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Wednesday, June 20, 2001

The system combines wireless communications and commercial off-the-shelf products instead of satellite resources, which are scarce and require authorization.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is showcasing the system, known as WARNET, this week at Camp Pendleton, a large Marine base in California.

Military planners pitch the system - which lets ground troops see a map of the battlefield complete with enemy locations - as a way to help troops fight in littoral spaces, along foreign shores.

The system consists of three levels. Aerial reconnaissance units, including unmanned air vehicles and a Navy CH-46 assault helicopter, contain airborne nodes. They in essence record and transmit a bird's-eye view of the battlefield. The system ultimately links that information with headquarters on shore and on ship and beams the data to computers held by infantry units on the ground.

The system is designed to further the military's strategic goals of relying less on U.S. forces stationed on foreign soil, as was the case in West Germany, and more on mobile forces housed on American warships.

Beach-storming troops often find themselves without sufficient communications infrastructure, a problem WARNET is intended to solve.

"What this program is designed to do is significantly enhance situational awareness at all levels, whether it's a battalion, company or small unit," he said. "The whole idea is that if you make the warfighter more aware, then we significantly increase the times we see the enemy and reduce the times he sees us or we see each other at the same time."

Roy Cole, who works at ONR, said he hopes the system will give soldiers in the field "a tailored slice of a common database. What they see is a function of their geospatial location and unit level. Squads, for example, don't need to see what battalions see, but a subset of that. And it's all done without having to rely solely on satellite communications or terrestrial relay."

The system relies on commercial products such as a WaveLAN II network card enhanced for military operations.

Cole said the ONR is sensitive to security concerns and is working to incorporate technologies whose security levels have been approved by the National Security Agency. He said some commercially available encryption systems are useful and that planners "haven't had a problem with any data being compromised using commercial encryption technologies."

"My concern is not technological but has to do with doctrine and chain of command," said John Keller, editor of Military & Aerospace Electronics, a trade publication.

"How do you fold it into forces? How do battalion commanders make best use of it? They are talking about access to tremendous amounts of information, does that have the potential to threaten their chain of command?"

Keller said technology demonstrations are designed to work out those sorts of questions.

John Petrik, an ONR spokesman, said the system would enhance rather than erode the chain of command.

"If a subordinate gets a mission and he or she can see that it's become impossible because of some hitherto unknown or unforeseen circumstances, then you want that subordinate to be able to report and adapt to the changes," Petrik said. These "technologies are designed to make this kind of flexibility possible."

Petrik said planners have developed ways to prevent network intrusions, but he was unable to comment on them.

"The last thing you want is for loss of a single terminal to compromise the entire network, and [military engineers] think they have figured out how to prevent this," he said.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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