Network Centric Warfare: BAE Systems prepares for JP 2072 | ADM November 2011

Gregor Ferguson | Sydney

After stumbling badly at its first attempt to field a battlefield trunk communications system, Defence is about to make a second attempt. With an RFT for Phase 2B of Joint Project 2072 –Battlespace Communications System (Land) “imminent” and 2nd Pass Approval expected some time next year, industry contenders are positioning themselves carefully.

When Defence awarded the original contract for JP2072 to General Dynamics early in this century, it came as a serious blow to BAE Systems Australia, which had built up a significant local capability and knowledge base in tactical and trunk communications on the back of its successes in the ADF’s Parakeet, Raven and Wagtail programs. The collapse of the project gave the company (and its rivals) a second bite at the cherry.

The Defence Capability Plan sets out the scope and purpose of Phase 2B in unambiguous terms: “Phase 2B aims to provide enhanced Command and Control (C2) services including enhanced trunking and switching infrastructure to deployed ADF Headquarters in the land environment. Phase 2B intends to leverage off COTS technologies to achieve a significant advantage over current deployed systems. Phase 2B is key to achieving the ADF’s NCW milestone of the Networked Brigade.”

In effect, this phase will replace the Parakeet trunk switching and communications system that BAE Systems developed during the early-1990s. The difference is that Ph.2B will extend this functionality down to Combat Team level, requiring a level of tactical robustness and flexibility that Parakeet didn’t need.

This is what makes the ADF’s requirements unique, according to the company’s Peter Cantwell. An off the shelf system simply won’t meet the ADF’s needs, he told ADM: while Commercial and Military Off The Shelf (COTS and MOTS) components will deliver most of the functionality, the system architecture will be configured uniquely to meet Australian needs. This means in turn that Defence needs a lead systems integrator to support the development of a system specification and system architecture.

The technical and industrial landscape has changed beyond recognition since the days of Parakeet, Cantwell told ADM. This was a MOTS solution based on a Tadiran switching system and proved challenging to sustain, especially given the high rate of obsolescence in IT.

The company’s bid for JP2072, he says, will be based around an architecture designed for enhancements and upgrades through its service life, employing COTS components wherever possible, and MOTS components wherever necessary.

The UK’s Falcon Internet Protocol (IP) based trunk communications and switching program, for which BAE Systems is the prime contractor, is the departure point for the Australian program. This replaces another legacy BAE Systems product, the British Army’s Ptarmigan trunk communications system, and offers much higher data rates and multi-level security as well as a smaller logistics and human footprint.

However, emphases Cantwell, Falcon, off the shelf, is not the solution the ADF is seeking, and it won’t be the solution that BAE Systems Australia offers. But there are Falcon components which the company will leverage and adapt in order to reduce development and integration, he told ADM. These include the Network management System and elements of the multi-level security architecture.

The process of defining the system architecture is proceeding in parallel with Defence’s own tender development. The Functional and Performance Specification (FPS) is a “work in progress”, says Cantwell, following release of a draft FPS at the end of 2010. This includes about 1,000 separate requirements and BAE Systems Australia (and doubtless the other contenders) submitted a detailed response addressing risks, challenges, and other issues. Defence has been “significantly interactive”, Cantwell says, and its requirements are evolving as a result of this process.

Among those requirement are a ‘SATCOM on the move’ capability which supports mobile broadband connectivity. This wasn’t possible in the Parakeet era, but BAE Systems Australia demonstrated just such a capability last year at Enoggera at the culmination of a Round 13 CTD project it had undertaken with a Brisbane SME, communications specialist EM Solutions. This saw the companies achieve mobile SATCOM broadband connectivity using a Ka-band link and novel tracking solution installed on a Bushmaster PMV.

The ADF tends to operate in a widely dispersed fashion, Cantwell notes, so SATCOM is its primary bearer – hence its major investment in the US Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) communications system. Hence also the need to get the most from the satellite’s footprint and bandwidth, including mobile functionality. However, even this network will be capacity and bandwidth-constrained so the Bandwidth Broker technology which BAE Systems Australia developed and demonstrated in an earlier CTD project will also be part of the JP2072 technology mix.

EM Solutions will be part of the BAE Systems Australia bid for JP2072, along with another high-technology SME, Canberra-based M5 Networks Security. There will be other industry partners as well, Cantwell said, but he was unable to disclose details at the time of writing.

The company recently signed a Global Supply Chain (GSC) deed with Defence which underlines its intent to deal with the high-tech SME community on a long-term basis. Different strategies are need to deal with different strata in the SME community, Cantwell believes: the high-technology innovators need long-term business relationships and a constant flow of work to remain on top of both technology and business practice, and firms like EM Solutions have been part of BAE Systems Australia’s team on the latter stages of Parakeet as well as the MILSATCOM project, JP2008.

There are genuine Global Supply Chain opportunities in similar projects overseas, he told ADM: for example, the UK’s forthcoming Falcon upgrade will embody some of the enhanced functionality the company and EM Solutions have already developed for JP2072. Similar opportunities are also starting to emerge in parent company export markets such as India, he added.

The JP2072 systems engineering effort will remain in-country, says Cantwell. BAE Systems Australia’s in-house capability has been refreshed and evolved with the recruitment of a new generation of young engineers. The company has developed its own structured measurement program to assess and measure integration risk and prevent the introduction of unnecessary risk.

As one would expect, many of the basic hardware components – switches and routers and the like – have already been selected by BAE Systems Australia and its partners with an eye to reducing integration risk and undertaking a sensible amount of pre-integration at an early stage.

The JP2072 bid will be primed from BAE Systems Australia’s North Ryde office in Sydney, which has a long history in the communications and signal processing business. The SATCOM expertise resides in Adelaide while the company will also exploit its reachback capabilities to its UK parent company’s Falcon program which is based in Christchurch. All the company needs now is an RFT.  

Subject: Joint