Army photo

US Army Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE)

WASHINGTON: At a classified conference last week, Army generals told their Air Force counterparts that ground troops can’t just adopt what the Chief of Staff has called an “air-centric” command system for future all-service operations.

Ironically, after at least three years of ardently courting the Air Force as its partner in future Multi-Domain Operations, the Army may have gotten more than it really wanted, because the Air Force is now threatening to take over. Specifically, the Air Force is eagerly pushing its nascent Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) — originally conceived as the Air Battle Management System — as the future command-and-control solution for all four services.

Army Futures & Concepts Center photo

Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley checks out a prototype for the Next Generation Squad Weapon as a soldier explains the rifle.

“One of the messages I think the Army was trying to communicate to the Air Force was that ABMS cannot be the sole solution, because it doesn’t account for, in some cases, the scale or the unique requirements of all the other services,” Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, chief of the Army’s Futures & Concepts Center, told me. “It certainly is a start point of a framework, [but] Army scaling issues have to be considered in any kind of framework that’s put together in the future.

“Other services might be looking at the scale of hundreds, where the Army is looking at a scale of thousands,” he said.

It’s easy to dismiss this and similar recent statements by Army leaders as standard-issue sibling rivalry, especially after inter-service budget battles catapulted into the open last week. It’s easy to say the Army has a long, self-sabotaging tradition of rejecting good ideas from outside sources just because they were “not invented here,” because the Army definitely does.

But Wesley, who gave me an exclusive (and unclassified) summary of the classified conference, raises an important point. So did Army network modernization chiefs Maj. Gen. David Bassett and Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, who spoke at an AFCEA event yesterday. The problem comes from both fundamental differences among the armed services and inherent issues in any computer network.

Hundreds vs. Thousands

The Army and Air Force put very different kinds and quantities of chess pieces on board. From the perspective of multi-domain operations, the things that count — and therefore need to be on the joint command network — are sensors, which detect targets; shooters, which attack targets; and command and control nodes, which pass data, analysis, and instructions.

In the Air Force, the sensors and shooters are the service’s more than 5,400 aircraft and satellites. Each of these can potentially transmit and receive an enormous amount of information. A cutting-edge fighter like the F-35 has multiple sensors — radar, infrared, diagnostics — that can constantly transmit data back on everything from targets detected to the real-time health of the engine. And an F-35 has multiple ways to shoot, from missiles to smart bombs to classified cyber/electronic warfare systems. But even with the F-35, which will be the most numerous type in service, the Air Force will only buy 1,763.

Army photo

A soldier checks his IVAS goggles’ navigation aides against his compass.

By contrast, in a deployed Army unit, every single soldier is both a potential shooter and a sensor. Those ground force sensor/shooters are much simpler than combat aircraft — most of them only have eyes, ears, a rifle, and a radio, although the Army is issuing new AI targeting goggles — so they individually require a lot less data. They also move much more slowly than any aircraft.

But there are vastly more of them. A single Army combat brigade has more than 4,200 soldiers and hundreds of vehicles. There were seven such units in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, 20 in 1991, and that’s not counting specialist support brigades like artillery, signals, and engineers.

In the chaos of modern warfare, you want to keep track of every individual because just one soldier in the wrong place at the wrong time can result in a death to friendly fire– remember Pat Tillman in Afghanistan – or a prisoner of war – remember Jessica Lynch in Iraq. And, except for helicopter aircrew and passengers, those soldiers need to be tracked on the ground, where hills, trees, and reinforced-concrete buildings combine to block sensors and signals in ways that just don’t happen in the air.

The two services are facing fundamentally different physics problems. One has lots of nodes, each requiring relatively little bandwidth, moving slowly through lots of obstacles. The other has relatively few nodes, each requiring lots of bandwidth, moving rapidly through empty air. Can the same network possibly meet the needs of both?

Source: CBO

The combat element of a single Army light infantry brigade. (Support units not shown). Armored units have much more equipment.

Tracking thousands of individual elements isn’t the kind of problem you can brute-force through. You can’t scale up a network built for hundreds of nodes to handle thousands simply by buying 10 times as much stuff, because each node you add increases the number of potential connections exponentially.

In fact, scaling is often the bane of IT projects. What works for a small office or start-up may break down when that company grows. So, if you want your network to be able to handle thousands or tens of thousands of moving nodes, you have to make sure to design it that way from the start.

“One of our main concerns [is], for the Army, we have to be able to scale this thing across echelons down to in some cases, individuals,” Wesley told me. “So it’s not sufficient to look at Joint All-Domain Command & Control through the lens of a limited number of boxes that a much smaller service might use.”

Air Force photo by TSgt Austin May

Air Force Gen. Mike Holmes has been a leading advocate of collaboration with the Army.

The Army is eager to collaborate with the Air Force, Wesley emphasized, as well as the Navy and Marines, who have similar same scaling issues once they hit the beach. What is happening today with the Air Force, he said, is “the most extensive collaboration that you’ve seen probably since [the 1980s with] the 31 Initiatives and AirLand Battle.”

He felt very positive about the classified conference at Nellis Air Force Base, hosted by the chief of Air Combat Command, Gen. Mike Holmes. “Gen. Holmes was very gracious to extend the invite to not only the Joint Staff, but also to the sister services,” Wesley said. “He lifted the hood and he allowed us to see inside the discussions they were having, with respect to their own C2 [command & control] work, which is sufficiently transparent, I think, to continue to weld this joint relationship together.

“What was I think eye-opening for everybody is we got to see each of the services’ challenges as it relates to Joint All-Domain Command & Control and all of the services’ individual unique requirements,” Wesley told me. “I think the Air Force clearly understood where we came from.”

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. photo

Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher briefs reporters on the future Army network

Cloud vs. Edge

The two Army generals actually building the next network made clear at an AFCEA conference yesterday that they have no interest in a one-size-fits-all solution. The problem they cited isn’t the balance of power or of the budget between the Army and the Air Force: It’s the balance between centralizing computing power and data in a cloud, versus distributing it to thousands of frontline ground troops at what’s called the tactical edge.

“One service does not have all the answers to Joint All-Domain Command & Control, okay, regardless of what you read about [how] one service may have the solutions,” said Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, director of the hand-picked Cross Functional Team for network modernization at Army Futures Command. “It’s got to be a joint fight, and what may work for one of our fellow services may not necessarily work for the Army. What will work, we’re going to incorporate.”

Even within the Army, you need to customize the network for different kinds of units, said Maj. Gen. David Bassett, Program Executive Officer for Command, Control, & Communications – Tactical (PEO-C3T). The service is developing a Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE) for forward headquarters, which are stationary most of the time but may need to move at a moment’s notice to escape attack. It’s developing a “mounted computing environment” to go on moving combat vehicles and a “dismounted computing environment” that runs on equipment light enough for foot troops to carry.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. photo

Maj. Gen. David Bassett

The Army’s idea is to supplement the central cloud with a “fog” or “mist” of smaller nodes across the battlefield. “It differs a little bit,” Bassett said, “from some of the other, earlier JADC2 concepts that largely focused on … the availability of space-based communications to push everything into a cloud environment that everybody can access.”

What about ABMS? When I raised the Air Force system by name at an AFCEA panel, on which Bassett wasn’t actually scheduled to speak, the lower-ranking panelists went mum as the two-star stepped out of the audience onto the stage to take my question.

“There are some things that can be common across the joint force and we’re absolutely working with the other services to identify what elements of the architecture can be common,” Bassett said. “There are also areas where the demands of the land force require information to be processed in ways that I think are different than … envisioned in what started out as an Air Force concept for JADC2 that’s heavily cloud-reliant.”

Some technical context is in order. “Cloud” has become a buzzword largely devoid of meaning. But when something’s “in the cloud,” all that really means is that it’s not on your computer right here, it’s on somebody else’s machine, somewhere else.

As long as you can connect directly or indirectly to that other machine, you can use what’s in the cloud. As soon as you lose that link, however, you lose the cloud. While even aircraft lose links sometimes – it’s a chronic cause of crashes by drones – connection problems are much more frequent on the ground, where hills and buildings block signals.

Army photo

An Army soldier crawls through a tunnel during urban warfare training.

Think of every time your cell phone dropped a call when you went into a tunnel or an elevator, then multiply that by thousands of foot soldiers moving through an urban war zone. They may be able to form a local network with their squadmates, but not a consistent connection to anyone else. That’s why the Army is looking to install mini-servers in vehicles, robots, and even soldier’s backpacks.

“We’ve got to have more of that edge computing [to meet] the needs of the tactical ground space,” Bassett said. “We acknowledge that some things can be pushed up into a single joint cloud environment” – often literally “up,” via satellite links – “but there’s going to be other areas where there’s going to have to be more horizontal interactions that need to happen between ground forces.”

Army photo

Army soldiers try out an early version of the new Command Post Computing Environment (CPCE)

So if ABMS isn’t the one ring to rule them all, I asked, how do the different services’ separate systems fit together?

“Each of the services is going to have contributions to the JADC2 framework,” Bassett said. “The Air Force clearly envisions ABMS as part of their service contribution, some elements of which might [become] the common, joint solutions. The Army’s going to have things we bring as well, whether it’s TITAN on the sensor side, CPCE on the mission command side, and the data fabric that we’re looking to build here as we approach Capability Set [20]23.”

Instead of imposing a single system on all four services – whether that’s ABMS or something else – the Army wants each service to build pieces of the whole, albeit in strict accordance with a common set of technical standards and a clear joint concept of operations.

“We have a broad agreement on the rubric that we have to enable any shooter via any sensor [and] any C2 node, in near real time, with the right authority,” Wesley said. “It holds each of us accountable for building systems that fit within that framework….Rather than everybody bringing their systems and federating them [after the fact], they have to be designed to behave in an integrated manner.”

US Air Force F-35A

But this is still about building Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2) from the bottom up, starting with individual services and specific missions, rather than from the top down.

“JADC2 has been a great forcing function to get the services to the table to talk about the end-to-end mission threads,” Bassett said. He’s talking about starting with specific, solvable problems, like letting any missile defense battery receive targeting data from any radar, rather than having to rely only on its built-in sensors. (Another more pointed term of art is “kill chain.”) In one recent experiment, Air Force F-35As spotted incoming cruise missiles for Army units on the ground.

Once the services can agree on several such clearly defined problems, Bassett said, “we can work the data elements that we need, [then] you take it out and you experiment, you demonstrate it, then build it up from there. [But] if you try to boil the ocean with some kind of grand scheme which has everything, we’re going to fail.”