Jets get Internet … Finally!

Score another one for Darpa.
According to Aviation Week, the fringe-​​science orga­ni­za­tion and the Air Force have suc­cess­fully tested a kick-​​ass new air­borne datalink — think wi-​​fi in the sky — that could make all oth­ers obso­lete. You think the raid that knocked off Zarqawi was fast? With this new datalink, air strikes will hap­pen even faster:
Although it’s just one piece of a much larger [Time-​​Critical Targeting] infra­struc­ture, a pro­gram spon­sored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has made quan­tum leaps in deliv­er­ing high-​​speed, Internet-​​protocol-​​based com­mu­ni­ca­tions to front-​​line air and ground com­bat plat­forms. This Tactical Targeting Networking Technology (TTNT) pro­gram recently proved its poten­tial dur­ing the 2006 Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment (JEFX) at Nellis AFB, Nev. Seven air­craft and four ground nodes equipped with TTNT ter­mi­nals worked with about 20 other fighter air­craft, most equipped with today’s low-​​bandwidth Link 16 data links.
Mission infor­ma­tion was routed via TTNT to AWACS and E-​​2C air-​​to-​​air command-​​and-​​control plat­forms, then on to fight­ers for exe­cu­tion. By all accounts, the tech­nol­ogy worked very well, and both uni­formed and con­trac­tor par­tic­i­pants declared the exper­i­ment quite suc­cess­ful.

Datalinks between air­planes and ground sta­tions have been around for decades. Link 16 — for which thou­sands of fight­ers, mis­sile bat­ter­ies and ships are wired — is really just an evolved 1950s air-​​defense datalink good only for trans­mit­ting basic loca­tion data. For years, the military’s goal has been to tran­si­tion to a true Internet Protocol datalink. Not only would an IP datalink be fast (2 Mb/​sec ver­sus Link 16’s 238 kb/​sec) and long-​​ranged (up to 100 miles), it would be com­pat­i­ble with a wide array of internet-​​ready sys­tems.
The Aviation Week arti­cle includes this sce­nario:
Using its Sniper tar­get­ing pod, an F-​​15E Strike Eagle crew detects a band of insur­gents smug­gling weapons into Iraq. But it’s dark, the pod’s infrared images are a bit fuzzy, and the crew is reluc­tant to attack with­out cor­rob­o­rat­ing infor­ma­tion.
The F-15E’s weapons sys­tems offi­cer cap­tures a still image of the sus­pected insur­gents load­ing weapons and presses a sin­gle but­ton to send the geolo­cated pic­ture to a Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC). A quick search of online intel­li­gence data­bases by CAOC oper­a­tors uncov­ers other data that cor­re­late with the fighter-​​transmitted image. Soon, the F-​​15E crew receives new images of the tar­get area, each anno­tated with crit­i­cal data that show the loca­tion of friendly forces. An accom­pa­ny­ing text mes­sage out­lines a “work­flow” of steps that the F-​​15E crew and asso­ci­ated command-​​and-​​control (C2) air­craft in the region should fol­low.
Bottom line: No friend­lies in the imme­di­ate area. Considerable insur­gent activ­ity and com­mu­ni­ca­tions “chat­ter” at the des­ig­nated loca­tion was detected within the last three days. “Cleared to attack.” Time elapsed: single-​​digit min­utes.

That’s fast. Link 16, the cur­rent state-​​of-​​the-​​art in air­borne datalinks, could never relay the same amount of data so quickly or so eas­ily. I wrote about Link 16’s lim­i­ta­tions for Sea Power back in the spring:
Link 16 is far from per­fect. The net­works finite capac­ity means that [net­work nodes] broad­cast infor­ma­tion only every 12 sec­onds, and enter­ing ter­mi­nals every 24, mean­ing a net­worked plat­forms sit­u­a­tional aware­ness, while more com­plete than ever, comes at the price of being up to 12 sec­onds old.
Its rel­a­tively ane­mic data rate is another one of Link 16s major lim­i­ta­tions.
The wave­forms that evolved into Link 16 were intended just to con­nect inter­cep­tors to ground con­trol sta­tions. As a result, these wave­forms sup­ported only highly-​​specialized mes­sage for­mats adapted to par­tic­u­lar rela­tion­ships between par­tic­u­lar plat­forms.
Adan says that spe­cial­ized mes­sage for­mats have dan­ger­ous con­se­quences. Recall that dur­ing Operation Iraqi Freedom, with­out com­mon Link 16 capa­bil­ity, we had Patriot bat­ter­ies tar­get­ing F-​​16s and F/​A-​​18s.
All these lim­i­ta­tions mean Link 16 is essen­tially a com­pro­mise sys­tem. Ideal future net­works would employ Internet Protocols (IP) to enable true plug-​​and-​​play capa­bil­ity at much higher data rates. But get­ting to there from here will take years and require all the ser­vices and the Department of Defense to com­mit to stan­dard equip­ment and wave­forms.

Squabbling between and within the ser­vices stymied ear­lier efforts to field an IP datalink. And TTNT ain’t out of the woods yet. While the TTNT datalink should be com­pat­i­ble with some of the same ter­mi­nals used for Link 16, it’s intended for a large-​​scale roll­out with the Joint Tactical Radio System, or Jitters, which has suf­fered huge cost over­runs and delays.
Check my Flickr to see pics of Air Force and Marine Corps squadrons that recently gained datalink ter­mi­nals as part of upgrades to their F-​​16s and two-​​seat F/​A-​​18Ds. And check out a recent review of my graphic novel WAR FIX.
–David Axe

June 21st, 2006 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | 19616 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/06/21/jets-get-internet-finally/Jets+get+Internet+...+Finally%212006-06-21+13%3A14%3A17hambling You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.