Navy to Upgrade UAV Tactical Control System: planned modifications focus on interoperability with Air Force, Army.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The U.S. Navy is continuing development and testing of the Tactical Control System for unmanned aerial vehicles. The TCS, which allows the simultaneous control of multiple UAVs and their payloads from the same control station, was conceived as a joint-service program but never was adopted by the Air Force or the Army.

The program is likely to survive, however, as a Navy-only system that eventually could be modified to accommodate UAVs from additional services, experts said.

The concept for TCS came about in the mid-nineties, when a number of UAVs were being developed, including the Air Force Predator and the Navy Pioneer.

"They wanted to have a ground station, so that they did not have to build one for each UAV," said Capt. Dennis Sorensen, the program manager for Navy UAVs at Patuxent River, Md.

So far, approximately $200 million has been invested in the program. The funding for this year is about $20 million. For fiscal year 2004, the program requested $37 million. The prime contractor for TCS is the Raytheon Company.

According to an industry source who works closely with the program at Joint Forces Command, "there is no definitive plan or date at which a fielded TCS capability would exist." A Raytheon spokesperson declined to answer questions about current TCS capabilities.

The Joint Forces Command is backing the continued employment of TCS and is running experiments through its Joint Operation Test Bed System (JOTBS). "JFCOM supported [TCS] from a joint perspective, because it allowed the joint commander to get information more quickly," said Sorensen.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department is asking the services to develop common UAV interoperability standards. The TCS technology would have to undergo significant modifications to become interoperable with other services, sources said.

The program office already is working on those modifications, said Sorensen. "TCS is based on interoperability standards. ... We are moving now toward a common standard. As the technology evolves, we are looking at standard-based methodology for achieving interoperability."

TCS also is the architectural basis for the NATO Standardization Agreement--STANAG 4586--for the UAV control system, he said. When adopted, this will enable interoperability between TCS and NATO UAV systems.

"It was implemented to allow different countries and different companies to build interoperable UAV systems to facilitate sharing of information across platforms and across systems and it is a method to migrate to a more open system," Sorensen explained. Two NATO countries...