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home > February, 2007 issue > article
Embedded nodes will populate DOD’s network
By Dawn S. Onley
Editor
The military’s next-generation tanks, ships and aircraft share one major feature — embedded technology that will link ground, air and sea forces via the Global Information Grid, the Defense Department’s ubiquitous network.
Tomorrow’s soldiers will operate much as these networked
weapons systems do, donning high-tech helmets with
embedded sensors that will let them track friends and foes, electronically mark targets and radio for help.
Open standards are the underpinnings that enable embedded technologies such as these to work. Such software running on technologies embedded in smart vehicles — from Humvees to destroyers — can automate operations that once were done manually.
The difference that can make in reducing force structures makes inexorable a fundamental philosophical shift that rejects the use of disparate communications suites in favor of true interoperability.
The purpose of technology in the Army’s digitized soldier initiative, Land Warrior, is to increase combat agility and lethality, and ultimately save lives. A future version will integrate with several key GIG programs.
“In the past, each vehicle would be its own program and develop its own distributed systems,” explained Edgar L. Dalrymple, associate director for software and distributed systems for the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.
But future tactical vehicles will have data integrated “so that across all these platforms, we’ll have an integrated view of the battlefield,” Dalrymple said.
Deploying embedded technology is not all gravy, however.
One challenge is managing security risks — both to the GIG and to the individual weapons platform, according to Robert Lentz, DOD’s director of information assurance. And determining and controlling who has access to what information is always a thorny issue.
But, in this future that DOD envisions — where tactical weapons systems and sensors are nodes on DOD’s vast network — preventing adversaries from cracking embedded software codes on battlefield platforms could be the greatest challenge of all.
DAWN S. ONLEY, editor
donley@1105media.com
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