“...Based on this psychobabble, it must be getting close to budget preparation time...” [SuperLuminal, post 5]
“The Army must have paid the contractor a lot of money for that word salad.” [mikey_hates_everything, post 6]
“My assistant, a young man of 28, is going off to Ft. Benning boot camp on September 9 to do exactly what this article speaks of....” [Cen-Tejas, post 7]
The article sounds like word salad because scarcely anyone on this forum is familiar with the basics.
The use of the electromagnetic spectrum for attack, defense, disruption, surveillance, and intelligence collection predates 1900. But the US military establishment has struggled for decades, to develop a coordinated, coherent approach to using the spectrum, denying its use to adversaries, and assuring its use by friendly forces.
Mere management of the electromagnetic spectrum to enhance friendly use and unsnarl interference between Allied users is a monumental and ever-growing problem. Everyone wants a piece of it and hates to accommodate any other user.
Reasons for this seem sinister, but are relentlessly mundane: security restrictions, bureaucratic rivalries, professional chauvinism and parochiality, contractual muddle, high personnel turnover, backward-looking senior leaders, inability of appointed & elected officials to grasp fundamentals. Et cetera.
If the Army-ese can be accurately deciphered, they hope to develop a better user interface that can present a simpler, easier-to-interpret “picture” of the electronic battlefield. Ease of use can speed up decisions; a few seconds either way in fomenting real-world understanding can spell the difference between victory and defeat.
Cen-Tejas’ assistant won’t be doing this in basic training. This stuff will come later, at tech school. He will need all the luck he can scrape together, with this task ahead of him.
I get the technical stuff regarding RF and EW, especially when it comes to having to jam all detected RF but still allowing your own RF comms, including networking, to get through among other requirements. What I try to avoid is the Army/DoD/Program Manager-ese that sound like the GD and NG commercials on WTOP. It’s annoying to us and tends to be very expensive when vendors pitch technical products using that DoD jargon.
My kid Robbie is to computers what Tiger Woods is to a set of golf clubs. The Army needs him and kids like him.