UNIQUE INSIGHT


An unusually frank and open forum among government and industry competitors yielded new insights into developing a Gator Landmine Replacement command-and-control system.


by Waliul Mizan and Sean Stevens T 26


raditional land mines have been used for decades by the U.S. Army to “shape the terrain” in order to deny, slow or steer an enemy advance. However, once the mines


were deployed, the warfighter lost the ability to control the field.


Adding a command-and-control architecture would provide the gateway for the warfighter to remotely arm, fire and assess the status of the minefield.


Tis capability would add a whole new dimension to terrain-shaping, with the ability to selectively turn it off. To simplify, a user could create a dynamic muni- tion field that could feed sensor information back to Army mission command to ascertain vehicle move- ment in the minefield and to allow a remotely initiated lethal response or safe passage. An aging land mine inventory that needed to be replaced created an oppor- tunity at Picatinny Arsenal to push for this capability.


Te effort is significant, as current policy restricts the use of antipersonnel land mines to systems that have


Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2019


a human in the loop. Te requirement for the replace- ment includes a command-and-control capability in the Gator Landmine Replacement system. (See related article, “A New Way of Tinking,” Army AL&T January – March 2017, Page 40.) Each munition field consists of three critical components: a bottom attack capability, a top attack capability and a command- and-control architecture to securely network the field back to Army mission command. (See Figure 1.) Part of the difficulty in creating the command-and-control portion of the system is that each building block of a minefield, which can be made up of many build- ing blocks, is 150 by 250 meters. Within a minefield, the munitions must communicate not only with other munitions, but also with the operator-control station. Te number of operators required in the loop has yet to be determined.


The Product Manager for the Gator Landmine Replacement (PM GLMR) is on an accelerated sched- ule—milestone A is scheduled for the third quarter of FY19, with milestone B just 18 months later— to develop and deliver the next-generation field of


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