Army Enlisting Digital Technologies
Southern California technology companies have won a spate of U.S. Army orders in recent months for systems and devices that do everything from mapping battlefields to deflecting enemy fire.
The contracts--each worth tens of millions of dollars--have gone to both little-known defense industry suppliers as well as TRW Inc. and other giants that once dominated the Southern California aerospace economy.
The orders are for small but sophisticated systems that, unlike missile programs, do not employ thousands of workers and do not command much political attention. But the contracts reflect the Pentagon’s growing appetite for a new breed of digital defense technologies.
Electronic warfare “is pretty esoteric; it’s pretty black art,” said Leonard Zuga, a researcher for industry consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. But, he added, it can also be pretty lucrative.
If the pace of recent orders continues, Southern California could see a rising stream of federal defense-related funds.
An artillery-detonating device called the Short Stop, made by a Simi Valley division of Condor Systems Inc., is already in the hands of soldiers stationed overseas.
The Army plans to equip one of its divisions in Ft. Hood, Texas, with a system from TRW in Carson as part of a much-vaunted effort to create a digitally equipped “Force 21” for the new century.
And on the drawing board is a flying combat zone scanner for which teams from several companies, including a Lockheed Martin Corp. squad in Palmdale, are dreaming up designs.
So far, one of the largest orders has gone to TRW, which recently won a contract worth $57 million over three years to supply the Army with 6,000 terminals capable of rendering up-to-date battlefield maps for soldiers in combat.
The project is part of a digital information network dubbed FBCB2, for Force 21 Battle Command Brigade-and-Below.
Designed and tested at TRW’s Carson plant in a computer laboratory behind a password-protected door, the system aims to provide commanding officers and soldiers with updated information on their surroundings.
Drawing on encrypted radio signals sent between allied tanks and bases, and incorporating information about the enemy that might be beamed from satellites, the system updates battlefield maps on a touch-sensitive display screen.
Engineers at TRW recently tested the system in the lab by assigning different computers the identities of vehicles that might be on the battlefield--here a tank, there an armored jeep. Synthesized pings echoed through the lab as the workstations exchanged frantic messages.
About 300 people, including some subcontractors from Raytheon Co.’s communications group in Fullerton, work on the network.
Engineers have faced their share of challenges in assembling the system. The biggest problem is getting all of the intelligence data from one vehicle to another over radio waves, said the program’s software development manager, Joseph Provenzano.
“The customer wants more and more,” he said of the amount of data the Army seeks to transmit over the wireless network. “I’ve got a little soda straw, and [they] want to put a fire hose through it.”
Indeed, Army officials discovered not long ago that the network, in development since the mid-1990s, could not handle one task of critical importance ever since friendly fire incidents claimed lives during the 1991 Persian Gulf War: how to tell a gunner on the verge of firing whether the target is a friend or foe.
The network can take as long as eight minutes to update its combat map, but the military wanted a much faster signaling method to reduce friendly fire. That led to renewed funding for a separate project in which TRW is also involved, the Battlefield Combat Identification System.
Moments before firing at a target, a vehicle equipped with the identification system sends out an electromagnetic signal that asks, in effect, “Who goes there?” If an answer comes back, the system shouts “Friend!” three times in a digitally simulated woman’s voice to dissuade the gunner from firing. (A woman’s voice was chosen, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Maddux, to distinguish it from the mostly male voices a gunner hears during combat.)
The signals go back and forth five times in 300 milliseconds to ensure accuracy and have been shown to work over a three-mile range even in heavy rain.
“We will never eliminate friendly fire,” Maddux, a product manager overseeing the TRW contracts at the U.S. Army Communication and Electronics Command in Ft. Monmouth, N.J., said. “But this system will significantly reduce it.”
About 20 TRW workers produce the system, which in June won a four-year, $37.9-million Army order. Having shown that the system can work on the ground, engineers are now trying to design lighter versions that can be mounted on helicopters, which could be crucial to reducing air-to-ground targeting mistakes, said Gerrit LeGrand, a TRW program development manager.
Still, the outlook for future orders for TRW’s identification system is cloudy. If the Army places a large-scale order for a combat ID system, it would invite other companies to bid on the contract, Maddux said. Also, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is close to adopting the Battlefield Combat Identification System signal structure as a standard, but European countries are likely to name European companies such as France’s Thompson to build equivalent systems for their armies.
Although the TRW products have yet to see actual combat, another electronic defense system manufactured in Southern California is already winning plaudits from as far away as the Balkans and the Koreas.
Built by a Simi Valley company once known as Whittaker Corp. and now owned by San Jose’s Condor Systems, the Short Stop device generates an umbrella of electromagnetic signals around bases and troops that fool incoming artillery shells into detonating hundreds of feet before they hit their targets. The umbrella can protect a square area about five football fields wide and five long.
Short Stop has been used to protect Army camps in Kosovo, South Korea and Kuwait, said Lt. Col. Jessie L. Barber, an Army program manager. “We get comments back from the field all the time from soldiers who say, ‘Give me more of it,’ ” Barber said.
Wally Roman, Condor’s Short Stop manager, said that although the first units weighed 135 pounds, the 50 workers on the program have come up with much more compact designs and are now close to deploying a 25-pound version that soldiers can carry on backpacks.
The technology makes use of long-standing expertise Whittaker workers acquired during the Cold War, when they built mimic radars to simulate Soviet detection systems used in American war games, he said.
With an April contract award for 90 of the devices worth nearly $17 million, workers will be kept busy until spring 2002. Privately held Condor sees about $150 million in annual revenue, Roman said.
In the distant future is the possibility that another Army electronic warfare system could be produced with help from regional technology talent.
The service has asked teams from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp. to submit designs by fall 2001 for a scanning device that would fly over a battlefield to gather information about an enemy.
Fewer than 20 of Lockheed Martin’s engineers at Palmdale are at work on the designs right now. “We’re starting with a clean sheet of paper, for a young engineer who can brainstorm and dream,” team manager Paul Valovich said.
The sensor would replace a 30-year-old device now in place, he said, noting that the Army has asked designers to weigh production and maintenance costs heavily in submitting their proposals.
Production on the intelligence system, called the Aerial Common Sensor, would not begin until 2007, but could be worth up to $2 billion, the Pentagon has said.
