while coming down hard on the communications suites riding on some of the tactical vehicles in the programs. For example, GAO called the communications technology planned for FCS immature and risky, and questioned whether it is ready for its prime-time rollout date. The first phase of FCS is planned for fiscal 2008, with full deployment of all FCS components anticipated by December 2014.
FCS is designed to link 18 manned and unmanned air and ground vehicles, unattended ground sensors and a non-line-of-sight cannon-and-launch system via a common computer network, including the System of Systems Common Operating Environment middleware and the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical program. In the role of lead systems integrator for the program is a partnership between Boeing Co. and Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego.
Edgar L. Dalrymple, the Army’s associate director for software and distributed systems and software engineering manager at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., said the FCS technology concepts are being developed and tested and so far, the progress is promising.
“We’re seeing surprisingly good results in our integration because of the early decision to go to common middleware and standard battle command services,” Dalrymple said. “By the end of fiscal 2007, FCS will be approximately one-third of the way through the software integration job.” That will include testing, delivering and integrating into vehicles 5.5 million lines of a total 17 million lines, he said.
The communications technology will lift the Army from its current manually intensive, on-board processes, Dalrymple said.
“In the past, we had sensors, and we had communications, but once an object was spotted, a text message was sent off to the tactical operations center and pushed out to troops,” Dalrymple said.
Full steam ahead
The Navy’s DDG-1000 Zumwalt class guided missile destroyers recently entered the system development and design phase. The technology being developed for the ships will also be integrated into legacy and next-generation fleets.
The DDG ships, designed by Northrop Grumman Corp., will house 114 sailors, down from the nearly 300 sailors on the previous model, the DDG-51, said Capt. James D. Syring, DDG-1000 program manager. The embedded software automation technologies “allow manning of less than half that of today’s DDG destroyers. In addition, the DDG-1000 can support Marine Corps operations, reducing or eliminating the need for Marine Corps artillery battalions on the beachhead,” Syring said.
“The number one cost driver for the Navy is personnel costs,” Syring said. “I will still have personnel. But the more people I can take off my ships enables us to reduce most costs.”
The Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship also will see a reduction in crew size.
“LCS is dramatically reducing its crew size,” said Capt. Donald Babcock, LCS program manager. “That can only happen through the smart use of automation and the transfer off the ships of work that used to be done on board. The crew on board becomes much more like an air crew, and that’s essentially the power of the network.”
Lockheed Martin Corp. is building COMBATSS-21, the mission system software for LCS, said Richard P. Calabrese, director of information fusion and human interface technology for the company’s Maritime Systems & Sensors division in Moorestown, N.J.
Key architectural features on the DDG-1000 ships include hierarchical control and use of adaptation processors.
"The command and control ships resource manager sets the mission priorities and tasks the domain controllers for sensors, communications, weapons and ship systems,” said DDG’s Syring. “Each of the domain controllers then allocates appropriate tasks to the elements it controls to carry out the tasks. The use of adaptation processors enables cost-effective integration of existing systems. These adaptation processors translate data between the DDG-1000 native infrastructure and that which is native to the existing system.”
The programming languages required to run the embedded software are being developed using Java, Real Time Java and C++ programming languages. For embedded technologies, Eclipse is being widely used for programming techniques as a defacto standard for open interfaces, according to LynuxWorks’ Singh.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, developed by Lockheed Martin with the help of Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems Inc., Rockville, Md., will be equipped with the most robust communications suite of any fighter aircraft ever built, according to the Joint Strike Fighter Web site at www.jsf.mil. The suite includes satellite communications capability, tactical data links and Web-enabled logistics support.
Plusses and minuses
The advantages of embedded platform technology that are being built into Joint Strike Fighter, Future Combat Systems and the Navy’s next-generation ships are numerous. The technology offers a feed of instantaneously updated pictures and common situational awareness, enabling constant connectivity to other platforms. Its open architecture standards simplifies its integration into legacy fleets as well as next-generation vehicles, officials said.
“Software will continue to go the way of open architecture,” Lockheed’s Calabrese predicted. “We would expect to see encapsulated capabilities from a diverse pool of third party suppliers who are investing in warfighting innovations.”
Still, there are many disadvantages to embedded technologies as well.
One issue is security, said Gurjot Singh, CEO and president of LynuxWorks. “When you have this GIG, you certainly don’t want things that happened to Paris Hilton’s PDA happening to secure systems,” he said, referring to the hacking and subsequent posting on the Internet of the contents of Hilton’s personal digital assistant. “There will be 2.5 billion people on the Internet by the end of the decade and you need a lot of security,” Gurjot Singh said. “There’s going to be data flowing back and forth. You’ve got some very significant challenges.”
“What we see down the road is a requirement for a higher assurance,” he added.
That’s far from news to DOD director for information assurance, Robert Lentz. The information assurance challenges of sensor-to-shooter connectivity are two-fold, he said. First is managing the risk of introducing an additional node to the GIG.
Second is controlling the risk to the individual platform by introducing new avenues of attack for the adversary.
“This later consideration raises the greatest concern,” Lentz said. “Dependency upon data available from general purpose command-and-control networks places an availability requirement upon those networks. Moreover, the consequences of failure reach to the pointy edge of the spear.”
“Finally, there is the potential, as numerous tactical systems replace point-to-point communications links with general purpose, interconnected, C2 networks, that these will become single points of failure and attractive targets for sophisticated adversaries,” Lentz said.
The first step in addressing the information assurance challenges is to concentrate attention on developing a robust program to counter potential malicious attacks, LCS’ Babcock said.
In the interim, current IA policy on security standards will prevail. For example, DOD Instruction 8500.2, “Information Assurance Implementation,” of Feb. 6, 2003, requires implementing information system security engineering to manage risks at the interface between the tactical platform and the GIG, Lentz said.
Other security avenues will be investigated as well.
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