Army gets green light to equip two brigades with broadband tactical network

The Army received clearance on Friday for production of two sets of an advanced broadband tactical network developed by Boeing Co. and three sets of a small, tracked battlefield robot built by iRobot Corp., but said a senior Defense Department official had canceled development of battlefield sensor systems and a small unmanned aerial vehicle.

The Army had planned to use all these systems as the key technology component of its $160 billion Future Combat Systems program that Defense Secretary Robert Gates canceled in April 2009.

The decision by Ashton B. Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, to chop the FCS technology components to just two elements ends the Army's grand scheme for a smart battlefield based on a variety of sensors. But the move does leave the service with a terrestrial broadband network whose performance has improved in tests at the White Sands Missile Range, N.M., during the past two years.

The Boeing tactical network, based on the Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radio, transmitted data at a rate of 2 megabytes per second -- about one-third the speed of a wired, home Internet connection in a test at White Sands last April.

The Boeing Ground Mobile Radio is one component of a network integration kit. It also includes the Army's Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below system that tracks and displays friendly and hostile forces on the battlefield, and a computer system that ties displays and keyboards into the network.

Paul Mehney, a spokesman for the Army Program Executive Office for Integration, said Carter's decision allows the service to equip two brigades with 81 network integration kits each, and three brigades with 38 tracked robots each. Mehney described the network integration kits as a "bridge" to further development of tactical networks.

In tests last September at White Sands, the Army demonstrated the ability of the advanced network to push all kinds of data, including satellite imagery. During that test, young soldiers also indicated that their preferred form of communication over the network was the same as their peers in college: Internet-style chat rooms.

Soldiers operate the camera-carrying small unmanned ground vehicle from iRobot -- the company that developed the autonomous vacuum cleaner -- with a controller derived from the Xbox video game controller.

The Army will equip units of the 1st Armored Division with the advanced network and the tracked robots when they deploy to Afghanistan, Mehney said.