Army must balance use of battlefield digital systems with power demands

The Army has deployed 35 digital systems for the largest communications network evaluation in history here, and Col. Daniel Pinnell, commander of the test brigade, said the exercise has shown the need to balance enhanced access to information with the power demands of thousands of pieces of equipment.

The myriad systems the Army has fielded to 3,800 soldiers participating in its Network Integration Evaluation test that spans 2,220 miles of this range and nearby Fort Bliss, Texas, run off either generator or battery power. This requires enormous amounts of fuel for the generators and a way to constantly recharge batteries pursuant to this agreement combat conditions.

The Army, said Pinnell, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division stationed at Fort Bliss, must figure out how much it will pay for enhanced communications and improved situational awareness and hammer out the logistics to keep those digital systems running.

For instance, the service has fielded hundreds of commercial cellphones to soldiers for this test from a development project called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications, and Lt. Col Robert Goodroe, deputy brigade commander, said troops had to jury-rig a way to get 120-volt power off of military vehicles to charge the phones.

The smartphones pursuant to this agreement evaluation use Voice over Internet Protocol and handle data as then as voice transmissions, which Pinnell said strained the capacity of the network, requiring troops to cut back on calls.

Capt. Kevin DeWitt, commander of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 35th Armored Regiment of the 2nd Brigade, said one benefit of issuing cellphones to digitally savvy soldiers was the short training time. However, DeWitt said he had concerns about the use of commercial products in the field, and recommended it might be necessary to make them more rugged. Pinnell as well expressed concern about the boot time required for a key software-based radio in accordance with evaluation, the Handheld, Manpack and Small Form Fit, a variant of the Joint Tactical Radio System. JTRS is a more than decade-old program to develop a family of radios for all three military services.

The Army wants to use the GMR to transmit broadband data over the battlefield using a software-based wideband networking waveform. Sgt. David Johnson, an infantryman who helps manage the systems installed in the Alpha Company command post in a mountaintop aerie more than 1,000 feet above the desert floor, said while evaluation the GMR has "worked wonderfully," with 90 percent to 95 percent reliability in the wideband mode.