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Posted on 04/11/2003 9:54:41 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
The Defense Department's recent push to increase bandwidth available to troops in the Persian Gulf is paying off in spades, including more success in intercepting surface-to-surface missiles, officials say.Increasing communication lines has helped to 'close the time loop'it takes to launch a defensive strike against an enemy missile once it has been launched and is in stark contrast to the 1991 war when there were almost as many 'misses' as there were 'hits' of the missiles, they say.
"Although the number of deployed forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom are only half that of Operation Desert Storm, our bandwidth usage in OIF is more than 30 times as great," said Rear Adm. Nancy Brown, the Joint Staff's deputy director for command, control, communications and computer systems.
"Use of vastly improved intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets -- such as unmanned air vehicles like Predator -- increase bandwidth requirements, but allow dramatically shortened decision cycle time in the targeting problem," she told the House Armed Services terrorism, unconventional threats and capabilities subcommittee on April 3.
And current military operations in Iraq are a prime example of improved targeting because of more able networks, according to John Stenbit, the assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence.
"If you were to compare 1991 Iraq and today . . . we were not very good at closing the time loop" from when enemy forces would fire a surface-to-surface missile to when "we'd could try to go over and shoot the tail," Stenbit told the House subcommittee.
Last year, with the war considered a high probability, the Defense Department began aggressively expanding bandwidth available to troops in the Persian Gulf (Inside the Pentagon, March 13, p2). Many military command sites in Southwest Asia now support connections in the OC-3 range. OC-3 lines transmit 155 megabits of information per second.
Now, because of bandwidth upgrades and an intense focus on network-centric warfare concepts, targeting success in Iraq today is much more common, he said.
"We had almost as many hits as we had misses and as many misses as we had hits" in 1991, Stenbit said.
"We were closer to one out of 10 last time and closer to nine out of 10 this time."
Stenbit plans to provide future warfighters even more bandwidth access through a new effort called the Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion program. On March 6, he approved a plan to spend $877 million over the next two years to connect 92 selected defense and intelligence sites to a new low-latency, high-speed optical Internet Protocol network that will allow sites to consume at least 10 gigabites per second or more. (ITP, March 13, p1).
Stenbit hopes the GIG BE, paired with sophisticated new communication technologies in space like lasers will enable future warfighters to post vast amounts of raw intelligence on a common network. Doing so, he says, will close the time loop that much faster.
"There's no question that today we are much better at distributing important information more broadly," allowing more people access to more data, he said. "I think you'll find the after-action report on what's going on in Iraq to be that we have a lot of [communications] and it's working very well," Stenbit later added.
Recent wargaming has shown, however, that if troops had all the bandwidth they could possibly want, they could "interactively talk with data sources" and accomplish much more at an even greater speed, he said.
Stenbit said he wants to focus more on improving tactical communications. By 2008, troops fighting on the ground, in the air and at sea should see almost complete interoperability of systems bought years ago and maintained separately by the services, Stenbit and Brown told the House subcommittee. The Defense Department is planning to spend an additional $2 billion to make sure it happens, according to Brown.
"We're not there yet, but this year we made more progress addressing our legacy systems and making them interoperable and planning it and getting the money in the budget to [achieve interoperability on the battlefield] than we have made in the past 10 years," Brown said.
-- Anne Plummer
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