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home > November/December, 2007 issue > article
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| Photography by Army |
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| Future Combat Systems, such as the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, were featured in Experiment 1.1 in May. |
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The future takes shape in the desert
By Sami Lais
Special to Defense Systems
The Army tests its emerging digital weapons in the glare of the southwestern landscape
Last year, the Army found a new place to test the hardware and software of its Future Combat Systems program at the service’s new Test Operations Center at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Part of the Army’s modernization program, FCS comprises 18 manned and unmanned ground and aerial vehicles linked through an advanced information network. It is already changing the way future wars will be fought.
Landscape of change
White Sands is the perfect spot for FCS and the TOC, said Jerry Tyree, chief of the WSMR business development office.
“For one thing, it has the land space,” he said. Covering nearly 3,200 square miles, WSMR — pronounced wiz-mer — is 40 miles wide and nearly 100 miles long. Size is important to testing for FCS, Tyree said, because “it has to operate over 550 kilometers.” A primary goal of FCS is to enable warfighters to cover more terrain while using fewer resources.
Meanwhile, the landscape makes its own contribution. Mountains in the southern range rise to 9,000 feet, while the slopes of those in the north are green and wooded. But the largest part of the range — the valley floor at 4,000 feet above sea level — is high desert. “I’ve been driven around Afghanistan enough to know that the desert at WSMR is very similar,” Tyree said. “We even have tunnels that emulate those that we’re finding in areas of activity in the world today.” The airspace over the range’s 2.2 million acres — and add another million or so acres for nearby Fort Bliss — also is important to FCS efforts that include “operating unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs] and non-line-of-sight cannons, called missiles in a box,” Tyree said. The cannons “can be fired remotely over a network to engage various types of targets, and that needs airspace.”
However, WSMR’s other assets may be the greatest draw, he said. With systems-of-systems testing as a major part of FCS development, the Army Evaluation and Test Force (AETF) and TOC were drawn to WSMR and Fort Bliss in part because of WSMR’s “literally billions of dollars of infrastructure and instrumentation and networks.”
The organizations have access to 1,200 miles of fiber optics “plus the ability to do radio frequency without a lot of noise, space to conduct electronic-warfare countermeasures and the ability to do the testing to make sure all of these systems will work together as well as in all these different environments,” Tyree said.
A major asset is “people with expertise in research, test and evaluation,” he said. “We’re techno-geeks,” Tyree said. “The civilian staff includes engineers and scientists of all disciplines — even some you may not think of.”
The experienced staff — the average age is 46 — includes engineers with numerous specialties: electrical, mechanical, civil and computer. “But [there is] also a psychologist, chemists and microbiologists, because we’re looking at and verifying systems performance in worldwide environments, so we worry about things like fungal growth,” Tyree said. In addition to ensuring warfighters have the capabilities they need, WSMR scientists test to ensure that systems are safe and reliable.
“What Fort Bliss brings to the table is a lot of the training range capabilities that don’t exist here at White Sands,” Tyree said. The Texas facility is “also a very large deployment center, one of the largest in the nation, [and] one of four or five places in the nation for deploying troops and equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
At first, the place called Blizmer — Fort Bliss and WSMR — wasn’t quite a perfect fit, said FCS program manager Col. Jonathan Maddux. Although WSMR handled a range of testing, “in the past, it had mostly concentrated on conducting missile tests,” he said.
Meanwhile, “The WSMR/Bliss complex is ideal” for FCS systems-of-systems testing, said Don Loftis, Boeing FCS lead systems integrator for test resources and facilities manager for integrated simulation and test. “It has the land and airspace capable of hosting the increased breadth and depth of the FCS battlefield and can accommodate the vast footprint of the FCS-equipped units.”
Building for tomorrow
Loftis, who is also lead systems integrator site leader for integrated simulation and test at WSMR/Fort Bliss, explained that “the TOC at WSMR consists of four buildings and two maintenance/motor pool facilities, with approximately 107,000 square feet of available space.”
“It provides work space and visitor spaces for close to 300 engineers, scientists and soldiers,” he said, “with motor pools that can accommodate two battalions of equipment and maintenance space for items as large as the Abrams Main Battle Tank.” Although the TOC is a government-owned facility, the lead systems integrator team of Boeing and partner Science Applications International Corp.
has “been proactively involved in TOC construction activities to ensure our systems and simulations properly interface with the facilities and equipment that the Army is establishing there,” Loftis said.
“The FCS team did develop, under the contract, one item of equipment to augment the TOC,” he said. “The Mobile Node, housed in a portable trailer design, provides an adaptable capability to enable network connectivity between test assets and test articles, and the FCS Simulation Environment and analysis capabilities in the field.” FCS, including a core staff of 15 lead systems integrator employees, has occupied part of the TOC since May 2006 and used its facilities during a program named Experiment 1.1.
An experiment in the works
Running from July 2006 through February, FCS Experiment 1.1 was a three-phase program of laboratory, field and demonstration activities, including testing by soldiers of FCS prototypes. The Phase 1 hardware and software integration and networking and systems interoperability testing was done at Army labs in California and New Jersey.
Phase 2 field events at Fort Bliss and WSMR focused on gathering data and assessing FCS systems performance in a realistic environment, and interoperability with current Army and Marine Corps systems.
During the final phase done in January and February at the TOC, 36 soldiers provided hands-on feedback on early FCS prototypes, a Boeing spokesman said.
Soldiers used FCS sensors and unmanned air and ground systems and gave engineers their input on what worked well and what needed
improvement.
That “user perspective and feedback will inform the [the Training and Doctrine Command’s] Battle Labs for the future transformation of the Army,” Maddux said.
Boeing’s Mobile Node also proved itself at WSMR during Experiment 1.1, Loftis said. It “provided data and test event monitoring at several U.S. locations.” It is “set up at the TOC and is beginning integration of test articles, test instrumentation and tools to support testing of the first spinout of FCS technologies to the current force.”
Coming developments
In October 2006, Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, FCS program manager, predicted that “by this time next year, we will have new FCS equipment in Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.” He’s on target. “FCS equipment is in those assets today,” Maddux said.
“They’re in different places for integration and developmental testing [and] will be delivered to the AETF, to the soldiers here, in October-November,” Maddux said. Meanwhile, “wire frames are being stood up to house the simulation environment for our core programs both at Bliss and WSMR” and tied to the systems-of-systems integration lab at Huntington Beach, Calif.
Army and lead systems integrator testing facilities are continuing to evolve to meet FCS’ needs.
“The FCS Mobile Node will have modeling and simulation capability that can be deployed to remote sites, including Army Test and Evaluation Command test ranges, Research Development and Engineering Command labs, and Tradoc Battle Labs,” Loftis said.
New infrastructure also will go up at the TOC and Fort Bliss/WSMR, and WSMR is changing to accommodate new FCS testing needs, bringing in new facilities as the Army Evaluation Task Force moves to the desert floor, Maddux said.
“We’ll be bringing in our test articles, both for development and to do the operational testing of unmanned ground vehicle and UAV prototypes,” Maddux said. Some of the new technologies are already helping save the lives of warfighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey Jr. told the House Armed Services Committee in September.
Casey showed the committee one of the 5,000 small unmanned ground vehicles deployed in theater. The vehicle has defused nearly 11,000 improvised explosive devices, he said.
The program is garnering further support. “FCS is less than 3 percent of the Army’s baseline budget for fiscal year 2008,” wrote Mackenzie Eaglen, senior policy analyst for national security at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy Studies. “However, this does not diminish its necessity as the Army’s highest-priority request this year. Now is the time for the Army to field its ‘future force.’”
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