Op-Eds

Radar/EW

Radar and the kill web - Blog

July 31, 2019

Ray Alderman VITA Standards Organization

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: This is a complex topic, broad in applications and deep in technical details. Radar can be studied from several different angles: by the domain covered (land, sea, undersea, air, and space), by the frequencies used (the IEEE, EU/NATO, and ITU all use different frequency band designations, making things even more confusing), by the range of the signal (long range surveillance, intermediate-range theater coverage, and short-range fire control radar), by application (offensive radar vs defensive radar), or by radar types (there are about 13 of them). Each of these approaches spill over into the next, creating a convoluted mess if you?re not careful. So, the safest way to eliminate the confusion in a short article like this is oversimplification. Therefore, we will look at what radar does in the kill web, and a little about how it works.

Comms

How Ethernet is key to VICTORY - Blog

June 28, 2019

Ronen Isaac MilSource

ETHERNET EVERYWHERE BLOG: Adding or enhancing new command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and electronic warfare (EW) technologies in armed forces? tactical ground vehicles has historically been done through a ?bolt-on? approach. Communications systems have traditionally been independent, siloed systems that lacked integration, futureproofing and as importantly, economies of size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C).

Radar/EW

Enemy ships and the kill web - Blog

June 27, 2019

Ray Alderman VITA Standards Organization

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: Since our primary enemies (Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea) have some capacity for naval warfare, it might be instructive to examine how they can confront the kill web at sea. To do that, we need to look at the hull count (total number of warships) and the total tonnage (water displacement of their fleet) for each country. Hull count will tell us how many ships they can deploy in a fight, and tonnage will tell us their range, and how large and deadly those ships are. That will give us the big picture and we can start assessing their capabilities from there.

Avionics

FACE approach improves affordability, time-to-field of avionics systems and software platforms - Blog

June 19, 2019

Ricardo Camacho - director of Safety & Security Compliance, Parasoft LDRA Technology

Maintaining U.S. supremacy in all aspects of warfare can be challenging for Department of Defense (DoD) leaders, partly due to being locked into proprietary platforms or vendor- specific open architectures. These issues limit the government?s ability to bring in third parties to compete or add new capabilities, which has resulted in sole-source or single-bidder contract awards. An open systems architecture strategy has shown to curb the high-cost, long program schedules and lack of integration options of warfighting capabilities. This is where an initiative such as the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) can play a major role in making a business and technological difference.

A.I.

How AI can help in battlefield healthcare - Blog

June 11, 2019

Nichole Heydenburg Apex Waves

Radar/EW

Strategic intelligence and the kill web - Blog

May 31, 2019

Ray Alderman VITA Standards Organization

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: In previous articles, we explored the technologies and tactics going into the Kill Web, and how they work. Now, we need to look at how strategic intelligence feeds into the Kill Web, and into the order of battle (OB). That's the structure of our troops and weapons, and how they will be deployed against an enemy.

Avionics

Vendor backing grows for the emerging FACE standard - Blog

April 30, 2019

Ricardo Camacho - director of Safety & Security Compliance, Parasoft LDRA Technology

Avionics vendors ? hardware and software ? share an enthusiasm for the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard, which promotes a common operating environment with reuse of software capabilities across multiple Department of Defense (DoD) avionics systems. This enthusiasm continues to grow as does participation within the FACE consortium ? run by the Open Group ? as the version 3.0 of the standard is soon to be released. The long -term life-cycle cost savings enabled by reuse standards such as FACE are changing the face of the DoD the procurement process for embedded computing solutions.

Radar/EW

Problems with the kill web: Moving from C4ISR to SNAI - Blog

March 27, 2019

Ray Alderman VITA Standards Organization

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: By now, you know the kill web is a dynamic networked "system of systems," that can act (offensively or defensively) at the speed of computers against our enemy's tactics and strategies on the battlefield. There are a number of technical problems to be solved in communications, computer architectures, sensors, and software, but the engineering brainiacs are working on those. The bigger issues are actually on the operational side of the kill web. Decisions involving many variables must be made in milliseconds or microseconds. The human mind cannot possibly handle all the data from the intelligence sources and sensors, assimilate that data, and make critical decisions in those timeframes. So let?s consider some examples, to expose the complications and contradictions in the kill web.

Radar/EW

Keep pace with a standardized development process - Blog

February 28, 2019

Nick Butler NI (National Instruments)

Standardization has been an aspirational objective in test organizations for decades. In 1961, D.B. Dobson and L.L. Wolff of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) published a paper, ?Standardization of Electronic Test Equipment.? The paper presented the principles, criteria, and techniques used in the investigation and prototyping of multipurpose missile system test equipment.

Cyber

Integrity of embedded systems - Blog

February 28, 2019

Russell Doty Red Hat

It is critical to be able to verify the integrity of systems used in military and other applications to ensure that they have not been modified or corrupted. It is of course best to prevent a system from being tampered with. If this can't be done, it is vital to detect tampering. In many cases it is better to prevent a system from operating at all if you can't be sure it hasn't been modified. In all cases it is vital to protect information on the system and especially critical secrets like crypto keys.

Cyber

Securing the supply chain - Blog

February 06, 2019

Chris Cummins Abaco Systems

Comms

Fiber and copper working together for today's Ethernet backbones - Blog

January 31, 2019

Ronen Isaac MilSource

ETHERNET EVERYWHERE BLOG: In all mobile military and airborne platforms, the transition from mechanical systems to electronically controlled systems is taking place. As the electronics content continues to grow, so do the processing loads that happen on every platform. Embedded computers are rising in sophistication as they need to support sensors, radar, video streams, and remote-control functions. Distributed processing, the interconnection of devices, and communication between devices has led to an exponential jump in bandwidth requirements on the interconnects between these devices. Traditional protocols like IEEE 1394 and USB still have legacy applications on these platforms, but most new platforms and platform retrofits are turning to Ethernet as their de facto communications protocol, supporting 1 Gbps in most platforms and growing to 10 Gbps in certain payloads.

Unmanned

Future weapons and the kill web - Blog

January 31, 2019

Ray Alderman VITA Standards Organization

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG: Come with me now as we travel to another dimension, a realm far beyond the mundane incremental improvements in traditional military weaponry. It?s a curious domain where warfare is bounded only by our imagination. The technology to implement the weapons you will see is available now, give or take some miniaturization of the components here and there. Not since the invention of gunpowder has mankind experienced such a revolution in the tools of armed conflict. So gear-up, and keep your heads down, as we embark upon this mission. You are now entering the kill web of the future.

Radar/EW

Embedding data center compute capability at the tactical edge with open systems architectures - Blog

December 20, 2018

John Bratton Mercury Systems

At a high level, the vast majority of contemporary compute processing hardware may be divided into two domains: powerful data center processors and smaller, embedded devices. Embedded devices have the support of their data center big brothers via a network connection, giving them to access big data applications.

Radar/EW

C4ISR systems and the kill web - Blog

December 20, 2018

Ray Alderman

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG. In previous articles, we looked at the market research reports and forecasts for fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and ground combat vehicles. All those platforms contain C4ISR systems (command, control, computers, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance). The openly available data about this market is much foggier than the information on the military platform markets. Making things more complicated, C4ISR is further divided into radar, sonar, signals intelligence (SIGINT), sensors, electronic warfare (EW), cyber warfare (CW), COMM (networked military communications), and administrative systems. Moments of clarity do surface in the reports, but you have to dig for them.