Networks and Digital Warfare

The danger of FVL incorporating too much IP and hindering spiral improvements

What will make the Army’s two Future Vertical Lift (FVL) programs — the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) and Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), both designed during the days of the Global War on Terror — relevant in a near-peer competition is their ability to spiral in new technology and capability improvements to counter whatever those platforms may face on a future battlefield.

In short, FVL may provide superior speed and range over the legacy fleet, but it is mission-system standardization and open systems through the Army’s Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) that will determine their legacy.

Said Maj. Gen. Walter Rugen, FVL Cross Functional Team director: “MOSA will be a game changer on many levels. MOSA is going to help the Army live within its budget by fostering a competitive environment with industry that will drive down costs while allowing the warfighter to rapidly upgrade mission systems creating real time dilemmas for our adversaries.”

To discuss how FVL has to evolve to compete against China and Russia, the transformational technologies the Army needs, and how openness can bring together the services’ all-domain endeavors, we talk with Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute.

Breaking Defense: How has the threat environment evolved since the inception of the two FVL programs, as FARA and FLRAA were proposed and demonstrated long before we started talking about the Great Power competition?

Thompson: All the major aircraft in the Army fleet today originated in the last century, mostly toward the end of the Cold War. At the time that the Army began looking for replacements, we were in the midst of the Global War on Terror. That had some influence on how the Army looked at the requirements, but since the programs began, we have transitioned to a national defense strategy that stresses Great Power competition — beating mainly China and Russia.

The problem, of course, is we’re now considering trying to defer or defeat the most technologically sophisticated countries in the world, and that requires fundamentally different technology than dealing with terrorists.

When FVL first began, we were fighting against enemies that had no air forces and no air defenses. Now we’re fighting enemies that have advanced defenses and a whole raft of other advanced capabilities, such as cyber attack, electronic attack, and various other non-kinetic technologies.

Breaking Defense: What are the transformational technologies the Army is asking for and what should industry focus on to ensure spiral improvements and future continuous advancement for both FVL and enduring fleet modernization.

Thompson: The Chinese and the Russians are continuously investing in new ways of waging war. It is impossible to know today all of the battlefield challenges that we might face 10 or 20 years from now, so we need the ability to network our forces and adapt quickly to new challenges that weren’t present at the inception of the program.

Most of the public discussion of FVL has focused on the aircraft and the airframes, which are supposed to be able to fly twice as far and twice as fast as the aircraft they’re replacing. But the heart of FVL is really in the onboard electronics systems, and there has been a mission systems architecture demonstration running in parallel with the development of the air frame.

If you don’t have advanced electronics, then you can’t have 360-degree situational awareness, advanced lethality, onboard diagnostics and self-repairing capabilities, or a range of other things that didn’t exist a generation ago. So it’s essential to have adaptable, interoperable electronics systems that can, in an agile way, respond to new requirements.

To put it more clearly, if you don’t have modular, open architecture to define your onboard electronics for FVL, it will be nearly impossible to participate in networked warfare. All the interfaces have to mesh seamlessly, otherwise you simply can’t communicate with other parts of the joint force who may have life-saving information available.

Breaking Defense: Is it your belief that the Army is doing a satisfactory job in defining its Modular Open Systems Approach for FVL onboard electronics systems? Some companies are concerned that is not necessarily the case.

Thompson: I’ve talked about this with Maj. Gen. Rugen, the director of the Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, several times. He believes that he has found the right balance between having an open architecture and addressing industry concerns about the control of intellectual property. Now, it’s hard for me to judge that without knowing information that’s not publicly available. But if the Army is too concerned about industry’s intellectual property focus there’s a danger that this system will incorporate too much proprietary technology that doesn’t mesh easily with the network.

My view is that the Army needs to control any of the intellectual property that defines the key capabilities of FVL. If it doesn’t control that intellectual property, then it runs the danger of fielding a system that can’t communicate in a timely fashion with other warfighters. Even if the baseline version of the FVL aircraft appeared to be open architecture, modular, and digitally engineered, you can lose that pretty quickly if you haven’t built a foundation based on a truly open architecture.

Breaking Defense: There’s concern within industry that Requests for Proposal often don’t include specific language about open systems. It’s the same for cybersecurity, which isn’t always specified in RFPs. As you know, if openness or cybersecurity isn’t built into an RFP, then a proposal responses from industry aren’t going to include it. What needs to happen to make these RFPs address open systems and cybersecurity?

Thompson: Because they are warfighters, there’s a danger that the people who preside over the issuance of the solicitation and do the source selection will put more emphasis on things like airborne agility or combat radius than they will on the performance features of the onboard electronics. It really doesn’t matter how agile or enduring your airframe is if, when you get to the war zone, you don’t have the full array of capabilities required to defeat a country like China.

Breaking Defense: What makes FARA and FLRAA relevant for multi-domain operations and JADC2?

Thompson: What makes both versions of FVL relevant to multi-domain operations resides entirely in the onboard electronics. Some of these systems will rely on satellite communications or direct communications with other warfighting platforms in order to achieve advanced precision with air launched effects. But to do those things, you must have connections, secure wireless connections, to a range of joint assets. Without the onboard electronics that allow these things to mesh, your ability to be relevant to joint airborne or other warfighting-domain environments is greatly diminished.

Breaking Defense: Staying on the subject of all-domain operations and Joint All Domain Command and Control, what are your thoughts on the ability of the Defense Department to combine separate efforts like the Army’s Project Convergence, the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), and the Navy’s Project Overmatch? As you know, there’s rarely any funding for “jointness,” so the concern is that we’ll never be in a position to truly develop a DoD enterprise-wide capability to counter near-peer threats.

Thompson: That’s a good way of putting it. Yes, JADC2 as it exists today is more of a vision than a program. The services are primarily concerned with integrating their own internal networks so that, for example, Army artillery can talk to Army aviation and Air Force bombers can talk to Air Force fighters. It’s understandable.

Frank Kendall, the Air Force Secretary, just told the air staff to go back and rethink how it’s doing ABMS with an eye for producing more concrete results sooner. But the problem is that if you don’t have standard interfaces, if you don’t have an agreement on what the standards are across all of the services, then you could end up with highly integrated military services that don’t actually have a greater ability to talk to each other in a combined arms or joint operation.

It’s not enough for the services to focus on integrating their own organic capabilities. We need standards and interfaces upfront that dictate a level of performance across service lines, otherwise we never get to making JADC2 a real thing.

Breaking Defense: Some have suggested that a DoD organization like Heidi Shyu’s office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering needs to provide the funding for jointness. Do you think that’s a reasonable suggestion, or even a suggestion based in reality?

Thompson: I agree with it in principle. If we’re going to have sufficient coordination of future network warfare across service boundaries, the direction will have to come from the office of the Secretary of Defense. The individual services will always prioritize their homegrown needs rather than their ability to interact with the other services seamlessly. I think somebody in OSD like Heidi Shyu or Dr. William LaPlante [the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment] needs to be setting the standards and controlling the money to make certain that JADC2 is a practical possibility.

Breaking Defense: It will still be a decade or more before FARA and FLRAA enter the fleet in any significant numbers. How can open systems be brought to legacy systems and fleets to create JADC2-like capabilities for the Army?

Thompson: We’re not going to have a joint warfighting environment unless we introduce some advanced electronics into our legacy platforms. Army helicopters like Chinook and Apache are going to remain in the force until 2050 or beyond. We can’t wait until then to introduce networked warfare. Therefore, we’re going to have to put advanced electronics, new sensors, new communications gear, and new displays into these legacy helicopters because they will remain the backbone of the joint fleet for decades to come.