by Senior Master Sgt. Jim Katzaman
Air Force News Service
WASHINGTON (AFNS) -- Unaware he was a TV star, a Serb soldier climbed onto his tank in rural Bosnia. Cruising high overhead, a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle trained its camera on the scene and sent the video by satellite to American intelligence gatherers, who watched with fascination.
The Predator images were part of joint test. The Serb's image appeared on a monitor aboard an Air Force "Speckled Trout" command-and-control aircraft flying over the East Coast of the United States. At the same moment, he was the prime attraction on Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps TVs from the Pentagon to Florida.
On board the Speckled Trout, a modified Air Force C-135 avionics test bed aircraft, Senior Airman Justin Mercier, an intelligence analyst, marveled at the Predator images. "You can't see the color of a person's eyes, he said, "but you can tell the color of his hair."
Pictures from the Predator planes will provide only part of the battle intelligence in the near future. Other sources will add missile defense data, worldwide weather updates, enemy force placement and logistics, and a lot more. By piecing everything together, commanders will be able to develop a detailed operational picture from which to make informed decisions.
The concept for futuristic warfare is really not that far in the future. Some of the command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems may be just weeks, months or only a year away from becoming operational.
Like the Predator overflight in Bosnia, tests were conducted of a variety of equipment in August during Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration 96. For three weeks, all the U.S. armed services, along with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, England and NATO, compressed 28 days of war games into five days. Then the commanders put the players back in place and started again. Five days later they repeated the war again.
The planners didn't care who won. There was no element of surprise. "We have a scripted scenario," explained Col. Lou Ramos, JWID 96 site director at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.
"We know who's going to do what to whom, and how it's going to be done," Ramos said. "Rather than winning or losing the war, we're interested in seeing how the technology works to support the war fighter."
To that end, JWID 96 set up 40 hardware and software demonstrations to address 11 objectives. These included tests of the latest communications systems, theater missile defense, sensor-to-sensor and sensor-to-shooter technology and other systems.
The demonstrations were complex, often at the cutting edge of technology and, surprisingly, the equipment was "off the shelf." Tight budgets have brought an end to when manufacturers built equipment solely for the military. Today's goal is to adapt existing products to warfighter needs.
For that reason, contractors were almost as well represented as the military at some demonstration sites. Together, they tweaked the systems, and the results were often dramatic.
"Demonstrations that might not have performed well yesterday might do well in the next 72 hours," Col. Rock Schmidt, JWID 96 director, said. "That's because the operator and vendor can talk about problems with the system.
"Then the vendor can get on the phone and tell his company engineers they need to tailor the system to do different or more tasks. The vendor comes back with the fix, and the system works," Schmidt said. "That has happened in the last several weeks.
"From the time vendors married up with operators, and that interface took place, and they built rapport, it's been a very healthy environment, he said."
JWID 96 planners didn't expect to solve every problem, but they expected to find "golden nuggets" they could quickly put into operation.
"When the exercise is over," Schmidt said, "we'll see which demonstrations performed better. Those are the ones we'll take up through the system to get rapidly procured if they're accepted."
One such golden nugget from JWID 95 was the Global Broadcast System for high-capacity data dissemination. A GBS demonstration was part of JWID 96, but it is already being put in place based on its performance in last year's tests. The Predator reconnaissance video of the Serb tanker, for example, rode around the world on GBS airwaves.
Capt. Stephen C. Jaszai of the Space Warfare Center, Falcon Air Force Base, Colo., explained the new system's power during an interview aboard the Speckled Trout aircraft.
For comparison, he said, commanders in Desert Storm used the Milstar system that could transmit 2,400 bits of information per second. A scant five years later, GBS can handle 23 million bits per second. That means priority data that took more than an hour to send on a dedicated Milstar channel in 1991 can travel today in just .38 seconds.
"With GBS," said Jaszai, "we can send the information to an aircraft, ship or van so everyone can see what's going on and be more efficient."
Interoperability is essential to achieve such efficiency, said Dr. Frank B. Horton III, principle assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence. He said the challenge is for different military services and nations to learn how to share data while using different generations of equipment.
"There's no way that, in any moment in time, all the equipment deployed in all the tanks and planes and ships from all the services will be identical," said Horton. "We need to test interoperability to see if what we're trying to do is relevant. One such place for that is the Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration."
In one sense, he said, "We are finally catching on to the potential implications of the World Wide Web and other things that came first in the commercial world. They have a lot to offer us in terms of breaking down barriers and sharing information.
"We hope to effectively and efficiently use these systems for our forces to keep war from occurring. Or if it does occur," said Horton, "we can deal with it quickly with minimum casualties."