BY George I. Seffers
The team developing the Openwings command and control architecture for the
Army is ecstatic following the successful demonstration of the prototype to the service's
V Corps in Europe.
The Army Command and Control System is composed of several command and control systems
lashed together. But unlike an office network, Army networks on the battlefield are torn
down, moved and set up again about every three hours, according to David Usechak, Army
product manager for common software in the program executive office for command, control
and communications systems.
The problem is exacerbated because "we have people joining or leaving a network
randomly, with no pre-planning," Usechak said. Furthermore, network setup and
operation is sometimes too complicated for the average soldier, and the systems that make
up the Command and Control System were not originally designed to interface with one
another.
To help solve those problems, Motorola Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. demonstrated a
prototype of the Openwings architecture July 28 to Army V Corps officials during a
week-long conference on digitization.
"We were trying to demonstrate this whole business of Openwings, a self-forming,
self-healing, network," Usechak said. "The demonstration pointed out the
robustness of this technology and how easy in one sense it is to take and start plugging
together various types of hardware and software and to make it work."
"The amount of effort involved is greatly reduced, and you have some level of
confidence that when you plug these guys together, it's going to work," he said.
The V Corps demonstration included bringing Unix and Microsoft Corp. Windows NT-based
laptops into the network without prior planning or setup, and it also included wireless
communications between a laptop and the network. Confident with their success,
demonstrators threw in an exhibition of voice data being passed via an IP network, Usechak
said.
Although the demonstration will neither make nor break the fledgling effort, Usechak said
he hopes it will help persuade Army and other service officials to provide funding for
further development.
"For next year, we know the Army will provide some money to Motorola to keep this
work moving forward, but we don't know yet how much. We're hoping for about $1
million," Usechak said. The service hopes to provide some units with an initial
capability of the open architecture within the next 20 months, he said.
