BCSS roll-out ramps up

Army's roll-out of the Battlefield Command Support System remains a quiet success story.
Unless you ask, you don't hear much about Army's Battlefield Command Support System (BCSS) program, Project Land 75. The system is being rolled out quietly in an iterative development and acquisition cycle. The intimate involvement of users in that process seems to be ensuring that they have realistic expectations of what BCSS can do for them, and are thus reasonably satisfied with what it delivers.

The roll-out of BCSS to 1 Brigade in Darwin is largely complete, and Brigade units have used successive releases of the system software and command support tools both in East Timor and on recent exercises.

The biggest recent milestone was the roll-out of BCSS to HQ 3 Brigade and selected units in time for Exercise Tandem Thrust earlier this year, so that DSTO's Land Operations Division could conduct a detailed evaluation of its impact on the formation under realistic conditions.

Meeting the schedule was a challenge for both prime contractor Saab Systems Australia and 3 Bde itself, which had only a short time to become familiar with the system. A CPX prior to the exercise confirmed that the Brigade had enough BCSS assets and sufficient experience with the system to be able to use it effectively during Tandem Thrust.

The twice-yearly development/fielding cycle described in ADM two years ago has now been modified because the tempo of ADF operations at present is such that the training burden on units and formations of a six-monthly system upgrade was too great. Now the project office and Saab plan to implement annual updates with the next, release 5.0, scheduled for late this year. Release 6.0 will be issued in late-2002, and so on.

Release 4.0 last year introduced a new multi-user planning capability, Command Post log and new Operations and Situational Awareness tools; the existing functions were also upgraded, and Saab plans over the next four or five months to enhance the overall functionality of the BCSS software suite by gradually enhancing the level of interoperability between the various functions in time for Release 5.0.

Saab signed a two-year renewal of its software acquisition and integration contract last November, and this has expanded to include responsibility for hardware acquisition and integration, something originally handled by the DMO. This arrangement allows the company to better identify the total impact of software and hardware changes and deal with these in a holistic way.

At present 3 Bde, although a dismounted light infantry formation, is equipped with much the same BCSS hardware as the heavier, more mechanised 1 Bde, consisting principally of industrial workstations and laptops for use in HQs and command vehicles and ruggedised field server stacks mounted in armoured personnel carriers.

The next stage in the BCSS development plan is to trial various hand-held units and their interfaces with Army's Combat Net Radio (CNR) family. Saab and the project office will also be looking at new Mil Standard workstations, ruggedised vehicle computers and commercial-type desktop and laptop computers for future use within BCSS in order to gradually refresh the current hardware inventory as it starts to age without allowing a proliferation of different hardware types and configurations.

At the time of writing Saab had two RFIs on the streets: for hand-held computers; and for a CNR interface for these, with both scheduled to close at the end of July. Three other RFIs were scheduled for release during July, closing in August: for a Mil-Std workstation; a Ruggedised Vehicle Computer; and a COTS non-ruggedised computer.

Saab expects to make final selections in all five cases by year's-end with the intention of integrating these and issuing them to users in late-2002 as part of Release 6.0.

In parallel, Army was planning to conduct initial user trials of potential handheld computer solutions later in the year. At the time of writing, it hadn't been determined which units would conduct the trial, but this will probably consist of 3 Bde troops under the eye of the project office and DSTO.

Handheld computers come into their own down at platoon/troop and section level and Army and Saab have studied a number of different units including various Compaq Ipaq and Casio models. Technology is moving fast in this area of IT, the company points out, so the challenge is to match the technology available with the functionality required in the most cost-effective manner.

The BCSS user trials will also feed into Project Land 125 - Soldier Combat System. In due course, Land 125 will become the umbrella under which every item of a soldier's personal equipment - including his personal weapon - will be acquired. This has obvious implications for BCSS and the various user trials planned this year will help inform the development of Land 125, but the latter project hasn't begun to overlay its requirements on top of BCSS as yet; this may be several iterations away in the BCSS development cycle.

Project Air 87 hasn't impacted significantly on the BCSS program either, as yet. There is a stated requirement for Army's new Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH) to be able to interact with BCSS but until a final choice of helicopter and ground mission management (GMM) station is made, and the overall ARH/GMM systems architecture known, the interface between BCSS and the ARH can't be explored in detail.

It's widely acknowledged that there would be little sense in trying to integrate a BCSS terminal into an ARH cockpit. The avionics integration task for a mere two dozen aircraft would be prohibitively expensive, so the likely solution will probably be some sort of interface within the GMM, perhaps building on a very basic level of interoperability in data and messaging formats. This would allow a relatively free interchange of data without incurring significant development and integration costs associated with either the GMM or the ARH itself. A similar level of basic interoperability with allied defence forces' equivalents to BCSS is also a key project goal.

Saab is also thinking ahead about the likely impact of UAVs on the battlefield information environment. Saab recently bought into the Aerosonde UAV company and is starting to explore the operational and communications implications (including security and bandwidth) of using Aerosonde and other UAV types in the communications relay, ESM, Sigint and imagery-gathering roles.

By Gregor Ferguson, Adelaide