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How mobile networks, borrowed from business, are changing the face of warfare.

		or most, HBO is as close as we'll ever come to the terror of parachuting behind enemy lines and peering into the darkness, desperately trying to figure out if the tank up ahead is friend or foe. And the director's lens is the only way we'll ever see the fear and frustration of dodging bullets at Normandy Beach when the two-way radio has become a 100-pound monkey strapped to a soldier's back. Fortunately for at least some of the men and women in today's armed services, the movies may also be as close as they will ever come to those nightmare scenarios. Wireless communications, broadband data links and satellite technology are all combining to make today's soldier the best-informed warrior the world has ever known. In war as in business, the combatants with the best information usually win the battle. So today's wireless warriors, like today's mobile managers, are the most confident and secure in history. In the 1950s, most technology traffic was on a one-way path from the military to private enterprise. With World War II over and won, the money and attention devoted to battle in the 1940s was paying off with massive transfers of technology to private enterprise—ranging from jet aircraft to microwave ovens. But these days, with the country more or less in the grip of peace since the end of the Cold War, the flow of technology—particularly in 'hit the ground running' and broadband communications—has reversed itself, and the military's warriors are benefiting from the experience of corporate road warriors who have been carrying miniaturized, lightweight, wireless voice and data devices in their standard gear for a couple of decades. Today's U.S. soldiers are benefiting from all the items that make up the primary arsenal of executives: PDAs, laptops with wireless Internet connections, cell phones and the like, all connected to reliable broadband networks that keep all users tapped into the knowledge of all other users all the time. It's just that the military has some novel uses for all this 21st-century executive equipment. Out on today's smoke-shrouded battlefield, a U.S. infantryman is no longer spending time squinting into the gloom to determine the allegiance of that foreboding tank. He knows for sure that it's friendly. That's because the soldier can see very clearly the location of his forces and the enemy's on the screen of his "ruggedized" laptop computer, one that can withstand the shock, for example, of being dropped onto concrete from a height of three feet. As for that cumbersome two-way radio that cut out for Tom Hanks in the moment of truth in Saving Private Ryan? Today's Hanks would just reach into his pocket for the wireless phone. The Army's high-tech revolution—which it calls the "Army Battle Command System"—has been in the works for 10 years now. The entire state-of-the-armed-forces system will seem very familiar to every traveling business person in the modern corporate army. It involves portable systems that can move around easily, tracking what's going on, storing and retrieving mission-critical information instantly, staying in touch with the "home" office and communicating on the move. The businesspeople might like the miniature scale of the latest high-tech gadgets because they don't disturb the lines of their good suit and can be carried easily onto a plane. Their military counterparts like them even better because they leave them more agile and unencumbered, an especially desirable feature when people are shooting at you. The Army is assembling its hardware systems and specialized software to support what it calls its "Tactical Internet," a mobile network of computers, radios and routers that allows commanders and soldiers in the field to figure out instantly where everybody is, be they friend or foe. This mobile network also allows a flood of additional battlefield information to be exchanged among all players, from commanders manning brigade-level tactical operations centers down to the individual foot soldier in the mud. Communications and data traffic for the Army's Tactical Internet are carried over three primary radio systems with each system optimized for voice or data over specific tactical distances. Working together, these radio systems provide the wireless link for America's digitized forces. They also make it possible to combine Global Positioning Satellite data with eyewitness, on-the-ground reports to draw up-to-the-second, onscreen battlefield maps showing both the terrain and the locations of all forces. An Internet controller supports the network and keeps data flowing in real time. The bottom line benefit of the Army's Tactical Internet is what the armed services' planners call "situational awareness." It's the Army's version of the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared." The real-world advantages of a networked Army were on live display this past spring in an elaborate war game played out at Fort Irwin, Calif., some 37 miles northeast of Barstow in the high Mojave Desert midway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The war game, dubbed "Division Capstone Exercise," was staged across 1,200 square miles of Fort Irwin's harsh desert terrain to demonstrate and test the ability of America's high-wired forces to fight a land war. The Army has assigned a tactically tongue-twisting name to the digitized mobile command system tested at Fort Irwin "Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below System" (or "FBCB2,"for short). The name merely indicates that we're dealing with a 21st century communications system to help command and coordinate forces in the field at brigade strength and below. (A brigade is comprised of about 3,500 soldiers in three or more battalions.) A close look at the system used in the desert war games offers a representative example of what the Army is trying to accomplish with its mobile networks. The Army's system consists of software running on the rugged computers that can generate information-rich digital maps. These maps not only automatically display their user's location and all other friendly locations onscreen, but also pinpoint enemy locations as they become identified. In addition to the map data, the system can be used to transmit a range of messages from mundane administrative information to urgent requests for targeting artillery fire. Major General Burwell B. Bell, the senior U.S. Army officer in charge of armor [tank forces], calls the result of having all this information in real time "perfect situational awareness." Bell was one of the Army's senior officers at the Capstone event. The two-week Capstone exercise involved 7,500 soldiers from the Army's 4th Infantry Division, the service's so-called "First Digitized Division." The soldiers divided into "Red" and "Blue" divisions in a mock war using nearly 1,000 networked computing devices. For the purposes of this pretend conflict, the Blues were "us" and the Reds were the enemy forces. As the battle unfolds, hostile forces deploying against one another in the desert terrain, Bell points to blue and red icons on a large screen in the corner of his office: "Now, you've got to do some interpretation because there are lots of squares and boxes and stuff. But believe me, this provides a very powerful understanding of the 'Blue situation'." Bell explains that the system was also mapping the locations of the Red forces, its accuracy dependent, of course, on the ability of the Blues' manned sensors, scouts, reconnaissance platforms, aerial sensors and ground battlefield sensors to identify and report the Red force threat. Given all that battlefield intelligence displayed conveniently on portable screens, Bell points out enthusiastically, "Our Blue leaders and soldiers are going to be able to better strike the enemy where they are weakest and most vulnerable, as opposed to blundering into one of their strengths." Seeing the enemy's every weakness on a computer screen? It almost seems unfair, a proposition with which Bell heartily agrees. "We are not looking for a 'fair fight' for these men and women who have to go into combat," he says. "We want to overmatch our enemies and bring dominant combat power to bear." Easy enough for a general to say. But how does the wireless revolution translate to the soldier carrying a machine gun in the dust and the dirt? Out on the desert, at a forward battle position on a barren ridge fondly known as "Siberia," a Blue infantry squad has just dismounted from the rear of a tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicle where they had been receiving wireless updates as they rolled into combat. Riding out to their battle position, the map screen in the rear of the Bradley automatically identifies the vehicle's location, keeping it centered on the digital map as it moved across the battlefield. Along with this real-time depiction of friendly Blue force locations, the system allows the soldiers in the Bradley to send instant "spot reports" to identify and mark the hostile Red force elements. Their digital intelligence reports are translated into red icons on the computer screens of every Blue unit, so that each Blue soldier's knowledge instantly became the property of every Blue soldier. "We've got a screen inside the back of the vehicle that tells us where we're at and where the other tracks are," reports one Blue soldier. "It even allows me to see exactly what the gunner and the commander are seeing. I can go to the gunner's display, the commander's display or I can go to a map to find out where the enemy is located." The key is that the information is there on a network for the soldier to use, explains Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hughes, a U.S. Army program manager for a key component of the Tactical Internet. But he quickly adds that the commander "still has to use his own intuition and his thought and decision-making process, but the tools are there for him to see this stuff and to react." The bottom line is that a battlefield commander equipped with wireless networks can make much faster decisions, Hughes explains. Major General Bell underscores the power of having all this information in the hands of soldiers and commanders out on the battlefield. "Knowing where you are, knowing where your friendly forces are and knowing where the enemy is empowers our formations to strike the enemy simultaneously in an initial decisive blow," he says. "Now, no one is suggesting that you can win a war in 20 minutes. But out where soldiers are fighting, we would much prefer to give them the advantage of enemy weaknesses at the outset, due to the fact that we have a better understanding of the battlefield." Even as the Army's First Digitized Division is continuing its experiments and demonstrations with the Tactical Internet, some capabilities of these systems are already arriving in the hands of U.S. soldiers in the field. In the aftermath of the 1999 border incident that saw the capture of three U.S. soldiers by Serbian forces, U.S. planners rushed to install a limited vehicle tracking and communications capability. Called the "Balkan Digitization Initiative," it relied on modified QUALCOMM commercial truck tracking hardware combined with scaled-down FBCB2 systems mounted on several dozen Army Humvees conducting patrols in the Kosovo region. The Army was satisfied enough with their ability to monitor friendly vehicle locations and movements that it recently started expanding the program to encompass several hundred more of these vehicles operating throughout the Balkan region. Much like the Army, the U.S. Marine Corps is using wireless technologies in amphibious combat. Just two months after the Army's digitized units left the high desert and returned to their home station, representatives from both the Marines and the U.S. Navy spread out across the coastal region of Southern California to conduct their own digital field exercises, "Kernel Blitz Experimentation 2001." The demonstration attempted to apply wireless networking technology to coastal warfare, equipping everyone from the headquarters command staff down to the small-unit level with mobile computing gear. They were out to test the durability and security of wireless network technology in naval coastal operations, as well as experimenting with how well the various communications components of the network would work together. "Our challenge is to take exploding information technology and use it to fight better, faster, more precisely," says Admiral Dennis Blair, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command. Discussing the ongoing exercise from the U.S. Third Fleet flagship, USS Coronado, an auxiliary command ship (AGF-11) located several miles offshore, Blair adds, "All of this stuff makes wonderful Powerpoint viewgraphs, but what you're going to see out here is how it actually fits into the combat processes that we have." Blair fixes on a practical example—the PDAs, called End User Terminals by the Navy, which strap to the arms of corporals and sergeants. "Those were designed in the lab," the admiral says. "But how do they work in the dirt? Do they want to keep their heads down looking at their Buck Rogers watches while they're getting shot at, or do they need to be looking up? And what if the information that might save them is there, but it's not getting their attention? "So the way you answer these questions is you get them out there and you try them. You have smart people observing today, writing down how they really work, and then afterwards we all get together and hash it out and say, "OK, this worked; this didn't." Ashore, the Marines were experimenting with different prototype models of the End User Terminals, ranging in size from larger portable laptop designs to smaller handheld terminals based on the Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC, linked to an additional processor via short-range wireless Bluetooth technology. Like the terminals in the Army's Tactical Internet, the Marines are linked into the wireless digital Wide Area Relay Network, or WARNET. End-user-to-backbone connectivity under WARNET relies on commercial technology, but WARNET enhances the off-the-shelf Ethernet through the use of power amplifiers and specialized antennae that allow Marines to operate on a highly mobile battlefield. One near-term system upgrade will include the introduction of a standard networking card with an embedded encryption chip to provide transmissions that meet the demanding security standards of the National Security Agency. Data transmitted by the various End User Terminals are received by a series of radios, including point-to-multipoint wireless Ethernet radios. Capable of being mounted in vehicles or carried on a variety of aircraft, these systems can broadcast data up to 50 nautical miles. Then another communications system, which works like commercial network trunk lines, extends the network over the entire battlespace. This system is currently composed of planes that collect traffic from digital radios and reroute that data over long distances. In the future, these piloted planes may be replaced by unmanned aircraft. The data, broadcast by individual Marines out in the field, are painted on screens in the Coronado's Experimental Combat Operations Center, the digital version of the old grease pencil and paper command centers depicted in World War II movies. Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Jerothe, an exercise observer from the Marine Corps' Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Va., says the idea behind the digital operations center is to enable a combat commander "to gather information across the battlefield that's air, land, sea—all the battlespace if you will—in a very quick, rapid, high-tempo environment, to stay ahead of his opponent." Indicating the men and equipment crowded into the Coronado's command center, Jerothe adds, "And what we're doing here is collecting that information digitally and putting it on the screens. We have the different warfighting capabilities throughout the different stations displayed on a common tactical picture so now a commander can make decisions more rapidly." From his "big-picture" perspective two decks above, Admiral Blair acknowledges that they're still working out the bugs in the software that runs the system. "There are real-world problems with managing your bandwidth and insuring that your information systems are matched up so you'll be able to do it safely and quickly," he says. "But what you see here, compared with what you'd have seen three, four, five years ago in a similar exercise, is a tremendous step forward. The problems that they're wrestling with are new problems: computer programs matching up; bandwidth being available; the reliability of networks." It's a brand new battle for the armed services and the Army's General Bell agrees that creating a high-tech military is a work in progress. "The challenge is to bring macro-level enemy information down to the user in a way that makes sense...and for the user to send that up and have commanders and their staffs understand how important it may or may not be," Bell says. "That remains an area of intense focus for us." SCOTT R. GOURLEY covers defense electronics and combat communications technology for Army Magazine and Jane's Defence Weekly.