In a bid to further reduce friendly-fire casualties, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' next tracking terminal will update the positions of vehicles about 30 times faster than current tracking units.
Currently, the Army and Marines have fielded 55,000 of the units, popularly known as Blue Force Tracker, developed by Northrop Grumman and deployed in 2003.
But its relatively slow five-minute refresh rate prompted the development of the new Blue Force Tracking 2 (BFT2) system, which refreshes every 10 seconds.
A senior Army officer who led forces in Iraq said the faster BFT2 will make a huge difference.
"Five minutes is a long time when you could not get an update on the battlefield," he said.
The new system, expected to arrive in 2010, also will allow troops to exchange e-mail and even Microsoft Word documents. But it may change some of the Army's current and planned communications programs.
"This fills an information niche for mobile forces on the move," said U.S. Army Col. Tim Coffin, Joint Forces Component Command for space.
The BFT2 is being developed under a 2004 systems engineering and integration contract with Northrop.
The Army and Marine Corps plan to buy the new terminal as part of their plans to keep equipping vehicles and helicopters with force-tracking gear, Army and DoD officials said.
The Army and Marines had planned to buy 120,000 of the current BFT units. It remains unclear whether the services will replace existing units with the newer version.
The new terminals will cost around $2,500 apiece, while today's cost roughly $1,600 each, Northrop officials said.
The new BFT 2 transceivers take advantage of Inmarsat IV's newer constellation of satellites that offer higher data rates, Coffin said.
"BFT2 will allow for data rates of 120 kilobits on the forward link and up to 3 kilobits on the return link on an Inmarsat 4 satellite channel," said Frank Ganaden, chief engineer of BFT2 for co-developer ViaSat.
That's as much as 50 times faster when downloading and 30 times faster when uploading, said Kevin Anastas, a Northrop Grumman account manager for Army command-and-control efforts.
"If you are going to call artillery fire, you need to know where your people are so you don't fire on top of your people or on friendlies," Anastas said. "If the guy to your left refreshed four or five minutes ago, he may be a long distance from where you think he is."
The new gear will also allow troops to use the vehicle-mounted terminals to exchange images, messages, e-mail and intelligence reports. BFT 2 also will have better encryption.
But Coffin said the encryption needed to be better yet.
"This is an interim step towards where you want to be," he said. "This system is working off commercial bandwidth right now, and we have to weigh the risks and the benefits of each of those."
In development by Northrop and ViaSat since April 2007, BFT2 was demonstrated in August to program managers at Fort Eustis, Va., then to general officers at the AUSA show, then in a helicopter Oct. 9 back at Fort Eustis.
"There are eight of these systems in existence. We're testing early prototypes," Anastas said.
Operational tests are slated to end next year, with deployment perhaps in early 2010, Northrop and Army officials said.
Northrop says BFT2 could also pave the way toward Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P), the Army-Marine Corps command-and-control system expected in 2010.
"The additional bandwidth enabled by the new transceiver could become the backbone of the network required for the Joint Battle Command-Platform program," said Joe Taylor, vice president of Northrop Grumman's Ground Combat Systems.
BFT2 also promises to improve how information is shared between units equipped with today's vehicles and those driving Future Combat Systems (FCS) vehicles.
One analyst said BFT 2 could complement Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T), which aims to connect forces on the move via small satellite dishes.
"WIN-T will overlay BFT 2 so you can get much more data back and forth between units," said Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank. "The key issue now is interoperability. The more that BFT is improved, the more that can be achieved."
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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