Non-Subscriber Extract
Executive Overview: Jane's Military Communications
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| 22 December 2005 |
By John Williamson, JMC Editor
Some major new network-centric warfare (NCW) initiatives have been kicked off in the last 12 months, and some key existing NCW projects have been progressed, expanded or updated. The rationale for increased spending on overall Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) is not difficult to appreciate. Improved C4ISR and better networking of assets hold out the prospect of achieving superior situational awareness, more informed decision making, and significantly improved speed of response, precision and effectiveness for any given level of force.
Best laid plans...
Not all major NCW programmes have proceeded smoothly, however. Three in particular have made headlines - the UK's vehicle-mounted battlefield electronic warfare system Project Soothsayer, the US Aerial Common Sensor (ACS) intelligence system and the US Department of Defense's Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS). Given the ambitious objectives of these programmes - particularly JTRS - some technical difficulties and timetable slippages were probably inevitable.
Originally planned for initial fielding in 2006, JTRS is a far-reaching effort originally aimed at replacing around three quarters of a million radios in between 25 and 30 different incompatible families with a much smaller number of multi-channel, multiband interoperable Software Defined Radios (SDRs). Software waveform selection defines the particular radio's function and reprogramming changes the 'personality' of the radio at any given point. Some observers have questioned the 'soup-to-nuts' scope of the JTRS project, suggesting that a more limited degree of interoperability between different sub-families of terminals would have been a more practical and low-cost proposition and, indeed, would be more than adequate for real-world applications.
COTS for the future
The military is taking an ever closer and closer interest in communications and IT technologies commercialised substantially, primarily or specifically for civilian applications. Three such are the Linux operating system, Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and, most recently, if it can do what its inventor says it can, a technology known as xMax™.
Contractor xG Technology LLC says that xMax™ is a novel modulation and encoding technology that boosts the data rates of both wired and wireless communications. xMax is not a compression technique, but a synergistic mix of two well-established communication approaches that is claimed to dramatically improve spectrum utilisation. By combining elements of traditional narrowband carrier systems with non-interfering elements found in low-power wideband systems, the company claims that xMax delivers data rates orders of magnitude higher than other broadband approaches.
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