Military project seeks to ease adoption of new technologies

A division of the Joint Forces Command is developing a new demonstration center to ensure that prospective military technologies work with existing systems before they move into the armed services' acquisitions pipeline.

"Interoperability is a challenge for the military with all these disparate systems, especially with commercial, off-the-shelf technology," Air Force Col. Robert Bennett, deputy commander of the six-year-old Joint C4ISR Battle Center, told National Journal's Technology Daily during an interview at the center's Suffolk, Va., headquarters.

The battle center has been tasked with developing the Interoperability Technology Demonstration Center (ITDC) in fiscal 2003. Bennett said the center eventually "might grow" to become the primary initiative through which the armed forces will improve interoperability among their information networks.

"We haven't stood it up yet," Bennett said of the demonstration center. "But I think it's a great complement to what we already do now."

The battle center's overall mission is to assess new technologies to lead the near-term transformation of the armed services' joint capabilities for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or C4ISR in military lingo. The center's roughly 125 employees include members of all four military services, civilian technology specialists and private-sector contractors, many who once served in the military.

Bennett said the battle center currently is drawing on its existing expertise, laboratory facilities, and other resources to develop the ITDC, which is expected to be running by the end of September. The fiscal 2003 defense budget provides no specific funding for the ITDC, but Bennett said the Pentagon's fiscal 2004 budget request would provide about $10 million for it.

The individual armed services already test commercial technologies to see if they can work with existing technologies before fielding them, according to Bennett. But he said those interoperability evaluations often are limited to each service's systems and do not take into account the systems of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

"They want this interoperability to be demonstrated within a joint command and control," Bennett said, noting that Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered the development of the ITDC in a memo to Joint Forces Command last year.

"The thrust of the [memo] was, 'Don't field these things until we really know if they're interoperable,'" Bennett said. "The military's certainly putting that word out, that we can't accept interoperability problems" with commercial technologies.

Bennett added that the battle center's method for assessing technology always has included "a little check for interoperability but not as much as with this new [ITDC] mission."

Marine Col. R.W. (Hap) Holm, the battle center's director of C4ISR assessments, said the ITDC will help the Joint Forces Command deliver new, interoperable communications technologies to war-fighters on the battlefield. "It's basically getting the right information to the right guy at the right time," Holm said.