Battlefield communications once meant terse transmissions barked into handheld radios by soldiers desperately trying to pierce the fog of war in their small section of the battlefield. Today it includes a staggering array of signals that instantly carry voices, data and real-time imagery between platforms in space, in the air, at sea and on the ground. Today information superiority – communicated, understood and acted upon – can spell the difference between military success and defeat.

To help manage this daunting web of information and link all the nodes into an “integrated battlespace,” the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) looks to industry for rapidly deployable commercial products, technology and expertise.

The Launch and Satellite Systems business unit within Integrated Defense Systems is using technologies developed for commercial applications to ensure its DoD customers can maintain the information dominance they enjoy today.

As part of its response to this key customer’s need, the unit looks to Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo, Calif., to supply the satellite infrastructure and expertise for a variety of defense communications systems.

“BSS has developed many revolutionary commercial communications systems, that are many times more efficient than the current military satellite communications system launched more than a decade ago,” said Bill Collopy, Launch and Satellite Systems vice president.

Randy Brinkley, BSS president, says that the unit he leads has “its feet planted firmly in both the commercial and government worlds, and the technology that flows back and forth provides great synergy, gives us a competitive edge and allows us to offer unique solutions to our customers. We built this country’s first commercial direct-to-home broadcasting satellites and a successful regional mobile communications system, and we’re at work now on next-generation satellite broadband platforms,” says Brinkley. “As a Boeing Enterprise Capabilities Center we can bring 41 years worth of expertise – much of it drawn from commercial programs – to bear on our own MILSATCOM programs as well as those of other Boeing businesses seeking to serve the military customer.”

A key example of this leverage is the Wideband Gapfiller Satellite (WGS) program. In January 2001, the U.S. Air Force selected Boeing as the prime contractor for WGS, a constellation of up to six Boeing 702 geosynchronous satellites that will provide two-way broadband communications as well as broadcast services to U.S. armed forces and other agencies worldwide.

WGS is built around next-generation technology and solutions that Boeing has developed for Spaceway and other commercial programs such as the Thuraya and ICO mobile communication systems. Spaceway is a commercial broadband satellite system whose first spacecraft – also a Boeing 702 – is due to launch in the third quarter of 2003 for Hughes Network Systems. The technologies incorporated into WGS will provide military users with near-term “transformation communications” – expanded next-generation capabilities – and are a cost-effective basis for further evolution that will continue to satisfy the rapidly changing needs of the military’s communications architecture.

“The three Spaceway satellites will each include high-performance phased-array antennas, high-speed packet switches and the most capable space-qualified digital signal processors ever launched into Earth orbit – equal in power to 10,000 Pentium® 3's,” Brinkley says. “Spaceway’s phased-array antennas will digitally form more than one hundred downlink beams that the satellite can move and reshape in microseconds to adapt to changing user demands. Using similar technology, each WGS spacecraft will literally supply warfighters with the capacity of more than 10 of the satellites they’ll replace.” The Air Force also will benefit from taking part in beta tests of the Spaceway ground system’s commercial capabilities prior to the launch of the first WGS satellite in 2004.

Leveraging commercial expertise has been something of a hallmark for the WGS program. The military’s WGS Program Office earned the Air Force's John J. Welch Award last year for its management of the WGS acquisition, which embodied a number of DoD acquisition-reform strategies modeled after commercial item acquisitions.

"Boeing, its industry partners, and the government have worked at a rapid pace in a cooperative, commercial-like acquisition environment to move through many significant milestones leading up to WGS spacecraft production, " said Lieutenant Colonel Brian Magazu, the WGS program manager at U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles, in a statement announcing the start of production for the first two WGS satellites.