The Army wants a better network. Specifically, Army leaders want a more resilient network to provide communications on the battlefield while enemies are trying to jam or disrupt the signal. In an October 2017 memo, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said the network must be \u201csufficiently mobile and expeditionary\u201d and \u201ccan be used to fight cohesively in any environment where the electromagnetic spectrum is denied or degraded.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To better understand the improvements that the Army has made in the past year and what forces are shaping the service\u2019s work, C4ISRNET Editor Mike Gruss sat down with Col. Greg Coile \u2014 project manager for tactical network, PEO C3T \u2014 and Col. Nora Marcos \u2014 chief of staff of the Army\u2019s Network Cross-Functional Team \u2014 during the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference, held in early October 2018 in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: What does resilient communications mean? What does that look like? What are some of the characteristics of that? <\/b><\/i> <\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
COL. NORA MARCOS:<\/b><\/i> <\/i>I look at resilient communication from a tactical environment \u2014 what it means to the soldier. When the soldier has a radio in his hand, it doesn\u2019t matter what path it\u2019s going through to get the message through. Is it radio-to-radio? Is it going to go through some other means? Maybe it\u2019s going to be through a different SATCOM link. He shouldn\u2019t have to worry about that. Resilient means, no matter what the enemy\u2019s throwing at us, the message is getting through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET:<\/b><\/i> <\/i>Can you walk through what a real-life example of the contested environment looks like and how that situation can play out if you don\u2019t have resilient communications? <\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
COL. GREG COILE:<\/b><\/i> If you\u2019re looking from an EW [electronic warfare] perspective \u2026 if our comms allow the enemy to get close enough to it, to send out enough electronic power to be able to interdict those comms, that could cause the unit to be disconnected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you had a platoon or a company that was geographically dispersed, you could lose their ability to communicate higher, lose their situational awareness, lose the ability to call for fires and to get support. Cyber obviously provides you with a lot of things that we know can interact to the network. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It may not be deliberate. If you\u2019re in a country doing a host-nation mission, there may be just interference inside that spectrum. There\u2019s just too much going on and that piece of the spectrum is just getting overused and you are going to have to have an alternate way to communicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The soldier doesn\u2019t care about how it gets there, it has just got to get there. And, so, we\u2019re looking at it from both aspects. From a design perspective, are those waveforms or those pieces of kit secure? But, also, if one of them is interrupted, either intentionally or unintentionally, there\u2019s an alternate path. We want to get it to where the system does that automatically without having the solider interact with that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: What role does redundancy play as we\u2019re looking for those resilient communications?<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
MARCOS:<\/b><\/i> If you\u2019ve got communication systems that communicate on different frequencies, different bands … Greg talks about the EW: Is it going to be a burst or is it going to be a broadband that they\u2019re going to interdict and going to attack us with? If it\u2019s broadband, then we could probably find them. But if they\u2019re doing pulses we need to be able to speak over frequency bands so that we can get the message through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: Can you walk through how size, weight and power improvements help soldiers and commanders?<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
MARCOS: <\/b><\/i>The big thing for me is so much of size, weight and power relies on the power. It\u2019s the battery. It\u2019s what the soldiers have to fit in their ruck sack that means they can\u2019t carry the water, that they can\u2019t carry all the food. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Someone\u2019s going to carry it for them. And I\u2019ve talked to soldiers that feel like the guy carrying the radio feels like he\u2019s the weak link in the squad because he\u2019s going to carry all this kit and he\u2019s slowing them down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, it\u2019s the radio, it\u2019s power consumption, but it\u2019s the power production, the batteries that are so critical to bringing down that size and weight for the solider. We all think about the tactical soldier. That\u2019s going to be critical because it means the longer they can stay out, the longer they can do their mission and contribute to their team\u2019s success. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
COILE:<\/b><\/i> <\/i>We\u2019ve had a lot of industry partners that have done a lot of great work to bring down the size and weight and even power consumption of a lot of our kit. But, at some point, there\u2019s going to come a point where you\u2019re going to trade something. So you\u2019re either going to trade power or you\u2019re going to trade capability. Or you\u2019re going to trade size with how many soldiers I can support. We have to go in [to] that eyes wide open and make design decisions on the network, understanding what the expectations are. If you want something that\u2019s lighter, something that can operate longer, it may have to give something up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: The new national defense strategy is a shift from counterterrorism to more of a great-power competition. What are some of the characteristics that you need now that weren\u2019t as high-priority in the past?<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
COILE: <\/b><\/i>There are things that jump right out. One, we were talking about resilient communications. We\u2019ve started programs that give us more redundancy in our network. We\u2019ve also looked at the ability to be more mobile. So, as we talked about a larger-scale conflict \u2014 being able to move, set, move, set and continue to do that leap frog as a more mobile battlefield \u2014 we had to make hard decisions about what is permanently mounted or mountable on a truck that can keep moving versus its deployability. One of the design choices you always look at is mobility versus deployability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
MARCOS:<\/b><\/i> I see it as modernization versus innovation. Or, how do we merge those two? Modernization is, \u201cWe know what we want and we\u2019re going to put that in.\u201d It\u2019s the redundancy, it\u2019s the hardening, that kind of thing. But we also need to look long. The National Defense Strategy challenges us to look at what is the future technology that we don\u2019t know what it is today. We need to be open to that, we need to continue to modernize our force, but we need to understand we can\u2019t modernize everybody at the same pace if we\u2019re looking long and really looking at what our most challenging adversary is going to bring at us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: How do you do that?<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
MARCOS:<\/b><\/i> <\/b>That\u2019s something we have to consider. We have our forces that we know need to be in the fight tomorrow, the next four years, the next five years. But, how do we prepare for the force that needs to get out there beyond 2020? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
C4ISRNET: What\u2019s something in the next 12 months that you\u2019re really excited about? <\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
MARCOS:<\/b><\/i> <\/b>What\u2019s exciting for me is to work the resourcing, knock down the wickets so that we can resource the innovation that industry is bringing to us. Not just in \u201919, but in \u201920 and beyond. We are well on our way but, as a resourcer, I need to do better so that these two can execute their desires and the soldier\u2019s needs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
COILE:<\/b><\/i> We have a number of things that are going in from every formation \u2014 our infantry brigades, armor brigades, strike brigades \u2014 I talked about our signal battalions getting additional upgrades. We are looking at new line-of-sight radios, new tropo radios. A lot of things we\u2019ve been working on for a while are coming to fruition and are being fielded and being put in the soldier\u2019s hands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other thing I really look forward to in the next 12 months is as the PEO C3T and Network [Cross-Functional Team] are kind of locking arms and going side-by-side through this process where we can make hard decisions on design, we can make trades, we can get, fast, realistic feedback on kit, make decisions early in that process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of it is getting a lot of kit to the field, but, also, it\u2019s part of how the Army has reorganized itself from a modernization perspective to move things to the field faster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two Army leaders share their thoughts on the service’s efforts to improve resilient communications in increasingly contested environments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":47533,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,29,16,32,20],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3361],"class_list":["post-15280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-it-networks","category-newsletters","category-thought-leadership"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"KYCBBGENCFAD7HVVFQ6MACMJ3E","arc_canonical_url":"\/it-networks\/2019\/01\/02\/the-merger-of-modernization-and-innovation\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n