What happens when the U.S. Army, whose Blue-Force Tracking system runs on Microsoft software, starts introducing the Future Combat Systems (FCS) vehicles that use the Linux operating system?
That's just one of the technical quandaries the service is grappling with in four "Battle Command" summits that are bringing some 70 programmers, engineers and information technology (IT) profession-als to Washington to work up an IT roadmap.
The Army uses "battle command" to refer to battlefield radios and electronic networks and the commanders who use them.
"It is not just battle command, but the IT network behind battle command which as a complete solution needs to be addressed," said U.S. Army Col. Brian Donahue, director of Army LandWarNet G3.
The first two, held in the Washington area in September and November, will be followed by two more in February and April, all chaired by Gen. Richard Cody, vice chief of staff of the Army.
The Battle Command summits are organized into four topic areas, including battle command brigade and below, which examines communications between brigade-size and smaller units; brigade and above, or communications between larger units; transport; and logistics.
A goal of the summit is to plan how to synchronize the operating systems.
"You can't have a Lego that has a square notch and one that has a round notch and put them together and put them out there," said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army's chief information officer.
"Everything you put out there has to snap together and work together. This whole effort to drive this convergence is to make sure that not only the combat brigades, but the functional brigades, the support brigades, even the divisional headquarters all have to figure out how to work together," he said.
There is a strong financial incentive to combine battle command systems, a congressional source said; in 2008, the Army budgeted $3.1 billion overall for the FCS program and $625 million on Blue-Force Tracking.
"The Army is continuing to develop two sets of software for battle command," a congressional staffer said. "It is an open question as to whether the Army can continue to afford to do both."
The first FCS brigade will arrive in 2015 with a new architecture suited for the 21st century, but it will have to operate with a largely 20th-century force.
"There will be units out there in many cases that will have to play with each other and work with each other," Sorenson said. "We do not want to have an Army of the haves, with all the latest capability, functioning next door to those that don't have, because they will not be able to exchange data, situational awareness, information, maps and intel."
At the moment, Linux-based operating systems can communicate only to a limited degree with Microsoft-based systems, according to an Army official familiar with the summits.
However, the service is working with software called Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, a product designed to increase interoperability by connecting different servers to one another.
"Red Hat 5 will link Linux with Microsoft and allow FCS forces to link with other brigade combat teams," the Army official said. "This will be an interim solution because over the long haul, eventually all of the Army's networks will be Linux-based."
Also being discussed at the summits is a DoD-wide program called Net Enabled Command Capability, a Defense Information Systems Agency effort to synchronize communication across the services.
With Net Enabled Command Capability, "you are talking about taking the battle command applications we are building and combining them with the battle command capabilities that are in the Air Force, Navy and Marines, making sure they work together and draw from the same data," Sorenson said. "The idea is so that what is seen on the ground in a combat environment at the soldier level can be transmitted up to an Air Force pilot. For the first time, you have a guy sitting in an F-16 with the same view as the soldier on the ground."
Work on the radio links is most advanced, with the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) mobile satellite terminals and the digital, software-programmable Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) arriving in the force in 2009 and 2010.
But much more remains to be done to establish formats for exchanging information among service communities that have long worked separately.
"You have the intel, you have the fires, you have the maneuvers and you have air defenses," Sorenson said. "As a consequence, they would not share data even though they had the need for that data. Now what we are trying to get to is kind of a data warehouse."
Summit participants, which include U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command and FCS personnel, say there has been progress in outlining the timelines for IT integration.
Sorenson said the timely delivery of WIN-T and JTRS will depend on the Army getting all the money it asks for in the upcoming Program Objective Memorandum, arriving sometime in the next month.
Congress authorized $853.6 million for JTRS in 2008. ■
E-mail: kosborn@defensenews.com.
The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is ready to test a few components that soldiers may have in their hands by 2010.
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