Mission Manager
Plug-and-play EUD/USB peripheral data exchange
Aided Close Air Support or DACAS. DACAS is defined as “air action by fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft against hostile targets that are in close proximity to friendly forces and requires detailed integration of each air mission with the fire and movement of those forces”. The Joint Terminal Attack Controller, or JTAC, is the specialized authority on the ground who, in coordination with air and ground commanders, controls the maneuvering and targeting of air assets and ultimately grants weapons release clearance to attacking aircraft. Each service branch organizes, trains, and equips its own JTAC specialists, which means both a wide range of aircraft may be engaged in the mission, as well as a dizzying array of supporting digital equipment on the ground. The illustration depicts a typical ensemble for the JTAC engaged in Digitally Aided Close Air Support. In this application, the soldier’s digital equipment set is a virtual personal area network (PAN) that includes radio comms, targeting, video downlink, GPS location, primary and secondary battery power and of course the soldier’s computing device or EUD with its DACAS software.
device for STAR-PAN Systems Remember when adding a printer or scanner to your office PC meant hours of work, installing drivers or struggling with complicated network protocols? Nowadays, it’s far more common for standard PC network devices—from routers to monitors to printers—to be instantly recognized by the PC or server operating system for immediate use. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for soldier Personal Area Networks (PAN). In the C4ISR world of today’s ground combat forces, peripheral device support for both general use and mission-specific profiles remains a complicated and time-consuming process—one that often must be repeated for each and every mission. Individual command, control and communication devices are designed for specific mission profiles, and generally for use within a particular branch of service. Soldier radios, for example (perhaps the single most important communication device in ground combat), are typically engineered for use within a carefully-defined IT domain where everything from supported frequencies to power supplies has been accounted for. But much of this careful attention flies out the window when soldiers need their equipment to interoperate seamlessly in a joint service or multi- national operation. The challenge grows even greater when it comes to support for specialized peripheral devices selected for use in unique missions. While plug-and-play configuration and management of standard USB / Ethernet and radio devices is much talked about in soldier systems, the reality is that seamless connectivity between the soldier’s tablet computing device (EUD) and the dynamic array of C4ISR equipment he has been tasked with using, remains a distant goal. That many device manufacturers resort to proprietary board-level technologies exacerbates the problem—often beyond the skillset (or the deadlines) of squad and platoon-level IT specialists. By way of illustration, let’s take a look at a complicated, but fairly common mission-profile, that of Digitally
Qwik Connect • January 2020
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