The problem: adversaries have become more proficient and precise in the sensing and jamming of signals.

“What we’re looking for in terms of resilience in the future is not only making individual links more anti-jam and resilient, resistant to threats, but also having the ability to use multiple paths if one goes down,” Joe Welch, chief engineer at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications Tactical (C3T), told reporters during a network demo at Fort Myer in early March.

“Your phones work this way between 4G and Wi-Fi and that’s seamless to you. That’s kind of the target of what we’re intending to provide with next-generation transport for the Army’s tactical network.”

Members of industry are now looking to develop radios to these specifications outlined by the Army.

“We have an extensive library of waveforms — 51, 52 waveforms that we can bring to bear — that we can say look we can use this waveform to give you more resilience with this capability,” Jeff Kroon, director of product management at Harris, told C4ISRNET during an interview at the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, in March. “Down the road, we need to talk about resilience and what’s going on with the near-peer threats.”

Next-generation systems, leaders believe, will be able to provide this necessary flexibility.

“The radios that we’re looking at buying now — the manpack and the two-channel leader radios — have shown themselves to be able to run a pretty wide range of waveforms and we think it postures us to run some changes to those waveforms in the future as we look at even more advanced waveforms,” Maj. Gen. David Bassett, program executive officer of C3T, told reporters at Fort Myer.

While jammers have become more powerful and targeted in recent years, officials contend the entire spectrum can’t be interrupted at once. The Army realizes links won’t be jam-proof, Bassett told reporters at Fort Myer, so it is looking at how they can be either more jam-resistant or able to switch seamlessly across portions of the spectrum that are not being jammed.

Kroon noted that one of the big developments within the radio community down the road will be radios that seamlessly switch frequencies or waveforms without direct user input.

“I think, as we move forward, we’ll start to have more cognitive capabilities that will allow [the radio] to adapt automatically, and keep the user focused on their own job and let the radio handle the rest,” he said.

In addition to multiwaveform and a large range of spectrum coverage, Kroon said the Army is also really looking for multifunction capabilities within radios.

Radios also have to have passive sensing capabilities to be able to understand the signals in the environment and provide some level of situational awareness of the spectrum environment.

“They have to have visibility into what’s going on around them … not just for [electronic warfare] purposes but sometime just knowing what’s going on in the spectrum around you as a planner is really important,” Kroon said.

“What’s actually going on out there, I don’t know I was told this frequency was clear, how do I really know. Having a radio come back and say look what we hit … it is actually very useful.”

After 17 years of war against low-tech adversaries, Army leaders understand that the next fight will be against high-end threats and recognize the need to modernize.

One of the critical modernization points is the Army’s tactical network, which leaders have determined won’t stack up against sophisticated enemies who can detect electronic signatures, jam signals and conduct cyber attacks.

Now, a newly established cross functional team is focusing on two priorities to meet these challenges: the unified tactical network and coalition interoperability.

“The unified tactical network is about what are we going to deliver that allows us to fight and win in a contested environment against a peer adversary,” Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, the network team lead, explained at the AUSA conference. He told reporters earlier this month that the Army is concerned about what soldiers need beyond the current tactical network, Warfighter Information Network-Tactical.

“That’s advanced line of sight capabilities, it’s a multi-path solution set, it’s more dynamic spectrum allocation across the network, low probably of intercept and low probability of detection in our radio systems,” he said. “It is about optimizing what we currently call our lower tactical internet, fixing our radio systems to get out of a box-centric, waveform-centric solution and really think of the network as more of an ecosystem.”

While many of these solutions will improve the network over time, the Army is working on short term wins in the interim. That’s where experimentation comes in.

The importance of experimentation

One of the key changes for the Army recently has been an emphasis on speed and soldier feedback through experimentation, prototyping and adaptation. Officials equate this to the DevOps model popular in Silicon Valley.

“Already we’re seeing the benefit of accelerated learning, if you will, from some of the experimentation that Gen. Gallagher and the team have done,” Maj. Gen. David Bassett, Program Executive Officer of C3T, said during a panel the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama March 27. “Things that I may not have learned until much later in the acquisition cycle, we’re pushing that left and we’re learning those lessons earlier.”

Bassett added that the CFT is encouraging the acquisition community to experiment more quickly and to get feedback from soldiers faster. This in turn allows for an improved understanding of systems in ways that may not have previously existed.

One example is the security force assistance brigades (SFABs) in Afghanistan.

“The decision the Army has made with regards to the SFABs and the types of equipment we’re putting in there [is] dramatically different from what we’ve done I the past,” Bassett told reporters at AUSA Global. “I don’t think that would’ve happened, certainly without [Gallagher’s] involvement and with the relationships he brought from the special forces community that I think helped pathed the way for those types of capabilities.”

Bassett said now there is a willingness to go forward with an 80 percent solution and learn from it without a full understanding of what the requirement will be. This kind of philosophy will allow experimentation to drive the requirement.

If the experimentation falls under a moniker the Army likes to use called “buy, try, decide,” then leveraging what is already in use by other services is what the Army calls “adapt and buy.”

“The No. 1 thing we’re working right now is this adapt and buy strategy. It’s adapting and buying solutions that are already available in the joint and special ops community in use that we the Army can explore and exploit to our advantages,” Gallagher said at AUSA Global Force.

As part of the Army’s modernization process, the service created a so-called cross functional team (CFT) focused solely on bringing forth assured position, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions to the force faster.

“We need capabilities that are scalable and affordable sooner,” the team’s lead William Nelson, said at the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama March 27. “There’s no time for long drawn out developmental programs. We’re looking to industry on innovate and accelerate this process.”

These systems need to be simple to use, agile and flexible because “solders should not have to figure out a whole new system or wait years for a better device,” he added.

Maybe most importantly, these solutions must be able to pace the threat in an environment environment changes constantly.

“Our adversaries are becoming more sophisticated, it is essential the Army outpace the threat and maintain overmatch,” Nelson said.

The teams will have three areas of focus operating along three lines of effort. The focus areas include:

• establishing a foundational architecture that affords assured position, navigation and timing path to enhance resiliency and incremental and scalable capability;
• synchronizing PNT efforts across science and technology programs, the program executive offices, the Army Rapid Capabilities Office, and;
  
• conducting experiments and delivering requirements documents that are aligned to the modernization priorities.
  

The three lines of effort, which span across multiple Army modernization priorities, include;

• long range precision fires, air and missile defense and the network first will enable the development in fielding a platform in soldier position, navigation and timing capabilities;
• providing infrastructure and alternative navigation solutions across the battlefield to ensure resiliency, and;
  
• increasing the situational awareness across the radio frequency spectrum to enhance timely decision making for commanders.
  

The Army has several concurrent lines of effort related to PNT. Aside from the PNT team, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities Office is working to deliver short-term PNT solutions that help solve urgent capability needs for soldiers in certain theaters across the world.

Moreover, the Army’s program manager for PNT is also focusing on longer-term, program-of-record-type solutions to field to the larger Army to solve these challenges in a more wide-ranging fashion. The office is still working its way through an acquisition strategy, according to some sources.

Nelson told reporters at the symposium that his team is working in coordination, not competition with these other efforts.

“I see a lot of what the RCO’s doing especially from a mounted PNT standpoint as really the trailblazers in setting the ground work where we…can take the mounted application that they’re working into a broader force,” he said, adding he has personnel embedded with the RCO team today working on the mounted solution.

The main focus of Army PNT solutions to date has been on delivering ground-based vehicle mounted capabilities. Nelson noted the Army must integrate PNT across 90 platforms and 50 different clients.

Despite the fact the Army is focused on ground based systems, Leidos, during a demo at the symposium, showed their solution for small unmanned aerial systems. Using a vision based algorithm, Leidos’s solution, which doesn’t require any new hardware to drones, takes live sensor images from the camera mounted to the platform and compares it to stored satellite imagery databases to provide location in the event GPS is lost.

As compared to other PNT methods, such as the use of inertial devices, the vision based navigation provides an error of one to ten meters as opposed to 10,000.

Given that the current Army effort is more geared toward ground vehicles, Leidos’s work on the air-based PNT side has focused primarily in research and development with the Army and Air Force.

In the not too distant future, brigades could have their own “cyber bullets” that could be used without going through lengthy approval processes or require support from remote cyber operators.

Leidos is working to make this capability a realty.

During a demo at the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama March 27, Leidos unveiled how local forces can use advanced capabilities through a jamming pod mounted to a large MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone. This would allow forces to mine IP addresses, intercept communications and even manipulate enemy messages.

The pod can conduct a scan of all local assess points allowing operators to identify what’s in the area and attempt to get inside networks that might be of interest. Using what’s called a brute force attack, U.S. forces can gain the passwords of networks to get inside. Once inside, the brigade can see all devices and data in the network.

The demonstration showed how, once inside the network, messages from one enemy to the other can be intercepted and even manipulated. For example, one enemy message sought to coordinate a meet up point. While the U.S. operator allowed the initial messages to flow unaltered back and forth, eventually, they began to change the location and time, which resulted in sending forces to the wrong location.

This capability is similar to those used both during the Iraq War and signals intelligence pods that are currently mounted on large drone platforms and which could intercept voice calls from cell phones below.

During the Iraq War, National Security Agency hackers would infiltrate the cellphones and electronic devices of insurgents to provide their location to pilots above for more precise targeting, according to Shane Harris, author of the book ”@War.” Hackers would also go one step further, sending fake messages to insurgents through hacked devices posing as trusted sources that told fighters to meet at a certain location, which would then be targeted by U.S. military aircraft.

Special operations forces also used their cyber skills in infiltrating internet cafes known to be frequented by insurgents during the Iraq War and uploading software that could either recognize keystrokes or covertly activate a webcam, allowing soldiers to positively identify a target, Sean Naylor wrote in his book “Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command.”

The big differences between those operations then and now, according to Adam Hinsdale, project director with Leidos, is on the signals intelligence side. Rather than voice driven, this tool is now data driven targeting Wi-Fi networks and the devices that connect to them. Second, the difference was who was conducting those operations during the Iraq War. While then it was often highly secretive agencies, the goal now is to provide this capability organic to a brigade commander.

What was needed during the Iraq War to execute those capabilities was pretty robust reach back, Hinsdale said. Also, the ability to do that from a long loiter platform, such as a Gray Eagle, around a cyber café for 30 hours without anybody knowing, was not done, he added.

One operational vignette Hinsdale described was that after a team has been collecting Wi-Fi networks and IP addresses for 24 hours from a loitering drone, those addresses could be fed into the Army’s intelligence network – Distributed Common Ground System-Army – which can then identify certain IPs or networks that are a priority.

Authorities

While this type of capability is ahead of current authorities, Hinsdale said Leidos is providing input to the Army’s pilot program to figure out what types of tactical cyber capabilities should exist at what echelons and the authorities they might need to execute them.

Moreover, officials have noted that depending on the types of “cyber” attacks or effects they want to achieve, they may not need new authorities as tactical commanders have full control over electronic warfare capabilities and so-called over the air attacks. This is different from the remote, strategic level cyber attacks that require cross-globe effects through fiber that might transit several third party or neutral countries.

The convergence of EW and cyber at the tactical edge might provide greater flexibility in this vein for tactical commanders. As such, the capability Leidos demonstrated is an objective requirement for the Army’s multi-function EW Air Large program, which will provide brigade combat team commanders organic offensive electronic attack and support capabilities.

Himsdale said Leidos is pursuing the Army’s MFEW Air Large contract as a way to provide this cyber attack capability to brigade commanders. The Army plans to award the contract for MFEW Air Large later this year.

The Army, according to fiscal 2019 budget request, plans to spend $39.8 million on MFEW Air next year.

At the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama this week, Jerry Leverich, who works in Army’s Training and Doctrine Command directorate of intelligence, outlined 12 trends and technologies that his organization is watching to help with that role.

Army leaders are following these areas, he said, for the possible implications they may have on future operations.

The list covers:

1. Robotics

2. Power generation and storage

3. Technology, engineering and manufacturing

4. Collective intelligence that leverages social media platforms

5. Increased level of human performance. This includes physical and cognitive enhancements.

6. Human-to-computer interaction. This can be important because it may lead to increased efficiency.

7. Cyber and space

8. Artificial intelligence

9. Big data

10. Climate change and resource competition. Both of these may increase the potential for conflict, he said.

11. Economic rebalancing and income disparity. These trends can foster discontent and instability, he said.

12. Demographics and urbanization. These areas can change the social and physical context of future battlefields.

“If you think about what we’ve been doing over the last 16, 17 years, I would argue that we’ve primary been contested in the land” domain, Gen. James McConville, the Army’s vice chief of staff said at the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama March 26. “We’ve been pretty much able to sail our equipment across the seas. The last time that an American solider was killed by an enemy aircraft was April 15, 1953. We really haven’t been contested from enemy air and we really haven’t been contested in space and cyber. But we don’t think that is the future.”

However, McConville added “we know that we’re going to be contested in every single domain.”

This new approach will require help from all the services to seamlessly use their weapons and capabilities in all domains of battle, he said.

“The return of a near peer competitor in Europe and the things that we’ve seen in Crimea, the Eastern Ukraine, Syria, things like electronic warfare and the potential that we recognize that we’ll have to conduct operations in degraded conditions,” Jerry Leverich, who works in Army’s Training and Doctrine Command directorate of intelligence, said at the symposium.

Leverich also explained that emerging concepts are bringing forth new ways of thinking about problem sets and new ways of considering how a weapon, including cyber, could impact a large population area or the military.

So before they’ve reached even initial operational capability, scheduled for this summer, the head of Army Forces Command has begun aligning CFTs with the Army’s numbered corps to test new devices and equipment.

“This is where we get immediate soldier feedback to help refine requirements,” Gen. Robert Abrams told Army Times on Tuesday at the AUSA Global Force Symposium. “One of our challenges all along has been, in the current acquisition process, we bring soldiers in kind of late, we bring commanders in late.”

Now, CFTs will be able to call up their assigned commander to coordinate a research session.

“Hey, we want to try something out three weeks from now – I need 10 soldiers to come down to Benning, 10 soldiers to go up to Vermont, 10 soldiers to go here, 10 soldiers to go there,” Abrams said, explaining the plan. “Hey I need a platoon to go, and we’re going to put stuff in their hands and try it out.”

The teams are aligned according to a few factors, Abrams said, based not only on what the corps itself does, but where divisions are in operational tempo and how innovative their leaders are.

For example, most of the Army’s infantry brigade combat teams are under XVIII Airborne Corps, so they have taken on the soldier lethality portfolio, Abrams said.

They also have the network, where 82nd Airborne Division soldiers began testing new communications equipment last summer.

Meanwhile, III Corps has the next-generation combat vehicle — because they’re home to eight of the service’s nine armored brigade combat teams — as well as synthetic training, because the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas-based CFT is only a couple hours from Fort Riley.

“They probably have our best, what we call a mission command training center, where we do our exercises,” Abrams said of Riley.

And long-range precision fires landed at I Corps, because they are already involved in a multi-domain task force prototype that is launching next year under U.S. Army Pacific.

Those Army Futures Command is still standing up, the CFTs are off and running with a handful of projects, based on programs the Army has already been working, and commercially available products the Army is scouting for its own.

One of these is the enhanced night vision goggles, at the top of the list for the soldier lethality CFT.

“Putting that into the conventional force with the speed – [Joint Special Operations Command] was testing these about three years ago – if you look at historically, it would take a decade to get something like that,” Army Undersecretary Ryan McCarthy told Army Times.

Meanwhile, the network CFT is looking at commercial products, he said, because the research and development is already done.

“The applications move so quickly in the communications space, that we need to think very hard about, how do you keep pace?” he said. “The development work just takes too long.”

And though it might be years before all of these things are in every unit, McCarthy said he’s encouraged by the progress they’ve already made.

“We mentioned yesterday, we have a big discussion on future vertical lift this cycle, as well as next-gen combat vehicle and long-range precision fires,” he said.

Not every soldier will have a hand in this modernization overhaul, Abrams said, but initial response from selected units has been positive.

“When we put this stuff in the hands of soldiers, they’re providing the feedback … ‘Hey, thank goodness you’re asking us this now, because we can solve a lot of these things right now.’ “

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Air and missile defense is one of the U.S. Army’s six modernization priorities, per the mandate of the forthcoming Army Futures Command.

The Patriot missile will figure into that modernization, of course, so its creator is working to update both the hardware and software that goes along with it. That includes not only a streamlined command-and-control center, senior manager Bob Kelley told Army Times on Monday, but a re-imagined visual control system with its first new look in decades.

“To be perfectly honest, if I had the right comms hooked to the back of this, I could control a Patriot unit in the Pacific from right here,” the retired colonel, a former Patriot battalion commander, said.

The Army has purchased five of the new battalion-level command-and-control hardware systems, Kelley said, which look like five stackable tough boxes and can be loaded into one vehicle.

The current system, on the other hand, comes with a lot of infrastructure — a huge transport truck, towing a generator, with a motorcade of personnel.

“To really deploy that truck-mounted capability, that unit’s about 128 people, 34-40 vehicles,” he said.

The new system would require 10 people, he added.

To go along with this smaller footprint is a new software interface that takes the small, white geometric shapes of the old command-and-control system and converts them to a three-dimensional map with color-coded symbols and customizable information displays.

“This is almost the same look and feel as the first Patriot system that we rolled out to the Army in 1982,” Kelley said of the version the Army is running on now.

In addition to the slick interface, the new system puts a summary of key information — like heading, speed, altitude — at the bottom of the screen, along with bookmarked displays of more detailed information, which in the current system have to be searched for each time a soldier wants to access them.

“We built this through a series of workshops with current Patriot operators,” Kelley said, adding that there was excitement about the possibility of a new, more intuitive system.

It will also be easier to train on, and perhaps, increase the “attractability” of Patriot operation as a job, he added.

Patriot fire control enhanced operator/maintainers have been a hot job in terms of enlistment bonuses — $10,000 to $40,000 last year — because it’s a tough MOS to fill.

Though the Army has been slower to adopt the new software, Kelley said, they have approved a partial implementation, for 2020.

“We haven’t gotten the final word on full implementation, but we’re hoping to get that soon,” he added.

Unmanned aerial systems have proven to be an invaluable asset for soldiers on the battlefield because they provide on-demand eyes on targets and can provide critical data.

In these future operating environments, drones will need to be hardened against jamming and cooperate collaboratively with each other, according to Dave Sharpin, vice president of tactical UAS business at AeroVironment, who spoke with C4ISRENT at the AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama March 26. The company builds the widely used RQ-11 Raven and Puma drone.

Here are three ways AeroVironment is preparing for those new realities.

Jamming

Near peer adversaries have advanced jamming capabilities that U.S. forces did not have to compete with during the counterinsurgency fights. As a result, Sharpin explained that AeroVironment is hardening datalinks from jamming, widening bandwidth and developing more agile waveforms.

He characterized these measures as counter-counter UAS or aiming to defeat the counter measures designed to defeat enemy drones.

“We’re looking at what we can do from an [radio frequency] perspective and a signature perspective and even some ways a platform perspective to protect ourselves,” he said.

Versatility

Sharpin also noted that customers will want drones that can perform a variety of tasks, including the ability take off and land vertically, the ability to operate in urban environments, and the ability to go from a cruising platform into a hover platform.

Many of these characteristics come to a head in dense, urban environments in which drones will need to hover over buildings, or even blocks, as opposed to circling large land masses.

Collaboration

Another emerging trend is the desire for multiple devices to collaborate and work together to prosecute targets.

Sharpin said he’s interested in the connection of aerial systems to ground systems to share data simultaneously.

Along the same lines, Sharpin mentioned the notion of multiple platforms working together, outside of drone swarms. Rather, he was referring to a variety of devices that could be controlled from a central point and work together.

This could provide greater situational awareness if more cameras are fixed on the same target or if multiple devices have a variety of sensors that can work collaboratively.

“You can start doing things with one platform has one sensor, one has another, one has another and they’re working in a geospatial way to come up with a common picture for the operator,” he said. He adding that radio frequency sensors can also provide geolocation capabilities by detecting frequencies below.

In the decades since the satellites first launched, PNT has gone from being a luxury to becoming a minimum requirement for military planners across all the services.

As a result, “by becoming dependent on it, you’ve made it the biggest target in the way we fight, the way we do business,” said Naveen Joshi, director of Northrop Grumman’s assured PNT program. That means those PNT services are regularly the target of jammers as a way to disrupt munitions, communications and even common navigation.

The Army is already concerned with how GPS jamming might affect the deployment of its smart GPS-guided munitions. In the president’s recent budget request, the service asked for $14.3 million in fiscal 2019 with a total ask of $56.8 million across the future years’ defense program for research and development of assured precision weapons and munitions.

In addition, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities Office is exploring ways for ground vehicles to relay their coordinates and provide PNT capabilities, even when GPS isn’t available.

Joshi and others suggest the Department of Defense adopt a layered approach to PNT and assure war fighters can operate with the advantages it provides.

“The layered approach is an attempt to provide the most economical, scalable, multidomain, assured PNT system that is common for as many platforms as possible,” he said. “An individual solider is not going to want to add weight to their kit, so a more complex system that integrates new sensors would not be viable for him or her.”

The layered approach he describes includes four ingredients:

The hub. A hub can provide PNT services to multiple devices. Like a phone’s location services, a PNT hub combines data sources to provide accurate location and timing, and then distributes that information to other locally connected devices. This can be a benefit from an acquisition standpoint because it means the Army can upgrade its capabilities without upgrading every device connected to the hub.

Finding the best possible GPS for the hub. DoD users can get a GPS signal using precise code, known as P code, which is resistant to spoofing, or military code, known as M code, which has multiple protections, or even the civilian acquisition code, known as C/A code. “In this context, the best possible today is M code, then P code and then C/A code at the end,” Joshi said.

Validation of the data you have. Because GPS jamming and spoofing is becoming more common, users need to have an awareness that an adversary may be trying to trick you. “At some point you have to make a decision. Do I trust this signal or not?” Battlefield leaders can add software to devices to ensure a signal’s success.

Keeping the GPS signal as long as possible. The way to do that is to employ anti-jam techniques, such as nulling, beam forming, and specially designed GPS antenna and counter noise. “When you have a GPS signal that you trust, you want to retain that signal for as long as possible,” Joshi said. “The way you lose it is when an adversary creates radio noise to interfere with the signal.”

Beyond this layer, if users are still in a GPS-denied environment, they can turn to radars or communications on existing platforms to cross reference, such as future mapping technologies. Or users can turn to new sensors on a platform.

A layered approach may not be universally applicable. For example, some vehicles may use a hand-held GPS; a more complicated hub may not be plausible. Submarines, for example, have their own answer, including using different of sensors.

But when a layered approach is used, Joshi said, soldiers can make the most of the capability and complete their mission.