Pentagon's Urgent Search for Speed

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

New York Times 1 December 2002
Pentagon's Urgent Search for Speed
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.

WESTMINSTER, Md. -- In soldier slang, the interval between a gun's 
recoil and the shell's explosion is known as "flash-to-bang time." In 
combat, the shorter it is, the better.

With war looming in Iraq, the term has taken on broader significance 
- in both the business of war and the business of supplying warriors. 
Everyone wants shorter flash-to-bang - from the moment a target is 
spotted to the moment it is destroyed, from the moment a march is 
ordered to the moment troops arrive, from the moment of invention to 
the moment of production and delivery.

That is why, here in the rural hills of Maryland, at a robotics 
laboratory owned by General Dynamics, the engineers boast that their 
new driverless vehicles, little armored off-road trucks bulging with 
lenses and antennae, can maneuver through the woods and fields at a 
snappy 15 or 20 miles an hour (10 at night).

And that is why General Dynamics, after just two years working on the 
vehicles, is ready to brief the brass on how robotic vehicles like 
this could transform combat units. The company says the firepower of 
a full infantry battalion could be packed into a unit of about 
one-third the people: 270 soldiers equipped with 140 robots.

The same quick tempo can be seen across the military industrial 
complex. Faster-moving infantry, smarter bombs, newer satellites, 
pilotless vehicles - are all being propelled by a wartime sense of 
urgency in what is sure to be a costly quest for speed. The average 
time between finding a target and hitting it dropped to 15 minutes in 
Afghanistan a year ago from 45 minutes in the Persian Gulf war of 
1991. And the Pentagon is pushing to trim that even more.

At Boeing, thousands of kits are being produced each month to turn 
unguided bombs into the satellite-guided smart bombs that were used 
more widely in Afghanistan than in any previous war. Pentagon leaders 
have promised that if there is war in Iraq, there will be plenty of 
smart bombs.

Before a satellite can guide a bomb to target, the satellite must 
carry target information among soldiers, pilots and commanders. With 
today's satellites swamped by a growing demand, manufacturers like 
Boeing and Lockheed Martin are eagerly awaiting the order to move 
ahead with a next-generation satellite, using lasers for the first 
time to communicate in outer space.

The lessons of Afghanistan, as well as the pressing possibility of 
war against Iraq, are speeding production of remote-controlled 
aircraft like the Predator, which the military uses to track targets 
and the C.I.A. has used to kill people identified as Al Qaeda leaders 
in Afghanistan and Yemen. This year, Congress is allowing $131 
million to buy 22 more Predators, made by General Atomics 
Aeronautical Systems. And $129 million more is to be spent on three 
of the Predator's much larger, more capable and more expensive 
cousin, the Global Hawk surveillance drone, made by Northrop Grumman. 
Global Hawk was rushed into service in Afghanistan, and its 
capabilities are still being upgraded with new sensors. (The price of 
a souped-up model would be about twice as much.)

"Speed is helpful if you know what you're looking at and can identify 
in near real time what your targets are," said Stephen A. Cambone, 
the under secretary of defense for policy, in a recent briefing on 
the military's spending priorities. "You say, `Gee, if I can get that 
kind of real-time information, speed then is worth having.' " But, he 
stressed, "speed's expensive."

With American troops still engaged in Afghanistan and getting ready 
for a possible war against Iraq, and with the Bush administration 
promising a "transformation" of the military, Congress appears 
willing to pay the price. In recent years, it has increased the 
military's budget beyond what the president requested, and military 
spending is now growing at its highest rate in 20 years. With 
Republicans controlling both chambers, President Bush is sure to get 
a warm reception for another spending increase in 2004.

David Strauss, who follows the military industry for UBS Warburg, 
predicts that spending on research, development and procurement will 
accelerate to 8 or 10 percent annually over the next few years, 
adjusted for inflation, after real growth of 4 percent annually since 
1996. (In the early 1990's, he says, the Pentagon went on a 
"procurement holiday.")

Of the total military budget of about $370 billion, procurement this 
year will come to about $71.6 billion, up $10.7 billion from 2002, 
while spending on research and development will come to $58.6 
billion, up $9.9 billion, in the spending bill signed by President 
Bush on Oct. 23. It sounds like a lot, but in fact the money for 
procurement is roughly 40 percent less than it was 20 years ago, 
adjusted for inflation. In 1983, during the Reagan military buildup, 
procurement spending came to $121 billion in today's dollars.

More notable than the spending spree itself, though, is where the 
money is being focused.

President Bush made the new emphasis clear last December, when he 
gave a major speech on military transformation. He highlighted three 
trends that were already becoming evident in the war in Afghanistan: 
the increasing use of robotic vehicles, the wider use of precisely 
guided bombs and the reliance on information-sharing networks.

"Our commanders are gaining a real-time picture of the entire 
battlefield and are able to get targeting information from sensor to 
shooter almost immediately," he said.

"Every soldier is a sensor," said Scott D. Myers, the president of 
the robotic systems division at General Dynamics and vice president 
of its Eagle Enterprises subsidiary, which is bidding on the 
modernization of equipment for foot soldiers. "And from the time he 
lases the target until the time the robotic vehicle selects its 
weapon and fires will be about five seconds."

The Army has been moving in this direction for years.

Late one night in September 2000, 45 paratroopers of the 82nd 
Airborne Division dropped from the dark skies over Fort Polk, La., 
for a mock combat drill against other Army troops. They wore an 
unconventional assortment of night-vision goggles, miniature 
computers and communications gear, a prototype of what the Army calls 
its Land Warrior system. The equipment had been cobbled together in 
just a year, and this was its first test.

The results were good enough that only a year later, similar 
equipment was delivered to American Special Forces units, which used 
it in Afghanistan.

It might cost billions of dollars to equip tens of thousands of 
soldiers with the full array of this gear, according to a report by 
the Pentagon's inspector general. But the Army is phasing it in - 
even as it begins a program to invent an even more elaborate set of 
tools for foot soldiers.

The competition to design the new combat kit pits General Dynamics, a 
giant with $14 billion in annual revenue, against a tiny 
entrepreneurial company, Exponent Inc., which has not been a 
traditional military contractor. Exponent has enlisted several 
partners, including Hamilton Sunstrand, a unit of United 
Technologies, whose expertise in making spacesuits for NASA is a big 
advantage. Conversely, General Dynamics has turned to its Eagle 
Enterprise unit, acquired a few years ago, to be the kind of 
entrepreneur the Army is looking for. Each team has been given $7.5 
million to produce conceptual designs and some prototypes, with an 
April deadline.

The ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of equipment carried by an 
individual soldier to roughly 50 pounds from more than 100, while 
greatly increasing the lethality of his weapons. Pentagon budget 
documents call the program "a leap ahead" and promise that it will 
achieve "revolutionary capabilities." The Army has projected spending 
of about $60 million a year for the next several years on research 
into the program and has projected that the new equipment will be 
ready for combat use in a half-dozen years or so.

Each soldier will have hand-held computers to control weapons, check 
maps and view pictures of the surrounding terrain. Individual radios 
will link the group into a tight team even as they spread out in the 
darkness; each team will be linked to others and to robots. In a 
squad of soldiers, one might carry a miniature drone aircraft 
capable, for instance, of flying around a city block to look for the 
enemy.

Even combat fatigues will be transformed. Synthetic undergarments 
will put sensors on the soldier's skin to monitor his physical 
condition, reporting if he needs medical attention. Several layers of 
lightweight clothing would include body armor and protection against 
chemical or biological attack.

With a vest or other garment designed like an electric blanket, a 
soldier might even be able to run a cord back to one of the robotic 
vehicles, which would provide a power supply for the many electronic 
devices each soldier would carry. (New batteries, carried by each 
soldier, are also being investigated; designed to last for many 
hours, they would be recharged by the robotic vehicles.)

But there are many kinks in any such futuristic scheme. Congressional 
committees, while supporting the Pentagon's development of 
hybrid-electric power for vehicles like the robots the Army wants, 
have asked for periodic progress reports, citing worries that they 
might not function well in extreme cold. That would be a problem, for 
example, for a unit deployed in the mountains of the Hindu Kush in 
Afghanistan in the dead of winter, unable to recharge communications 
batteries or warm up soldiers' uniforms.

All the emphasis on seamless communications among troops, ships and 
planes, and the visions of individual soldiers sending maps and 
photographs back and forth, or robots sending home streams of videos, 
have a glaring weakness: there is not enough telecommunications 
capacity, or bandwidth, on the military's satellites.

"You need a lot of bandwidth to move that kind of data around," said 
Mr. Cambone at the Pentagon. "Think about whether you would have been 
able to use your 286 computer to work the Internet as it exists 
today. You can't do it."

According to Boeing, one satellite maker, that became clear when 
American forces in Afghanistan found themselves short of enough radio 
channels even for their more limited tactical communications. To fill 
the gap, the Navy activated a nine-year-old satellite that had been 
put in orbit over Africa as a spare. The old satellite added 15 
percent more communications capability to the military forces in the 
region.

The problem has been known for some time. After the military's 
deployment in Bosnia, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 
reported that only a few select headquarters were able to get enough 
bandwidth for large-scale exchanges of information.

"One thing we've learned," said Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr., the 
director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, "is that with 
each conflict that we have, we certainly increase the amount of 
bandwidth that is required for our deployed war fighters."

The need for a new satellite system to carry videoconferences between 
commanders, let alone the huge amounts of data shared by troops on 
the ground, became especially evident after Sept. 11, according to a 
Pentagon document. In response, the Pentagon has proposed a crash 
program to design and field a new satellite system, known as the 
Advanced Wideband System, starting this year and with the first 
launching in 2006.

Unlike previous satellite communications systems, this one would use 
a new kind of link entirely: one based on laser communications. As a 
mark of its importance to the technology revolution the Pentagon is 
seeking, it is being called by a new name: the transformational 
satellite.

Nobody can say yet how much this will cost. But for a sense of the 
project's scale, a set of satellites viewed as a temporary solution 
and known as the Wideband Gapfiller Satellite is being built for $1.3 
billion by a team led by Boeing. In a change from past practices, the 
satellite relies heavily on commercial technology, which will make it 
available earlier but will leave it more vulnerable to certain kinds 
of attack, like the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear explosion in 
space.

Another upgrade of satellites using extremely high frequency, or EHF, 
signals, known as the Advanced EHF Satellite and set for launching in 
2006, is being built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems and TRW Space 
and Electronics for $2.7 billion.

Air Force officials have said that if the laser technology comes 
along fast enough, they may decide not to buy the fourth and fifth 
Advanced EHF satellites, instead moving quickly to the laser-based 
version. But they will not be ready for that decision until the end 
of 2004. "Depends a little bit on how much risk has been reduced by 
that point," said Peter B. Teets, the Air Force under secretary.

MILITARY analysts have already wondered whether all this 
communications capability is too expensive. Marco A. Caceres, an 
analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace research firm, warned at an 
industry conference in January that some satellite systems are 
already behind schedule, and that there will be pressure on the 
military to lease capacity from commercial satellites rather than 
building its own so hastily.

Others, like Loren B. Thompson of the independent Lexington 
Institute, caution that the Pentagon may commit too much, too soon to 
technologies that may be overrated on the basis of unusual recent 
wars - notably the victory over the poorly trained and under-equipped 
Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

"The incompetence of our adversaries has given us an exaggerated idea 
of how much progress we have made in transforming our forces," he 
said.  

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/business/yourmoney/01BUIL.html>
-- 
Yoshie

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