Category Archives: Army

Army, Contractors & Vendors, Lockheed Martin, Sensors

Q&A – Lockheed's Airborne Multi-Intelligence Lab

Last month, Lockheed-Martin brought an independently developed test aircraft, called the Airborne Multi-Intelligence Lab, to the Army’s C4ISR On-the-Move exercise,

Lockheed Martin's Airborne Multi-Intelligence Laboratory

which took place at and near Ft. Dix and Lakehurst, New Jersey. The AML is a repurposed used Gulfstream III corporate jet equipped with a large radome and commercial electronics racks; the aircraft is designed for testing the integration of multiple sensors and open architecture intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, providing aggregation of multiple sensors right on the aircraft by analysts, who pass that data to operators on the ground.

I spoke with Lockheed’s Jim Quinn, vice president, and John Beck and Mark Wand, both with Lockheed’s business development group. Here’s the interview:

Jim Quinn: A little over 10 or 11 months ago, Lockheed martin made some decisions, investment decisions in particular that looked at where the customer set was going — some of their higher priority needs. This was driven both internationally as well as domestically, and the importance of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in supporting operations around the globe.

We recognized that a lot of the difficulty that our customers were having were trying to take advantage of multiple sensors, and to fuse and correlate that data in a way that it provided meaningful and actionable intelligence to war fighters on the edge. Whether they be war fighters on the edge or a command post or ground station that were trying to turn that information into usable knowledge.

We know that a lot of the platforms and sensors that are in operation around the world do that in a single int. fashion. They are a dedicated platform that collects a single (form of) intelligence, whether it be synthetic aperture radar, or FLIR (forward looking infrared), kinds of electro-optic sensors, or whether it be a sigint (signals intelligence) sensor, and then usually that data is transported by data link to some sort of ground station, and in many cases those ground stations are dedicated to the platform and the sensor that they are affiliated with. So we recognize the value of trying to have at our customers’ disposal and for our own experimentation, a platform that could take and plug-and-play various sensors in a multi-intelligence configuration. That would allow us to investigate how we take multiple inputs from sensors, and then either cross-queue or show the benefit of merging and synthesizing that data onboard the platform, and then pushing it down to the users on the ground. Whether it is a ground station or a user on the edge

So we made an investment, and procured a used (Gulfstream III) in the aircraft market with partners that we worked with in industry, We constructed a first set of sensors, and perhaps more importantly, we put on the aircraft a hardware and a software infrastructure that allowed those sensors over time to be plugged and played — that is, we could configure the hardback of the aircraft and the software infrastructure of it, the ability to take a sensor from various suppliers, whether it be one of our own or from a supplier in industry that was wanting to partner with us, and put it onboard the aircraft, and do that very very quickly.

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Army, Boeing, Harris

Harris says it delivers “JTRS capabilities today”–Boeing begs to differ

On Monday, I got a walkthrough of a demo by Harris Corp. of  the Falcon III AN/PRC-117G radio being used as the basis for a battlefield network — both using currently available waveforms and the yet-to-be-released Joint Tactical Radio System Wideband Networking Waveform.

In the demo, Jaime Rubscha, a product manager for the RF Communications Division of Harris, showed how intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data , voice circuits (including Voice over IP phone circuits) and video could all be piped over an IP  network, and bridged between Harris’ Advanced Networking Wideband Waveform (ANW2) and the JTRS WNW waveform. Additionally,  Harris demonstrated that the 117G could be connected via a satellite “hump” to INMARSAT’s Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) in places where line-of-site communications didn’t work (though it was clearly difficult to demonstrate BGAN connectivity from inside the Washington Convention Center).

It was all fairly impressive; handheld and laptop computers running the TIGR tactical intelligence application developed at DARPA, as well as phones, push-to-talk mics, and video feeds were connected to each of the endpoint radios, while one pair of radios acted as a bridge between ANW2 and WNW. The demonstration was Harris’ way of showing that it was already providing the types of data services that WNW and the pending JTRS program-of-record Ground Mobile Radio (GMR) from Boeing and its partners (Northrop Grumman, Rockwell Collins and BAE Systems, with support from Harris Corp.) would provide, at a fraction of the projected cost.

On Tuesday morning, I was briefed by Boeing on the status of the GMR. Boeing’s Ralph Moslener, program director for JTRS GMR, said that the program had finally begun its Formal Qualification Testing, and that code for all of the waveforms has been “frozen” under configuration management (except for the Soldier Radio Waveform, which is being managed by another program of record, General Dynamics C4 System’s Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit (HMS) ).

Moslener spent a good deal of time making the point that Boeing’s GMR is the only radio that will meet all of the JTRS GMR requirements — all 37,298 of them — and that the radio’s expected cost is declining, approaching $25,000 per channel per radio. He offered up a number of direct comparisons to the 117G, noting that it doesn’t have internal traffic routing and retransmission capability of the GMR, and has less frequency range and transmitting power.

When presented with Boeing’s points, Harris representatives agreed with Boeing’s assessment. The 117G doesn’t meet all of the JTRS requirements, which is why it’s available now. The 117G doesn’t have the internal routing and depends on an external router for that task, but the GMR isn’t integrated completely into a single box, and both rigs would have a similar footprint. And since Harris’ design is modular, an external amplifier could get the 117G up to the GMR’s 100-watt transmission strength.

As GMR finally approaches its own formal testing, having been used only in engineering design model (EDM) form in a few Future Combat Systems Limited User Tests (LUTs), the underlying question is whether the JTRS program-of-record radio will be cost-effective enough to be purchased in volume by the DOD. With major RESET re-equipping coming, and thousands of 117Gs already deployed, that’s not exactly guaranteed.

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