HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. (June 14, 1996) -- A phased approach to change will bring about the replacement of a 25 year old Defense Department command and control system.
An aging system that is increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain, the World-Wide Military Command and Control System will be replaced by the Defense Information Agency's Global Command and Control System, for which Electronic Systems Center is reponsible for Air Force implementation.
"We expect to see initial operational capability this summer at 37 Department of Defense and 28 Air Force sites with the new system," said Maj. Robert E. Walbridge, chief of the program's integration and test branch. The Air force will be responsible for 14 of the DoD sites.
"Our immediate goal is to use new equipment and software to replace WWMCCS with an equal functionality," Walbridge said. "We'll replace an outdated system with one based primarily on commercial off-the-shelf software and hardware products." Once the baseline is established and the Global Command and Control System has replaced the basic WWMCCS, the program office in conjuction the Defense Information Agency and the other services with will start looking at enhancements to make it a more capable system. Significant upgrades are not possible with WWMCCS.
Development of a common operating environment will take place along with the replacement project. The Defense Information Agency looked at 19 functional areas that will enable development programs the ability to reuse software and work together in a combined environment.
Each of the three services lead six joint working groups charged with bringing in commercial products to form a common operating environment. The 19th item is the responsibility of the Defense Mapping Agency. The Global Command and Control System laid the ground work for the future the Defense Information Infastructure common operating environment. Program officials said this will greatly enhance the transfer of information between the services.
Most of the hardware and software has been fielded for the replacement of the old system at the primary sites. These include Air Force installations world-wide and joint organizations such as U.S. Central Command and U.S. Strategic Command. The system is being tested now and Initial Operational Capability is expected in late July.
"We have migrated away from several different service systems into one that does the job for all services," Walbridge said. "While there will be minor differences with the different services, the bulk of the system will be common.
"One of the office's greatest assets is a program integration facility at ESC. The facility allows the GCCS office to do much of the application development, the common operating environment development and application segmentation here. The facility is also used to help migrate other ESC systems into the GCCS."
Among those are the Air Force Mission Support System, Joint Message Analysis and Processing System and Joint Message Preparation System, Theater Battle Management Core Systems and Command and Control Processing System. The GCCS program office is working with people from the other programs to make sure their applications are properly structured to fit into the GCCS operating environment.
"We hope in the future to work more closely with the CUBE (Command and Control Unified Battlespace Environment) laboratory and Fort Franklin to foster the interoperability work that ESC is doing," Walbridge said.
"The best example of how GCCS supports the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others at that level is that our forces in and around Bosnia were deployed there using WWMCCS but will be returned using GCCS," Walbridge said.
The Global Command and Control System will give commanders 100 times the computing power of the old system in a fraction of the floor space. ."
For more information, contact Roy K. Heitman via email- heitmanr@hanscom.af.mil
or at ESC's Office of Public Affairs - (617) 377-4466