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home > November/December, 2007 issue > article
Navy fields ship-to-ship coalition comms
By Caron Golden
Flashing lights and flags can be great communications tools for ships close to each other. But what if the ship you’re trying to reach is over the horizon?
Out of sight no longer means out of mind — or communication — for shipboard coalition partners. The Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System enables real-time, Web-based communication between military personnel from countries in coalitions.
“This network is designed for people in tactical environments afloat to operate with coalition partners in a secure environment,” said Robert Wolborsky, program manager at the Navy’s Networks, Information Assurance and Enterprise Services Program Office.
The Navy and some coalition partners gave Centrixs a thorough workout at this year’s Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training Exercise in Malaysia.
Wolborsky said Centrixs started as a separate set of projects in the Pacific Fleet, including the Coalition Wide Area Network (Cowan), which is the Pacific Command’s wide-area network. Cowan was consolidated with Centrixs after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when the ability to collaborate at a network level with coalition partners became more of a necessity and priority.
Users access Centrixs, which plugs into the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, via a Web-based interface and thin-client system, which allows for improved security, access control and remote administration.
The system is deployed on 160 Navy ships and vessels belonging to coalition partners, including the 80-plus countries in the largest of eight groups of coalition partners, the Global Counterterrorism Force nations. The system serves about 10,000 U.S. Navy coalition clients.
Lt. Theodore Mac Quidem, a combat systems officer on the USS Higgins who recently returned from deployment in the Middle East, said that before Centrixs, communications were done primarily through voice circuits and, if the vessels were close enough, flashing lights and flag hoists.
“When conducting communications via voice circuits with some allied countries, it was sometimes difficult for both parties to understand the intent of the other due to language and articulation barriers,” he said. “The use of flashing light and flag hoist eliminated the problems that come with voice communications, but those methods of communication require vessels to be at very close range.”
He primarily used the Centrixs chat room to exchange information pertinent to the exercise or operation, such as intended movement, assignment and composition of forces.
Petty Officer Aaron Percival, with the 7th Fleet Information Management/Automated Data Processing Division, has used Centrixs for more than a year for sending e-mail, sharing documents, viewing sensitive Web pages, finding points of contact from another country, and using collaborative tools such as chat and logs with other countries.
“We’re able to have a flow of sensitive information between countries in a timely and relevant manner,” Percival said.
The next big push in technology is real-time chat language translation, Wolborsky said. “We’re pushing this out in November with our Japanese exercise on the Centrixs-J network.”
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