As an Air Force officer during Operation Desert Storm, George Muellner commanded the Joint Surveillance Target Attack System (Joint STARS) unit that flew every night of the air and ground war. The E-8 Joint STARS aircraft were equipped with mission systems which provided both air and ground commanders with wide area surveillance and downlink of targeting information. The system was capable of detecting and tracking moving-targets and also providing Synthetic Aperture Radar images of fixed targets.

Although Joint STARS proved to be the most decisive intelligence asset of the war, its effectiveness was reduced by the inability to rapidly get the information to the decision-maker, or the warfighter. Since the system had been pulled out of development and drawn quickly into front-line service, one major limitation stood out. There was no connectivity to the key warfighters that could quickly act upon the information Joint STARS could provide.

“The lesson I learned was that this connective tissue to the warfighter was just as important as the sensor,” said Muellner who has oversight of the Integrated Battlespace market for Boeing. “Good intelligence that does not enable rapid and decisive decision-making is of little value.” Boeing Integrated Defense Systems and Muellner are not alone in that assessment. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in 2001, “possibly the single-most transforming thing in our force will not be a weapon system, but a set of interconnections and a substantially enhanced capability because of that awareness.”

On the Cutting Edge
To help facilitate the transformation to NCO (Network-Centric Operations), Boeing is using a “Best of Industry” approach by employing common architectures across systems engineered for interoperability and interdependency. This was a successful strategy in winning the U.S. Army’s FCS (Future Combat Systems) program. Boeing is also working with the U.S. Navy on their transformational program FORCENet, and with the Air Force on ConstellationNet.

Boeing is working across a broad range of products, both new and existing, to integrate the battlespace from the individual soldier in the field, up to overhead fighters and bombers and ultimately the high ground of the 21st century—space. Transformational communication programs now in development at Boeing include the Family of Advanced Beyond line-of-sight Terminals, which will allow the strategic architecture to be extended from ground into space, and the Airborne, Maritime and Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System, which offers an affordable, modular and scalable architecture for a host of different platform types.

A critical characteristic of the integrated battlespace is military jointness. To provide a unifying framework, Boeing has developed and introduced Joint Effects-Based Command and Control. This family of command and control products will provide rapid integration and interoperability to give the Joint Force an asymmetrical advantage over adversaries whether in the air, on land, at sea, out in space or within the information domain.

The hallmark of transformational programs is considered to be the Transformational SATCOM Space Segment, which is intended to overcome the warfighters’ communication capacity constraints and make a secure, internet in the sky a reality. Boeing last year was one of two contractor teams awarded $514 million to develop a system design and demonstrate the critical technologies for the program. The downselect to a single contractor is scheduled for 2006.

The development and testing of systems to create an integrated battlespace is paying dividends to each of the services. For example, the Air Force and Navy will benefit from all of the capability and commonality being built into the System of Systems Common Operating Environment for the Army. Additionally, the mission systems that went into the Navy P-8A Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft were derived from systems incorporated on Air Force AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and international AEW&C (Airborne Early Warning and Control) programs. This validated Boeing’s investment in expanding its network of modeling, simulation and analysis centers and laboratories across the U.S, which provides the networked virtual environment within which to test these systems together. Boeing’s push toward the Integrated Battlespace is not limited solely to new programs.

“We are providing upgrade paths for existing platforms to become key elements of the integrated battlespace.There will be B-52s above the battlefield in 2024, so we have to figure out how to pull them into the network,” said Muellner. “Shooters like the F-15E, F/A-18, or air crews delivering humanitarian aid via a C-17 will be key nodes in a robust network that includes the decision makers and the space, air and ground sensors. The objective of the Integrated Battlespace is to compress our OODA Loop and get inside our adversary’s process with decisive action. That is how you win in battle and also how you display agility in business.”

OODA Loop

A basic principle of warfare is that the warfighter who can sense the environment, decide on a course of action, and act more quickly then his adversary will normally have a decisive advantage. An example of this observe-to-act cycle being too slow, was the Son Tay POW camp rescue attempt that took place during the Vietnam War on November 21, 1970. Evidence emerged that Son Tay prison held POWs and its location allowed for a possible rescue attempt. The mission was planned and as the final go-ahead date approached, the latest reconnaissance photos taken by Firebee UAVs and SR-71s were examined at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam and at Kadena Air Base, Japan. But when the raid took place the POWs were gone. “Our adversary’s command cycle was shorter than ours,” Muellner pointed out. “It’s not a desirable situation to operate outside your adversary’s OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) Loop. By exploiting modern networking technologies we can shrink the OODA Loop, and we call the resultant environment the Integrated Battlespace.”

Ultimate Objective

A working Integrated Battlespace concept would flow down the acquired information from national, military and commercial reconnaissance and surveillance assets through a robust communications network involving space, airborne and ground-based assets. This communications network would provide global situational awareness to all warfighters and enable decision- makers to rapidly determine and communicate a course of action to the appropriate forces. “The objective is to assess the situation and act more quickly then your adversary is able to do,”Muellner said.