ARMY AL&T
those sounds as a reference point to obtain a back azimuth on his compass. By triangulating the sound of the artil- lery, he was able to check the accuracy of his location on his topographical map, which was covered with grid squares.
“Most times, we were close enough,” said Ruane, Fort Monmouth, NJ, Force Protection Representative. “It wasn’t always totally accurate because the sound would be distorted through the jungle, but it was better than going 200 meters or a mile through the brush and not knowing where you were.”
At White Sands, the Soldiers within a company could communicate with their own platoon and even with the battalion. Inside their command posts, company commanders exchanged text messages and e-mails, tracked simulated IEDs, and collaborated on the battle using the Command Post of the Future system. They planned fires with the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System. They tracked automatically populated friendly forces’ movements and manually added enemy and haz- ard locations with Force XXI Battle Command Brigade-and-Below/Blue Force Tracking. They also used WIN-T Increment 2; the Network Integration Kit; other Army Battle Command System Suite 6.4 applications; JTRS Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit radios; and shared intelligence through the Distributed Common Ground System-Army.
Today, most of this information is accessible only at the brigade and bat- talion levels, said LTC John Matthews, also a trail boss for the exercise. Pushing these data to lower echelons allows the company commander to share the information with platoon and team leaders and to coordinate the battle during direct enemy contact. During the exercise, information was also exchanged digitally using aviation plat- forms, a critical tactical advantage for rapid and accurate close air support.
11 OCTOBER –DECEMBER 2010
Video feeds are received in a command post at APG from WSMR on July 15, 2010, during the BCT Integration Exercise. (U.S. Army photo.)
One Soldier used the Land Warrior system to request a medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) to the company command post. Using the Shadow-connected system, which allows Soldiers to see battlefield information through an eyepiece attached to a helmet, Soldiers initiated calls for a medic and pushed information almost instantaneously to medical evacuation crews.
“That 9-line request for a MEDEVAC … was sent back to the battalion and then to the brigade at APG,” McNulty said.
Developing the Future Battlefield Network
Throughout the exercise, engineers from the separate PEOs and TRADOC met in working groups to determine how to integrate the terrestrial waveforms with the satellite communications capabilities of WIN-T Increment 2, said Clifton Basnight, a system-of-systems engineer with Project Manager WIN-T. In just a few days, they carefully developed a “straw-man architecture,” laying out how each would operate in conjunction with the others, he said. The group held technical interchange meetings once a week to discuss and develop solutions for routing challenges. Decisions were made as a team.
“Before we went down a path, we had some level of consensus,” Basnight said.
Engineers such as Basnight forged new relationships with those from sister PEOs. Many traveled to separate regions, providing their expertise at each stop.
“We put into play things that, even though they might not have been the total solution, were vetted and had engineering rigor to them,” Basnight said. “It wasn’t done in a vacuum.”
“It was really a fantastic exercise of teamwork,” DeGroodt said. “Everybody was out to make the exercise successful.”
This integrative effort demonstrated the importance of reducing stand-alone developmental efforts, Basnight said. “We left with a sense that we made the impossible possible,” he said. “But this is just the beginning.”
JOSHUA DAVIDSON, Symbolic Systems Inc., supports the PEO C3T strategic communications team. He holds a B.A. in journalism and profes- sional writing from the College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College).
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