The six- to seven-page capabilities requirements document is waiting signature from Army leadership, Willie Nelson, director of the assured-PNT cross-functional team, said Oct. 9 at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Nelson described this feat as a somewhat watershed moment for the Army because the service has been trying for years to compete a requirements document. Previously, the approach was trying to come up with a systems-of-systems approach for the entire Army that ended up being too big and too expensive.

Now, the approach is to break off smaller chunks to be more manageable. This includes a mounted requirement, which is completed and awaiting signature, a dismounted requirement, which is also nearly complete, as well as others.

The program managers are now using rapid equipping contracting vehicles to get after solutions in this space immediately.

Nelson also said the plan for engaging industry is to ask for specific solutions within each of the position, navigation and timing sectors as opposed to only something that addresses all the above.

“I break it down because I think everybody has an area within that. Maybe you’ve got a specialty area where you’ve got a unique or innovative capability that can help in one of these areas, we’re all ears,” he said.

The Army is planning an industry day in Austin, Texas, for February or March where it plans to provide industry with technical and program or record roadmaps in the the mounted, dismounted and aerial spheres of assured-PNT realm.

The figures are part of the department’s annual Selected Acquisition Reports and cover the 83 major defense acquisition programs that make up the largest programs managed by the former undersecretary of defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics.

The Military GPS User Equipment Increment 1 increased $265.1 million to align with approved Milestone B cost estimate, according to the report.

In DoD program vernacular, Milestone B is considered the official start of a program.

The Air Force’s new position, navigation and timing satellites, known as GPS III, feature an advanced signal that make it harder to jam and more difficult to spoof. That signal is called M-code, or military code. But for weapon systems – which includes ships, aircraft, ground vehicles, missiles, munitions, and hand-held devices ― to take advantage of those capabilities they need updated GPS equipment.

The increase was also due to a revised estimate to reflect department-wide funding adjustments, the report said. MGUE has a total cost of $1.4 billion.

GPS ground system

The report also noted that the Next Generation Operational Control System program, known as OCX, rose $665.3 million due to increased funding to support the Regional Military Protection requirement as well as increased funding in FY19 through FY23 to align with the Service Cost Position dated May 25, 2017.

The increases were partially offset by revised escalation indices, the report noted, with revised estimates to align with the FY19 budget.

The OCX program totals $6.06 billion. Raytheon is the program’s prime contractor.

Army’s tactical network

Separate from the satellite realm, the report disclosed the Army’s tactical network, Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, decreased $7.78 billion due primarily to changes in the Army network modernization strategy.

The Army announced last year it would make major changes to its tactical network citing operational concerns.

Other causes for the decrease are a result of a change in fielding, new equipment training and software maintenance costs.

A revised estimate reflects the procurement of Tactical Communications Node – Lites and Network Operations Support Centers-Lite configuration items for modernizing previously procured infantry brigade combat teams, the report states.

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.

Perhaps the best known GNSS constellation is the Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides the bulk of the PNT data that U.S. and allied forces rely on to communicate, navigate and make decisions on the modern battlefield. Yet, due to their ubiquity and our forces’ reliance on them, enemies have developed and/or have access to portable devices that can jam and spoof GPS signals.

To counter these threats, alternate sources of PNT information should be considered when GPS is not available. There are multiple options available today, and a layered approach to signal protection could deliver better results than relying on any single solution. There are also alternative signals that are available and suitable for low size, weight and power assured PNT devices. A combination of additional PNT signals and other fail-safe solutions, together with traditional GPS systems, can make PNT applications more resilient against jamming and spoofing, and suitable for operations in GPS-denied environments.

Weak signal strength

One of the vulnerabilities of GPS signals is that they are extremely weak compared to other RF signals. Since GPS satellites orbit the Earth at 12,500 miles above the surface and the average signal transmission power is in the 10-100-watt range, by the time the signal reaches the surface it is actually weaker than the natural background noise. A GPS receiver can detect this weak signal in the background noise because it “knows” which signal pattern to look for. Once the search pattern is identified and the data stream decoded, the GPS receiver can calculate the signal location.

This low signal strength also makes GPS transmissions susceptible to interference from natural phenomena, RF transmissions seeping into navigational frequency bands, intentional GPS signal jamming through small consumer-grade GPS jammers or military grade jammers.

Military GPS receivers use the encrypted Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module (SAASM) GPS signal to ensure that the transmission received can be trusted. Although encrypted signals are considered safe from spoofing because their authenticity is assured, they can still be jammed with minimal technical effort. For example, a one-to-10-watt jammer can deny GPS coverage for a large area, whether the signals are encrypted or not. The U.S. military’s new M-Code, which replaces SAASM, is slightly less prone to jamming, but not immune to it.

Counter jamming technology solutions

GPS jamming can be mitigated through interference, detection and mitigation technology and tactics. For example, dedicated navigation systems and unrelated technologies such as cellular systems, although designed for a different purpose, can provide useful alternative PNT data under certain circumstances. A mix of diverse technologies and platforms, such as space-based and terrestrial or microwave and long wave signal strategies can decrease the likelihood that interference will impact more than one PNT source.

Perhaps the best way to deal with interference is to prevent it from getting into the GPS receiver in the first place. Advanced active antenna technology called Controlled Radiation Pattern Antennas have multiple, narrow, steerable beams which point at the individual satellites and away from the interfering signals. Even simpler passive anti-jam antennas whose beams are focused near the zenith and away from the horizon (where most interference comes from) can be very effective countermeasures.

Often interference is temporary, so another tactic is to ignore GPS during periods of interference and “flywheel” or coast on internal sensors. Other options include using an Inertial Measurement Unit consisting of accelerometers and gyroscopes to provide accurate positioning and navigation for several minutes, or employing a precision internal oscillator, such as an atomic clock, to provide accurate time sync for hours.

Multi-frequency and multi-constellation receivers offer an added measure of protection since jamming all bands is more difficult. Current SAASM and the new M-Code signals operate in both the L1 and L2 bands, but new GPS satellites now have the L5 and L2C signals to provide more diversity. Galileo, GLONASS and Beidou signals are other diverse signals available today, though they can never be a sole solution. Additionally, new signals are now available, such as Satellite Time and Location (STL) that are 1,000 times stronger than GPS (though not as accurate), which can augment GPS during outages.

Ultimately, there is no “silver bullet” or single solution approach to monitoring, detecting and mitigating threats in order to safeguard GPS-reliant systems from interference. It will take a layered approach, combining traditional and new technologies, together with innovative solutions that meet both existing and emerging needs in any environment.

John Fischer is vice president of advanced research and development at Orolia.

From CNET:

According to Ford’s patent filing, your vehicle would register a fault in one of its sensors and using a vehicle-to-vehicle network, it communicates with one of these drones, which then finds its way to your vehicle. Once there, it lands on and acts as a replacement sensor while it directs your vehicle to a nearby repair center where the issue could be fixed permanently.

Patent filings don’t guarantee future production, but they’re a solid springboard for implications of a future technology, a possible path yet-to-be-taken. So what could this technology mean, assuming the idea was pursued to fruition? And, more importantly for anyone reading here, what could this do for military vehicles?

First, this assumes a world where vehicles have a reliable data port for the drone to plug into, and it also assumes a network of relief-driver drones ready to swoop into action and take over the hobbled car, feeding new data from a sensor onboard the drone into the car’s own internal navigation system. This would be quite the infrastructure challenge for civilian vehicles on roads, though I suppose not an impossible one.

In a military context, we can picture a similar setup used to the ability to repair sensors on an Infantry Fighting Vehicle, or perhaps rescuing a stuck autonomous supply truck after it loses a camera. Any system light enough to mount on a drone could be added after a short flight to a vehicle, so long as the drone could connect with the vehicle’s onboard computers. It would be one way to add modularity to a fleet, with the possible modifications limited only to what a drone can fly out and plug in. A drone system like this could be instrumental in retrieving vehicles abandoned by crew or left stranded for situational concerns, provided the wheels or tracks of the vehicles are still working.

There’s nothing in the patent about securing the connection used by the drone to communicate with the vehicle it docks onto, though it’s a safe assumption that any such tool would need some protocol making sure only drones that are supposed to take over navigation of vehicles actually do so. Otherwise, the entire process opens up a world where adversary drones could latch onto vehicles and perform a hostile takeover. If mobile navigation systems can latch onto cars to steer them in a helpful way, then no doubt someone will attempt to adapt the same technology for malicious ends.

This is veering into straight-up fiction, so I’ll leave the remaining implications for screenwriters. Still, what stands out about the patent is how it imagines a whole new interaction between vehicles, aerial robots autonomously dispatched to augment passenger-carrying robots when they get stuck. The future is likely far weirder than we give it credit for, and something this strange is now at least floating into the realm of possibility.

The games will be held on the outskirts of Las Vegas at Nellis Air Force Base. Known as Red Flag exercises, the joint exercise will test the ability of pilots from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Royal Australian Air Force and U.K. Royal Air Force to operate in the age of electronic warfare.

Aviation news outlets reported Thursday that GPS-equipped aircraft should expect satellite outages in California, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico between January 26 and February 18. This matches the time frame for the Air Force’s Red Flag 18-1 exercise.

The vulnerabilities of GPS to jamming and spoofing have been known since the technologies inception. While reporting regarding the threat of adversaries deploying GPS-jamming technology has focused primarily on Russia, one of many countries developing GPS-jamming and anti-spoofing technology.

In 2007, China reportedly outfitted military vans with GPS-jammers, and North Korea is known to have jammed GPS signals of South Korean airliners multiple times since 2010.

Every vehicle fielded by the Department of Defense – aircraft, naval vessel, armored vehicle, etc – since 2000 is required to be outfitted with GPS in order to receive funding. Because of the U.S. military’s heavy reliance on GPS, and increasing concern from military officials about losing GPS capability, it is not surprising the Air Force is taking steps prepare pilots to work without a technology that many 21st century citizens have started to take for granted.

Already, the two organizations are coordinating with Special Operations Command, and in other areas, to better equip soldiers in GPS-denied environments.

The Program Manager for PNT, formerly under the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition Logistics and Technology), moved over to IEW&S September 28, according to a November release from the Army.

In one of their first projects, the two offices are exploring ways for ground vehicles to relay their coordinates and provide PNT capabilities even when GPS isn’t available. The effort is an early example of how the new structure will fast-track PNT development and capability going forward, RCO officials said.

“Because we’re looking at what’s possible…I’ll run that through the [RCO] Emerging Technology office and as we find something that we realize may be an opportunity to accelerate, then we’ll move that back to the program office to execute,” said Doug Wiltsie, director of the Army RCO. “We’ll bring information in, look at it, share it with the [cross-functional teams], share it with the PMs, share it with [IEW&S Program Executive Officer Maj. Gen. Kirk Vollmecke]. Together, back at the board, we can say, ‘there’s an opportunity here.’”

The RCO is “really making sure that the information that we gather is shared with the PNT team, and I would expand that beyond the PM and into these cross functional teams, which PNT is one of the subgroups,” Wiltsie said. “We do have a sense of urgency because of what we have seen with regards to GPS and so do they want us to move forward [with] a demonstration and bring that back for a decision.”

With the move, PM PNT joins programs including the Distribution Common Ground System-Army, the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, aerial intelligence surveillance systems and several other sensors and systems related to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

PM PNT brings to IEW&S a chartered product manager, Assured PNT (A-PNT); two product leads, Resiliency and Software Assurance Measures (RSAM) and the Emerging Capabilities Office (ECO); and the Global Positioning System Army (GPS-Army) Directorate, the Army release stated.

The Army’s Rapid Capabilities Office and Special Operations Command plan to run a demonstration in late March of emerging position, navigation and timing technologies that industry can offer. In a request for information released Dec. 12, the government said it is looking for non-GPS technology that can provide PNT capabilities while mounted on ground vehicles without the presence of a GPS signal.

While the notice was published by SOCOM, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities Office will run the PNT portion of the experiment. The office will then share the results with SOCOM and the Army PNT project office as it comes out, Doug Wiltsie, director of the RCO, told C4ISRNET in a recent interview.

“For industry, this is one of our opportunities to allow them to demonstrate their wares and then allow it to potentially lead to additional demonstration of prototyping and, ultimately, if there’s something that has good performance and is mature enough, may lead to some limited production opportunities,” Wiltsie said.

Without knowing what technologies will be participating, given proposals aren’t due back until Jan. 12, Wiltsie said the Army is interested to see capabilities coming out of the autonomy world and technologies that understand depth and terrain that can compare algorithms used to define location on a map.

“We’ll know a lot more come the middle of January about what capabilities will be brought to bear,” he said.

The Army will test these technologies in a demonstration at Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations in Indiana, Rob Monto, Emerging Technologies director of the RCO, told C4ISRNET.

The Army will be looking at these technologies in operations that involve day and night, rain, snow, sun with preplanned routes and specific waypoints to understand what the GPS coordinates are of those waypoints, assessing how well they perform on relaying back where they think they are.

“The technologies will be used to go over long distances, multiple environments … so that we can get an understanding of their capabilities and their limitations,” Wiltsie said. The eventual goal, he said, is by putting them in an operational environment they can understand their performance out on the terrain and possibly in more of an urban environment, a key concern of top Army leaders.

[Urban combat: The Army’s next frontier]

Supplementing current PNT efforts

The RCO, along with the program manager for PNT, is continuing to work on an early capability called Project Titan. That program seeks to provide platform PNT assurance with point protection, or access and integrity to PNT data at a platform level, as well as electronic support sensor capability that would help the Army Europe commander when maneuvering in a GPS-challenged environment.

[Army still working long-term acquisition strategy for PNT]

Wiltsie said the effort, aimed at ground vehicles, is ongoing with a first demonstration this summer.

The Army hopes to make a decision on this capability in 2018, which allows for limited navigation and the timing that is necessary to feed and synchronize all the equipment on the vehicle.

Wiltsie said he expects this effort to transition into production by the end of this year adding the Army is looking at this capability to go to Europe but also inject to the Korean peninsula.

The RCO’s efforts don’t work to field to the entire Army, but rather specific combatant commands based on urgent operational needs statements that might inform future requirements for programs of record.

The effort with SOCOM and the March demonstration is an opportunity to see if there are technologies that give the Army higher performance than what they currently are considering.

Without knowing what technology industry will present in March demonstration, Wiltsie said he expects a few successful technologies could lead to a more formal acquisition process in the summer.

[Army still working long-term acquisition strategy for PNT]

The announcement, issued through the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, lists 10 areas of research interest. Below is a breakdown of the capabilities and the Army’s goal for each project:

[Army rapid prototyping office wants EW, PNT solutions]

• Pseudolite systems. Goal:  Improved situational awareness and support to mission command.
• Vehicle navigation system. Goal: Develop, design, and demonstrate ground vehicle mounted PNT systems for the benefit of mission command.
• Inertial navigation. Goal: Provide improved situational awareness capabilities.
• Positioning. Goal:  Advance the state of-the-art regarding location determination and/or orientation technologies for the benefit of improved mission command.
• Aiding sensors for navigation systems. Goal: Identify, develop ,demonstrate and advance navigation aiding technologies for dismounted soldiers and ground vehicle platforms where GPS performance is degraded or unavailable.
• Navigation sensor fusion. Goal:  Advance the area of navigation sensor fusion for mounted and dismounted soldier applications.
• Biometric for navigation purposes. Goal: Advance the state of the art in PNT through biologically-inspired technologies as they relate to mission command.
• Timing for PNT systems. Goal: Advance the area of accurate timing sources and time transfer technologies for Army applications.
• Modeling and simulation for PNT. Goal: Demonstrate the application of modeling and simulation to each of the other PNT topics previously mentioned.
• Technologies for navigation warfare applications. Goal: Demonstrate NAVWAR technologies.
• Autonomy and artificial intelligence application for PNT. Goal: Demonstrate the application of autonomy and/or AI technologies and techniques for each of the other PNT topics previously mentioned.

GPS has become an integral part of how the Army operates. But it is increasingly the target of adversaries seeking to deny navigational capabilities.

The potential PNT solution would use modular hardware and software on a tactical computer.

“It will be a sensor fusion filter that will allow us to hook up any sensor to the filter, and the filter will understand what the sensor is, what the data is and how to integrate that into a single PNT solution,” said Adam Schofield, the chief at the Emerging Technologies Branch of the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, or CERDEC.

In initial tests, the Army is looking for an open framework within which it could combine GPS and inertial measurement units, or IMU, which are made up of sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers. In the future, the system would incorporate cameras for visual-aided navigation, as well as other sensors to help determine location and direction.

Known as Scorpion, the software driving the links between systems is being jointly developed by the Army and the Air Force Institute of Technology, and it is part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Initiative for Open Systems Architecture for PNT.

An open-architecture interface would make it easier for soldiers in the field to switch rapidly between multiple PNT systems. “There may already be a sensor on the vehicle for other purposes ― they may have a camera for sighting things ― and now you can use that [for ONT] just by plugging it in,” said Eric Bickford, an engineer in CERDEC’s Command, Power and Integration Directorate’s Positioning, Navigation and Timing Division. “You don’t have to add a camera or any other individual systems. You can use what you already have on there.”

Likewise, an open-architecture solution would allow the service to more easily integrate future PNT systems and solutions. “It means you can bring new technology to the battlefield faster,” Bickford said.

Developers say they are making headway in the effort to develop a software solution that would enable that kind of simple integration. In one recent test, they routed a GPS unit through a small form-factor computer and simulated a GPS outage. Prototype software enabled the system to automatically configure another GPS unit and bring it online. “It doesn’t even require a very powerful computer. A laptop will function perfectly well,” Schofield said.

The team also is working on developing a “smart cable,” an interface that would help to facilitate these connections. It too would be based on an open-architecture design.

Additional tests have shown that the system would be capable of handing off PNT functionality to an IMU unit in case of GPS failure.

All the trials so far have been conducted on commercial platforms. Planners say the next phase of development calls for testing of the plug-and-play capability on military vehicles, which may have unique compute platform and other idiosyncrasies. “The idea will be to show what a full-featured navigation system could look like on an actual Army platform,” Schofield said.

If the Army succeeds in developing an open, plug-and-play environment for PNT assets, it could have significant battlefield impact.

“This is a paradigm shift,” Schofield said. “It means you can adapt to real time a situation, which is something that just can’t be done right now without a major integration effort.”

That ability to shift on the fly would give U.S. forces a significant tactical edge in a GPS-challenged environment, giving them enhanced flexibility to meet a range of scenarios. “On a per-vehicle, per-mission basis, you could tailor the navigation sensors that would be required for that mission,” he said. “That also will lead to uncertainty for the enemy: They won’t know [which] sensors will be on which vehicle at any given time.”

All this becomes crucial at a time when adversaries have set their sights on GPS as a potential weak link. “Our mission is to prepare the next generation of Army system to operate with GPS when it is available, but also when GPS is not available. We want to provide a PNT capability at all times, regardless of the GPS environment,” Schofield said.