Battle Lab Shrinks Army Tactical Ops Center.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

Missile-defense command post manages to 'condense' hardware and software

The Army's missile-defense research branch developed a tactical operations center prototype that is much smaller and more easily transportable than conventional TOCs.

A TOC is an assemblage of vehicles and tents that house the computer networks and multitude of radios used by commanders and staffs to plan the battle and to communicate both with soldiers in the field and with national authorities.

A mechanized brigade TOC typically is made up of three or four armored command-post tracked vehicles, which back into a given area and lower their rear ramps. That area--covered with camouflage netting--shelters the workstations, servers and radios. Several dozen operators run the equipment.

The Army Space and Missile Defense Battle Lab, in Huntsville, Ala., is spending $5 million over two years to develop a so-called "advanced warfare environment" that makes it possible to set up a TOG with only two Humvee trucks (the shelter carrier model) and one Drash (deployable rapid assembly shelter). About 12-14 people would be needed to operate it.

Battle lab officials said the Army needs a "force projection" TOG for air-defense operations--one that can be up and ready before other units arrive in the theater. It would be an "early-entry asset" to plan, for example, defensive strategies against ballistic-missile attacks, said Army Lt. Gal. Gregory G. Hoscheit, chief of training and exercises at the battle lab.

He explained in an interview that TOCs can be downsized simply by consolidating tasks that require several bulky computers into a smaller number of commercial PCs, running Microsoft or Windows.

"Our goal is to merge capabilities into one box," he said.

An effort to develop a mobile TOG began about two years ago, at the urging of the former chief of the Space and Missile Defense Command, Lt. Gen. John Gostello. "He asked us to reduce the logistics footprint," said Hoscheit.

The battle lab's prototype TOC would be transportable by G-130 medium-lift aircraft, he said. It also could move on a truck.

The secret to making a TOC smaller is to have software that provides a single, consolidated picture of the battlefield in a 3-D environment, he said. That eliminates the use of the separate servers typically needed for different combat applications.

The computers in this TOC host the "advanced warfare environment" software, called Aware. The Aware boxes operate autonomously, without servers. They can connect to the Army Battle Command System--a collection of 11...