In damage control mode, Army builds future network for combat brigades.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

For the Army, this may be its last chance of salvaging the surviving pieces of the ill-starred "future combat systems."

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Working to the Army's advantage is that what remains of FCS is something that soldiers need and currently don't have: A mobile communications network that can be accessed by everyone on the battlefield, even small units that constantly move around.

Current command-and-control and communications systems in the Army were designed for division-and brigade-level use. Before Iraq and Afghanistan, smaller units were not a high priority and, to this day, have limited means of tapping into the Army's battle-command networks. Today's systems also lack enough range or capacity for data to stream down to those small units that are scattered across hundreds of miles.

During the past nine years at war, much of the responsibility for intelligence gathering and counterinsurgency operations has fallen on small units, so commanders have been seeking ways to extend the network down to lower echelons, and even down to the individual soldier.

Troops have voice-communications devices, such as push-to-talk FM radios. But that is not the technology the Army had envisioned for the information age. Army leaders have spoken for years about their desire to provide Internet connectivity to the entire force, and to be able to deliver voice and data from a single device, such as a software-programmable radio or even a smartphone.

The rhetoric, however, has not matched the reality. The closest the Army has come to having an IP network at the squad level is in the "land warrior" system--an ensemble that includes a communications and navigation computer-radio suite. In the land warrior network, each member can pinpoint the others' locations by simply looking at a display. But this is only a niche solution and does not solve the larger problem of connecting every element of a deployed brigade.

After more than a decade of failed attempts--and billions of dollars spent without achieving results--the pressure is on for the Army to fix this. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said that the "network" is now the cornerstone of the service's modernization strategy. "It will require an open architecture that will allow further plug-and-play development in the future as our network grows and matures," Chiarelli said at an industry conference last year.

The Army's answer to Chiarelli's call comes in the form of a program called Early Infantry Brigade Increment 1, or E-IBCT--the surviving offspring of the future combat systems. Defense...