[Satellite News 10-19-09] U.S. military officials are asking commercial satellite companies for more bandwidth and next-generation technology to assist them in creating a Global Information Grid (GIG) that is easily accessible for military personnel in the battlefield.
    On a Satcon 2009 panel, "Improving the Integration of Satcom Within the GIG," U.S. Army Col. Edward Eidson outlined the military’s preferences for its next-generation network architecture. "A key factor in connecting our tactical networks back to the GIG is a thing called Global Newtork Enterprise Construct. The goal is to connect distant operations and communications into the grid in a plug-and-play format, with the ability for soldiers to plug in once they get into the battle theater," he said.
    U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Janice Hamby agreed with Eidson and highlighted the potential of properly connecting U.S. forces to configurable communications. "The young men and women who are serving in today’s military understand how to make this technology work because they grew up surrounded by it," she said. "My own daughter doesn’t have cable television because she downloads her favorite shows online. This is just an example of how resourceful this generation is when it comes to technology. They do not need to be specialists or signaleers to operate these systems."
    Using the term "plug-and-play" may be a signal that the U.S. military is paying attention to the tech-culture of its young forces. Creating a global plug-and-play grid would connect easily and instantly any soldier to a variety of network resources, said Eidson. "We’re looking to leverage applications such as UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] and build a robust and thicker network by using satcom components to build a network-centric waveform," he said.
    To accomplish this task, the military is going to need bandwidth and lots of it. "Bandwidth is the new currency of the battlefield," said Tracy Allison, chief of transformational communications engineering at the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). "The defense community is now reaching out to the commercial industry with a need for bandwidth."
    In return, Allison said the U.S. military intelligence agencies are ready to open up to commercial providers to better communicate their needs. "The attitude towards this relationship for myself and others in my arena used to be based on the ‘need to know.’ Now, our priorities are focused on the ‘need to share.’ The information needs to go both ways."
    The military is looking to acquire network technologies based on platforms that are already available in the enterprise sector, Edison said. "The ability for expeditionary forces to instantly disconnect and reconnect to home stations is crucial for efficiency and security. The commercial sector can help us achieve this by helping us collapse and consolidate these networks where it makes sense. We’ve outlined our needs up until 2025, however, to be realistic from a financial and technology point of view, this network cannot be run on a single military-exclusive architecture. We need a network of networks and a variety of options to configure and re-route comms," he said.
    Hamby said this massive network grid would involve several platforms and resemble the hybrid infrastructure seen in next-generation mobile solutions. "This cannot be achieved over satellite alone. We must be working together with terrestrial, fiber and other mobile partners to realize the solution that we need," she said.
      "The challenge for the [commercial] industry is to understand and realize our desire to do this and understand the sheer amount of traffic that we will be pushing through this network when designing satellite modems for this architecture. The sheer amount of data we use cannot overwhelm these systems. Our current on-the-move comms systems are crucial to our success in the battlefield, but they are limited in power and ability. We need to move to the next level," said Eidson.