The Joint Program Executive Office Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JPEO-​​JTRS) is devel­op­ing the Rifleman Radio as part of an effort to bring secure, net­work­ing capa­bil­i­ties to the intra-​​squad level. 

The Rifleman Radio is inter­op­er­a­ble, soft­ware pro­gram­ma­ble and upgrad­able and employs the Soldier Radio Waveform. It is ruggedi­zed and light, includes a con­ve­nient push-​​to-​​talk, and a hands-​​free head­set. The sys­tem is self-​​networking and will expand and con­tract as radios are added or sub­tracted from the net. Recently tests of the new radio were con­ducted at Fort Bliss, Texas with the 1st Armored Division. 

Right now, the indi­vid­ual Soldiers and their squad lead­ers are the biggest have-​​nots within the com­mu­ni­ca­tions arena, said Maj. Tracy Mann, of the TRADOC Capability Manager for Tactical Radios. This capa­bil­ity will allow squad lead­ers and team lead­ers to talk directly to their sub­or­di­nates, and their sub­or­di­nate lead­ers to be able to com­mand and con­trol their indi­vid­ual squad and pla­toon bat­tle troops. 

By employ­ing a National Security Agency Type 2 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, the Rifleman Radio can offer con­trolled but unclas­si­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions a Soldier can employ with­out requir­ing secu­rity clear­ances. This solves one radio prob­lem for infantry units, which are com­prised mostly of troops who are not cleared. The NSA Type 2 encryp­tion bars clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion from being passed dur­ing trans­mis­sions and makes secure infor­ma­tion more dif­fi­cult for ene­mies to inter­cept. With these fac­tors in place, the Rifleman Radio will not only deliver 10 to 100 times the band­width to the tac­ti­cal edge, but at the same time, make shar­ing infor­ma­tion more secure for the Soldier.

(more…)

The future is now.

Or maybe a year to 18 months from now.

That’s about how long it would take L3 Communications to prep and demon­strate extend­ing Future Combat Systems capa­bil­i­ties to the Army’s Cold War gen­er­a­tion systems.

FCS envi­sions all bat­tle­space intel — drawn from satel­lites, elec­tronic war­fare air­craft and other sig­nal intel­li­gence plat­forms — feed­ing all tar­get­ing data to its sig­nals intel­li­gence ground sta­tion called Prophet, a trio of vehi­cles linked to a Humvee-​​based com­mand sta­tion. The data is crunched or fused at Prophet, cre­at­ing an accu­rate and com­plete pic­ture of the bat­tle­space and tar­gets that then can be dis­patched to a com­bat unit or vehicle.

But FCS as envi­sioned extends to just a rel­a­tive hand­ful — maybe 15 to 17 — of the Army’s 70-​​plus brigades.

Left out of the vision will be the Army’s M1 tanks and Bradley fight­ing vehi­cles, says Mark Landrith, direc­tor of com­bat sys­tems for L3’s ComCept division.

What L3 pro­poses is bridg­ing the older plat­forms with the FCS, so that every Army brigade will have the same kind of capabilities.

Landrith said a demon­stra­tion could be read­ied any­where from 12 to 18 months from now if the Army wanted a test. He said a lim­ited demon­stra­tion might trans­mit data from an RC-​​135V/​W Rivet Joint sur­veil­lance to the Prophet sys­tem, and from there to what­ever vehi­cle was selected for the test.

The demon­stra­tion would cost in the area of about $1 mil­lion, he estimated.

– Bryant Jordan

The Pentagon’s IT geeks are putting together plans for a new White House “top-​​secret net­work and mul­ti­me­dia Crisis Management System (CMS) designed to oper­ate in a wide range of fixed loca­tions, on Air Force One and on a new fleet of pres­i­den­tial heli­copters.” That’s accord­ing to the fine folks at FCW​.com. The idea is to “pro­vide the pres­i­dent, cab­i­net sec­re­taries, and des­ig­nated agency direc­tors and their staffs with a secure, ded­i­cated net­work capa­ble of han­dling full motion video, voice graph­ics and data at 64 fixed and mobile loca­tions.“
The new net­work will also fea­ture a col­lab­o­ra­tive tool suite sim­i­lar to Microsoft Share Point. It will allow the top fed­eral lead­ers to view and work on doc­u­ments on the net­works video dis­plays. Ten loca­tions will be equipped with the new tech­nol­ogy in 2008 at a cost of $12 mil­lion, accord­ing to the DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] bud­get doc­u­ments.
DISA said it will equip two next-​​generation Boeing 747s that serve as Air Force One and nine new pres­i­den­tial heli­copters with the new net­work and CMS. They will also be on six 757 and two 737 VIP air­craft used by the vice pres­i­dent and cab­i­net sec­re­taries. The new net­work will pro­vide the lead­ers with near per­fect reli­a­bil­ity and com­mu­ni­ca­tions sur­viv­abil­ity, the DISA bud­get doc­u­ments state. 

Back in September, Newsday sparked a furi­ous debate when it reported that Hezbollah had hacked into Israel’s best-​​protected radios. At stake was more than that secu­rity of Israeli com­mu­ni­ca­tions; American radios, which rely on sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies and designs, would also be at risk if the ter­ror group was now able to lis­ten in.
Now, Aviation Week is weigh­ing in, to say that the hack never hap­pened.

Hezbollah is inca­pable of pen­e­trat­ing and exploit­ing the Israeli army’s tac­ti­cal radio sys­tems as it claimed it did dur­ing the recent fight­ing in Lebanon, say senior U.S. elec­tron­ics indus­try offi­cials.
Even so, the mil­i­tant Islamic orga­ni­za­tion is par­lay­ing the results of a rel­a­tively com­mon sig­nals intel­li­gence capa­bil­ity for ana­lyz­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions traf­fic and inter­cept­ing cell-​​phone calls into a major psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare vic­tory, say U.S. offi­cials. The suc­cess has been so com­plete that both Israel Defense Force (IDF) and U.S. Army users of advanced encrypted, frequency-​​hopping radios have raised doubts about the secu­rity of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions.
“What they’re really doing is a very good psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tion,” says a senior infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions spe­cial­ist and indus­try exec­u­tive. “One of the things you want to do is instill doubt. Hezbollah makes the pro­nounce­ment that they can read encrypted radios. They wanted the IDF troops to believe they weren’t as invul­ner­a­ble as they thought… They scored big time.” 

“What was more rel­e­vant was mon­i­tor­ing cell phones,” [a] sig­nals intel­li­gence spe­cial­ist tells the mag­a­zine, echo­ing what we said here when the Newsday story broke.

“Everybody out there has a cell phone. You see any pic­ture of troops on the street in Baghdad and they’ve got a Blackberry or a cell phone. That’s what is mon­i­tored… With some­thing like a police radio scan­ner, if you’re in the right fre­quency, you can lis­ten to a cell phone.”

Except… it’s not that sim­ple. The Northeast Intelligence Network got a hold of some IDF pic­tures, show­ing a Hezbollah hide­out with equip­ment that’s a whole lot more sophis­ti­cated than police scan­ners.
So what really hap­pened? Many Defense Tech read­ers — guys who know a thing or two about secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions — believe that Hezbollah never actu­ally decrypted Israel’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which rely on “spread-​​spectrum” (bounc­ing from one fre­quency to the next) tech­nolo­gies. They didn’t have to, as Nicholas Weaver noted:

Just some high speed tri­an­gu­la­tion of spread-​​spectrum sources (which actu­ally, the spread-​​spectrum nature prob­a­bly helps, just a bunch of anten­nas look­ing at ONE fre­quency with high-​​precision tim­ing, and take advan­tage that it “hops on, hops off” cleanly to get start-​​end time for each sig­nal source) can give you a huge amount of infor­ma­tion as to where the com­mu­ni­cat­ing enemy is.

Av Week’s spe­cial­ist basi­cally draws the same conclusion.

“It’s not the hop­ping but the encryp­tion that’s very dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to break,” the spe­cial­ist says. “What they did is use direc­tion find­ing [DF] to locate fre­quency hop­pers. In fact, they’re eas­ier to DF than con­ven­tional sig­nals because you have more shots at it. With a com­mer­cially avail­able sys­tem, you can prob­a­bly find at least one of the frequencies.”