A former assembly building for Delta rockets seems an unlikely hub for a massive network-centric engineering effort. But the featureless facility on Boeing's southern California campus is the mother node for a country-spanning network of partner and customer laboratories tasked with developing and testing the Future Combat Systems (FCS) – centrepiece of the US Army's transformation to an agile, networked fighting force.

Newly refurbished, and like a conference centre with its theatre-style auditorium and video-teleconference rooms, this is the System of Systems Integration Laboratory (SoSIL). Like an ark, the SoSIL will host one of each of the 18 manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles that, along with the network and soldier, make up the FCS for which Boeing, with SAIC, is lead system integrator.

"FCS is making network-centric real on a mega scale," says programme manager Dennis Muilenburg. "The army is using FCS to drive its network-centric transformation, and FCS is driving the network-centric engineering process – how to take the theory and make it reality," he says.

"Rather than say we have 18 platforms to develop, then design a network to connect them, we design the network architecture first, then the platforms are purpose-designed to be part of the network," says Muilenburg. "In the past the deliverable was a platform, now it is a warfighting capability – a unit of action including 3,000 soldiers and 700 vehicles, some manned, some unmanned, all networked to the soldier. It is a fundamentally different design and development process."

Key to developing the FCS is the ability to model, simulate and test the entire unit of action – all of its moving elements and the mobile ad hoc network. Each of the partners developing the 18 platforms has a traditional system integration laboratory, and will supply a representation to the SoSIL, where the full unit of action will be integrated and tested. "Some elements are simulated, some are prototypes rolled into the high bay, some are in the field. It is a very distributed environment," says Muilenburg.

The first of six major FCS builds will be tested in the SoSIL in October. "The first event will prove processes and tools, and includes mainly simulated assets," says Muilenburg. The partners have delivered simulations, which are being integrated into the network. New builds will come along every 12-18 months.

Last August, the programme was modified to accelerate the fielding of FCS capabilities though four incremental spirals. "We will take key FCS technologies and spiral them out to an experimental combat brigade team, then the army's new modular brigades," says Muilenburg. This will allow the army to start fielding network-centric capability in 2008, ahead of delivery of the first unit of action in 2014 under the $15 billion FCS system development and demonstration programme.

GRAHAM WARWICK / HUNTINGTON BEACH

Source: Flight International