Late last year Harris delivered the 10,000th digital tactical radio under Phase 2A of JP2072 and now there are more digital radios in the fleet than legacy radios.
This marks a significant point in the program, which has had a long and frustrating gestation but which is now achieving significant traction.
Second Pass Approval for the next phase, Phase 2B, is expected to occur either very late this year, or early in 2015 and was in the final stages of evaluation as this article was being prepared in late April.
Bringing battlefield communications into the digital age has to be done with great care however, as Army’s capability and operational tempo cannot be interrupted and that has been one of the key challenges for the program since its inception.
Moreover there are over eighty other projects that will either use, or be used by, the JP2072 product. Some of these projects will use the radios for their own purposes and others will have applications hosted on them. The ‘Land 200’ combine (Land 75/125) is one of the prime partners, as it rolls out the Army’s Battlefield Management System (BMS), using the JP2072 radios as the bearers.
JP2072 overview JP2072 is the Battlespace Communications System (Land) project, a multi-phase program of multi-phase projects that has been described as a ‘system of systems’, or a ‘network of networks’ across ADF strategic and tactical communications domains.
“Think of us as the Telstra of the battlespace,” Myra Sefton, Director General, Communications Systems Branch of DMO’s Electronic Systems Division explained. “When the troops walk out the front door of their barracks, all their communications are provided by JP2072.”
According to Sefton, the definition of an integrated BCS(L) architecture and associated specifications is a complex task. The first contracted attempt, during Phase 1, was unsuccessful and the Commonwealth terminated the work then ongoing with General Dynamics Canada in October 2007. However the damages received have been used towards bringing the prime Systems Integrator role in-house, using a core team of engineers and supported by specialist contractors as and when required.
“One of the reasons the attempt to implement Phase 1 failed was that it was just too complex a program to have a contractor doing work such as configuration management and support at arm’s length, so a deliberate decision was made to do the PSI work within the DMO project office,” Sefton explained.
The next iteration of Phase 1, which achieved final Second Pass Approval in 2009, oversaw the acquisition of commercial off-the-shelf and military off-the-shelf communications systems to address urgent shortfalls in the ADFs communications requirements. Essentially it focussed on digital mounted radios intended to equip a Brigade.
Phase 2A continues the rollout of deployable communications systems to high readiness land formations and units, primarily dealing with dismounted, hand-held digital radios, and will also establish the mature support systems.
Phase 2B will provide high capacity trunk communications to enhanced Command & Control services to ADF headquarters when deployed. It is essentially a modernisation of the current Parakeet trunk communications.
“Phase 2B will provide a wide-band communications backbone for land forces, enabling greater capacity and flexibility for voice, data and video services,” Bob Hutchinson, Program Director JP2072 told ADM.
Phase 3 will continue the expansion of mounted digital communications throughout the remainder of the ADF to support operations and is divided into a number of work packages. Phase 4 (in the 2012 DCP but as yet unapproved) will continue the rollout of deployable communications systems including any emerging capability gaps.
Current status One of the achievements of the first phases of JP 2072 has been to replace multiple legacy radio types, the oldest of which dates back to use in the Vietnam War, with a smaller much more capable software-defined radios.
“We have progressed past the balance point where there are now more of our radios out there than legacy radios and the rolling program is still occurring and will continue to around the end of this year. There’s a real momentum happening at the moment,” Hutchinson explained.
With the delivery of radios now well underway the immediate focus is on Phase 2B, the integrated battlefield telecommunications network, for which the competition is now down to teams led by Boeing Defence Australia and Lockheed Martin Australia.
“We are in the final stages of solicitation for Phase 2B, so the evaluation is substantially complete and the team is just finalising the source evaluation report for the delegate,” Myra Sefton noted. “After that we will be advising the Minister and the tenderers and we will be progressing to Second Pass, depending on programming, either in the last quarter of this year or the first quarter of 2015.”
Support Support and configuration management of software-defined digital radios is a challenge, with much of the technology residing on printed circuit boards, which cannot be maintained in the field. In fact, aside from simple replacements of antennae, connectors or selector knobs, most maintenance needs to be done by the OEM.
“Configuration management was also a challenge because we have so many users and each has its own software requirements, including their own preferred waveform set. All the radios look the same, so how do you know just by looking at it what waveforms it has on it?” Myra Sefton explained.
“However, the common radios and common waveform sets are still very efficient in terms of lower through life support and operational costs. Different users in different scenarios would normally require different suites of radios. With software defined radios the number of physical radio types in reduced. Because that radio can carry multiple waveforms, if you break your radio you won’t have to wait for a specific, matching replacement to be provided.”
Both Harris and Raytheon, the two major suppliers of radios to JP2072 have established a maintenance capability in Australia to support their products. According to Bob Hutchinson, the formers’ facility in Brisbane includes the largest vault in the southern hemisphere – to support the crypto-enabled radios.
Feedback With the majority of radios in the field now providing digital capabilities, feedback from exercises and operations are now being analysed and used to both refine current use and also to inform further phases of the project.
“We are getting good feedback from big exercise like Talisman Sabre 2011 and 2013; it’s a ‘learn by doing’ process that’s actually working in this case. In this respect we are working very closely with Land 75 and their Battlefield Management System, as a major user of our communication bearers. And in fact, some of the feedback has already changed the firmware within the system and which will be rolled out,” Bob Hutchinson commented.
“And as we are using the system more, people are finding better ways to actually use it. For example, medical personnel have found that they can transmit critical patient data forward from field ambulances, so by the time they reach care, the base medical staff can be better prepared.”
Allied interoperability is also being demonstrated through activities like the multi-national experiments (MNE) conducted in the United States.
“We are participating in local and international exercises and working groups, where we can stress test the systems together,” Myra Sefton added.
Remaining risk and the future As history has already shown, JP2072 is a very complex and ambitious program of individual projects, which not only have to work individually, but must integrate with a host of other components - past, present and future.
“The ideal is still not here and won’t be for quite a while, as Phase 2B will be one of the big enablers of that network centric warfare. To have a network management measured across all radios is the vision and we have progressed a long way towards that. In the meantime we might have a federated hierarchy of network management, or something similar, which will help us to build up towards that capability,” Bob Hutchinson detailed.
“Integrating the capabilities remains a risk. If you take Phase 2B for example, the battle telecommunications network, it will be a fully integrated, very capable system. But we’ve got both legacy and emerging systems out there to integrate into an operational ‘system of systems’, at the same time as ensuring we have continuity of communications, security and support etcetera.
“We think we’ve identified the touch points and we are prepared for that to feed into the specifications for Phase 2B, the specifications for the new radios we are buying, but there is still risk remaining and that’s just a fact of life.”
Myra Sefton explained further that a lot of the effort is optimising performance
“You might have a COTS radio specification that promises a certain performance capability, but when you try to integrate it into another system you may compromise on some individual performance. You are going to have to optimise the performance of the two systems to get the best outcome. And certainly we’ve encountered that with our EPLRS (Enhanced Position Location Reporting System) and BMS integration. A lot of effort was required to make sure we balanced the individual systems and derived the best overall performance,” she added.
“Certainly one of the significant components of Phase 3 is the soldier personal radio which almost every soldier will carry and they will feel as strongly about them as they do their boots. The manager of Phase 3 is also actually looking at some exciting new capabilities that will influence future phases of JP2072. The project is not just about delivering radios - the radios are the final step of a long process in a complex program. We have had quite a long gestation but we are now delivering.”
