Here’s another one for you, this time an exclu­sive video of the T-Hawk Class 1 UAV in flight and an inter­view with an Army UAV oper­a­tor fly­ing it.

Pay atten­tion to his pros and cons on the sys­tem. Neat idea — and it’s come a long way since its incep­tion as part of the FCS sys­tem — but there are still some tweaks to be made.

(Video: CLowe)

– Christian

Installment #2 here folks, this time it’s the Tactical Unattended Ground Sensor. Basically it’s a more robust ver­sion of the U-UGS we posted ear­lier that is designed to be placed in the field.

One com­man­der I spoke with said he likes the idea and sees some use for it at a vehi­cle check­point, for exam­ple. With the cam­era trained on the dri­ver or pas­sen­gers, the image can be trans­mit­ted via the net­work to a commander’s vehi­cle or the TOC and com­pared to an HVT data­base or a BOLO vehi­cle descrip­tion. Rather than rely­ing on the trooper at the check­point to do the foren­sics, the sen­sor can pro­vide that link back to the head shed where more infor­ma­tion lives.

The com­man­der did say that, as with the U-UGS, this sys­tem still has a way to go in its abil­ity to cap­ture images quick enough and in a res­o­lu­tion high enough to really do the IMINT. Again, he said “it’s giv­ing me yesterday’s news.”

It’s all part of the devel­op­ment, of course, and this is pre­cisely what the lim­ited user test is intended to do — find those prac­ti­cal flaws and find ways to fix them.

(Video: CLowe)

– Christian

As I men­tioned on my ear­lier post about the Army Infantry Brigade Combat team mod­ern­iza­tion shindig I attended this week the Soldiers I talked to said they’d leave both the Urban and Tactical unat­tended ground sen­sors behind should they deploy with any of the techs we saw dur­ing the visit.

That’s not to say the Soldiers didn’t like the con­cept of the leave-behind sur­veil­lance modules…it’s just that they didn’t think the sys­tems were ready for prime time.

Nevertheless, here’s a brief from the pro­gram man­ager explain­ing what the objec­tive is for these mil­i­ta­rized ver­sions of trail cams.

(Video: CLowe)

– Christian

A long and very inter­est­ing day today on the Dona Ana Range out at his­toric White Sands Army Missile Test Range in New Mexico. I had the oppor­tu­nity to speak with a dozen Soldiers, from the bat­tal­ion com­man­der level to the team leader about the Army’s most high pro­file mod­ern­iza­tion pro­gram for the brigade com­bat team — what most in the biz call “son of FCS.”

We saw in action the Block 1 Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, urban and tac­ti­cal unat­tended ground sen­sors, the Class 1 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Block 0 and a sta­tic dis­play of the Non-Line of Sight Launch System — all tied into the Humvee pack­able net­work inte­gra­tion kit.

I’ll roll out some info about each of these over the next cou­ple days, includ­ing some video clips I shot dur­ing brief­ings in the tac­ti­cal oper­a­tions cen­ter and dur­ing a cor­don and search mis­sion under­way as part of an ongo­ing test of the sys­tems at the range’s Adobe Village.

But some pre­lim­i­nary take­aways are note­wor­thy. By far the two most pop­u­lar sys­tems were the Class 1 UAV and the SUG-V. From both the Soldier on the ground and the bat­tal­ion com­man­der in the TOC, all were unan­i­mous about the two drone system’s value in the cur­rent fight. One said “you can never have too many robots on the battlefield.”

One new devel­op­ment for the Class 1 UAV is the abil­ity to con­trol and process imagery from the drone on a tough­book com­puter right in the field. During the oper­a­tion at Adobe vil­lage, the Soldier con­troller (who was really spooled up on the sys­tem) was able to walk through the oper­a­tion con­trol­ling the UAV buzzing over­head on the com­puter attached to his body armor. He could radio what he saw to squad lead­ers and other com­man­ders right there on the objec­tive. He said the range was some­where in the 10 klik range as long as you have an unin­ter­rupted line of sight.

Likewise the SUG-V is pop­u­lar, though Joes and their com­man­ders admit, it can be eas­ily defeated with a rock, a blanked or a trip wire placed just out of the ground drone’s site. Nevertheless, as bat­tal­ion com­man­der Lt. Col. Kevin Hendricks said, “if I’d had that on the bat­tle­field in Iraq I would have saved lives.”

For rea­sons of their own (either because it’s too com­pli­cated to use in the heat of bat­tle at the pla­toon level, or doesn’t deliver the res­o­lu­tion and time­li­ness for the TOC needs) no one I spoke with was a big fan of the tac­ti­cal and urban ground sen­sors. As Hendricks admit­ted, “a lot of these sen­sors are giv­ing me yesterday’s news” while rei­t­er­ing that with bet­ter res­o­lu­tion and the band­width to trans­mit it quickly, these sen­sors could be increas­ingly use­ful on the battlefield.

“You have 3G iPhones right now. … It’s like we’re work­ing with a 120K iPhone at this point.”

I’ll have much more — and I’ll let the Soldiers speak for them­selves — after I’ve had a chance to edit my hour and a half of video.

– Christian

It’s ramp­ing up to a thun­der­ing fusilade…

The FCS lobby is load­ing up the bombs, feed­ing the ammo belts and launch­ing the salvos.

While the Pentagon’s offi­cial posi­tion is that the FCS pro­gram will be rad­i­cally restruc­tured and the ground vehi­cle pro­grams killed, Army and indus­try offi­cials are act­ing as if “there’s noth­ing to see here.”

On Tuesday, FCS co-prime Boeing released a state­ment say­ing it had com­pleted a “System of Systems Preliminary Design Review” and, guess what, it totally val­i­dated the FCS pro­gram and showed how much bet­ter the Army would be with the entire web of sen­sors, robots, ground vehi­cles and networks.

The SoS PDR is the most com­pre­hen­sive review of the pro­gram to date. It val­i­dated that the designs for all FCS sys­tems and sub­sys­tems, includ­ing the net­work, sen­sors, weapons and manned and unmanned vehi­cles, meet cur­rent require­ments and will func­tion as an inte­grated sys­tem of sys­tems. The review proved that a fam­ily of net­worked sys­tems will pro­vide greater com­bat capa­bil­i­ties, includ­ing enhanced intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance, and recon­nais­sance capa­bil­i­ties, across the full spec­trum of con­flict.

No way!? So all this talk about vul­ner­a­ble vehi­cles, net­work band­width prob­lems and sched­ule slips is baloney?

And our boy Greg Grant from DoD Buzz reports that Gen. George Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, had a momen­tary bout of hon­esty when he told the SASC this week that he didn’t ask for or want the FCS rejig­ger­ing but he’d been forced to back it.

Asked by SASC chair Senator Carl Levin whether he agreed with Defense Secretary Robert Gates deci­sion to can­cel the FCS vehi­cles, Casey said: I sup­ported it; I did not agree with it. The fun­da­men­tal point of dis­agree­ment, he said, was whether the vehi­cle design included suf­fi­cient pro­tec­tion against IEDs.

Oh, the boxes we get put in…

And yes­ter­day the Pentagon announced a hastily-called together press con­fer­ence for today where Army offi­cials would help reporters under­stand the service’s mod­ern­iza­tion pro­gram for Brigade Combat Teams. One won­ders what they would have said had not the presser been can­celled this morn­ing with­out prejudice.

I have always believed that the FCS pro­gram was far too com­plex to exe­cute both tech­no­log­i­cally and fis­cally as a total pack­age but was tai­lor made as a sort of ser­vice “Skunk Works” that could develop the asso­ci­ated tech­nolo­gies for futur­is­tic solu­tions to aging plat­forms and incre­men­tally pop­u­late them within the force. It’s as if you’re work­ing toward that Buck Rogers goal every day know­ing full well you won’t get there but that at least part of the fruits of your labors will be incor­po­rated into forces who need them today.

The Army’s going to need a replace­ment for the Bradley and M1 soon and as the devel­op­ment of the JLTV shows, there’s lots of cut­ting edge solu­tions or just beyond the edge ones that could make the next set of ground vehi­cles more deadly to bad guys and safer for Joes. Or are we at a tip­ping piont here — kind of like the one the Air Force is strug­gling with — where it’s all just a waste of money spent on manned sys­tems. Is it close enough for us to envi­sion robot ground vehi­cles pum­mel­ing enemy redoubts instead of manned ones in the next “generation?”

Maybe so…

– Christian Lowe

I always sort of roll my eyes when I look at the defense autho­riza­tion bill each year and see Sen. James Inhofe’s suc­cess­ful attempt to cor­don off the Non-Line of Sight can­non devel­oped by the Army’s FCS pro­gram from any bud­get cuts — kind of reminds me of the JSF alter­na­tive engine. 

Instead of parochial­ism, it all really boils down to whether the Army needs a replace­ment for the Paladin mobile Howitzer gun. And I reluc­tantly come out on the side of “yes.” 

I’m going to excerpt Greg Grant’s excel­lent story from DoD Buzz today and draw your atten­tion to a com­ment made on the story — really a com­ment about a comment:

As we reported the other day, the Armys $200 bil­lion Future Combat Systems mod­ern­iza­tion pro­gram looks likely to suf­fer some big hits when the defense bud­get is finally wrapped some time later this month. Rumors of FCS doom have its cham­pi­ons in Congress, chief among them being Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., vow­ing to fight for the peren­ni­ally trou­bled program. 

Dear to Inhofes heart, and his con­stituents, is the Non-Line Of Sight Cannon, orig­i­nally part of FCS. It was given its own bud­get line by Inhofe in an effort to fence it off from pos­si­ble cuts to the larger pro­gram. Why? Well, Oklahoma is home to Ft. Sill, the Armys artillery cen­ter for one thing and NLOS-C builder BAE Systems kindly said it would pro­duce the can­non in Elgin, Okla. Inhofe has included lan­guage in past defense bills telling the Army to build a num­ber of pro­to­types and rapidly move NLOS-C into full-scale production. 

The NLOS-C is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the Armys Crusader mobile how­itzer pro­gram that was uncer­e­mo­ni­ously can­celled by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; many of the parts used in the NLOS-C were orig­i­nally designed for Crusader. It is intended to replace the Paladin 155mm self-propelled how­itzer, and is opti­mized for long range counter-battery fire on a con­ven­tional bat­tle­field. In a state­ment released by his office this week, Inhofe said: To say that FCS and the NLOS-C are designed for a con­ven­tional war is narrow-minded and over­looks the real­ity that the sys­tems that FCS will replace are being used on the bat­tle­fields today in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Over the past eight years, bat­tles in Afghanistans road-less and moun­tain­ous ter­rain have cer­tainly demon­strated the need for organic fire sup­port to light infantry, but of the mor­tar vari­ety, or per­haps a light­weight moun­tain can­non, not a large, tracked mobile how­itzer. In Iraq, the Armys Paladins spend their tours of duty parked in the motor pool as the red legs go off to patrol as motor­ized infantry. 

The Paladin is more than ade­quate to give the Armys maneu­ver for­ma­tions mobile fire sup­port if they square off against an enemy mech­a­nized army any time in the near future. To counter insur­gent mor­tar and rocket fire in Iraq, air strikes from fixed wing or attack heli­copters have proven more respon­sive and accu­rate than artillery fire, if for no other rea­son than the air space must be cleared before artillery can fire, an often lengthy process. 

(more…)

The Army and senior OSD lead­er­ship are debat­ing whether to elim­i­nate all but one of the eight FCS vehi­cles, a Hill source says. The sole sur­viv­ing vehi­cle would be, not sur­pris­ingly, the Non Line of Sight Cannon.

But the plan being con­sid­ered would save a rel­a­tively pal­try $500 mil­lion in 2010. As the Hill source noted, the FCS net­work and soft­ware com­prise “most” of the R and D money.

Also, an indus­try source pointed out that as the num­ber of vehi­cles in the pro­gram shrinks, so does the via­bil­ity of the net­work. The devel­op­ment of the FCS net­work is linked to the devel­op­ment of FCS Manned Ground Vehicles. Each MGV acts as a node in the ground based aspect of the net­work. So cut­ting MGVs reduces the via­bil­ity of the net­work, the indus­try source said.

But because so much of the FCS pro­gram depends on economies of scale from build­ing vehi­cles on a com­mon chas­sis, the Army would be hard pressed to save a great deal. The Hill source noted that half of the research and devel­op­ment costs are for the chas­sis and you would still be devel­op­ing and build­ing the chas­sis, no mat­ter how many vehi­cles you killed.

The Army wanted had a very dif­fer­ent plan to restruc­ture the Future Combat System in the out years, but the OSD said no to it because it saved almost noth­ing in the short term. Now the Army is wrestling with those noto­ri­ous mean­ies at PA and E over the pro­grams very future.

Of course, build­ing NLOS would help remove one very promi­nent irri­tant, from the Pentagons point of view. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has prod­ded and pushed the Army for years to build NLOS and to build as many of them as pos­si­ble. He wants to pro­tect jobs at Fort Sill, the Armys artillery center.

[Editor’s note: Inhofe has each year pushed lan­guage in the fis­cal year defense autho­riza­tion bill that specif­i­cally pro­tects the NLOS can­non and launch sys­tem from can­cel­la­tion if FCS as a pro­gram faces cuts…Read the rest of Colin’s story, and keep up with the steady trickle of ’10 DoD Budget leaks at DoD Buzz.]

– Colin Clark

The vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, com­po­nents and processes used to make armor are rarely dis­cussed with reporters, or the gen­eral pub­lic. Keeping those things secret saves sol­diers lives. So when the Armys test­ing com­mu­nity rolled out the ser­vices top armor sci­en­tists and allowed us glimpses of the facil­i­ties used to make armor as part of our FCS tour at Aberdeen Proving Ground they sent a very clear mes­sage of the impor­tance they attach to this enor­mous program. 

After a brief­ing by two top Army materiel sci­en­tists, the group of reporters trudged in to a large room that looked like a cross between a pack­age wrap­ping sta­tion for a small mail-order com­pany (big rolls of flat and bub­bly plas­tics) and an enor­mous art stu­dio, with sev­eral giant presses and kilns dom­i­nat­ing the struc­ture. Everyones heard of ceramic armor and Kevlar, but few have seen the seem­ingly ordi­nary stuff that helps make armor really effec­tive. The two sci­en­tists had laid out on a big metal table more than a dozen sam­ples of var­i­ous armor com­po­nents. One mat roughly the size of a din­ner table mat looked like woven glass fibers. There was a roll of some­thing that felt and looked remark­ably like mag­netic tape. Of course, there was a ceramic sub­stance that had been shat­tered in some sort of bal­lis­tic test. Next to it was a big thick wad (maybe three inches thick) of sur­pris­ingly light aluminum. 

Ernie Chin, from the Army Research Laboratory, told us that some armor vari­ants involve ceram­ics or other mate­ri­als bonded to metal matri­ces (of which there were sev­eral exam­ples includ­ing one that looked a lot like a hon­ey­comb), per­haps with lay­ers of glass, plas­tics or other more exotic mate­ri­als. The whole point is, how do we put all this together, he said.

(more…)

From this morning’s front page of Military.com:

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Army will deliver some key tech­nolo­gies to ground forces in war zones three years ahead of sched­ule as part of its $160 bil­lion Future Combat Systems pro­gram led by Boeing Co. and SAIC Inc. 

Senior Army offi­cials on June 26 said changes to the FCS pro­gram will expe­dite the use of high-tech equip­ment, includ­ing unmanned sen­sors and robot­ics, to infantry brigades fight­ing in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2011. 

Portions of FCS were expected to be used by armored units by 2014, but Army offi­cials say the tech­nol­ogy being devel­oped is needed for the cur­rent war effort. 

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Vane, direc­tor of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, said accel­er­at­ing FCS and other com­ple­men­tary pro­grams will help “fill­ing the gaps” cre­ated by huge demands on the infantry brigades, while increas­ing the effec­tive­ness and safety of U.S. soldiers. 

Army offi­cials main­tain that while costs may rise in the short-term from the new sched­ule, they will bal­ance out in future years and will not raise the program’s over­all price tag, which has been crit­i­cized by lawmakers. 

Lead con­trac­tors Boeing and SAIC said the Army’s deci­sion to accel­er­ate the FCS tech­nolo­gies shows con­fi­dence in the program’s progress. FCS includes 14 manned and unmanned sys­tems that are linked through a secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions network. 

On Wednesday, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey briefed Defense Secretary Robert Gates on plans to restruc­ture the pro­gram. Gates, who backed the shift, told reporters at a sep­a­rate brief­ing Thursday that FCS “deserves support.” 

Dan Goure, a defense ana­lyst at the Lexington Institute, said it appears that the Army “didn’t want to repeat the same mis­take” as the Air Force in bat­tling Gates pub­licly over F-22 jets made by Lockheed Martin Corp. Gates also has pre­vi­ously raised doubts about the FCS program. 

“Clearly this show that Gates is in com­mand in a way few sec­re­taries have been of the ser­vices,” said Goure.

(more…)

In the key areas of defin­ing and devel­op­ing FCS capa­bil­i­ties, require­ments def­i­n­i­tion is still fluid, crit­i­cal tech­nolo­gies are imma­ture, soft­ware devel­op­ment is in its early stages, the infor­ma­tion net­work is still years from being demon­strated, and com­ple­men­tary pro­grams are at risk for not meet­ing the FCS sched­ule.

Ouch…

Read the lat­est in a series of crit­i­cal GAO reports on the progress of the Army’s FCS pro­gram.

Even though the devel­op­ment of FCS will fin­ish late in its sched­ule, com­mit­ments to pro­duc­tion will come early. Production fund­ing for the first spin­out of FCS tech­nolo­gies and the early ver­sion of the FCS can­non begin in fis­cal years 2008 and 2009.

(more…)