Graham Warwick/WASHINGTON DC
Next month, the USAir Force will conduct the latest in an escalating series of force experiments designed to test concepts and technologies for future expeditionary operations. In cockpits and at workstations across the USA, personnel will get a taste of what joint operations in the 21st century could be like - if it all works.
These experiments are not exercises - exercises are intended to train personnel to use fielded systems; experiments are designed to test new systems and determine whether they should be recommended for fielding, rejected, or carried over for further exploration.
"Experimentation is an ugly process," says Lt Col Dan Bryan, chief of the Air Force Experimentation Office's assessment branch. "It's a new way of doing business. It's not like an exercise; it's not straightforward. We want the war-fighters to use the stuff and see if it works."
It is an iterative process which began with the USAF-only Expeditionary Force Experiment (EFX) in 1998 and continued with last year's Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment (JEFX), which brought in other US services and coalition partners. The latest iteration, JEFX 2000, will begin on 3 September.
The USAF calls the process "spiral development". It brings the operator and developer of a system together for the experiment and allows the operator to identify things that need changing and the developer to take notes. After each turn of the spiral, systems that are ready for deployment can be spun off into the field, while others go through another round of refinement.
During JEFX 99, for example, it was found that the air operations centre - the nerve centre of the experiment - could not handle the flow of information coming in, so one focus of JEFX 2000 is on improving information management. "Lots of things didn't work," says Bryan. "We wring everything out before it gets into a JEFX, so we don't expect total failure, but some things don't work as anticipated."
One concept which did not work as anticipated during JEFX 99 was dynamic precision strike. The intention was to redirect an aircraft in flight as new targets emerged and to inject the new coordinates directly from the ground into a GPS-guided munition. "The way we wanted to do it didn't work at all," says Bryan. "But the operators found a way to work around the problems and the concept was successful."
Similar lessons are certain to be learned during JEFX 2000, which will take place within the wider framework of Millennium Challenge 2000, the US armed forces' first joint field experiment. Sponsored by the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), Millennium Challenge will provide a "common joint context" for four individual service experiments.
In addition to the USAF's JEFX 2000, Millennium Challenge will encompass the USNavy's Fleet Battle Experiment - Hotel; the USArmy's Joint Contingency Force Advanced Warfighting Experiment; and the USMarine Corps' Millennium Dragon experiment. Together, they provide a launch platform for a concept known as "coherent jointness".
The USDepartment of Defense is moving towards a concept of jointness in which all four services share a common battlespace. This differs from current operational practice, which is to "de-conflict" the battlespace by dividing responsibilities so that the services do not run into each other. To achieve the "joint vision" targeted for 2010, US forces have to move from simple interoperability to coherent jointness.
Each service has its own joint vision, and Millennium Challenge is the first attempt at providing them with feedback on how well the capabilities they are developing are meeting the requirements of joint operations. The four individual service experiments will be used by JFCOM as a laboratory to test new joint concepts. These include initiatives to improve deployment planning, precision targeting and battlespace awareness.
The Joint Deployment Process Improve-ment experiment aims to reduce to 72h the time required to plan the phased deployment of a force sufficient to conduct the first seven days of a major engagement. This will use "interactive virtual collaboration" tools to streamline the traditionally cumbersome process of producing time-phased deployment data.
Effects-based Targeting
The Precision Engagement Process experiment is intended to help commanders use the full spectrum of lethal and non-lethal weapons available to achieve "effects-based" targeting. This will provide access to operations and intelligence experts, regardless of their location, by using a support network to create a virtual extension of the commander's staff.
The Information Superiority/Command and Control experiment addresses weaknesses in crisis action planning by creating a common information environment which allows shared battlespace awareness and joint interactive planning. One aspect, the common relevant operational picture, provides "timely, fused, accurate, consistent and relevant information from multiple sources" and common at all joint force elements. The aim is to allow commanders to make "better, faster" decisions.
Decisive Concept
Millennium Challenge will also test rapid decisive operations. This is the first "integrating concept" to be pursued by JFCOM since its creation in October last year. According to the DoD, "integrating concepts describe an overarching warfighting approach and provide context and focus for function concepts". In other words, a new way to fight.
The concept of rapid decisive operations has grown out of the US realisation that, although it has overwhelming military power, it has not been as quick or decisive in its use as it needed to be. In recent conflicts the USA has taken considerable time to build up its forces in theatre before launching operations. Coupled with this, adversaries have shown themselves willing to inflict and sustain significant military and civilian casualties with no time constraints on achieving their goals. The result has been increased costs and risks to US forces.
JFCOM is working to develop the capability to project, within days and not months, sufficient military capability to incapacitate a capable regional power - a capability which has been described as "move while we plan and plan while we move". The concept of rapid decisive operations also shifts the goal of the forces, once deployed, from attrition of the enemy to attacks on the command and control infrastructure that binds its forces together and makes them effective, JFCOM says.
Under the integrating concept of rapid decisive operations are several "functional concepts". In addition to joint interactive planning and the common relevant operational picture already mentioned, these include adaptive joint command and control, and attack operations against critical mobile targets. The latter is a concept for a future system with advanced sensors, near-instantaneous sensor-to-shooter data flow and high-speed, long-range precision weapons. This would allow rapid identification and engagement of tanks, surface-to-air and theatre ballistic missile launchers and other mobile targets.
Using modelling and simulation, JFCOM has been experimenting with attack operations against critical mobile targets for some time, with mixed success. Although 60-90% of missile transporter/erector/launchers were killed across all trials, pre-launch kills were uniformly low. Additional iterations of the experiment are planned, including during Millennium Challenge, which will look at issues such as using smart weapons to provide sensor data and improving the critical mobile target cell organisation to reduce reaction time. Time-Critical Targeting
One of the concepts to be explored in the US Air Force's JEFX 2000 is time-critical targeting. The USAF describes this as "a continuous process which permits the fastest possible location and strike of the right targets at the right time and in the right sequence to achieve the desired effects...in the quickest and most effective manner possible".
Under the concept, a time-critical targeting cell with hunter and killer teams will develop a more extensive target list more quickly, then manage sensors and shooters dynamically to identify, prioritise and prosecute both established and emerging targets in a controlled sequence, while minimising the risk to delivery systems. This illustrates a key aspect of the rapid decisive operations concept, which is to conduct operations on terms the allies, rather than the enemy, dictate.
Time-critical targeting is only one of many concepts to be evaluated under JEFX 2000. Its predecessor, JEFX 99, examined 57 technology and process initiatives, of which 26 were recommended for fielding or consideration. Many of the successful concepts had been tried first in EFX 98, then further refined.
JEFX 99 exploited the distributed operations concept first tested in EFX 98. This allows combat forces to be deployed quickly while leaving the operational support back in the USA, a concept known as "reachback". While the aircraft are sent forward, intelligence is sent back, analysed, turned into a target list, then send forward for prosecution. This is intended to keep the deployed forces light and nimble.
JEFX 2000 will use the infrastructure put in place for the earlier experiments. This includes the Air Force Operations Support Centre at Langley AFB, Virginia, which serves as the rear air operations centre (AOC); the Coalition Air Operations Centre at Hurlburt Field, Florida, which simulates a deployed AOC; plus wing-level Expeditionary Operations Centres at the locations where the air expeditionary forces involved in the experiment scenario are based. As in JEFX 99, there will be real-time links to the USAF's airlift/tanker, space operations and intelligence centres.
The "backbone" of the distributed operations concept is the theatre battle management core system (TBMCS), command and control software designed to integrate previously discrete applications and speed the creation of the air tasking order - the time-phased operations plan which allocates resources against targets.
Developed by Lockheed Martin, an experimental version of TBMCS experienced some problems in EFX 98, but was "very solid" by JEFX 99, says Bryan. As a result, it was recommended that the initial version of the system be fielded by the USAF. JEFX 2000 and subsequent experiments will evaluate capabilities which can be added to the baseline TBMCS software suite.
TBMCS is used in the rear AOC to generate the air tasking order, which is forwarded to the deployed operations centres. One result of JEFX 99 was a recommendation that the USAF field en-route expeditionary operations centres - specially equipped Boeing KC-135s which will allow the joint force air component commander to maintain situational awareness while deploying to a contingency.
In EFX 98, the commander was provided with the full capability to plan and execute operations while en route, but it proved difficult to maintain the required communications connectivity. For JEFX 99, the concept was streamlined to provide the deploying commander with visibility of the developing situation and the ability to modify the operations plan developed by the rear AOC. "We found we didn't need all that capability," says Col Terry Thompson, director of the Air Force Experimentation Office. "We do not need to plan on the aircraft when we can do reachback."
Virtual Network
What JEFX 99 demonstrated, and JEFX 2000 will exploit further, is the ability to build, on demand, a virtual command and control network that supports expeditionary air operations. The next step, experimenters say, is to increase the use of powerful commercial information technology tools, which the USAF sees as key to building the virtual network and enabling distributed operations.
EFX 98 explored a distributed, collaborative command and control environment, and JEFX 99 expanded the concept to include space and coalition operations. Together they created a baseline architecture for a future command and control system. The USAF says JEFX 2000 will plug new initiatives into this "motherboard" architecture to allow potential future capabilities to be explored.
The experiment will extend exploration of the distributed, collaborative, coalition environment with the emphasis of achieving a quick response capability, the USAF says. The main focus of JEFX 2000 will be to explore future capabilities for "agile combat support" of expeditionary forces. This is the air force's ability to sustain and protect deployed forces, and will look at concepts such as automating maintenance management; providing decision-quality weather data; and web-based, theatre-wide munitions status reporting.
Concepts will also be explored which allow the USAF to develop a distributed capability to task and re-task airlift forces dynamically, so that expeditionary forces can be delivered and sustained. Precision engagement experiments will look at dynamically controlling sensors and processing, exploiting and distributing the data to allow precision targeting and increased situational awareness. Dynamic battle control initiatives will explore the ability to retask airborne aircraft and satellites to alternate targets and missions and to put weapons on targets quickly to halt an advancing force.
Cutting across all areas being explored in JEFX 2000 is the need to maintain information superiority, and the concept of the "joint battlespace infosphere". This is intended to fuse information from multiple intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sources into an understandable form which can be disseminated. "The ability to collect, control, exploit and defend information, and to counter enemy information operations, is critical to achieving air and space superiority," the USAF says.
"JEFX 2000 will look at information management, ISR battle management and dynamic battle control," says Thompson. It will be followed next year by a small-scale experiment which will act as a risk-reduction exercise for the next major event, in 2002. As the saying goes: "experimentation is hell".
Source: Flight International