If you want to read a cool story about night-camouflaged marines wading ashore
along Iraq’s tiny stretch of Persian Gulf coast, silently ICQing each other
with their PDAs over a portable Wi-Fi network, it’s not going to happen. Not
yet anyway.
The Office of Naval Research, through something
called the Littoral Combat (LC) Future Naval Capability (FNC) Program Office,
is examining the potential of Wi-Fi with assistance from Washington-based
company Consulting and Engineering Next Generation Networks (CenGen) Inc.
According to CenGen’s
press release, they’re "evaluating and working closely with several
programs of record to introduce secure wireless connectivity into the Navy and
Marine Corp." One of the most promising of the technologies being investigated
is Harris Corp.‘s SecNet secure Wi-Fi system.
However, according to Ruth Shearer, command and control enabling capabilities
manager with the LC-FNC, the Navy and Marines are a year or more away from deploying
Wi-Fi in the field of battle. "Our transition strategy is to [deploy it]
in the 2004 to 2006 time frame," she says.
The project, while clearly not as shrouded in secrecy as one might expect,
is nonetheless protected by the natural camouflaging effect of military English.
Couple the army’s love of acronyms and novel syntax with the high-tech industry’s
equally passionate regard for obfuscating jargon and you have a lethal combination.
To clarify, littoral means basically "of the shore." The Littoral
Combat program investigates new ways the Navy and Marines can operate on shore.
It’s one of 12 such programs under the Future Naval Capability program. Within
it, Shearer explains, there are several "product lines" — technological
capabilities under investigation — and within them, many "products,"
of which secure wireless data is one.
Shearer’s group is investigating three main applications. One is to provide
wireless networking inside ships. The big benefit here is that it will save
ripping frigates and destroyers apart to wire them for Ethernet — a difficult
business, she says.
On the other hand, how well is Wi-Fi likely to work inside the steel hull of
a ship? That’s one of the things Shearer’s program is hoping to scope out and
document.
On board Wi-Fi WLANs would allow maintenance technicians equipped with wirelessly
enabled "wearable PDAs" to roam about the ship and stay in contact
at all times. "They really can’t be tethered," Shearer notes.
Now they can’t keep in data contact when working remotely. The wearable PDAs
could improve technicians’ productivity just as wirelessly connecting mobile
technicians in industry does.
The LC-FNC group is also experimenting with using wireless for ship-to-shore
and ship-to-vehicle data communications, but its main focus is the simpler problem
of equipping Navy and Marine "tactical command posts" on shore. These
could be tents with portable furniture and men and women with laptop computers,
or a military vehicle such as a Humvee, Shearer says. Workstations in these
command posts are currently linked using Ethernet cabling and routing.
Mobility is definitely one big advantage of wireless. Officers working at a
command post would not be tethered. They could walk around, including outside,
while staying in constant data contact — which as Shearer says, "increases
their situational awareness," so they can look around and better see what’s
going on.
The big advantage though is that wireless gear is lighter, takes up less room
and is easier and faster to set up. The "reduced footprint" is an
important benefit both on board ship and on shore in forward command posts,
Shearer says.
So what’s so difficult about this? Why can’t the Navy move faster on deploying
the technology?
"The implementation of wireless technology has not been characterized
yet," Shearer says. "Performance hasn’t been documented, the effects
on other [Navy] applications has not been documented. What is the technology
appropriate for, what is it not appropriate for? What are the impacts of high-level
packet loss, for example? What else needs to be considered — such as power
amplification?"
This is more than just bureaucratic meticulousness. Failure of a wireless data
communications system in the battle field — or worse, the failure of its data
security systems — could be catastrophic. Shearer’s program, she says, is about
"risk reduction." Her group is doing work that will eventually be
applied in a number of other Navy and Marine Corp initiatives around wireless
data communications.
The work involves both lab and field testing. Much of it is happening at the
Marine Corp Tactical Support Activity (MCTSA) center at Camp
Pendleton in California. Shearer isn’t giving away much about progress on
the testing but she does say it will involve installing a Wi-Fi LAN on board
a ship with clients equipped with the Harris SecNet WLAN cards.
She hints meanwhile that the near-term objectives of her program may be just
the tip of the iceberg for Wi-Fi — or at least broadband wireless — use by
Navy and Marines. While our scenario of platoon sergeants instant messaging
each other as they move into battle is well beyond the scope of current testing,
it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.
"The architecture for the Marine Corp right now is not that each platoon
would have a [wirelessly enabled] PDA," Shearer says. "But there is
no technological reason why that could not happen."
