By Peter Green and Richard Pollard
An industry perspective from Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions

Through-armor video systems provide in-vehicle crews of manned and remote crews of unmanned ground vehicles with critical visibility and situational awareness. This vital visual information needs to be accessible as close to real-time as possible. Delayed video images can make warfighters unaware of an approaching enemy, an impending man-made or natural obstacle, or the unsafe proximity of a warfighter or civilian outside the vehicle, until it’s too late to appropriately or adequately respond. These risks increase when vehicles are moving quickly and when they include large and dangerous moving parts. It doesn’t take much imagination to consider the kinds of negative incidents that could occur when video images are delayed.

DAVIDSON, N.C. Curtiss-Wright Corporation announced that it won a contract by Raytheon Technologies to provide its rugged Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA)-based processor and networking modules for use in the Next Generation Special Mission Processor (NextGen SMP). According to the company, the NextGen SMP is intended to serve as the central processing component of the AC/MC-130J aircraft.

By Charlie Kawasaki, PacStar, a Curtiss-Wright company

In order to achieve and maintain warfighting overmatch, coordinate deployed forces, and enable new warfighting capabilities, the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force are actively looking to new programs such as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) to ensure warfighters have maximum situational awareness. This push to upgrade is driving the development of end-to-end networks linking the cloud, command posts, combat platforms, and dismounted warfighters. It also anticipates the addition of vast numbers of sensors and video feeds – backed by big data processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning – to speed decision-making across all warfighting domains.

On the battlefield, time can be a dependable driver and a formidable adversary. For this reason, companies supplying military electronics are viewing the services’ all-encompassing decision-making processes through a data-powered lens in hopes of giving the military one thing: Actionable information in the shortest possible time frame.