Services Wrestle With the Challenge of UAV Intelligence Interoperability

By MARGARET ROTH
Sea Power Correspondent

Now that the Shadow, Dragon Eye and Global Hawk have proved in Iraq how much unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can contribute to the fight, the question for the Navy is how the different services can use them to contribute to each other.

If the services’ dozens of unmanned aircraft could be made interoperable, U.S. tactical units would benefit from better information, obtained faster, about the battle area. For example, instead of providing information immediately to a single controller at one ground station, a UAV could feed data simultaneously to multiple users through a network available to all services.

Integration is one of the major challenges still facing the military in its use of UAVs, said Capt. Daniel C. Duquette, head of the UAV office in the Navy’s Air Warfare Division.

“The technological pieces are not the big challenge,” he told Sea Power. “Probably the bigger challenge is meeting the interoperability standards,” such as building codes, even while UAV technology is changing constantly.

Duquette, who has been involved in combat operations in Kosovo and Iraq using the RQ-2A Pioneer UAV, said the value of UAVs in providing nonstop intelligence to ships and ground troops is obvious. “Our concern is that last tactical mile, of getting the information to the person in the Humvee, the soldier, the Marine, the allied joint NATO force person who needs to know what’s behind the next corner” as they’re headed down the road, Duquette said.

“We want to be able to send it from the UAV directly to them,” he said, rather than to a central collection point, such as a classified network, from which the information could be tapped or disseminated within the limits of classification.

Achieving that goal is a complex undertaking, however, and the services have yet to agree on a common, “plug-and-play” architecture for command and control of UAVs: their software, sensors and ground stations. Until that happens, the Navy cannot count on obtaining intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance (ISR) information from Air Force or Army UAVs, and vice versa.

The issue is not one of sharing control of the UAV’s physical movements, said Christopher Jackson, deputy director of intelligence for ISR integration at U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., which has the “big-picture” mission of improving UAV interoperability among the services. It is “the timeliness factor,” he said: making information gathered by an Air Force Predator available to a Navy user as quickly as technology allows.

What’s standing in the way is the volume of different technical requirements for the various UAVs, made by different manufacturers and used by different services, he said. Through such initiatives as the Joint Operational Test Bed System and Multi-Sensor Aerospace-Ground Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition, Joint Forces Command is looking at how best to create a network and common data format whereby any subscriber can plug a UAV sensor in and share real-time information.

Noting that “you don’t rely upon single sources” of information on the enemy in maneuvering or targeting, Jackson said UAVs can be a force multiplier. Suppose, he said, “You have two UAVs that are working in conjunction with one another. One might be an Air Force Predator. The other might be an Army Shadow. Both are being used by the Marine on the ground.”

Or a Dragon Eye being used by a Marine maneuver element could generate information relevant to an air operations center or a Navy commander aboard a ship. At this point, “Can it be readily moved out from a tactical environment to a joint-force level? The answer to that would be ‘no,’” Jackson said. “Is that a problem? It could conceivably be. Two points of information are better than one, and three are better than two. You get increased value of intelligence.”

The sharing of UAV intelligence became a bit easier last fall with the ratification of a NATO standard for UAV command and control, called STANAG 4586, but even that is not uniformly accepted by the services.

To put interoperability to the test, Joint Forces Command has plans through 2012 for UAV experimentation using the test bed system, said Frank Roberts, head of UAV initiatives in the command’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Integration Division.

The Joint Operational Test Bed System, used in a number of exercises since 2001, provides for three or four experiments a year using real UAVs and sensors, most recently last year’s Joint Combat Identification Exercise. This year, the focus is on Forward Look, a series of three “building-block experiments” that began in December to see how dissimilar UAVs, with multiple ground stations, can be managed at one time, along with the flow of intelligence they provide. Forward Look will culminate in Combined Joint Task Force Exercise 04-2 in June, involving U.S. and British troops.

The test-bed system does not address the NATO standard per se, but the system may be used to test it, Roberts said.

The command is experimenting with a variety of emerging capabilities and how they can be integrated using commercial off-the-shelf solutions to improve battlespace awareness. Those experiments, in turn, will provide findings and recommendations to the Joint Staff through its Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, introduced last year to foster efficiency, creativity and flexibility in defense acquisition.

“Probably the greatest force multiplier for ISR would be having the connectivity,” Jackson said. “The quicker you get all of the information available to the guy who’s actually pulling the trigger, the better his decision will be.”

Industry, too, would benefit from a common standard that would allow multiple UAVs to function in a single network. A study group organized by the National Defense Industrial Association reported last fall that while the Defense Department was working toward a common definition of UAV architecture, it would also have to reliably enforce the common standard in operational planning, training and exercises.

The military’s use of UAVs is growing rapidly.

The Pentagon’s fleet of 90 unmanned air vehicles is expected to quadruple over seven years, according to its long-range plan, published last March.

Meanwhile, the Navy’s own goals for UAVs are focused on:

RQ-8 Fire Scout, a small helicopter adapted from a commercial traffic-watching aircraft, that will support the Littoral Combat Ship. With vertical takeoff and landing, it will be able to go out 110 nautical miles and feed live imagery and coordinates back to the ship, day or night. Whereas Pioneer has manual controls, the takeoff and landing of Fire Scout will be fully automated. Fiscal 2007 is the target date to introduce it to the fleet.
Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS), to fly for 20-30 hours at a time, at a greater range than Fire Scout, delivering a steady feed of information on ships and traffic patterns and enabling the Navy to develop and maintain what’s called a “common operational picture.” BAMS also will be fully automated. Its target date is fiscal 2010.
Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) is a joint project with the Air Force. Working as part of a carrier strike group, this UAV would be very low-observable and fully automated, designed to be flown around the clock to make maximum use of a Navy sea base. With the information it could provide, the commander could pre-identify and continually identify targets.

“Potentially we would never bring any ordnance back to the carrier,” said Duquette, formerly a navigator aboard the carrier USS Harry S. Truman. The target date for J-UCAS is fiscal 2015.

The Navy’s own vision of how best to put UAVs to work, “and bring the information back reliably, without it being jammed or intercepted, without it being changed by the enemy,” is the Tactical Control System (TCS). Developed by Raytheon Systems Co., TCS is software for the ground control of UAVs, governing a range of capabilities from receipt of imagery to takeoff and landing. It is being purchased solely by the Navy, but theoretically could be made to accommodate other services’ UAVs.

Duquette sees numerous opportunities for joint use of UAVs, not just overseas but in homeland defense, an idea that has powerful backing in Congress.

“If there’s a Navy UAV flying off a Littoral Combat Ship, I ought to be able to directly feed that information to a Coast Guard ship,” he said. “Likewise, [with] a Coast Guard ship flying a UAV, it doesn’t matter what kind of UAV; what really matters is the data.”

While the services are still in the thick of developing a common architecture for UAV command and control, Duquette sees major progress.

“With UAVs, we are where we were with computers in the middle 1980s. We had many different types of computers, many different operating systems. We’re trying to iron them out.” The technology is there for the UAVs the military needs, he said. “The next pieces are the formality of connecting them.

“We’re moving quickly to make those pieces come together. It’s happening, and it’s pretty exciting.”