December 2010 - National Defense

Industry Offers Alternatives to Border Fence OeNmT bHe 2 DM ec r 0 21 0 1 0

Army Embraces Virtual Training Soldiers Join Engineers In Robot Rodeo

w w w. N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E M A G A Z I N E . O R G

MONTH 2010

Budget Pressure At a Time of Trillion-Dollar Deficits, How Much Defense Can the United States Afford?

MONTH 2010

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Boeing’s groundbreaking integration of Live, Virtual and Constructive training domains (I-LVC) sets a new standard of training and readiness. With I-LVC, real aircraft can be integrated into exercises with simulators and computer-generated threats.

It’s the latest addition to Boeing’s full spectrum of training capabilities, including live range training— unparalleled training options that reduce cost and most importantly, maximize personnel readiness.

decemBer2010 NDIA’S BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE vo l u m e x c v , n u m b e r 685 W W W . n AT I o n A l D e F e n S e m AG A Z I n e . o r G

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Viewpoint

18 Defense Affordability: Can We Buy only What We Need?

cover story 22 how much defense the nation can afford may not be a question that most Americans want to ask. Or they may be too trusting of those in charge to make the right decisions.

In the post-Cold War era, the public has been surprisingly accepting of the government’s spending prerogatives. Lacking familiarity and information on the military’s workings, citizens have blindly accepted that the nation must have a huge defense deficit.

20 International Defense Markets: Seizing opportunities, Avoiding Common Pitfalls

While many top-tier defense firms are well versed in the complexities of cracking overseas markets, others will face unfamiliar challenges.

By MRINAL MENON AND ALEKSANDAR D. JOVOVIC

coVer storY

22 Military Spending: how Much Defense Will the American People Support?

Americans by most measures support a strong national defense. But how much is the country willing to pay for it?

By NATHANIEL H. SLEDGE JR.

coVer: ILLUSTRATION

BY BRIAN TAYLOR, ISTOCKPHOTO, DREAMSTIME / COVER DESIGN BY BRIAN TAYLOR.

ground robots 32 imaGes (clocKWise): creDit, creDit, creDit

Participants in a robotics “rodeo” seek to convince Army leaders that mechanized soldiers have a place on the battlefield.

training and simulation 42 Training on U.S. ranges is expensive.

An experiment slated for 2012 will integrate live soldiers on mock battlefields, computer-generated “virtual” forces and others who are operating simulators nearby. The Army hopes the concept will lead to big savings.

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26 A Single Recipe for Boosting The Economy, Fixing the Border And Making Clean Energy Large photovoltaic and thermal energy plants located in the Southern California borderlands would require huge investments, but could deliver big payoffs.

Training and Simulation

42 Mix of Live and Virtual Training Will Result In Savings, Army Says

By July 2012, the Army will blend live, virtual and constructive training in an effort to save time, money and space.

By KAREN L. JONES

Homeland Security

28 With SBInet in Limbo, Border Technology Is Anyone’s Game

A Tucson, Ariz.-based consortium wants to create a technology park where companies can create, test and sell systems designed to protect borderlands.

By STEW MAGNUSON

43 System Keeps Tabs on Troops as They Train in Dangerous Terrain 44 Greater Appetite for Unpiloted Aircraft in Combat Zones Fuels Demand for Simulators The difficulty of training remotely piloted aircraft operators in the United States is boosting the need for high-fidelity video game-based technology.

By ERIC BEIDEL

Robotics

32 Proponents Hope ‘Rodeo’ Can Move Army Ground Robots Forward

If the service is to integrate mechanized soldiers into the battlefield, it will have to gain the support of those who write requirements.

By STEW MAGNUSON

34 Technologists Make Progress on Autonomous Ground Robots 36 Army, Marine Corps in Pursuit Of Robotic Convoy Systems Both services are pursuing kits that can be installed in any logistics vehicle to make them automated. The plan is to take drivers out of harm’s way.

By GRACE V. JEAN

By ERIC BEIDEL

In Securing Our Future, Innovation is Imperative

by Lawrence P. Farrell Jr.

6 Defense Watch Ruminations on current events

by Sandra I. Erwin

8 Defense Insider Keeping a finger on the beltway

by Sandra I. Erwin

10 Security Beat Homeland defense briefs

by Stew Magnuson

N at i o n a l D e f e n s e • D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 0

Editor Sandra I. Erwin (703) 247-2543 SErwin@ndia.org Managing Editor Stew Magnuson (703) 247-2545 SMagnuson@ndia.org Senior Editor Grace V. Jean (703) 247-2585 GJean@ndia.org

48 Spy Game to Help Rehabilitate Veterans Suffering From Brain Injuries

Design Director Brian Taylor (703) 247-2546 BTaylor@ndia.org

By GRACE V. JEAN

51 Cybersecurity Market a Potential Boon for Simulation Companies

Graphics/Production Vy Koenig (703) 247-9469 VKoenig@ndia.org

Programmers are developing software that can train employees to prevent cyberattacks.

By GRACE V. JEAN

54 Air Force Graduates First Batch of Cyberwarriors

National Defense Magazine 2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 400 Arlington, VA 22201 Change of Address: http://eweb.ndia.org

14 Inside Science + Technology Musings for inquiring minds

by Grace V. Jean

16 Tech Wire Defense technology in the digital age

by Eric Beidel

58 STEM News / NDIA News 59 Ethics Corner 60 NDIA Calendar Complete guide to NDIA events 64 Index of Advertisers

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associate Editor Eric Beidel (703) 247-2542 EBeidel@ndia.org

A new video game will help wounded warriors recover from traumatic brain injuries.

2010

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46 Marines Field New ‘Smart’ Video System for Urban Combat Exercises

departments 4 President’s Perspective

December

Letters to the Editor: National Defense welcomes letters—pro or con. Keep them short and to the point. Letters will be edited for clarity and length. All letters considered for Readers Forum must be signed.

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PRE-LIVE THE FUTURE

PRESIDENT’SPERSPECTIVE

BY LAWRENCE P. FARRELL JR.

In Securing Our Future, Innovation Is Imperative Throughout U.S. history, advances in military capability have been fueled by innovation. The military services consistently have managed to use technology in new and creative ways to improve battlefield effectiveness.

The application of existing technology is a quick and effective way of enabling U.S. forces to out-think enemies by penetrating the adversary’s decision-making cycle, known as the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act).

The nation also has turned to invention for military capability.

This is how the Defense Department has acquired many of its major systems and platforms, with long and costly development timelines, and pushing state of the art so vigorously that schedule and cost overruns have become common.

But the era of big invention is coming to a close, at least for the foreseeable future. Even today’s generous budgets cannot support existing acquisition plans in the context of the nation’s unsustainable economic circumstances.

So where do we go now? One answer may be found in a quote from an old British flag officer: “We are now out of money, so we must begin to think.” The financial problems we face are truly staggering. The numbers are so big as to be incomprehensible. The scientist Richard Feynman put it well: “There are 10 ^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a large number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit. We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

In the defense business, it is clear that things must change. Perhaps we should return to the basics of innovation.

The Coast Guard recently hosted its 10th Innovation Exposition.

Its leaders celebrated a decade of pursuing novel ways of doing business, while applying existing technology to create efficiencies and new capabilities. One could argue that the Coast Guard is ahead of the other services in valuing and using innovation.

According to one official, “A productivity boom has transformed how private enterprises react to the customer and changing markets while the federal government remains largely unchanged and lagging behind in terms of efficiency, agility and service quality.”

Senior vice president of FedEx David Zanca spoke at the conference on this issue. He asserted that real innovation does not equal invention, but arises from creative application of existing technology. He cited several examples from his own company: an iPhone app for FedEx services, a shipping app on Windows Outlook, a sensor inside packages that tracks and reports temperature and other environmental conditions inside critical shipments.

FedEx has institutionalized innovation in the company by encouraging employees to seek smart solutions to problems. The 4

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company focuses on early adoption of innovation in order to get ahead of competitors. The bottom line: sustainability and efficiency over the long term.

Zanca cited Apple Computer as a model of innovation. It does little invention or basic research. The company’s biggest success stories — the iPhone, iTouch, iPad, iTunes and App store — are all based on pre-existing technology. When the iPhone and App store rolled out in July 2008, they had one application. Eighteen months later, there were 134,000 third-party apps and 3 billion downloads.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has launched an efficiency campaign to save $100 billion in overhead costs over five years.

Innovation here might be in order.

It is fair to expect that major programs will be further squeezed. It is a huge concern that our inefficient acquisition system continues to be slow in coming up with new contract vehicles, and that the Defense Department is likely to dip into modernization accounts to pay for other needs. The 2012 budget will be an indicator.

It is also worrisome that the services are beginning to retrench on previous plans. The Air Force is moving existing platforms (bombers and fighters) to the right and enhancing them with structural upgrades and avionics. This is in recognition of the slowdown and increased cost of the F-35 as well as the lack of an approved plan for a long-range strike platform. Rather than focus on a new bomber, the Air Force will consider a larger family of strike systems, including aircraft, missile and surveillance assets. It plans to collaborate with the Navy on this effort. The Air Force also announced that its next fighter — the sixth generation, due around 2030 — will have both manned and unmanned versions. One can reasonably expect the other services to adopt similar strategies.

Adding to this tough set of problems — tight budgets, aging platforms, rising acquisition costs — is the fact that future U.S. adversaries are innovating too, and in quite effective ways. As a result, we need to pick up the pace.

There is no other choice. We are where we are, and must acknowledge and deal with it. The alternative is to fall into the trap postulated by the Greek orator Demosthenes, who said: “ What each man wishes, he believes to be true.” We may have been doing some of that for the past several years, believing against all evidence that we could continue along the current acquisition path. This also brings to mind the words of UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden: “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”

Innovation in defense is a necessity, not an option.

EMAIL COMMENTS TO LFARRELL@NDIA.ORG

DEFENSEWATCH

BY SANDRA I. ERWIN

American Götterdämerung Is a Perennial Pundit’s Game It appears that on any given day in Washington, as of late, someone is unveiling a book, releasing a study, giving a presentation or briefing foreign-policy wonks about the impending demise of America as we know it. These are indeed boom times for “declinist” literature.

They are all variations of the same theme: The world is becoming multipolar, America’s era of supremacy is over, there will be new players and new rules in the global power game.

Lending credibility to this worldview was the November 2008 report by the National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025,” which predicts that the U.S.-dominated international system that emerged following World War II will be revolutionized.

It also foresees an unprecedented transfer of wealth from West to East, and the rise of the BRIC’s (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as legitimate new disruptors of the global balance of power. It foresees that gaps in national influence will continue to narrow between developed and developing countries.

The NIC’s judgment was seen inside the Beltway as a sign of impending downfall. But contrarians are now pushing back, arguing that the national intelligence analysts missed the mark, that they were overly influenced by the disheartening course of events in Iraq and Afghanistan and by the September 2008 U.S. economic meltdown, and that they failed to take a broader look at historical trends.

Not surprisingly, the combination of an economic downturn and the authoritative imprimatur of an NIC report predicting America’s decline became “congealed into a conventional wisdom very quickly,” said Eric S. Edelman, former U.S. ambassador to Finland and Turkey, who also served as undersecretary of defense for policy during the George W. Bush administration.

Edelman last month unveiled a counterview to the NIC study, “Understanding America’s Contested Primacy,” published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy think tank in Washington, D.C. At a briefing on Capitol Hill, Edelman cautioned that much of what is in Global Trends 2025 is accurate analysis. But he questioned why the NIC in 2008 painted such a drastically different picture from the one laid out in its 2004 report, “Mapping the Global Future 2020,” which had concluded that the era of unipolarity and U.S. primacy was likely to continue for as far as the eye could see, Edelman said.

“What was it that changed so dramatically between 2004 and 2008 that would lead to this radically different conclusion?” he asked. One factor was the inconclusive counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have been draining the country of trea6

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sure and of lives, and were “creating a sense in the international community that the United States had not managed affairs very well,” he said.

Edelman also saw as a dubious claim the NIC’s statement about a “seemingly inexorable rise of the so-called BRICs,” which, as it turns out, originated not from intelligence analysts but from Goldman Sachs’ financial gurus.

Predictions of America’s fall, according to Edelman’s study, are as cyclical as the stock market.

Prophets of doom have surfaced periodically over the course of U.S. history — usually at the end of every decade since the end of World War II. In the late 1940s, after the Russians exploded a nuclear weapon, is was the end of America’s nuclear monopoly and proof that we had lost our edge. At the end of the ‘50s, after Sputnik and the missile gap, there was a sense that the nation was playing second fiddle to the Soviet Union. At the end of the ‘60s, another wave of declinism spread as a result of the Vietnam War. In the late ‘70s, it was the oil crisis, and President Carter’s “malaise” speech, “even though he didn’t actually use the word malaise in the speech, but in which he talked about trying to do less as a nation,” Edelman noted.

At the end of the ‘80s, influential historian Paul Kennedy wrote “The Decline of the Great Powers.” In the United States, it was seen as an augur of dark times that would result from imperial overstretch. At the end of the ‘90s, historians were predicting the end of the nation state. “And since the United States was the leading nation state in the international system, presumably it would decline along with the role of the nation state,” said Edelman.

If this debate were strictly academic, it could be ignored as irrelevant drivel. But Edelman insists that this is a “debate with real consequences, because how policymakers, both in the executive and the legislative branch, think about America’s role in the world is, to some degree, conditioned by what role they think we need to be playing in the world, and what we’re capable of playing.”

So who’s right and who’s wrong?

Reality, as if often the case, is far more nuanced than is convenient for most pundits who are trying to make a point. Yes, the nation faces a crushing debt, is dangerously addicted to foreign oil and to foreign capital, and its military forces remain bogged down in a war that most Americans believe is unwinnable. Not a pretty picture, but the current malaise still may not be enough to qualify as proof of the apocalypse.

EMAIL COMMENTS TO SERWIN@NDIA.ORG

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DEFENSEINSIDER n e w s f ro m i n s i d e t h e b e lt way BY SANDRA I. ERWIN

We Have Met the Enemy: It’s the Economy, Stupid In the U.S. military, planning for the future usually means determining how many forces, how much hardware and firepower will be needed to defeat potential enemies.

The Army, alas, is channeling Apple Computer and decided to “think different.”

No matter what conflicts the nation might face, there is a fairly high certainty that the military will be cash-strapped, strategists predict. Politicians today might be in denial about the impact of the national debt on the military, but the Army is trying to get ahead of the game, and is openly debating how it might do business with a budget half the size of what it is now.

“The United States has the biggest credit card in the world. But even that credit card has a limit. When that credit card gets taken away, what do we do?” asked Lt. Col. Mark Elfendahl, chief of joint and Army concepts at the Army Capabilities Integration Center at Fort Monroe, Va. At a recent “Alternative Futures Symposium” in McLean, Va., three “alternative futures” were projected for the period 2018 to 2030: One of global economic collapse, one where enemies would deny the U.S. military access to critical areas of the world, and one where Asia has taken over as the global center of power.

How the Army would cope with diminished resources was the dominant theme.

“When the ways and means simply aren’t available to us, we’ve got to rethink our ends,” said Elfendahl. Under a scenario where the Army’s budget is slashed by 40 to 50 percent, “you have to completely rethink your assumptions,” he said.

Against this backdrop, the Army, for instance, would have to contemplate the possibility that social unrest in the United States would require military intervention. “Our sense is that there would be a greater domestic focus” for the Army, Elfendahl said.

Read more at http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=244

Army Adopting a ‘Less Is More’ Attitude in Weapon Acquisitions ■ The Army will be taking a “buy less, more often” approach to modernizing the force.

The idea is to acquire smaller quantities of new systems and to accelerate technology development and testing so that equipment can be fielded faster and, if all goes well, at less cost than has historically been the case.

This is the philosophy behind what the Army calls an “affordable force modernization” effort that will seek to cure what has ailed Army acquisition programs for decades: Long development cycles, out-ofcontrol prices and, in the end, nothing to show for it.

Another new twist in the strategy is that

equipment will not be acquired in isolation but, instead, the hardware will be evaluated in the context of how Army tactical units are organized and trained, said Rickey Smith, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, in Arlington, Va. Ultimately, it’s all about saving money, Smith said. The Army expects budgets to tighten up in the near future, and it needs to soon change the way it buys equipment, he said. The way business is done today assumes growing budgets, and ample time to develop, test and endlessly tweak the “requirements” of a weapon system.

That is a luxury the Army no longer can afford, Smith said. “If you have a requirement that cannot be resourced, that’s a fantasy. … It’s OK to reach but not overreach.”

Read more at http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=225 We invite you to comment on these and other related stories on the National Defense Blog at http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog You can also join us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/NationalDefense and follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/NationalDefense

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Air Force CIO: We Are Still Delivering ‘Yesterday’s Technology’ ■ The Air Force is regarded as the most “high-tech” branch of the U.S. military. But when it comes to information-technology, the service is nowhere near the cutting edge, says Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. William Lord.

Outdated contracting methods and a “risk averse” procurement culture are keeping the Air Force generations behind the latest technology in areas such as wireless communications and mobile networking, Lord said.

The Air Force acquisition bureaucracy is comfortable with the traditional “metal bending” business, but has yet to adapt to the information age, Lord says. The slow pace of military procurements, he says, is incompatible with the IT world, where technology advances in leaps and bounds.

Airmen who deploy to war zones, for instance, are stuck with technology that originated in the “ancient milspec environment,” Lord says. “They want to know why the new technology is not out in the pointy end of the spear.”

Airmen “rightfully demand” at least the same communication and networking systems that they have at home or at their offices, says Lord. On commercial flights, he says, “I can get wi-fi for $9.95 and do a video-teleconference with a laptop.” Such easy and highspeed access to the Internet is not common on military jets.

Lord’s office is now reaching out to technology buyers within the Air Force to try to shake things up. “We have a great dialogue going on with the acquisition community,” he says.

Read more at: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/ Posts/Post.aspx?ID=238

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HOMELAND DEFENSE BRIEFS

BY STEW MAGNUSON

Pentagon Criticized For Not Doing More to Protect Homeland From Cyberattacks

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Iran, for example, the government there could massively retaliate against the United States without leaving its borders or calling on its proxies to launch terrorist attacks. It could shut down power grids, derail trains, blow gas lines or mess with the stock market.

He is not a big believer in so-called “air-gapped” computer systems that are supposedly separated from the wider Internet and therefore invulnerable to outside attacks. There have been many successful attacks against these intranets, including, by the military’s own admission, the Pentagon’s SIPRNET. “Nation states do not go out and attack each other just because they have a new weapon — thankfully,” he said.

Nevertheless, the United States is like a football team with a great offense, but no defensive players, he said.

There are solutions, but they would require federal regulations, he said. When he first looked at cybersecurity issues in the 1990s as a member of the Clinton administration, the thinking was that everything had to be protected.

Now he believes that priority should be placed on certain sectors. Power grids must be secured first and foremost. After that, the half-dozen main Internet service providers should be required to filter traffic going over their networks for malware and other attacks. That could take care of 85 percent of the problem, he asserted.

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The Defense Department declaring that it will only be responsible for protecting its own computer networks and that the private sector must fend for itself would be like telling U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh that an air assault is coming and it must go out and buy its own fighter jets and antiaircraft guns.

So said Richard Clarke, former national coordinator for security and counterterrorism coordinator under three presidents, at an American Bar Association speech.

Neither the Pentagon nor the U.S. government has anything resembling a strategy when it comes to protecting the nation’s computer networks — including their own, said Clarke, who now works for Good Harbor consulting, and has written a book, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. As far as the private sector in concerned, “The defenses we have do not work,” he said. Firewalls, anti-virus software don’t work, either: “None of that stuff is stopping the intrusions,” he said.

Cyberespionage against U.S. corporations is so rampant that companies should now assume that most of their trade secrets are long gone and in China, he said.

The difference between cyberspying and cyberwar “is just a few keystrokes,” he said.

In a scenario where the United States entered into conflict with

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Ultra-Light Aircraft Emerge As Newest Threat On Southwest Border â– After several years of cat-and-mouse games with Mexican smugglers who tunnel under southwest land crossings, Customs and Border Protection has had to play defense in the air.

Ultra-light aircraft have emerged as the latest challenge to agents, said Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher. “When you think that we’ve got it figured out, that threat — as the threat does — is going to change, and going to morph. We have to be as agile,� Fisher said at a recent National Defense Industrial Association homeland security symposium.

The five-mile stretch between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa crossings south of San Diego is one of the most heavily fortified sections that the agency patrols. Smugglers responded by digging numerous tunnels in the area. Now that ground-penetrating radar has been employed to ferret out the underground structures, the cartels have taken to the air in ultra-light aircraft, Fisher said. “Right now, we don’t have an interdiction policy,� Fisher said. CBP tries to identify them, launch air assets and “provide an armed escort back south.�

The profits for a successful operation can be enormous, though.

Ultra-light aircraft kits cost anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, according to the all-about-ultralights.com website. A pilot weighing about 150 pounds could leave another 100 pounds in excess capacity.

With current street values of cocaine at about $100 per gram, one quick flight over the border could gain cartels $4.5 million.

The latest National Drug Threat Assessment carried out by the Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center, said there has been some speculation that this method could be used to bring terrorists or weapons of mass destruction across the border.

However, “Intelligence and law enforcement reporting indicates that [drug cartels] have not demonstrated any interest in or intent to smuggle on behalf of terrorists,� the report said.

Reps. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and Dean Heller, R-Nev., introduced the Ultra-light Smuggling Prevention Act this year, which seeks to increase penalties for those caught flying over the border. It passed the House in September, and has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee.

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Personal Tracking System Touted As Lifesaver for First Responders ■ The ability to track firefighters inside buildings where GPS signals are weak or nonexistent has been a long-time goal of the Department of Homeland Security.

The tragic loss of 343 first responders in the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11 has prompted the department’s science and technology directorate to look for tracking devices that can tell an incident commander exactly where firefighters are, which direction they are heading, and alert them if those inside are in danger.

A University of Michigan professor of robotics Johann Borenstein is touting a personal locator system that is embedded in the heel of a first responder’s boot.

“The big concern for firefighters is that they can become incapacitated due to injury or smoke inhalation or running out of air. They want to be found real quick by their colleagues and rescued,” he said.

An inertia measurement unit in the boot transmits through radio relays the location and trajectory of a firefighter. The software, which a commander can monitor outside a building on a laptop, can track multiple firefighters.

It’s important that the tracker identifies odd motions, such as

one firefighter picking up and dragging a fallen comrade. It can read falling, dragging, crawling and other movements.

“Our system tracks these different modes of motion very accurately,” he said.

ISTOCKPHOTO The technology can also be used to track soldiers or robots that are sent into GPSdeprived situations such as buildings or tunnels, Borenstein said.

The program received money from the Center for Commercialization of Advanced Technology at San Diego State University, which is funded by DHS, the Office of Naval Research and the office of the secretary of defense. CCAT recently tested the system in San Diego, but Borenstein’s program has come to a standstill. He’s looking for a company that will license and commercialize the technology and take it though the so-called “Valley of Death” where good ideas die without ever reaching a market.

There are many companies and organizations working on this problem, Borenstein acknowledged. “Our system is ready to go,” he said. “The funding seems to be thrown in buckets in the millions at large defense contractors,” he said.

Underlying Science Behind Biometrics Requires More Rigor, Report Says ■ The biometrics industry has seen rapid growth in the post-9/11 world with numerous companies touting products that they say can confirm a subject’s identity based on his physical or behavioral characteristics with reasonable accuracy.

The physical measurements range from finger and palm prints, to irises, facial and speech recognition and other modes. Behavior can derive from the way a person types to the way he walks.

But none of these methods is infallible, and much of the underlying basic research that can confirm the utility of the devices has not been carried out, said a National Academy of Sciences report, “Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunity.” This is occurring even as the technologies are becoming more ubiquitous, it added.

“Users and developers of biometric systems should recognize and take into account the limitations and constraints of biometric systems — especially the probabilistic nature of the underlying science,” the report said.

Because a person’s physical traits change

over time, or can be intentionally altered in ways to fool a machine that reads them, no single method for collecting, analyzing and confirming whether the subject is who he says he is, can be called 100 percent accurate, the report concluded.

Human recognition systems are “inherently fallible,” the report said. Faces, voices, and other modes change over time.

There needs to be more studies on how populations of test subjects interact with biometric systems, particularly if they are connected to programs of “national importance,” the report stated. Presumptions and burdens of proof arising from technologies need to be based on solid, peer-reviewed studies, it added.

Laboratory evaluations of technology are useful, but they often do not reliably predict field performance, the report said.

“As biometric recognition is deployed in systems of national importance, additional research is needed at virtually all levels of the system including sensors, data management, human factors and testing,” the report recommended.

ND EMAIL COMMENTS TO SMAGNUSON@NDIA.ORG

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INSIDESCIENCE+TECHNOLOGY

BY GRACE V. JEAN

Advancing Hidden Nuclear Material Detection the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego.

On any given day, ships and trucks deliver cargo containThe resulting solid-state device is much smaller than its tubular ers filled with tons of imported goods. Homeland security gas counterpart, but just as effective, he said. officials have long warned that terrorists may use them to smuggle One configuration of a commercially available helium-3 gas nuclear materials into the United States. detector comes in a tube about 50 centimeters long with a Detecting radioactive substances at ports and border crossings has 1.27-centimeter diameter. For the same sensitivity to neutrons, the remained problematic for two reasons. First, most smuggled nuclear solid-state detector would contain a 4-centimeter by 4-centimeter materials would not emit much energy in the first place. Picking square film of boron nitride that is 100 microns thick. There are up those signals is a fundamental physics problem, said Andrew 1,000 microns in a millimeter.

Wiedlea, deputy branch chief of the Defense Threats Reduction “For the same neutron flux, you can have a much smaller detector Agency’s innovation and systems engineering office. Because of the yet still count the same number of neutrons coming in because of the low energy emissions, available portal technologies that attempt to high density” of boron atoms for nuclear reactions, said McGinnis. detect them often have high false alarm rates. Moreover the systems The scientists sandwich a thin layer of the boron nitride cannot find heavily shielded nuclear materials and some detectors between several electrodes. To generate an electric field to attract are simply too large to fit existing border inspection lanes. electrons that are freed up by To help solve the problem, the neutron reactions, only tens military scientists are pursuing or hundreds of volts need to be solid-state materials that may applied, compared to thousands one day yield detectors that or more volts in the helium gascan accurately locate radioacbased system. tive substances and also fit into One challenge in using boron devices small enough for troops nitride as a neutron detector is to pin onto their collars. that the material itself has to be There are several ways to of high quality. Boron nitride detect radioactive materioften comes in polycrystalline als. One method is to sense form, where there are mulgamma rays, or high-energy Scientists have developed a prototype solid-state thermal neutron detector to find hidden nuclear materials. WAYNE MCGINNIS tiple tiny crystals all crunched photons emitted by nuclear together. With the naked eye, compounds. When gamma rays the material looks like white silt. But a closer inspection reveals collide with certain materials, such as plastic, they give off lowergrain boundaries that can trap freed electrons, which means one energy photons of visible light. The photons can be converted would not see a current pulse to indicate a nuclear reaction in the into electrons to generate a measurable electrical pulse. detector, explained McGinnis.

Another way to find nuclear reactive materials is by detectWith a team of scientists at the University of Michigan, ing the emission of neutrons, or the non-charged particles McGinnis is working to improve the material. Researchers are found in atoms. Uranium and plutonium — the two radioactive growing films in a hexagonal crystal structure and testing them in compounds used in modern nuclear weapons — emit neutrons the neutron detector. through their natural decay process.

“The focus is on getting a high enough quality material grown Conventional neutron detectors consist of metal tubes containso that it will work as a detector to see those current pulses,” said ing helium-3 gas. When a high voltage is applied to a fine wire McGinnis. “As we do that, we will be testing the bench shop prorunning the length of the tube, any passing neutrons create a totype detectors we’ve made with neutron sources that we have nuclear reaction with the helium-3 atoms. The atoms split into two access to,” he said. particles, a proton and a triton. A triton consists of a single proton When scientists placed two of the detectors back to back, they and two neutrons. Those particles zoom through the rest of the gas could tell from which direction neutrons were emanating because the and collide with other helium-3 atoms. The collisions knock loose concentration of colliding particles was higher at the closer device. electrons, which are attracted to the tube or the wire depending on Scientists believe that fitting six parallel detector units in a cube polarity and cause a sudden jump in the electrical current. shape will further identify the location of a neutron source. The The problem with the existing gas-based detector technology team recently received a patent for this concept. lies in its unwieldy baseball bat-size and the decreasing supply Once the test results are published, McGinnis said researchers of helium-3. Scientists are pursuing solid compounds, including will seek industrial partners to produce the system as a deployable boron nitride, to replace the gas. detector.

“You get a lot more boron atoms per volume in this solid boron nitride than you get in the helium-3 atoms per unit volume in a EMAIL COMMENTS TO GJEAN@NDIA.ORG tube,” said Wayne McGinnis, the scientist leading the research at 14

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TECHWIRE

E X P L O R I N G T E C H N O L O G Y I N T H E D I G I TA L AG E

BY ERIC BEIDEL

LOCKHEED MARTIN

Jack Daniel’s Corporate Jet Transformed Into Flying Intel Lab A jet once used by executives at Jack Daniel’s may improve military intelligencegathering operations.

Lockheed Martin spent $18 million to buy and modify a Gulfstream III business jet, which once belonged to a semi-pro hockey team and the Jack Daniel’s company. The plane is now a flying laboratory in which customers can test and update intelligence-gathering technologies.

The Airborne Multi-Intelligence Laboratory (AML) has been making stops domestically and overseas. During a recent visit to the United Kingdom, the plane demonstrated its ability to disseminate real-time intelligence via streaming video, imagery and communication feeds to a ground station.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown the need for sensor systems that can detect, identify and track small groups operating outside a traditional military structure. The AML has been designed with those situations in mind, said John Beck, transformation programs manager at Lockheed Martin.

“We took a private executive jet with a wet bar and made it into an operational [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platform,” said Charles Gulledge, strategic programs manager at Lockheed Martin. “Now we know what it takes.”

The transformation from swank corporate jet to intelligence lab took just 10 months. While intended to provide an airborne platform to test

Interest Grows In Military Space Troops ■ In the future, help may be just a suborbital hop away.

The military has been looking into using space travel to rapidly insert

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and update sensors, the plane is fully operational and contains four on-board work stations. “If a customer came in tomorrow with the right checkbook,” Lockheed could sell them the plane as is, Gulledge said.

The Finnish Air Force has committed $100 million for Lockheed Martin to outfit an EADS CASA C-295 aircraft with the same configuration. The contract also calls for the company to provide ground stations and communication terminals to support the airborne system.

troops or drones into battle for the better part of a decade, but the private sector may lead the way. Advances in commercial space tourism have created a renewed interest in the science of taking a small number of troops, launching them up into space and then back down onto another part of the world to deal with a crisis.

“It’s the coup that’s about to happen. It’s the hostages you now suddenly know where they are,” said Taber MacCallum, CEO of Paragon Space Development Corp., an Arizona-based company that makes gear and equipment for humans to wear in space.

Paragon was one of many companies that last year took part in an

TECHWIRE

Cybersecurity Threatened By Common Password Buster

LOCKHEED MARTIN

■ A seven-character password is “hopelessly inadequate,” say scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

A password with 12 characters may be just as vulnerable.

GTRI researchers have proven that an inexpensive graphics processing unit (GPU) can bust passwords at the speed of a $100 million supercomputer. Until recently, GPUs were difficult to use for anything other than graphics on a computer monitor. But new software has allowed them to be

programmed using the popular C language. This enables a technique called “brute forcing,” a highspeed procedure that involves trying every combination of characters to figure out a password.

A password consisting of eight lower-case letters can be cracked in a few minutes using a cluster of GPUs, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist and project lead. This puts at risk everyone from the casual user logging into an email account to larger networks used by banking institutions and the military, researchers said.

The longer the password, especially one that includes numbers and symbols, the longer it will take to figure out. A password using every character available on a keyboard could take a group of GPUs thousands of years to crack.

Military Medics, First Responders Guided By Simple Light

one device that is slightly larger than bulbs commonly used in Christmas decorations. The technology was developed in conjunction with Air Force medics and also is being used by a Marine battalion and Army medics. They use the ■ Five soldiers lay wounded in a field. Who lights for triage, equipment marking and indicatshould receive help first? ing emergency landing zones, A San Antonio businessCienfuegos said. man has come up with A corpsman home from a solution to conducting Afghanistan sparked the battlefield triage that idea. “He said he was caralready is catching on in rying too many bags with the military. Juan Ciendifferent colored chemical fuegos is the founder of light sticks, getting shot at Southwest Synergistic and it was just too much Solutions, the company stuff,” Cienfuegos said. “He that manufactures a new wanted to lighten his load, line of triage technology improve his time per patient called E/T Lights. and make sure that support A single light beams was able to distinguish who four colors based on the on the battlefield went on condition of a patient — the helicopter first.” red, yellow, green and The lights are small blue. Instead of using four enough to be controlled by different chemical light one hand, making it posSOUTHWEST SYNERGISTIC SOLUTIONS sticks, a soldier can carry sible for a patient to visually

industry workshop on the topic and responded to the Defense Department’s request for information on the matter. An official Pentagon report based on the input from those sessions was recently completed but remains under wraps.

“The guys from space come

crashing through the 10th floor window,” MacCallum said. “It’s got a great sci-fi ring to it, but there is some serious work beginning to be done. It could be the thing you do really fast that could stop the war from happening.”

He points to efforts like Virgin

Galactic’s private spaceship built to send tourists on suborbital trips. With a similar system, a small military unit could reach dangerous situations overseas in a matter of minutes. The problem is that no one yet has a good idea for getting them back out, MacCallum said.

D EC E M B E R 2 0 1 0 • N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E

17

But as graphics cards become more powerful, passwords of any length may still prove ineffective, said Joshua Davis, a research scientist working on the study. Methods relying on two forms of authentication could become necessary, such as using passwords and PIN numbers or even biometric data like fingerprints and face recognition technology, he said.

GARY MEEK

announce his own priority to medical support.

Cienfuegos also envisions the lights being used in mass casualty situations. If a hurricane slams a town full of victims with triage lights, first responders can know even in darkness where to go initially, he explained.

VIEWPOINT Defense Affordability: Can We Buy Only What We Need?

BY TOM CAPTAIN Military acquisition budgets globally are flattening out and declining. Large scale multi-billion dollar programs are running over budget and being delayed. Weapon systems requirements are getting more sophisticated and changing all the time. What can we do to afford and develop the innovative defense and security technologies needed to defeat the next generation adversary?

Calls for controlling the costs for military healthcare, operations and maintenance as well as increasing spending on weapon procurement and research and development are all noteworthy, but in the meantime, there are more immediate actions that should be considered, such as addressing program complexity problems, generating more cost efficiencies, and engendering an innovation environment in industry with a renewed talent base.

The Defense Department’s 2011 budget represents growth of 1.8 percent above inflation, but underneath those numbers there is an expected decline for research and development as well as procurement for new weapons. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that real defense costs will, on average, exceed planned baseline projections by about $59 billion of shortfall annually for the next 20 years.

This shortfall is caused by increases in pay and benefits for military and civilian personnel, the projected rise in operations and maintenance costs for aging equipment, plans to develop advanced weapon systems to replace many now nearing the end of their service lives and the growing investment in new capabilities such as advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems to meet emerging security threats.

These requirements will likely result in an increasingly smaller slice of the pie dedicated to weapons research and development as well as acquisition. If there is no real growth in the defense budget, acquisition accounts could slide from 35 percent of the budget in 2010 to 24 percent by 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service. If this were to occur, likely outcomes could be underutilization of the industrial base, cost cuts and rationalization to preserve profitability, and most importantly, reduced investment.

In addition, the weapons acquisition process is yet again going through major reforms. As the Government Accountability Office reported recently, major defense programs are collectively almost $300 billion over their planned costs and only 30 percent of those programs are on schedule.

According to a recent Deloitte study, this is based on a combination of root causes. They include technical complexity, use of immature technologies and requirements creep; work force and talent management difficulties in educating, recruiting, developing and retaining the science, technology, math and systems engineering skills needed; supply chain management issues, especially as the tier-two suppliers take on more design authority, conduct sup18

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ply chain oversight and become risk sharing partners; unrealistic program and cost plans based on best case program scenarios with very little room for error; and the annual congressional budget process that is subject to affordability, and the normal political process, which too often results in budget cuts and program terminations.

With defense contractors receiving a smaller slice of the pie, coupled with cost overruns, the defense industry is having trouble affording the technical innovations that are being requested to address future adversaries. Under current plans, defense spending would decline to 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product by 2015 and to 3.1 percent of GDP by 2028. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is a reasonable proxy for gauging affordability, and when viewed over time provides a good comparison.

Including the war costs, this year the Defense Department will spend approximately $720 billion, about 4.9 percent of GDP. The nation faces security threats of equal or greater significance now than in past conflicts, such as the potential for a nucleararmed Iran and North Korea, and cyberattacks from China, Russia and non-state actors. Yet U.S. defense spending when compared to prior periods of conflict is significantly lower.

U.S. adversaries are clever and increasingly sophisticated in furthering their goals. Seemingly primitive weapons such as improvised explosive devices, shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades and dirty nuclear devices pose substantial threats to U.S. security.

American weapon systems requirements are shifting emphasis from large platforms such as fighter aircraft, ships, and tanks, to more real time software-centric technologies, such as laser and GPS guided munitions, missile defense, directed energy, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and data fusion. The nextgeneration adversary may well figure out how to defeat stealth technology, intercept and deny precision targeting technologies, jam communications, use cyberattacks to disable electronic controlled infrastructure and information systems, and blind surveillance capabilities. Consideration needs to be given to technologies that address these and other current and future threats.

The Defense Department and the contractors that support weapon systems development have experienced a significant increase of about 60 percent in budgets since 9/11. This increase has funded innovative technologies such as UAVs, laser guided bombs, and precisions strike capabilities. It also has paid for significant levels of administration, management and oversight.

There are some estimates that 40 percent of the defense budget goes for “overhead” costs, not on direct costs for the personnel and weapon systems. As has been pointed out by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, we need to “do more, without more,” by eliminating redundancies, terminating costly weapon programs, creating more efficient processes, both in industry as well as in government.

VIEWPOINT

Defense contractors have been doing more, with less, for several years, with higher productivity as a result. Indeed, profits per employee on an inflation adjusted basis, has increased 5 percent annually, with a 108 percent increase since 1994. This has come about as a result of the emphasis on lean six sigma initiatives, widespread use of digital product definition and process technologies, and the game changing industry consolidation that took place in the late 1990s, which drove scale economies.

Certainly in these unique economic times where other domestic matters have priority, we cannot forget that a strong defense has contributed to the nation’s economic well being, security and stability. With the expected decline in defense spending as a percentage of GDP, the increasing requirements for the United States to contribute to global security and the increasingly sophisticated activities of our adversaries, the stakeholders should consider the defense budget challenge, where it ranks in priority, whether it should be used to protect the industrial base and to foster creativity and innovation; and if so, how.

There is also a well-recognized need for the industry to promote and advance the development of science, technology engineering and math skills into the ranks of the work force, both in the acquisition community as well as industry. This starts with K-12 education but needs to continue into college, where programs need to be created to attract students into the industry.

Innovation is key to create the kind of game changing technologies, and education is key to create the necessary skills and is fundamental to achieving this goal.

The defense industry, too, must address program management and execution challenges by injecting more realism into program budgets and schedules, which includes adequate management reserve to cover contingencies. Also, customers should consider specifying more mature technologies, with shorter development timeframes, and increased commercial off-the-shelf content.

Additionally, rapid prototyping with new innovative technologies producing smaller, remotely controlled, more lethal and less costly technologies is required in order to deploy systems faster.

In this environment, industry and government need to work across organizational boundaries to continue to eliminate redundancies, ineffective overhead processes and create cost efficiencies.

If industry, in partnership with acquisition officials and Congress, can work together on this most pressing challenge, more funding could be created virtually out of cost savings. Every dollar saved can be applied for newer more innovative technologies. At least in the short term, the industry might be able to afford its immediate future.

Tom Captain is vice chairman and the global and U.S. leader for Deloitte LLP’s aerospace and defense sector, based in Seattle. He can be reached at tcaptain@deloitte.com

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VIEWPOINT

International Defense Markets: Seizing Opportunities, Avoiding Common Pitfalls

BY MRINAL MENON AND ALEKSANDAR D. JOVOVIC The past decade has been a period of unprecedented growth in U.S. arms sales overseas. Foreign military sales could reach a record $50 billion by the end of fiscal year 2011.

Annual foreign military sales grew from $8 billion to $38 billion over the last 10 years, and in the past several months alone, the United States has announced a $5.8 billion sale of C-17 aircraft to India, a $6 billion agreement to provide a range of defense equipment to Iraq and a massive $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. This uptick in international business comes as a welcome respite from dreary forecasts for the U.S. defense industry’s domestic market, and it elevates foreign sales from an often ancillary activity to a major growth opportunity.

U.S. companies looking to expand their footprint abroad are encountering a rapidly changing international landscape. The well-developed markets for U.S. defense products in Western Europe and other NATO countries are lagging as a result of acute budgetary pressures. Instead, the Middle East, and emerging markets in Asia and South America will account for the bulk of major arms purchases over the next decade.

While many top-tier defense firms are well versed in the complexities of international sales, for others the imperative of growing their business will force them to confront a host of unfamiliar challenges. Even for the largest defense primes, the shift in emphasis from large platform sales to more diverse systems and subsystems will stress their existing operating models and practices.

Compared to highly regimented and relatively transparent processes in the United States and, to some extent, NATO allies, the defense acquisition practices in many growing markets are a continuing source of frustration for Western firms. Regulations and decision-making processes are often both opaque and underdeveloped, making it difficult to ascertain the playing rules, let alone the requirements for success. Decisions take years longer than expected.

Long a part of international sales, offsets remain a key component of many transac20

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tions. While direct offsets tied to building indigenous defense industrial capabilities are still part of the mix, the offset framework has expanded to encompass a broad range of indirect (and barely related) trade and investment initiatives. Depending on the size of the acquisition, offset obligations can be extensive and difficult to discharge. The most successful firms take a proactive approach to offset requirements, seeking to fulfill their obligations in ways that not only satisfy the overall program intent, but also build good will and thus improve their competitive positions over the longer term.

Export restrictions for U.S. technology also are likely to remain major obstacles to international sales. Delays, denials, and uncertainty regarding which technology or technical data can be transferred to foreign countries impose additional costs and delays that undermine the competitiveness of U.S. firms as compared to their foreign competitors.

European firms, as well as less familiar competitors from China, Russia, and Israel, have worked tirelessly over the past decade to build and sustain a solid footprint in key emerging global markets. For example, while U.S. firms are still struggling to determine how best to serve the Indian market, Israeli firms can look back at nearly a decade of remarkable success. Moreover, non-U.S. firms are often quite adept at navigating murky bureaucratic processes, are keyed in to customer preferences, and are unburdened by stringent anti-corruption measures, such the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Despite these challenges, the allure of new global markets will drive many U.S. companies to try to expand their international business presence. International sales approaches can range from resource-intensive corporate efforts, to opportunistic ventures undertaken by individual business units.

Unsurprisingly, the more aggressive a firm’s international revenue targets, the higher the necessary commitment of resources.

Firms with smaller scale offerings typically

elect the tactical route, seeking sales with shorter lead times and greater certainty of fruition. An international footprint that relies heavily on local agents and commissionbased sales representatives may prove sufficient to provide exposure and accomplish sales across a number of countries. Conversely a portfolio of large platforms or other high-value items requires a more resourceintensive approach. “Badged” employees and a full time in-country presence are often necessary in key countries to manage long-term capture efforts, and oversee local partnerships, subsidiaries or acquisitions.

In-country employees can shape demand and requirements, but engender substantial costs in overhead and leadtime. The most successful firms opt for a calibrated response.

The appropriate human resources, legal, and other internal processes must be in place to vet, hire, and train personnel in foreign countries. Legal teams must be well versed in both local and U.S. laws and export control regulations, which are crucial to correctly interpreting complex acquisition procedures and avoiding costly fines and penalties.

While the international arena will present challenges for most U.S. defense firms, it represents a key avenue of growth at a time of strained domestic defense spending. With forethought and preparation, organizations can capitalize on opportunities in the international market while avoiding pitfalls that many U.S. firms have faced abroad.

Mrinal Menon is a senior analyst and Aleksandar D. Jovovic is a senior associate at The Avascent Group. Stephen T. Ganyard, president of Avascent International, contributed to this piece. They can be reached at mmenon@avascent.com, ajovovic@avascent.com and steve.ganyard@avascent.com

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VIEWPOINT

Military Spending: How Much Defense Will the American People Support?

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2017, annual interest payments on the national debt will be larger than the defense budget.

A more efficient allocation of diminishing resources is essential.

This will require organizational and strategic reform, and much more fiscal discipline. Ultimately, the nation’s ability to execute successfully its national military strategy is at stake.

Opinion surveys tell us that, above all, the military is respected among U.S. institutions. According to a Harris Poll, “military officer” is among the most respected professions, and the annual Gallup Poll puts the military at the top of all institutions. In a world of uncertainty, military service retains a special mystique. One reason is that, since the War of 1812, the U.S. military has not fought a war for national survival. The only exception may be World War II. Fundamentally, however, Americans know very little about the military.

Proportionately fewer and fewer families contribute sons and daughters to the armed services, and knowledge is limited to what people see on TV or in movies. For many, defense is a subculture, best left to martial bureaucrats and to those who crave the muck and mire associated with national security and government.

Lacking familiarity and information, Americans have blindly accepted that the nation must have a huge defense budget. But few know how the money is allocated or spent. Even fewer know what is going on in the broad area of defense and national security, let alone how nearly one-fifth of the national budget is allotted.

How much defense the nation can afford may not be a question that most Americans want to ask. Or they are simply too trusting of the ability of those in charge to make the right decisions. As long as someone else is involved in this complex and dirty work, why should citizens concern themselves? Out of sight, out of mind.

In the post-Cold War era, the public has been surprisingly accepting of the government’s spending prerogatives. In a country where approximately 50 percent of wage earners don’t even pay taxes, perhaps Americans have become inured to government spending. It is not their problem. They seem unaware that they have a lot of “skin in the game.” A pertinent analogy is the filtering and disguising of the high cost of healthcare through third-party payers and government programs, so that average Americans don’t feel the pain and, therefore, have insufficient concern about cost growth, inefficiencies and quality.

Despite the mounting debt and financial crisis, defense spending remains virtually unscathed. President Obama has agreed to grow annually, albeit very modestly, the already massive defense budget.

The reason is that the nation is fighting a two-front war, and the chief executive is usually given the benefit of the doubt during wartime. Except for some increases in personnel end strength, this

ISTOCKPHOTO

BY NATHANIEL H. SLEDGE JR. Americans by most measures support a strong national defense. But how much is the country willing to pay for it?

That question may be far from most citizens’ minds but it is an important one, especially with the United States facing a staggering debt.

“You cannot have a strong defense in a rotten economy,” said retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, an advisor to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The nation’s defense budget currently equates to less than 5 percent of the U.S. economy. Yet, one should ask whether 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product gives the nation its money’s worth.

One way of measuring the return on defense investments is whether more money translates into more capability to defeat our enemies. In this context, if the U.S. military were measured by the might of its enemies, we have little to celebrate.

It is helpful here to look at the results of military engagements during the past several decades, such as Operation Desert One in Iran, the intervention in Grenada, and actions in Somalia, Libya, Panama and the Balkans. The U.S. military merely survived embarrassment in the first three. It acquitted itself pretty well in the second three, two of which were dominated by combat aviation, an area in which the United States enjoys supremacy.

How forces are faring in Iraq and Afghanistan reflects well on the uniformed personnel fighting and sustaining the wars, but the direction and quality of overall policies, strategies, and management of the wars must be left to historians to ponder. Surely, we can do better.

The United States has enjoyed a permissive environment as the lone superpower, with unrivaled military prerogatives.

Viewed broadly, the U.S. military ultimately prevails against much weaker foes in part because of its great natural resources, secure geography, dominant culture, and overwhelming political and economic power. Another reason is that enemies were inept and forgettable, but mostly the United States has prevailed because it is a rich nation. Less-than-stellar military performances have occurred against a backdrop of hegemony, relative abundance and prosperity.

This record of success and abundance has led to an entrenched and complacent culture among defense-related institutions. As Gates put it, we are maintaining “20th Century appetites instead of facing 21st Century realities.”

Now, the nation must grapple with a dismal fiscal outlook and expected downward pressures on defense spending. Current spending levels are unsustainable. Indeed, if trends persist, by

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doesn’t explain the enormous growth in the underlying base budget.

Growth in defense has occurred as U.S. government spending as a proportion of the economy continues to steadily increase. In 1948, government constituted about 20 percent of the nation’s output. During the Korean War it peaked at 29 percent. At the height of the Vietnam War it was more than 31 percent. Today, the government sector accounts for about 44 percent of gross domestic product, and economists project it will reach at least 50 percent in the next few years. For a country that touts free markets and capitalism, this is a troubling trend.

Historical numbers suggest an overall relative decline and consolidation in defense spending around 5 percent of GDP. Defense spending relative to GDP during wars and conflicts tells a story of this relative decline: War World II, 38 percent; Korean Conflict and nuclear weapons race, 14 percent; Vietnam, 10 percent; Reagan era build-up, 7 percent; Kuwait liberation, 5 percent; Clinton era Reductions, 3.5 percent; and post 9/11 peak, 6 percent.

Defense spending has also declined as a portion of the U.S. budget, too, but less so when measured against GDP. This says more about the growth of the federal budget and U.S. willingness to borrow to finance government operations than it does about defense. The bump in defense spending since the Clinton years in relation to national output may presage a new, more troubling trend. Total defense spending now accounts for 20 percent of the federal annual $3.8 trillion budget. This is not a redeeming statistic, yet it seems to be acceptable to most Americans.

Despite the relative declines of defense against GDP and the budget, inflation adjusted defense spending has grown along with the government sector of the economy. Gates has described a chart of annual defense budget allocations as resembling the “EKG of a defibrillated heart patient.” Defense may have been volatile, but in absolute terms, since the Clinton years, it has enjoyed a steady uptrend. The U.S. defense budget is now above $750 billion annually which, compared to a GDP estimated at $14.6 trillion, amounts to 5.1 percent of GDP. When adding other national security costs such as Department of Energy (nuclear weapons) and intelligence agency budgets, the total exceeds $800 billion.

The next question is whether today’s high defense budgets are needed to defeat militias and lightly armed insurgents, as opposed to nuclear-armed, peer competitors with large conventional ground and air forces. The $50 billion the United States spends on intelligence agencies alone exceeds the GDP of 53 percent (96) of the 180 United Nations member states that are tracked by the International Monetary Fund. U.S. defense expenditures of $750 billion exceed the GDP of 90 percent (162) of them. As Gates has noted, the defense budget is larger than the defense budgets of all other nations combined. Does this reflect an appropriate and efficient application of our resources?

Advocates have argued that this spending is necessary to ensure readiness for future threats. Others disagree, and contend that the current path is unnecessary and unsustainable given U.S. long-term fiscal problems. It’s funny how the future threat always looks like the threats of yesteryear, which makes the solutions strangely reminiscent of yesteryear’s — nuclear weapons, missiles, tanks, ships, bombers, interceptors, submarines and carriers. These capabilities most likely will be needed. The issues are how much and in what proportions. The American people should be asking hard questions, no matter how complex and esoteric these issues might be.

The public should be concerned that much of the decision making is carried out in secret. Anyone who has ever submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) request can confirm that government opacity is real. Information about the Defense Department is among the most challenging to acquire, and strangely, not for reasons of protecting national security.

Shielded from the vagaries of foreign policy and defense planning, programming, and budgeting, it is no surprise that few Americans are monitoring the enormous treasure sinks of defense spending. Oh sure, the topic occasionally attracts interest from the news media, such as when TV networks seek to make ratings hay out of government mismanagement.

Remember the $800 toilet seat?

Unfortunately, the public has a short attention span. Like most issues in America, defense scandals, once exposed in the 24-hour news cycle, are soon forgotten.

In the early 2000s, few questioned the increases in intelligence and defense spending, or the deficits that naturally come with war. Today, in the midst of a great recession, many are concerned about the mounting federal budget deficits. In the near future, as slow economic growth and cultural malaise set in, perhaps citizens will question the nation’s mounting defense bills.

A wake up call is in order.

It is exceedingly important for citizens to understand the role that the industry and Congress play in how defense dollars are spent.

For industry, budget decisions become matters of survival. Procurement is the mother’s milk of defense contractors. Historically, defense industry profits have come from procurement rather than research, because the profit margins for research and development have not been as favorable. Research and development projects are relatively short term. Thus, they do not provide a long-term and stable contribution to corporate bottom lines.

Defense firms, especially the top-tier primes, need production contracts or their contemporary substitutes: re-manufacturing of “current” systems and service contracts.

When the Pentagon’s strategic plans coincide with the fortunes of defense industry, a formidable entente for defense programming STORY CONTINUES ON PAGE 24

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and budget pie cutting is born. Behind the scenes are the Pentagon leaders providing subtle winks and nods to companies that aggressively lobby Congress for their mutually favored programs. In many cases, linkages to the national military strategy, if there are any, are incidental.

The industry also generates significant revenue from support service contracts, which currently amount to about $200 billion per year. Defense contractor personnel that support military agencies are de-facto government workers. They are just paid differently and some can be more expensive. The practice of outsourcing, greatly expanded under the Bush administration, simply grew government under a different, more politically palatable heading.

Gates’ pledge to cut the white-collar contractor work force by 10 percent per year is actually a pledge to cut the government work force, because service contract personnel are just an extension of the government by another means. Recent announcements by top defense contractors of their plans to reduce staffs are an attempt to bow to the inevitable and Defense Secretary Robert Gates position themselves self competitively for DEFENSE DEPT. lower defense revenue.

Of all the things to be concerned about the defense industry, one of the most serious ones is its access to and influence of members of Congress. Influence peddling and the pursuit of business that is unsubstantiated by national security requirements are among the most confounding causes of resource and strategy mismatches.

Many weapon systems would not get to square one were it not for industry intensely lobbying Congress. This practice allows for a shadow government of sorts to coexist outside the official Defense Department, with its own protocols and procedures.

It’s always about jobs. Want to keep a combat vehicle or engine plant going? Just establish strong relations with that region’s congressional delegation, make the appropriate campaign contributions, fund a few plant visits or junkets, provide white papers, and, voila, you have secured the future of your plant with little input from the Pentagon.

This is how the system works. Members of Congress seem to be interminably focused on reelection. Many legislators appear to perceive defense spending as a way to reward selected constituents and communities, thereby gaining political influence.

Congressional culture can be self-serving and myopic, too. As long as constituents, and more importantly, campaign contributors and political supporters, are taken care of, most members of Congress are satisfied. All legislators seek the praise of constituents who laud their record of bringing home dollars to their district or state.

There isn’t enough revenue for all to succeed at this, so they bring home borrowed money. This practice ultimately becomes a losing proposition for the nation as dollars are borrowed and redistributed. But as former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, this scheme works well “until you run out of someone else’s money.”

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The nexus between Congress, its constituents, and lobbyists can undermine defense priorities. Most lawmakers lack a national, let alone international, perspective. For clues about how this mentality shapes defense spending, again, just follow the money. One would expect better from the Senate, but it has become just as partisan and provincial as the House of Representatives.

Congressional influence of the budget process contributes to the dysfunction. The feeding frenzy for defense dollars usually begins with intense lobbying for lucrative programs and the maintenance of those that provide steady employment. When enough congressional districts benefit from a particular defense program, it achieves the “critical mass” necessary to launch and sustain a major program. It is no surprise that most successful major defense acquisition programs are developed or produced in many states to ensure broad political support and advocacy.

The congressional authorization and appropriation committees demonstrate the abject meddling and micro-management that is characteristic of Congress and ruinous to objective strategic planning. Instead of just ensuring that broad strategic goals make sense, assessing major Pentagon policies, and determining resource levels for the major weapon systems, these committees delve into each program element, adding unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and frustrating the efforts of those specifically charged with national defense: the national command authority and Pentagon leaders.

Obviously the legislative branch holds the power of the purse, regardless of what the executive branch has to say. But often it is involved much more than it should be. At a recent Precision Strike Association conference, an Army project manager, frustrated by congressional meddling, remarked that, “Defense Acquisition Boards will soon be held in congressional hearing rooms.” This is an exasperated and exaggerated prediction, but not by much.

Congress seems immune to the will of the people except during elections. Only better informed and more engaged Americans can bring pressure on elected officials.

Regardless of political persuasions, the American public must become better educated about the budget process and national security. Citizens should be aware that the current trends of government spending can be ruinous and unsustainable.

Will we walk the plank like Greece, Spain or Argentina into insolvency? Time will tell. Hopefully, if and when the nation stands on the edge of another economic abyss, Americans will become more concerned about the due process that spends their hard-earned tax dollars on the good, the bad, and often, the unnecessary.

Nathaniel H. Sledge Jr., PhD, is a retired U.S. Army colonel. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government, the Defense Department or the U.S. Army.

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A Single Recipe For Boosting the Economy, Fixing the Border and Making Clean Energy VIEWPOINT

By Karen L. Jones The United States today faces enormous challenges. A struggling economy, unemployment, border security, and access to clean and renewable energy are among the most pressing.

These problems on the surface may seem unrelated, but they really are not. In fact, there is a way to address all four at the same time by locating renewable energy infrastructure along the border, particularly in areas that are economically depressed.

The concept may seem over the top, but it makes perfect sense.

The U.S.-Mexico border contains some of the most valuable solar resources on the planet. The idea is for federal, state and local governments to join forces and establish “renewable energy corridors” within border regions where the Department of Homeland Security already has invested in infrastructure associated with the SBInet (secure border initiative) virtual fence project. It is reasonable to envision the renewable energy infrastructure being integrated with SBInet.

Renewable energy corridors would establish clean energy capacity, create green jobs in areas of high unemployment, help to diversify the economy and enhance national security by expanding presence and surveillance along the border.

The private sector could provide utility scale renewable energy installations such as photovoltaic farms, solar power towers or geothermal plants. Initial federal investment is needed to cover the cost for upgrading existing transmission lines in areas such as Imperial County, Calif., which flow to nearby energy markets in San Diego, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

The federal government could even recoup its investment after a few years of operation through allocation of “wheeling” fees — transmission tolls which the local utility typically collects.

The security challenges along the U.S.-Mexico border have, to some degree, diverted public attention away from the significant economic and sustainable energy opportunities that the region offers. In remote border areas, multi-purposed renewable energy infrastructure should be considered an effective avenue to enhance security and stability and an innovative means to exploit the enormous renewable energy potential of the region.

Strategically located utility scale renewable energy infrastructure (solar, wind and geothermal) can generate thousands of megawatts of electricity while perimeter fencing and surveillance installations surrounding these facilities can help DHS’ efforts to secure the border.

Renewable energy facilities within a designated corridor in the border region can also increase economic opportunities in the 26

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The All American Canal carries water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley, Calif. Every year illegal aliens drown in the canal’s swift current during their entry into the United States. KAREN JONES

United States and Mexico. Green jobs will reduce economic marginalization of target communities — and possibly reduce crime rates. This could generate millions of dollars in recurring tax revenues for state and local governments that are now struggling with the associated costs of border related crimes.

A plan focusing initially on Imperial County provides a preliminary operational design and business model. This area is a good starting point because of its sunny climate, extensive system of transmission lines and rights of way along the southern border and its proximity to major Southern California cities.

Security is a significant challenge. The border region has experienced illegal border crossings, related deaths and drug traffic and crime in rural and remote areas. The harsh environment has resulted in deaths from dehydration, freezing and drowning. DHS has spent more than $1.3 billion on fences and surveillance systems, but it has become clear that these installations have limited coverage and utility.

Economic considerations also are key. Imperial County’s 30 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the nation. The region is not well diversified from an industrial base perspective and depends largely on agriculture. To make matters worse, Imperial County spends millions of dollars each year covering the cost of providing services to undocumented immigrants.

Environmental concerns are also a major factor. California has in place one of the most ambitious “renewables portfolio standard” (RPS) that compels utility companies to increase procurement of green energy resources to 33 percent by 2020.

Although the renewable energy corridor can include any combination of energy options, the Imperial Valley region is broadly prospective for solar and, to a more focused degree, geothermal energy. The corridor could operate similar to an industrial park, with different companies and a range of technologies co-existing within the same general area. Utility scale solar and geothermal facilities within the corridor could include double security fencing and attached surveillance systems. Surveillance data collected

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Under the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, the California Fish and Game and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service helped identify the best areas to site renewable energy, while avoiding conflicts with endangered species and sensitive areas.

The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management said most of Imperial Valley borderlands were “disqualified from further consideration for potential habitat and ecology issues.” But the site selection process did not consider the significant benefits that a renewable energy project could provide in terms of border surveillance.

Setting up a renewable energy corridor near the Imperial County/Mexico border also offers important practical advantages: Existing transmission rights of way following the international border would carry electricity to major utility markets in San Diego, Los Angeles and Arizona. The corridor would be located on public lands administered by BLM. Coordinating with one primary entity rather than hundreds of private landowners offers advantages in terms of time and coordination.

Initial research indicates that several transmission lines near the border would need to be upgraded. Moreover, any action on federal lands will require compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act process to protect the lands and desert ecosystem.

A project of this size is never simple. But the payback would be

huge.

ND Karen L. Jones is a technology strategy and management consultant with a focus in energy, environment and natural resource policy. She works for The Aerospace Corporation in Arlington, Va. Email: Karen.l.jones@aero.org

© 2010 Christie Digital Systems USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

within the corridor would also be integrated with the SBInet and Customs and Border Protection command centers to facilitate tactical decision making and law enforcement responses.

An area 80 miles long and one-quarter mile wide north of the international border could serve as a photovoltaic solar corridor.

When operational, it could produce upwards of 2,102,400 MW hours of power annually. This would equate to generating $231 million in revenues per year.

The introduction of new and high-tech renewable energy opportunities will also broaden the local employment base and raise the overall economic profile and image of the community.

Not all jobs created by a large-scale renewable energy corridor will land in the United States, however. Mexico is now beginning to gain green jobs — many outsourced by U.S. based solar cell manufacturers. While at first glance this may not appear optimal, creating jobs in Mexico will discourage local workers from illegal immigration as more green jobs open up in their own country.

A big hurdle for any new renewable energy project in the West is moving power to customers. There simply isn’t enough capacity on existing transmission lines to handle the additional electricity from one or more new utility scale solar installations.

More research is needed on how best to structure an initial infrastructure investment by DHS. The investment would be significantly less than the current total cost of SBInet, and would allow over time for reimbursement of federal spending through revenue generation from electricity sales.

Thus, after a solar facility starts to generate revenues, the electricity would be wheeled to Southern California Edison or the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power territory. The Imperial Irrigation District typically receives “wheeling revenues” when a tie in occurs in their district. These same wheeling revenues could be applied to partially reimburse the federal investor — until an agreed upon project payout point is reached A transmission upgrade would also incentivize renewable energy companies to participate as connections to the California grid would become easier. This would allow DHS to be reimbursed for their transmission upgrade investment and create the seed capital for an economically dire area of the country to rebound and prosper.

While Imperial County’s 105-mile border area is secured by 989 CBP agents, 13.3 miles of primary fencing (no secondary fencing) and 10.8 miles of vehicle barriers, these measures failed to restrain 33,520 people who were apprehended by the Border Patrol within the El Centro sector during 2009. It is believed that thousands more escaped scrutiny by slipping through the permeable and remote border outside the urban areas of Mexicali.

Even if DHS decided to abandon or curtail SBInet, it would not be too late for the department to consider how to integrate renewable energy infrastructure into the existing border security architecture. While a renewable energy corridor and related transmission upgrades will require upfront capital investment from both the private and public sector, pay back in terms of clean energy, revenue generation and enhanced border surveillance can justify the investment.

The corridor can host a range of renewable technologies — essentially operating as a renewable energy and border security zone. It is possible that a variety of utility scale solar energy technologies are suitable. One option is concentrating solar power — thermal power towers, dish arrays and troughs. Another is photovoltaic solar power — flat fixed panels, or tilted rotating panels.

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With SBInet In Limbo, Border Technology Is Anyone’s Game

By Eric Beidel TUCSON, Ariz. — Authorities have closed public recreation areas here and peppered the harsh desert landscape with foreboding messages about threats rising from the Mexican border.

“DANGER — PUBLIC TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED. Active Drug and Human Smuggling Area,” reads one sign at a destination popular for its towering saguaro cacti, Indian relics and wildlife.

“Visitors May Encounter Armed Criminals and Smuggling Vehicles Traveling At High Rates. Stay Away From Cash, Clothing, Backpacks and Abandoned Vehicles. If You See Suspicious Activity, Do Not Confront!”

Against this backdrop of fear, local entrepreneurs envision another kind of sign: “Open for Business.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s program to deploy a network of cuttingedge cameras, sensors and communication technologies along the southwest border has hit its share of snags and more recently a wall. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano earlier this year ordered a review of the Secure Border Initiative’s technology efforts, dubbed SBInet, and diverted money away from the program. The secretary put a moratorium on new work under the initiative.

This uncertainty leaves the door open for other attempts to bring technology to the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.

In the north and the south, partnerships are forming between universities and small businesses in the name of security and profits. The players want secure borders, but they also want DHS to spend more money in their regions.

Mike Crosby recently relocated his surveillance and communications firm from the nation’s capital to Tucson and joined a group of university and industry executives trying to solve the border crisis brewing a little more than an hour’s drive south.

“It’s the sector where DHS is spending most of the money,” Crosby said. “We want to be right here in the heart of it. As they say, ‘follow the money.’”

Crosby’s company Aria International has become a partner in the Border Security and Technology Commercialization Center.

The BSTCC makes its headquarters at the University of Arizona Science and Technol28

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ogy Park, a sprawling 2 million square feet of offices and laboratories on more than 1,300 acres just outside Tucson’s city limits.

The center exists mostly on paper right now, but the plan is to give an economic shot in the arm to border communities by providing local companies a way to test and deploy technology on the U.S.-Mexico line.

The ultimate goal is to create a series of testing facilities and research parks along the border between Tucson and Santa Teresa, N.M., where the university has a partner in the Bi-National Sustainability Laboratory, a nonprofit organization that could bring in collaborators from Mexico.

“There’s a lot of technology out there that might address border issues,” said Bruce Wright, associate vice president for research parks at the University of Arizona. “But it’s not adequately tested and evaluated and integrated into the processes and the circumstances of border-crossing locations.”

The center is seeking $3 billion from DHS for a five-year pilot project that would result in the testing of two yet-to-be-identified technologies, one in Tucson and one in New Mexico. A DHS spokesperson would not comment on the initiative.

The center could help DHS and other agencies find solutions and evaluate those already in existence in real-life settings and situations, Wright said. The effort mirrors a previous partnership between the university and the Food and Drug Administration aimed at bringing drugs to the marketplace in safer, faster and cheaper ways. This one, though, hits closer to home.

“If we’re going to be in bed with the border on a day-to-day basis with all of its problems and issues and there’s a solution to it, why shouldn’t we be the place where that issue is solved and we get the commercial benefit from it?” Wright said. “We have a cluster of companies emerging here in Tucson that are developing these technologies and we want to grab those companies, keep them here, manufacture their products, distribute them and bring economic value and wealth to the citizens of our region.”

Businesses are thinking the same thing in Michigan, where DHS officials recently attended a conference devoted to northern border security.

The nonprofit Michigan Security Net-

work wants to create a site in or near Detroit to field-test new products under consideration by DHS. Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and smaller schools are founding members of the security network, which includes more than a dozen companies.

Michigan’s cold climate and high-traffic border crossings would be the ideal environment to test new surveillance assets, sensors and tactical infrastructure, the network’s CEO Leslie Touma said at the conference.

Local companies could provide solutions to detect intruders, hazardous materials and underwater tunnels and pipes, she said during her presentation, which is available on her organization’s website. Despite sharing a border with Canada, Michigan receives less DHS funding than 30 other states, according to FedSpending.org. Virginia, Washington, D.C., and California have received the biggest contracts.

The money has been flowing to Arizona, home to the least secure section of the southwest border. Half of all illegal entries into the United States occur across the 260 miles of border in the Tucson sector, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin said during a speech at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. SBInet has focused its attention on Arizona. Prime contractor Boeing in 2009 deployed 15 sensor towers, 13 communications towers and 400 unattended ground sensors along 54 linear miles of the ArizonaMexico border in the areas of Ajo and Tucson. It had begun laying the groundwork to install additional equipment along 120 mores miles when Napolitano halted work.

The secretary’s review of the program was nearing completion in late October, a DHS spokesperson said.

SBInet followed two previous programs abolished because of equipment failures and mismanagement. The Government Accountability Office conducted an audit between November 2009 and June 2010 and found some of the same problems with SBInet.

“Among other things, our reports and recommendations point to an SBInet technology program in a constant state of flux, with delays in deployment that require the Border Patrol to continue relying on existing technology for securing the border and weaknesses in testing and acquisition that have resulted in a program that has not produced expected results,” reads a July 30 GAO report.

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border technology

Boeing has worked with CBP to overcome past performance and management challenges, company spokesperson Jenna McMullin told National Defense. “We have held to a schedule baseline over the past nine months that has resulted in capabilities that are in the hands of Border Patrol agents right now, providing them greater safety, situational awareness and resource effectiveness than ever before,” she said.

In addition to this so-called “virtual fence,” there already stands a few hundred miles of actual fencing along the southern U.S. border with plans to add more. If a physical barrier has to be built, those involved in the Tucson initiative would like to see it placed a few miles inside the actual border.

“We don’t like to put fences right on the border,” said Crosby, whose company a few years ago installed double fencing, thermal cameras, radars and remotely operated M-16 rifles on poles around Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. “You can put them back from the border a little ways and put other things out there to give you some warning and indicators. By the time they climb over the fence, it’s too late.”

Crosby suggests placing systems of smart cameras and sensors at the border and

installing the fence about five miles in from that. He already has devices that the BSTCC could test — container and vehicle scanners that will become vastly more critical in a couple of years. Legislation slated to go into effect July 2012 calls for all containers to be scanned or screened before coming into the United States. While DHS has the authority to delay the start of this law, it does not have a standard for what scanners are to be used, Crosby said.

About 1,700 trucks each day roll through the Mariposa Port of Entry about 71 miles south of Tucson in Nogales. The entry point is Arizona’s largest for commercial traffic, but it is not the most secure, Wright said.

During a recent visit, people on foot waved to him while crossing over from Mexico, he said.

“Part of what we’re suggesting to DHS is not only do you need to identify technology but you need to figure out how to integrate it into the overall process,” Wright said.

“Let’s say you need to X-ray railroad cars going through the city of Nogales. How do you take that X-ray technology and integrate it into the overall inspection process and make it work?”

The university’s tech park has a partner in Alion Science and Technology, a company that specializes in systems integration and could help solve that problem, Wright explained. Other local outfits have signed on to the effort based on capabilities they could provide to border security operations.

Darling Environmental and Surveying uses terrestrial light detection and ranging to create 3D maps of buildings and underground passageways. The firm has worked with NASA, Raytheon and San Francisco and Dulles International airports. The company has scanned a tunnel under the border and possesses the tools to find other underground passages.

“There is a considerable concern that there are so many tunnels being formed underneath Nogales that the ground is actually subsiding,” said Vaughn Cantor, marketing director for Darling. “This is something we can measure from a half-mile away.”

DILAS, a company that manufactures diode lasers, has looked into powering unmanned aerial vehicles with high-energy lasers from the ground. The company is located at the university park.

Then there’s Crosby, who has experience securing borders overseas. While on active duty with the Navy in 2002, he led counterproliferation efforts for U.S. Central Command in Iraq. He oversaw about 160 30

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special operatives who were to keep an eye out for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons moving across the borders of 27 countries. Shortly after this assignment, Crosby formed Aria International and began integrating drones, airships and helicopters into surveillance operations.

Aria won a $3 billion contract to install 22 high-end crossings between India and Pakistan. It also is currently under contract with the Royal Thai Army to monitor a growing insurgency in southern Thailand.

The efforts there include using a Skyship 600 blimp to watch over events on the ground. Crosby said he has been talking to CBP officials about flying an airship along the southern U.S. boundary.

“Integration of these systems really isn’t a challenge,” Crosby said. “It’s not rocket science. Some of the big companies put so much management oversight, so much conceptual design to this thing and try to make it into a [research-and-development] program. But there is enough technology out here today that can be applied in an effective manner.”

The BSTCC has proposed building a testing facility at the tech park where a variety of entry ports and scenarios can be simulated. The compound could be made large enough to accommodate more than border-related tryouts.

“If you wanted to mock up the entry point to the green zone in Baghdad, you could do that,” Wright said. “If you wanted to put together the lane configuration at the commercial port of entry at Mariposa in Nogales, you could do that.” The initial testing at the tech park would precede run-throughs at specific locations along the border, he explained.

“We have the ability to bring a methodology and approach to this that is badly needed by DHS,” Wright said. “Too often these technologies aren’t tested in the actual context in which they need to be applied and then there’s a problem when they’re actually deployed.”

With the help of a college student, tech park personnel are working to identify every company in the Tucson region that has technology it wants to present to DHS. If no federal money is made available for the program, the companies say they will make it happen on their own.

“We’re not waiting for DHS to fund this,” Wright said. “We’re taking it from the other side, the commercial side.”

ND Email comments to ebeidel@ndia.org

Proponents Hope ‘Rodeo’ Can Move Army Ground Robots Forward

BY STEW MAGNUSON FORT BENNING, Ga. — Representatives of some 50 companies, service research labs and universities gathered under the warm Georgia sun at a remote corner of this sprawling Army base to show off the state of their art at the second annual Robotics Rodeo.

Nestled among the concrete buildings of a mock village were three demonstration areas where small tactical robots darted in and out of doorways. At a fourth site, tele-operated earth-movers shoveled dirt among a stand of trees. Next to that, SUVs autonomously drove around a track.

All of this happened as officials from the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence watched.

And that’s no accident, said Jim Overholt, senior research scientist in robotics at the Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center.

The center of excellence, located at Fort Benning, is now responsible for writing requirement documents for ground robots.

“Many of the government folks who are here are the ones who are going to help us craft requirements for the future,” Overholt told National Defense.

The deployment of ground robots during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has mostly been ad hoc. Explosive ordnance disposal teams from all four services were the first to widely use remotely operated machines to help them search and destroy roadside bombs. Other ground forces have sent them into buildings and caves to perform reconnaissance.

The Navy is the executive agent for the EOD robots and is busy creating next-generation bomb disposal drones. If the Army is to purchase and integrate other so-called mechanized soldiers, the documentation that will allow that to go forward must come from the maneuver center.

“Right now one of the most critical areas is really defining the hard requirements that the community can go out and respond to,” said Overholt. Vendors want to know what the Army wants, so they know where to invest their research dollars.

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The rodeo was the brainchild of Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, former commander of Fort Hood, Texas, and the 3rd Armored Corps, who was perhaps unique in the Army. He was a combatant commander who held a master’s degree in robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lynch, who has since been promoted to oversee the installations command, was a vocal proponent of fielding more robotic systems, including those that are armed. He

Top: Segway’s robotic mobility platform can reach speeds of 18 mph.

Right: QinetiQ’s modular advanced armed robotic system fires its weapon.

Bottom: American Android’s semi-autonomous multi-arm robot opens a backpack. Stew magnuson photos

helped organize the first rodeo in September 2009 at Fort Hood to specifically show Army leadership that the technology was mature enough to be used in battle zones, where they can save soldiers’ lives, he said.

Showing mature technologies to senior Army leaders is important, Overholt said, but the event in its second year has evolved.

Having officials from the maneuver center observe the demonstrations is key, he added “As much as Gen. Lynch nailed it the first year by saying we need to do this, the emphasis this year is to try to get that requirement community engaged and to help us write these hardened documents that will help us develop the robots of the future,” Overholt added.

The four-day rodeo was divided into two parts. The first two days were military-only demonstrations, where evaluators went among the five sites to see the robots in action. The second two days were open to the public. Researchers from defense companies and service laboratories took copious notes on what their rivals were displaying, and asked pointed technical questions.

There were signs of cooperation as well. Executives with Macro USA, a small firm that has been selling light, but highly ruggedized surveillance robots that can be tossed into buildings discovered that University of Michigan researchers had navigation software that could help the company track their micro-unmanned ground vehicles without needing GPS. Troy Tukach, CEO of Kairos Autonomi, and Chris Brown of Autonomous Solutions struck up a conversation in the parking lot on the final day. Brown wondered if both of their robotically controlled automobiles that were using the same standardized software

could “talk.”

And more importantly, “Could we do this in a short amount of time without 25 researchers and millions of dollars?” Brown asked.

They had the two different vehicles connected before the scheduled 10:30 a.m. demonstration. It wasn’t instantaneous, and took a little more than an hour, but it did prove the utility of the joint architecture for unmanned systems (JAUS) software — standardized computer codes that make it easier for robot manufacturers to integrate devices onto platforms.

Overholt said the event “gives the DoD ground robotics community a chance to come together as a whole and really kind of get a feel for the state of the art on robotics in key areas.”

Participants included companies who have had long-standing relationships with TARDEC, universities, research labs such as the Navy’s SPAWAR Systems Center, and small businesses that have never had a contract with the military.

Bob Quinn, vice president of TALON operations at QinetiQ North America’s technology solutions group, said there has been remarkable progress in the robotics community since the 2009 rodeo in terms of autonomy. Last year, the exhibitors only had a few months to pull together the self-controlled robotics systems that Lynch said he wanted to see at Fort Hood. With more time to prepare this year, the demonstrations were much more impressive (see related story).

The opportunity for the organizations to show their wares before soldiers, and in some cases, let them take control of the robots, is story continues on page 34

enemies, and then the MAARS robot armed with either a non-lethal or lethal weapon, could disable the target. Both public demonstrations were packed with observers, although at the first showing, MAARS failed to fire its weapon. Quinn blamed the malfunction on a software glitch.

Overholt repeated what many observers have said about armed robots on the battlefield: many treaty issues and tactics, techniques and procedures have to be

worked out and “intense risk mitigation analyses” have to completed before teleoperated armed robots reach the field.

“In the meantime, the military should be looking into how we fight with these things. What are the plusses? What are the minuses?” Overholt said. “We’re finally moving out on that kind of activity.”

Overholt said he particularly wanted to showcase common controllers.

“I do not want to burden the war fighters

Technologists Make Progress On Autonomous Ground Robots

As Jim Overholt, senior research scientist of robotics at the Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, put it, automation can “let a soldier be more situationally aware as he drives down an alley and let the mundane job of driving a vehicle be handled by the computer.”

Autonomy was a key theme at the 2nd annual Robotics Rodeo held here.

The Southwest Research Institute equipped a Ford Explorer with a computer system that can be switched to six different modes: manual driving; tele-operated; pedestrian following; vehicle following; supervised autonomy and full autonomy, said Ryan Lamm, manager of intelligent vehicle systems at the San Antonio, Texasbased nonprofit.

Within the vehicle following mode, the system can be set to follow at longer distances, or it can drive to the right or left of the lead vehicle. In some cases, it’s not always advantageous to fol-

vital, Quinn said. “We do about 30 trade shows a year, and one event like this. I wish it were the other way around,” he added.

One of the displays garnering the most interest was QinetiQ’s modular advanced armed robotic system (MAARS), which was demonstrated in tandem with a Raven unmanned aerial aircraft and the company’s smaller Dragon Runner robot. The company wanted to show how a UAV flying overhead and a small robot could be used to find

■ FORT BENNING, Ga. — Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute used eBay as inspiration when they were searching for ways to make unmanned aerial and ground robots work autonomously to search for targets.

Using two small unmanned aircraft and an SUV that can drive itself, the three vehicles employ computer algorithms to conduct an auction over the airwaves. Once a human has designated an area for them to search, the onboard computers start bidding on which of the three is the closest and has the most fuel to spare. The winner takes off to conduct its search, leaving the other two to carry out other missions.

“We don’t want for a human operator to have

to tell each vehicle what to do and where to go,” said Charles Pippin, a research scientist at the institute. “We prefer that the vehicles communicate with each other and task themselves.”

The 2009-2034 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap produced by the office of the secretary of defense called for “autonomous adaptive tactical behavior” for ground robots.

Researchers want to take the burden of teleoperating the machines off soldiers who have enough things to worry about in war zones. Or they want robots to do routine tasks such as carrying heavy loads or driving vehicles down highways with little or no directions from their human masters.

The Southwest Research Institute’s multi-modal unmanned ground vehicle Stew magnuson

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with a controller for every different robot that they’re going to see. We need to have commonality as much as possible,” he said.

“I want a controller that can share images, pass messages back and forth and allow some common operating picture between them.”

That includes operating ground robots along with small unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Raven, which is already widely deployed with troops.

Leader-follower technologies, whether they are small robots that accompany soldiers in the field and carry heavy equipment for them, or trucks that autonomously drive behind other vehicles in a convoy, are some of the more mature systems that Overholt also wanted to see. They are “right around the corner” as far as their technology readiness level is concerned, he said.

“The more the soldiers get trust in the technology, the more you’re going to see

them asking for new and better capabilities,” he added.

Not everyone was impressed with the demonstration. Col. Billy Miller, of the Army Signal Corps Battle Lab at Fort Gordon, Ga., came to see if any of the robotic systems on display could link with existing Army communication systems.

His blunt assessment: “They don’t.” ND

low another vehicle in a straight line, Lamm said.

“The more reliable comms you have, the more you are able to extend the distance out,” he said. The truck currently can follow a lead vehicle and self-drive up to 70 meters behind.

If a pedestrian or other obstacle gets in the way, it either swerves or stops, then automatically goes faster to catch up with the convoy.

In the pedestrian-following, or dismounted, mode, the vehicle’s sensors are programmed to visually latch onto a person on foot and stay a few paces behind as he or she walks forward.

Even if another pedestrian walks in within the truck’s line of sight, it remains zeroed in on the original subject.

The tele-operated mode allows a person to drive the vehicle remotely. A driver behind the wheel can choose to revert to manual mode and take complete control of the vehicle, or do “supervised autonomy” — making small adjustments to the steering, speed or brakes if he doesn’t like the choices the computer is making.

In a small system, iRobot Corp. has developed the AwareHead, a pedestrian-following, gesture-controlled software and sensor suite that it can integrate into its family of robots.

The idea is to lessen the operational burden placed on soldiers, lighten their load and decrease time on task.

It’s not enough to just have a robot that can follow a soldier and carry equipment while avoiding obstacles. It must also sense situations, said Christopher Geyer, senior lead research scientist at iRobot of Bedford, Mass.

For example, if it sees its leader firing a weapon, it can react by moving more conservatively.

“We are trying to make interaction with the robot more natural,” Geyer added.

For robots that are autonomously traversing over rough areas without a human guide, St. Paul, Minn.-based Primordial Inc. has adapted software that was designed to help soldiers find the best path from point A to point B. Originally a part of the Army’s Land Warrior soldier ensemble, the ground guidance system takes data on topographical features and veg-

etation and lets robots plot courses without relying on GPS, said Kyle Estes, software engineering manager at the company.

An autonomous vehicle can head for a waypoint and use obstacle detection sensors to avoid rocks, trees or other objects in its path, but it doesn’t know if there are major impediments such as rivers, lakes, or ravines.

“The idea is to give the robot a course overview path, and then use its on-board sensors to avoid rocks and cars and stuff we can’t catch in our map data,” Estes said.

For urban navigation scenarios, Sarnoff Corp. in Princeton, N.J., has developed the ViewTrek suite of sensors and software that can help

robots navigate in scenarios where GPS signals are weak or nonexistent.

The system, which can be integrated into any robot, uses visual landmarks to keep track of where it is going and to backtrack if needed.

It uses stereoscoptic processing for obstacle avoidance.

“The big piece of this is that it is GPS denied,” said Chetna Bindra. “It can go indoors, outdoors, and in caves,” she said.

The OSD roadmap identified intelligent visual navigation and communications that worked in urban scenarios as key technology requirements for future ground robotics programs.

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Email comments to smagnuson@ndia.org

­ — Stew Magnuson

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Engineers are working to automate the medium tactical vehicle replacement truck. OSHKOSH CORP

Army, Marine Corps in Pursuit Of Robotic Convoy Systems

By Grace V. Jean Because roadside bombs have claimed the lives of thousands of troops, both the Army and Marine Corps are pursuing efforts to reduce the number of injuries and deaths by developing robotic trucks that can drive long distances at highway speeds.

As part of its modernization plan, the Army is funding several ground robotics programs ranging from small, remotely controlled explosive ordnance disposal units to large autonomous tactical wheeled vehicles.

One of the more mature initiatives is a kit that promises to turn any of the Defense Department’s trucks into an autonomous system.

Funded by the Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, the convoy active safety technology program aims to improve convoy operations. The kit is small enough to be installed in the cab of a transport vehicle while allowing ample room for soldiers to ride along. It connects to the steering wheel story continues on page 38

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and pulls in feeds from the various sensors that are installed on the vehicle. The sensors include millimeter wave radar, LIDAR (light detection and ranging) and electrooptical and infrared cameras.

The system is configured to operate either in an optionally piloted mode where the soldier sits behind the wheel but the vehicle drives itself, or in a fully autonomous mode without any humans in the cab.

If an insurgent tries to disrupt the convoy by cutting into the line of vehicles, troops can simply hit a red button to disengage the autonomy in order to take control of the situation.

In an Army Research Laboratory experi-

ment, soldiers operated the vehicles in trials that involved finding hidden improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Soldiers ran the scenarios twice, once with troops driving, the second with CAST in operation.

“They saw 25 percent more IEDs when they were using CAST,” and at greater distances, said James Lowrie, director of autonomous systems at Lockheed Martin Corp. The soldiers also experienced no rearend collisions, he told National Defense.

The price point for a full-production system is reportedly $20,000 per unit.

Lockheed Martin engineers on the program recently developed a “push” robotic vehicle that can lead a convoy.

“That’s a capability that’s rarely seen in autonomous technology,” said Adrian Michalicek, program development manager for Lockheed Martin autonomous systems.

“It’s another layer of sophistication,” he said. The vehicle is equipped with onboard sensors including a disturbed soil detection system to search for IEDs. All CAST kits have an obstacle detection and avoidance system. In a video demonstration, a convoy of four trucks using CAST drove into a scenario where a small mannequin resembling a child perched on the side of the road. The first truck passed by safely but suddenly the mannequin moved out into the street. The second vehicle detected the obstacle, slowed down and determined a safe route around to avoid hitting it.

CAST has been tested in a number of experiments and demonstrations covering more than 12,000 miles of autonomous operation so far, officials said. They are coordinating with the Army to field the system into theater for evaluation. While there is no firm commitment, “Everyone wants to see that happen in 2011,” said Lowrie.

The Army is attempting to make fielding robotic vehicles a reality by developing the network they will communicate on. The service’s program executive office for integration, which is working to bring all the robotic systems together, will continue those efforts in the coming year, Paul Mehney, a spokesman for the office, told National Defense at the Association of the United States Army annual convention in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, Army Training and Doctrine Command leaders are examining requirements for a multi-mission unmanned ground vehicle. The service is planning two variants: counter-IED and an armed light reconnaissance vehicle.

There is already a program of record for the armed robotic version, once part of the now-defunct Army future combat systems.

Lockheed Martin Corp. is on contract to build six prototype vehicles beginning next year. The six-wheeled vehicle is designed to provide dismounted soldiers with a mobile scouting capability that can fire upon enemies when called upon. The intent is to eventually arm it with a machine gun and Javelin missiles.

“This system cannot and will not do independent autonomous engagements,” said Don Nimblett, senior manager for business story continues on page 40

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Engineers are adapting the robotic technologies aboard this medium tactical vehicle replacement truck to other military vehicles.

OSHKOSH CORP

development at the company’s missiles and fire control division. “We’re not inventing the ‘Rise of the Machines,’” he said, referring to the “Terminator” science fiction movie series in which robots attempt to eradicate mankind.

The company has been asked to focus on producing the vehicle first, said Nimblett. The chassis has articulated shoulder points on every wheel that can move in a 200-degree arc. The wheels have an in-hub motor and operate independently, allowing the vehicle to climb over obstacles.

Test vehicles have successfully traversed 1-meter steps and crossed a 1.8-meter gap, he said.

The company will deliver the prototype vehicles to the Army for testing, said Nimblett. Initial low rate production is expected in late 2013.

On the Marine Corps side, a joint effort between the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the Defense Department’s Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise seeks to experiment with technologies that will automate the service’s logistics convoys.

A two-year contract was awarded to Oshkosh Corp. to help explore the concept of manned and unmanned teaming of the Marine Corps’ workhorse truck, the medium tactical vehicle replacement truck, or MTVR. “This initiative is to get marines out of some of the vehicles and off the roads away from [improvised explosive devices],” said Brent Azzarelli, chief robotics engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Dahlgren, which is providing engineering and program management support to the warfighting lab.

Oshkosh is adapting its autonomous truck technology, called TerraMax, for the task. It will participate in a number of experiments and demonstrations, called 40

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limited technical assessments, to evaluate the progress. A culminating demonstration in 2012 at Camp LeJeune, N.C., is in the works.

The lab plans to experiment with leaderfollower capability and flesh out the right mix of manned and unmanned vehicles for convoy operations. Among the tactics under development, engineers will help determine how to enable a “self-healing” convoy in cases where an autonomous leading truck is attacked and made immobile, said Azzarelli.

Initially developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s 2005 Grand Challenge — a robotics race through the California desert — the TerraMax autonomous technology was a finalist in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

“We’ve been building on those and improving, and now adapting it to more relevant applications,” said John Beck, Oshkosh’s chief engineer for unmanned systems. Engineers have integrated the technology onto a number of Defense Department trucks, including the load handling system variant of the Army’s family of medium tactical vehicles.

In the DARPA challenges, the TerraMax team was not allowed to interact with the vehicle as it proceeded through the closed track and navigated its way past obstacles.

But for the warfighting lab effort, engineers will have to establish ways for marines to communicate with the vehicle and to apply it to tactical operations.

“They want the vehicle to operate as human-like as possible,” said Beck. “It needs to understand the terrain it’s operating in.

It needs to understand how to deal with that terrain in an intelligent fashion.”

To give the vehicle more advanced behaviors, Oshkosh has been working with the national robotics engineering center at

Carnegie Mellon University and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging LLC to improve its autonomy and sensing capability. For example, if the truck has to navigate a side slope, the LIDAR may perceive the road as a wall or barricade. Using more scans from the LIDAR helps the vehicle understand that the “barrier” is really a steep grade and it can then properly traverse the road, Beck explained.

The electro-optical sensors that helped the vehicle to detect road boundaries, such as painted lines and curbs, are being enhanced by the LIDAR to allow for improved positioning on roads running across rough desert terrain.

Beck said that they also have added traditional radar into the mix. “We’re using it now to help us deal with dust,” he explained.

Part of the challenge will be establishing a communication architecture between the manned and unmanned vehicles.

“There’s information that the manned vehicles may need to get if the lead vehicle is autonomous,” said Azzarelli. Allowing marines in the convoy to have access to that truck’s sensors will be critical to the concept’s success, officials said.

Oshkosh is working with a number of radio companies to meet the lab’s requirements of specific line of sight and non-line of sight distances.

Engineers also are engaged in testing where in the convoy the autonomous vehicles ought to be located: up in the front leading, bringing up the rear, or scattered throughout the line of vehicles. Another goal is to investigate the number of robotic trucks that a single operator can monitor at one time.

The focus in the first year will be on experimenting with a single autonomous vehicle and one operator control unit, said Beck. During the second year, company officials anticipate integrating the autonomy kit into a second or third MTVR and placing them into a manned convoy operation.

“We’re at the beginning of our twoyear relationship, and we’re going to push them,” said Azzarelli. “It’s a short time frame to get technical and operational questions answered.”

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Mix of Live and Virtual Training Will Result in Savings, Army Says

By STEW MAGNUSON

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army photos

For the most part, Army training has taken place in three separate realms: out in the field where soldiers stage mock fights in the dirt and the dust; in front of screens where the real world is simulated with computer-generated graphics; or on desktop computers where officers can populate battlefields with friends and foes and play virtual war games.

By July 2012 at Fort Bliss, Texas, the service will blend all three in the first exercise that uses its live-virtual-constructive integrated architecture.

Army officials are calling this mix of the three different training methods the wave of the future, and they tout its potential for saving precious funds. All four services and the National Guard have been pursuing the concept, but the Army is the first to have a program of record.

In one scenario, a battalion of about 1,000 infantry will be maneuvering through a mock village. Nearby, Apache pilots or Bradley fighting vehicle crews will be in simulators providing support. At a headquarters, officers will see these elements on the “command post of the future,” a network which is widely used in real battlefields today. Ahead of the battalion are the red teams, or enemy forces. Some of them might be real soldiers, but most are computer-generated icons. The officers “can’t tell the difference between who’s in the live environment and who’s in the virtual and constructive,” said Col. Mike Flanagan, project manager of training devices at the Army’s program executive office for simulation,

training and instrumentation.

Soldiers in the field may be told there are enemy forces 20 miles ahead. As they approach, live soldiers portraying the red team could be inserted. Allies fighting nearby could be computer generated as well.

“The live guys can see their buddies in front of them but when they look on their screen for situational awareness they may see an adjacent unit that’s a constructive unit,” Flanagan said.

The idea behind the program is to save time, money and space, all things that the Army has little to spare lately.

Col. Karen Saunders, project director for constructive simulation at PEO STRI, said reductions could come in the amount of time it takes to plan and set up an exercise, and the number of personnel needed to run the operation. All this will result in less money being spent as well, she said. How much depends on the exercise.

The Army is hoping for about a 20 percent reduction in the cost of training, she said.

While the time to conduct training has been in short supply with the higher tempo of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, that will not always be the case, Flanagan added.

Army leadership in the coming years is aiming for 24 months of dwell time to be followed by either 12-month deployments overseas or being on standby ready to deploy.

“We’re now going to have a larger part of the Army back in home station,” Flanagan said. Leaders will have to keep troops sharp. “We don’t want people sitting around, wasting their time twiddling their thumbs. The challenge on our part is to enable realistic, challenging training that we can afford.”

Meanwhile, “We can’t pay for everybody all the time to be shoot-

System Keeps Tabs on Troops as They Train in Dangerous Terrain ■ In the wake of several fatalities

army photos

ing live ammunition on a range,” he added.

The elements that will be used in the hybrid training system already exist, Flanagan noted. Simulators for aircraft, trucks and fighting vehicles are widely used. The homestation instrumentation training system (HITS) tracks real-world soldiers as they maneuver and when they fire their guns. The battle command training capability populates command-and-control systems being monitored by officers with the computer-constructed forces they see on their screens.

The fourth element will be the command-and-control systems that are currently used by the Army, Flanagan said. For the program to succeed, these four technologies will have to be tied together by 2012.

“These things exist today but the real secret and the technical challenge is establishing an architecture and an interface for all these things to communicate,” Flanagan said. Saunders said PEO STRI has set up a laboratory at its Orlando, Fla., headquarters to begin integrating the systems.

The other three services also have similar live-virtual-constructive training concepts in various stages of development, Saunders said. Representatives of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force all briefed office of the secretary of defense staff on the status of their projects recently.

The Air Force has run experiments that mixed live and virtual F-15E pilots, who destroyed both live and simulated ground targets, according to a Boeing press release.

At last year’s Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in Orlando, Rockwell Collins tied an F/A-18 simulator at the Naval Air Warfare Center exhibit to an Aero L-29 jet trainer flying in Iowa and a joint terminal attack controller at the Rockwell Collins booth. The Navy continues to experiment with the concept, Rockwell Collins said in a statement.

The National Guard Bureau and the California National Guard have a joint training experimentation program they are envisioning for homeland defense scenarios.

“Every single service is working on a version of what they say is live-virtual-constructive,” Saunders said.

Later increments of the program will seek to integrate the concept at the joint level, so the four services’ programs may all come together in the 2013 to 2014 time frame, she added. ND Email comments to smagnuson@ndia.org

suffered during land navigation training, the Army has created a new system to track troops as they find their way through rough and dangerous terrain.

The soldier tracking system will let Army leaders keep tabs on trainees who are walking solo through forests and deserts with only their compasses and maps to aid them.

Despite the pervasiveness of GPS devices in the military, the service still wants its recruits to be able to navigate their way out of difficult situations without relying on technology, said Son Nguyen, a systems engineer at Army’s program executive office for simulation, training and instrumentation.

Soldiers are sent into wilderness areas alone, which has sometimes led to accidents.

PEO STRI began developing the system after several tragic incidents. Second Lt. Zachariah R. Miller, 22, died during a land navigation course at Ranger Training School in 2002 in Fort Benning, Ga. Miller failed to complete the course in time and a search party was sent out to find him. It took more than seven hours to locate his body, according to press reports at the time.

U.S. Army Sgt. Lawrence G. Sprader, 25, died during a desert navigation training course at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2007. Pfc. Norman Murburg III was found dead under similar circumstances while performing Special Forces assessment and selection training at the Hoffman Training Area, Hoffman, N.C., in 2008. His body was found after a 21-hour search.

Murburg, 19, had an emergency beacon-tracking device, but it had to be activated to send out a signal, said the Fayetteville Observer. His exercise took place at night.

The new system sends out a constant signal to leaders who track all participants on a laptop computer.

“Every second, we know exactly where they’re at,” Nguyen said. If a soldier slips and breaks his leg, for

example, there will be a warning sent out that he or she is not moving. There will also be a button he or she can press when in trouble to transmit a may-day signal.

Col. Mike Flanagan, PEO STRI project manager of training devices, said, “You could just issue something like cell phones, but the overarching requirement here as well was they can’t be able to communicate with each other. This is an individual event. You’re on your own,” Flanagan said.

Some of the more challenging land navigation courses can last up to 10 hours and include several hours of the exercise during the night, Flanagan noted.

The software has the added benefit of tracking soldiers who may wander out of bounds of a training area.

For example, they are not supposed to use roads to find their way to the end of the course. The data is also stored so officers can review where and how the trainees navigated a course. They can determine where a soldier took the wrong path and tell them how to do it correctly the next time.

Soldiers plot their positions during a course on land navigation as part of their pre-deployment training at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany. ARMY

“The power of training is the after action review,” Flanagan added.

Another benefit of the system is a much quicker end to an exercise.

It used to take four to six hours to gather up all the soldiers who were scattered around the wilderness.

Now, since leaders know where everyone is, they can round up the stragglers and the lost soldiers in about 45 minutes, he said.

— STEW MAGNUSON

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Greater Appetite for Unpiloted Aircraft in Combat Zones Fuels Demand for Simulators

By Eric Beidel The growing demand for unmanned spy aircraft in combat zones has increased the burden on training organizations that are being asked to produce more operators, and faster.

But schoolhouses in the United States are finding it increasingly difficult to train unmanned air vehicles pilots because of their restricted access to the national airspace.

As a result, UAV operators are logging more flight hours in “synthetic” skies where mistakes can be corrected and the airspace is endless. In high-fidelity video games, more military personnel are now learning how to fly UAVs and operate the aircraft sensors.

The influence of video games has reached Fort Huachuca, Ariz., and other locations where students learn to operate the military’s drones. By the end of 2012, the armed forces will operate more

than 250 classrooms for PC-based military training.

The simulation industry is taking note.

“W, A, S, D,” said Brad Johnson, who develops UAV training solutions for General Dynamics Information Technology. “Look at who we’re targeting and the generation coming up.” Recruits know from playing games that those letters represent the computer keys needed to move forward, left, backwards and right, Johnson said.

Though based in Orlando, Johnson works closely with his company’s simulation and training operation at Fort Huachuca, home to the world’s largest UAV training center. More than 350 General Dynamics employees teach at “Black Tower,” where they train students on the Hunter, Shadow, Gray Eagle and Warrior Alpha systems. The company is developing technology that would allow their students to practice flying missions without leaving the barracks or

stepping foot in a classroom.

With the Pentagon looking to shave costs at nearly every turn, the simulation industry is searching for a one-box-fits-all solution to save money, time and space.

Some companies believe that the video game industry has pointed the way toward “agnostic” systems, said Howard Phelps, a vice president for UAV training and simulation efforts at General Dynamics.

“Training dollars are very scarce for the government and they are trying to get the biggest bang for the buck,” Phelps said.

“Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines – while they need to know how to physically operate their equipment in a real environment, if you can achieve the same training objectives by using a simulation, it saves money.”

Crashing a live drone could mean a milliondollar loss. An accident on a simulator only costs a bit of time, Phelps explained.

More and more UAV simulators will

Defense contractors are leveraging gaming technology to achieve more realism in UAV simulations. CAE

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require nothing more than a joystick and personal computer. These portable systems will allow operators-in-training to practice on their own and switch between platforms and environments. Pilot a Predator over Iraq today, then fly a Raven above Afghanistan tomorrow.

“You can call them desktop simulations, laptop simulations, whatever terminology you want to use,” Phelps said. “But it is basically a PC-driven type of simulation.”

The Black Tower facility consists of more than 350,000 square feet of runways and hangars. Nearly 1,500 students train there each year, logging almost 5,000 flight hours.

They spend just as much, if not more, time flying simulated drones. Depending on the system, students can spend a month or two on a simulator before launching a real bird.

In some cases, soldiers complete 100 hours of simulation before just 10 hours of actual flight during training.

A recent report by Army Col. Mark McManigal discussed what he called a demographic shift of seismic proportions – that is, the ever-increasing number of Generation Y or “millennial” soldiers entering the service. These men and women do not always learn best in a classroom and gravitate more toward experimental and collaborative exercises in a digital space, McManigal wrote. The Army in turn created Virtual Battlespace 2, a game engine also used by the Marine Corps that allows units to conduct real-world mission planning and rehearsals by selecting from a menu specific terrains in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“Initial reports suggest that the VBS2 game and other gaming technology adapted for military purposes are an efficient and effective way to train and educate agile leaders and develop small teams for operations,” McManigal’s report concluded.

The last few years have seen the gaming influence stretch to UAV training, said Frank Delisle, vice president of engineering and technology for L-3 Link, the creators of a Predator and Reaper simulator used by the Air Force and Air National Guard. The system can mimic different times of day, adverse weather and thermal effects that can impact operations. Gaming can inject a huge dose of realism into a simulation with some caveats, Delisle said. The video game industry can provide the high-quality imagery to create a realistic urban environment over which to fly a drone, as well as a physics-based processing capability that makes people and vehicles move and react in ways they would in real life.

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L-3 Link uses graphics company NVIDIA’s PhysX technology, which allows students to experience blazing explosions, reactive debris, realistic water, lifelike characters and other entities. Delisle cautioned that this technology cannot go straight from gaming to a military training setting.

“Most of their applications are made to excite the gamer, so characters run faster and jump higher” than humanly possible, he explained. “So there is a translation required to make sure you accurately replicate the world of the UAV and sensors, people, cars and things. Our goal is when [students] interact with our simulation environment, it’s hard for them to tell between our environment and the real environment.”

Just in the past five years, that gap between virtual and reality has closed remarkably. A lot of the “scripted Mickey Mouse capability” has been left in the dust, Delisle said. Companies are now developing simulations that can be plugged directly into a ground control station that is used to manipulate a real UAV. This allows for a quick switch between training and operation. Months used to pass between the two

situations, Delisle said. Now they can be done about the same time.

The military services and contractors are inching closer to “true mission rehearsal,” using gaming technology to practice a combat task right before it’s undertaken on the battlefield. Already, the Army has used virtual exercises to prepare for live training. A unit at the Yakima Training Center, Wash., recently prepared for a live fire exercise by playing a video game that was set up to mirror the actual environment and targets on the range.

A demand throughout the Pentagon to do more with less also has industry investigating ways to simulate the flying of multiple UAVs by one operator, said Adolfo Klassen, chief technology officer for CAE Inc., a company that has developed a traditional simulator but is aware of the growing focus on shrinking the size.

A laptop can run all of the vehicle dynamics, including the sensors, Klassen said. With a joystick, an operator can take the same environment he sees with a high-end device into the field. “Gaming STORY CONTINUES ON PAGE 46

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technology is certainly influencing the man-machine interface and how you control the operations,” he said.

Defense contractors also are experimenting with ways to operate war machines with everyday tools. Raytheon has developed a control system for unmanned aircraft that is based on the same technology behind popular games such as Halo, and the Army has used Xbox controls with ground robots.

A former Navy pilot has even come up with a way to control a drone with an iPhone.

“Kids are used to the iPhone,” Phelps said. “That’s what they expect to see in a simulation. And if it’s not, there’s a sensing of, ‘This is not very cool.’ You probably have more power on your cell phone than all of the computers that put the first guy on the moon. Technology has increased that much. So you take and do training for a UAS operator on a laptop and they get the same training.”

With a cost-effective mobile training solution, students and their instructors can closely review strengths and weaknesses. A trainee could take a simulation on a CD

home over the weekend and practice on his computer. When he returns to class, the teacher can see exactly how his student’s flights went.

“They can pull data out and say, ‘You flew 20 missions over the weekend practicing. You did really great at taking off, but every time you tried to land you crashed,’” Phelps said. “So when they come back in and actually go on the big simulator, they can focus on that piece.”

Not everyone believes that military simulations should look or feel anything remotely like video games. Brooking Institution Senior Fellow Peter Singer wrote in a recent issue of Foreign Policy that certain simulations mask the reality of the battlefield. Singer recalled a conversation he had with a former F-15 pilot, who said that virtual training gives drone operators no sense of what is really going on.

The distinction between a fun flying game and training for military action is not lost on contractors, experts said. “We’re tapping into the underlying industry, not directly into the gaming community.

They’re trying to thrill and delight gamers and that’s beyond reality,” Delisle said.

However, “without the gaming community driving the commodity market and all the investments driving all the hardware and software out there, we would not be where we are today.”

And where they are today is a delicate space between what young service members consider fun and what is necessary to be an effective UAV operator in theater.

The hardware is becoming smaller, the systems less expensive and the controls more familiar, but the same lessons are being learned, said officials at General Dynamics.

Simulations today are not quite at the level of an action-packed summertime film, but the military to a certain extent follows Hollywood, Johnson said.

“I think that’s where the future is going,” Phelps added. “I don’t know how long it will take everyone to get there, but look how far PCs have come in the last few years.”

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Marines Field New ‘Smart’ Video System for Urban Combat Exercises

BY EDWARD LUNDQUIST ■ The Marine Corps is now deploying “intelligent” video systems that will be used at urban combat training facilities. The new technology, called tactical video capture system, fuses video images from multiple cameras into a single three-dimensional view.

The TVCS allows trainees to look around corners or behind buildings, fly from rooftop to street level, and even review pre-recorded video from different perspectives. Operating it is like playing a video game, except the scene is of real events in real time. The operator grabs the joystick and flies down hallways and around buildings, immersing himself in the scene.

The system is derived from technology that the Office of Naval Research developed under a “Video Flashlight” program. It stitches multiple video and sensor data feeds into a single-screen and record all aspects of a training evolution action and replay scenarios as a virtual display to evaluate the effectiveness of training and tactics. Users say that TVCS can process streams of disparate video and audio into an easy-tounderstand, actionable format to be immediately available for review. Users can evaluate threats and surveillance information directly or from a mobile device, and can move around to view what is going on throughout a training facility.

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The Marine Corps program manager for training systems (PMTRASYS) is rolling out TVCS at training areas.

“ONR’s close cooperation with PMTRASYS, Marine Corps Training and Education Command, and industry developers has resulted in advanced technologies that empowers and enhances the training of Marines and Sailors,” said Deputy Chief of Naval Research for Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Science & Technology (EMWCT) George Solhan.

Successfully commercialized by L-3 GS&ES, the originating technologies were developed by Sarnoff Corporation under ONR sponsorship in the early 2000s. Solhan started the program as “Video Flashlight” in 2002. “It’s gratifying to see that this small research program we started is making such a huge impact on future USMC live training,” Solhan said.

The first TVCS became operational in May 2010 at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

In the area of video-based training technology, ONR also funded the development of the automated performance evaluation and lessons learned (APELL) program. Sarnoff Corp. used video technology to automatically flag infantry exercises to assist instructors. Instructors can specify what they want their trainees to do, and

the system will automatically alert when those predefined conditions are met or violated. If the instructor wants each squad member to remain a certain distance apart from each other, APELL will let him know if they successfully carried out his orders.

The APELL system is a mixed reality, closedloop training system, where the system controls the actions of wall-projected computer-generated role players based on the real-time actions and performance evaluations of the Marines in the exercises. PMTRASYS is currently fielding APELL systems at two urban combat training locations.

“Our top priority is to focus on those areas that deliver the biggest payoff for our future and ensure we make every single dollar count for maximum benefit for the war fighters.” said Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, Chief of Naval Research.

Carr says ‘transition’ is one of ONR’s main metrics. “It’s not enough just to do interesting science. What matters is transitioning the products of that science to the war fighter.”

ND Edward lundquist is a retired Navy captain and a senior science writer with MCR LLC in Arlington, Va. The company provides program management and technical services to the Office of Naval Research.

Spy Game to Help Rehabilitate Veterans Suffering From Brain Injuries

By Grace V. Jean The signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — traumatic brain injury — continues to plague thousands of troops long after they have returned from the battlefield. Many suffer from cognitive impairments including memory loss, reduced attention and concentration and slow central auditory processing speed.

Repairing the damage is possible, neuro-psychologists say. As in physical therapy, cognitive rehabilitation is best accomplished through daily sessions over a long-term period of weeks and months. During that time, clinicians assign exercises to help treat brain injury patients. Many are computer-based drills that include memory games involving playing cards and attention tasks that, for example, require players to hit the space bar whenever the letter “A” appears in a series.

But those cognitive skill exercises do not cut it for combat veterans who grew up playing Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation video games.

“It’s really hard to get them to buy into a video game that doesn’t have a cool story line and graphics involved,” said Kirk Little, a clinical psychologist who owns a practice in northern Kentucky.

Available exercises on the Internet also lack the entertainment factor of console games and become so boring and tedious to use over time that troops eventually lose interest altogether. “It’s too much of a chore, like folding your socks,” Little said. Without the repeated practice, cognitive functions do not improve, neuroscientists say.

To appeal to the gaming generation, researchers are developing a trainer designed to rehabilitate brain injury patients at Walter Reed 48

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Army Medical Center through adaptive scenarios that engage them in audio and visual exercises.

“Our goal was not only to develop a tool that could be used at home, but also to help folks stick with rehabilitation,” said Alexandra Geyer, senior cognitive scientist at Aptima Inc., the Woburn, Mass.-based firm that is producing the game.

The training tool, called adaptive gaming for auditory training and evaluation, or AGATE, takes participants through a series of puzzles and exercises with a spy-adventure twist to them.

“They feel like they’re playing a video game,” said Jason Sidman, a cognitive scientist who leads the instructional and training technologies team at the company.

In the initial phase of AGATE, a player might approach a briefcase with a keypad lock on it. A code is verbally given to him through an earpiece and he has to remember the sequence and punch it in to open the briefcase. “What’s under the hood is a digit task that assesses memory — how many digits they can actually remember and enter into the keypad,” said Sidman.

To train patients on the speed of processing, players will control a robot and follow verbal directions as they maneuver through a maze of underground pipes. “You have to make those decisions in time in order to correctly navigate the pipes,” said Sidman.

Beneath the entertainment exterior, the game runs algorithms that adapt and tailor the exercises to the specific cognitive needs of each individual. When patients sit down to play for the first time, they complete a series of tasks that assess their cognitive abilities. Based upon the results, the game sets up challenges and

TRAINING & SIMULATION

Troops will solve audio and visual puzzles like this memory sequence drill in a game designed to help rehabilitate cognitive deficits caused by traumatic brain injuries. APTIMA

levels appropriate for the player, and then continuously assesses his cognitive skills.

“We wanted to make sure that the skills that are being rehabilitated are the skills that actually need to be rehabilitated,” said Geyer.

The game records the player’s performance and progress, and directs him to subsequent levels of difficulty to allow for additional practice on the skills he needs to hone, Sidman added.

“We know if people will work on these tasks, it can make a meaningful difference in their rehabilitation,” said Little. He cited a study conducted on London taxi drivers that showed the brain is capable of growing through repeated practice over a long period. English cab drivers before becoming licensed must proceed through a twoyear internship learning the complicated city streets. Brain scans taken before and after the program revealed that the part of the brain responsible for visual and spatial memory had doubled in size.

“With repeated practice, we can get people to regrow parts of their brains that are damaged. We just have to get them to practice and stick with it,” said Little. In his own clinic treating brain injury patients, he can typically persuade them to keep at the cognitive skills exercises for about two to three weeks. But then they peter out quickly because the games aren’t very motivating.

His hope for AGATE is that patients will play the game a few hours a week at the beginning and become hooked on it, so that they stay at it for an extended period. Their skills will continue to improve depending on how often and for how long they keep

practicing. It is no different than how concert pianists or professional football players hone and maintain their abilities, clinicians pointed out.

Aptima officials said it would take a minimum of 20 to 40 cumulative hours of playing the game before patients will start seeing meaningful impact and benefits to their cognitive functioning and everyday life.

“It doesn’t eliminate the need for a clinician or doctors or rehabilitation professionals. It’s an added tool that the patient can utilize,” said Little, who is one of two consultants on AGATE. Aptima scientists are integrating a feature that will allow patients to print out a summary of their playing time and performance. The report can be taken to their next appointment so that the clinician can chart progress and make recommendations for further rehabilitation.

The game is scheduled for delivery next year to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Company officials are considering using Xbox as the game platform, with AGATE distributed on a disc.

Developers also would like to make it compatible for smart phones to allow patients to play on the go.

Aptima officials intend to create an online community where players can communicate, share hints and insights and discuss their gaming and rehabilitation experiences.

“We feel strongly it’s going to help them, so we’re putting a lot of time and effort into making sure that the experience is going to be enjoyable,” said Sidman.

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Cybersecurity Market a Potential Boon for Simulation Companies

BY GRACE V. JEAN Governments and armed forces worldwide last year spent more than $8 billion in the cyberwarfare market to beef up networks and increase security. Analysts believe that an expected growth in information security spending also could lead to new opportunities for businesses that can help train cyberwarriors.

Visiongain, a market research firm based in London, is forecasting significant sales growth in the global cyberwarfare market in the coming years. “We believe the cybersecurity boom offers a lucrative range of business opportunities for defense companies and software developers,” a company spokesman said in promotional materials for a report titled, “Cyberwarfare Market 2010-2020.”

That range not only spans information technology hardware and security software but also includes training and education for the cyberwarrior and layman alike.

“There are opportunities for those that have online training or in-class training to grow a market,” said Robert Rodriguez, chairman and founder of the San Francisco-based Security Innovation Network, an organization that aims to advance IT security.

As governments nurture their cybersecurity work forces, some leading companies and organizations also are trying to educate their own workers so that they are savvier about conducting day-to-day business in the Internet-connected world. They are quickly learning that tried-and-true teaching methods are becoming obsolete in the digital realm.

“Traditional classroom training may not any longer be the most effective,” said Diane Miller, operations director of Northrop Grumman Corp.’s cybersecurity group.

Training is evolving from lecture delivery to a computer-based process that is engaging, visually appealing and contains embedded tools and quizzes that progressively move students from the basics to more advanced levels.

“The curse of much computer-based training is that some scenarios are really profoundly uninteresting and you walk D EC E M B E R 2 0 1 0 • N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E

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away bored, no smarter, possibly a little bit dumber, than when you sat down,” said Jared Freeman, chief research officer at Aptima Inc., a Woburn, Mass.-based company that specializes in adaptive training tools. “The trick is to present scenarios that challenge folks at just the right level and then to push them to the kind of expertise

you want them to attain.”

The company is developing a 3-D game with an “accelerated learning architecture” to quickly train frontline managers in identifying potential insider cyberthreats.

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issues we have,” said Rodriguez.

Though the government and the Defense Department remain focused on thwarting cyberattacks from outside entities, one of the growing areas of concern is an enemy that is already inside the nation’s networks conducting espionage or theft or sabotaging systems.

Pentagon officials are just beginning to grapple with how the department will continue operating when faced with that problem. Educating managers to spot potential troublemakers in the work force is one way to help security officers stop an attack. Currently they do not receive such training.

Aptima’s game, RESISTEM (Resisting Espionage & Sabotage with an Intelligent System for Training Expert Managers), aims to change that.

“We will take novices in this area and help them become journeymen,” said Freeman. “They will acquire a new way of

A screenshot from a cybersecurity game designed to teach upper level managers how to spot insider threats. APTIMA

understanding the behaviors of their staff that may help them to identify threats more accurately, earlier.”

The game simulates a corporate office

environment. Players control avatars and learn how to spot clues indicating their fictional staff may have an insider threat lurking about. Just as they would in real life, players receive emails, take phone calls STORY CONTINUES ON PAGE 54

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and access personnel reports and other documents and materials in search of indicators of disgruntled employees who are more likely than others to pose a problem.

“We’re trying to exploit some theory about bad behavior in the workplace — theory and evidence that comes from psychology, both cognitive and organizational,” said Freeman. Psychosocial cues, such as anger management issues or isola-

tion, and environmental factors, such as recent company layoffs, can alert managers to a potential problem.

Freeman emphasized, “We are not trying to make security people out of everyday managers. We’re simply trying to help them identify the existence of threats within their walls,” so that the appropriate security officers can conduct an investigation.

The game operates in any web browser

that supports JavaScript. Players proceed through scenarios in a free-play environment. The game assesses the state and skills of the student and selects the scenario that is most likely to advance him toward expertise.

“The accelerated learning architecture ensures that each student is constantly,

Air Force Graduates First Batch of Cyberwarriors ■ WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — Thousands of Air Force communications personnel are now transitioning into the newly designated cyber career field. For the 3,000 officers that have switched over, the Air Force Institute of Technology is updating two graduate-level course curriculums to advance the Defense Department’s cyberwarrior corps.

“We’re about producing that work force as well as technology solutions,” said Richard Raines, director of the Center for Cyberspace Research at AFIT’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management.

The center is in charge of educating mid-career Air Force cyberwarriors and also conducts research in technologies and techniques that will improve the nation’s network security.

AFIT in late October graduated its first class of students from its new Cyber 200- and Cyber 300-level courses.

“This is a real milestone for us,” said Brig. Gen. Walter “Waldo” Givhan, commandant of the Air Force Institute of Technology.

The Air Force previously did not have advanced cyber courses for officers.

More than 600 students will graduate from the courses annually, said Maj. Melinda Moreau, who is part of the professional continuing education instructor cadre. “The ultimate goal is to shape abstract thinking in our future cyberspace professionals,” she said.

The curriculum involves a mix-

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ture of lectures, discussions, guest speakers and hands-on laboratories. With its tactical and operational focus, the Cyber-200 course is geared toward captains with at least two years of cyberspace experience. The Cyber-300 course, intended for majors and lieutenant colonels who have six years of experience in the cyberworld, focuses on the strategic level of operations.

“The course is a unique blend of policy, doctrine, technology and legislation,” said Col. Harold Arata, deputy director of AFIT’s Center for Cyberspace Research.

When students arrive for the courses, they are issued laptops preloaded with the tools they will use in the classroom. In addition, they are given iPads loaded up with textbooks, guides, information sheets and back-up instructor videos.

“Part of my job is to debunk the notion that this is complex and that you need a 40-pound brain to do anything,” said Capt. Jack Skoda, an instructor for Cyber-200 who hails from the Vermont Air National Guard’s 229th Information Operations Wing.

Students participate in lectures and classroom discussions in the mornings and then move onto the lab portion of the courses in the afternoon.

“In about 90 minutes, we have you writing code. We have you exploiting websites. We show you the different capabilities that are out there and that it doesn’t take a 40-pound brain to bring these capabilities to the Air Force,” said

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Skoda.

Maj. Paul Williams, who graduated from the Cyber-300 course, said that it’s important for airmen to have the exposure. “The folks that are graduating from here not only are going to have a big picture understanding of policy, doctrine, technology and law, but also what we’re faced with from a war fighting perspective, and how we can perform all of our jobs in the future,” he said. As director of operations for the 561st Network Operations Squadron at Peterson Air Force Base, Williams brought to the course his experience of overseeing 600 people in the service’s integrated network operations security center-west.

“We’re able to capitalize on that collective cyberintellect that comes from each of our individual experiences,” said Lt. Col. Diana Bishop, who contributed her tactical communications background and her experience in network operations and radio communications to the Cyber-300 class. Now at Air Force Space Command’s Office of the Reserve Advisor to the Commander, Bishop lauded the curriculum for its breadth and depth.

“All of those topics enable us to leave this institution with the ability to contribute to cyberoperations from a more broad perspective,” she said.

For their culminating graduation event, the Cyber-200 students had eight hours to plan, execute and then brief a Defense Department cybermission. It was set up as a “capture-the-flag” penetration test, said Skoda. Students were given

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a range of IP addresses to target, and they had to infiltrate the machines to attain files. They captured “flags” or bits of information that helped them to piece together an intelligence briefing to deliver to the Cyber-300 students the next morning.

The Cyber-300 students in turn gathered to talk about the information, which involved details of a plan to attack a coalition partner nation. They had to determine whether enough data was collected through the network exploitation exercise to merit taking kinetic action.

Upon completion of the curriculum, graduates of the Cyber-200 course receive their senior cyber professional rating while those completing the Cyber-300 course receive the master cyber professional rating. “Cyber in the past has suffered from being everything and nothing at the same time,” said Arata. “The Air Force has done a good job of putting it into a construct that’s organized, enabling it to sustain itself in the nation for the long haul.”

Because the cyberarena is constantly evolving, the shelf life for the training program is only several months, officials said.

“We are retooling this class after every single class,” said Arata. “That’s how you stay relevant.”

The Cyber-200 course will be offered 12 times annually.

Cyber-300 will be taught seven times a year.

“I think we have a wonderful product that is going to help shape our nation for years to come,” Raines said.

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appropriately challenged. This deliberate study and the amount of it are what makes experts,” said Freeman. The mathematical technique, called “partiallyobservable Markov decision process,” that is embedded in the game can be applied across many learning domains.

“This approach reliably accelerates learning even in complex military team tasks,” said Freeman.

By the end of next year, Aptima expects to deliver a prototype to the Defense Department.

Company officials hope that it eventually becomes a standard part of the department’s managerial training curriculum or is made available to managers for voluntary training. “We think there’s a commercial market for this as well and will be looking at that as the project proceeds,” said Freeman.

Northrop Grumman has been working with a small company that developed a 3-D training tool for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Together, the

companies’ engineers created a scenario that turned into a 10-minute cyberdefense game that debuted on 12 laptops at an education workshop for school children in the Washington area. In the game, players took on the role of company executives in charge of new employees. They had to equip the workers with laptops, connect them to the network and allow access to certain files and systems via passwords.

They also had to set up physical zone security within the organization’s walls and fight off problems such as malware coming into the network.

As the players made decisions, the training tool responded and reacted to those actions and customized the next step. For example, if a student forgot to purchase anti-virus software for the laptop and the new employee subsequently opened an email with an embedded virus, then the company would lose money.

Miller said the program has been so successful that the company is acquiring a new cyberdefense game.

Officials plan to disseminate it via Facebook to reach middle school-aged children and make them aware of cybersecurity. The hope is that the children will decide to pursue careers in the field, and perhaps one day come to work for the company. “You’ve got to find them early and start building that talent pipeline,” she said.

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STEMNEWS science

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JETS Promotes Engineering, Math To U.S. High School Students

BY CYNTHIA D. MILLER Though science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education is receiving a lot of press today, there have been organizations dedicated to the advancement of the fields for many decades.

One such organization, the Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS), was created in 1950 as the brainchild of Dean Lorin Miller and Harold Skamser. While initially created to give high school students who already excelled in math and science an outlet to participate in reallife engineering experiences while still in school, the organization’s philosophy has changed over the years and it now embraces all levels of students in secondary schools.

A non-profit with more than 40,000 students participating in its activities annually, JETS emphasizes that engineering is not simply math and analytics, but embraces creative problem solving — especially in a team setting. To help students discover their potential for engineering, the organization offers a unique approach to activities — “explore, assess and experience.” The “explore” portion offers print and online resources that promote the positive aspect of the engineering profession and how engineers make a difference in the world. One component of explore is the JETS free e-newsletter, which includes “Extreme Engineer” interviews with professionals in more than 20 disciplines with descriptions of the various projects that they participate in daily.

Students are also invited to examine how their own skills and interests can align with engineering by completing the PathAssess tool. PathAssess is an online interest inventory and skills survey in which students answer a series of questions and are then given a summary of engineering majors and occupations they may want to consider.

Lastly, students can gain hands-on engineering experience by participating in the JETS TEAMS Competition. TEAMS is an annual high school program challenging 58

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students to work collaboratively and to apply their math and science knowledge toward the solving of real challenges. Each year, the topics for these competitions focus on a theme and embrace one of 14 grand challenges issued by the National Academy of Engineering. The 2011 competition will focus on energy and the need for diversification, efficiency, security and ecological sustainability.

TEAMS competitions are conducted on the campuses of high schools, universities, corporations and professional societies. Over a four-week period each year, between 10,000 and 12,000 students in teams of four to eight converge at regional sites. During their specified day, each team participates in two competition segments. In the first part, team members collectively answer 80 multiple-choice questions focused on critical thinking, analytics, math and science. Part two consists of eight open-ended tasks, expanding students’ ideas as they explain their engineering solutions. With 11 to 20 teams participating at each site, the day ends with an awards ceremony and the entering of that site’s results into the national JETS database. Teams are ranked within their respective states and across the nation.

The value of the JETS TEAMS experience to participants is affirming for both the organization’s staff members, and those professionals who volunteer as coaches, site hosts and subject matter experts. “JETS allowed me the opportunity to get an inside look at what engineers do every day,” said one TEAMS participant. “I had never understood how involved engineers are in our everyday lives, and through JETS I was given a whole new perspective.”

Last year’s competition was one of the most successful to date with the help of major corporate sponsors, Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill, Motorola Foundation, Rockwell Collins and Shell, as teams focused on providing solutions for clean water access.

Megan Balkovic, JETS senior director, said, “Securing additional corporate spon-

sors will expand JETS programs into new communities and impact more students.

We hope to diversify our current TEAMS program to include a hands-on activity that will more directly engage students in an engineering experience.”

The next national JETS TEAMS competition will be held Feb. 14 to March 15. Interested participants may register at www.jets.org.

Cynthia D. Miller is president of Miller.

Omni.Media, Inc., a woman-owned small business specializing in strategic communications, marketing and media production. She can be reached at milleromnimedia@comcast.

NDIANEWS Excellence in Enterprise Integration Award Winners Announced The Association for Enterprise Information, AFEI, will award the winners of its 8th annual Excellence in Enterprise Integration Awards on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at its DoD Agile Development Conference in Alexandria, Va. The top Industry Award is Symetrics Industries, LLC, Melbourne, Florida for their Truly Paperless Manufacturing Floor Project. The Paperless innovation has transformed operations with quality improvements, cost reductions, less scrap and rework, and on-time delivery.

The top government submission selected is the Air Force’s Persistent and Daily Distributed Mission Operations Training from the Distributed Training Operations Center (DTOC), Des Moines, Iowa. The DTOC has enabled the nation’s military to use Distributed Mission Operations (DMO) for pre-deployment training, upgrade training, student syllabus rides, and to even replace live-fly training missions.

Five Honorable Mention Government Awards will be presented for these programs: InTheater Embedded Instrumentation (Blackbox) Effort, Process Improvement implemented across the Air Force Test and Evaluation Enterprise, Project Liberty, Task Force 120, and to TIS NIPRnet Globe Serivces.

Now in its eighth year, the Excellence in Enterprise Integration Awards Program recognizes and rewards the contributions and achievements of project teams that exemplify excellence in achieving integrated enterprises and are models of the best applications of technology and leadership to improve enterprise performance.

For more information on the awards program and the Agile Conference, log onto: www.afei.org.

ETHICSCORNER

BY LAURA O’NEILL, LISA NAVARRO AND KARA BOMBACH

The Long Arm Of the U.K. Bribery Act For U.S. companies, particularly those active in foreign countries or engaged in high-profile markets such as the defense industry, maintaining ethical operations and avoiding corruption is essential.

Many U.S. companies have in place policies designed to maximize compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The expanded breadth of the anticipated U.K. Bribery Act 2010 should trigger a revisit, perhaps even an overhaul, of existing corporate anti-corruption policies and procedures, even by U.S. companies with minimal connections in the United Kingdom.

U.S.-based companies should heed this U.K. legislation because of the Bribery Act’s broad jurisdictional thresholds. In addition to all relevant acts of bribery occurring in the United Kingdom, it also covers acts of bribery, wherever committed, to the extent the offending party has a “close” U.K. connection — for example, a British citizen or corporate entity.

Even broader, however, is the reach of the “corporate offense” provision, which criminalizes “relevant commercial organizations” for failing to prevent acts of bribery by its employees, agents, subsidiaries and joint venture partners. The definition of a relevant commercial organization is widely drafted to catch any company that does business in the United Kingdom, as well as all U.K. incorporated entities.

Whilst this might not sound too onerous on its face, to be

subject to the Bribery Act, offenses need not be committed in the country, and need not be committed by the part of the U.S. business with connections to the United Kingdom.

As such, a non-British entity could find itself prosecuted under the Bribery Act for acts committed outside of the country by non-U.K. subsidiaries, simply because part of its business takes place in the nation. As a strict liability offense, it will be no defense to claim ignorance, or even negligence. The only defense is to demonstrate that adequate procedures had been put in place to try to prevent the bribery from happening.

What is considered adequate, however, will be a matter for the courts to determine.

If the Bribery Act offenses mirrored the FCPA, its impact would merely be to increase the number of potential international prosecutors. The Bribery Act, however, goes much further than the FCPA or any other national equivalent, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Convention against Corruption.

Existing rules criminalize bribery of foreign public officials. The Bribery Act also bars bribery of private individuals and businesses, and bribery involving domestic governmental officials. The FCPA criminalizes offering or paying bribes whereas the Bribery Act also criminalizes receipt of bribes.

These additional offenses require a reassessment of corporate attitudes, market strategies and vulnerabilities. For example, robust due diligence of international partners and payments to and from third parties — already integral to an effective FCPA-compliance program — is now key.

The FCPA exempts so-called “facilitation payments” and allows an affirmative defense for reasonable and bona fide business expenditures directly related to certain promotional activities. The Bribery Act provides neither of these exceptions.

In banning facilitation payments, the U.K. government’s approach is in keeping with recent OECD policy statements.

Given that the Bribery Act explicitly renders local custom and practice irrelevant to whether an offense has been committed, how a firm clears customs and renews visas or licenses may require review.

The decision to omit exceptions for cor-

porate promotion expenses is rooted in a belief that the scope of legitimate conduct should be a matter for the courts and prosecutorial discretion. With such a thin dividing line, however, between lavish corporate hospitality and corrupt practices, this uncertainty has not been welcomed by industry.

Corporate and individual penalties for Bribery Act violations can be severe. The FCPA maximum prison term is five years; Bribery Act convictions can be up to 10 years. For companies, monetary fines are unlimited.

Perhaps even more important: entities proven guilty of a Bribery Act offense may be permanently barred from bidding for public contracts anywhere in Europe under European public procurement rules.

One motivation behind the Bribery Act was criticism of the United Kingdom’s record of prosecuting bribery. To further counter this criticism, many anticipate vigorous enforcement under the Bribery Act from designated U.K. prosecutors, including the Serious Fraud Office, and joint enforcement with U.S. officials for actions violating both the Bribery Act and the FCPA. The Bribery Act comes into force April 2011, which gives companies until then to update their anticorruption compliance policies. On Sept. 14, the U.K. government published draft guidance for developing, implementing and maintaining effective and adequate anti-corruption policies and procedures. Consultation on that draft guidance closed on Nov. 8, with a final version to be published in early 2011.

The degree of change introduced by the Bribery Act means that there is no room for complacency. It raises the bar for global anticorruption standards, whilst making it clear that the risks should be addressed on a pre-emptive basis to avoid liability. All companies with a connection to the United Kingdom should heed that message.

Laura O’Neill is a shareholder (oneillla@ gtmlaw.com) and Lisa Navarro (navarrol@ gtmlaw.com) is a senior associate in Greenberg Traurig Maher LLP’s London office.

Kara Bombach (bombachk@gtlaw.com) is a shareholder in the export controls practice group in Greenberg Traurig LLP’s Washington, D.C. office. The views expressed are solely those of the authors.

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NDIACALENDAR U P C O M I N G E X H I B I T S , S H OW S A N D E V E N T S

DECEMBER 2 C4ISR Breakfast Pentagon City, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/192B

3 C4ISR Breakfast Pentagon City, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/192C

6-8 Tactical Wheeled Vehicles Conference Monterey, CA TWV Modernization: Balancing Sustainment and Transformation

15-16 Stability, Security, Transition & Reconstruction Operations Conference Washington, DC www.ndia.org/meetings/1450 See our ad on page 63.

JANUARY 24-28 Defense Systems Acquisition Management Course (DSAM) Clearwater, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/102A

25 Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office Advanced Planning Briefing for Industry Washington, DC • Presenting specific high priority needs of the combating terrorism community, a preview of the R&D requirements targeted for funding, and BAA release timeframes. www.ndia.org/meetings/1090

FEBRUARY 2-4 Munitions Executive Summit (MES) Tampa, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/1650 See our ad on page 63.

MARCH

• The only annual event specific to the military’s Tactical Wheeled Vehicle community. Register early – this event will sell out! www.ndia.org/meetings/1530

8-9

14-17 27th Annual National Test and Evaluation Conference Tampa, FL Test & Evaluation: Serving the Warfighter • Great opportunity to discuss ideas and concepts for Test & Evaluation policies, procedures and related studies as they pertain to our nation’s national defense and homeland security needs. www. ndia.org/meetings/1910

22nd Annual SO/LIC Symposium & Exhibition Washington, DC www.ndia.org/meetings/1880 See our ad on page 63.

16-17 Mastering Business Development Workshop Orlando, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/107B

23-24 2011 Biometrics Conference Arlington, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/1860 See our ad on page 63.

23-24 Precision Strike Annual Program Review Ft. Walton Beach, FL www.precisionstrike.org

14-17 Pacific Operational Science & Technology Conference & Exhibition Honolulu, HI Forging Regional Science and Technology Ties: Synergizing International Partnerships to Meet Shared Objectives • This conference will join PACOM warfighters and technology stakeholders from DoD and industry. www. ndia.org/meetings/1540

21-25 Defense Systems Acquisition Management Course (DSAM) Dallas, TX www.ndia.org/meetings/102B

22-24 2011 Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference & Exhibition Orlando, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/1380 See our ad on page 62.

For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org. Or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.

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NDIACALENDAR

trated program providing the most current overview and perspective on the latest developments in the fields of science and engineering technologies. www.ndia.org/meetings/1720

28-31 2011 Joint Undersea Warfare Technology Spring Conference (Secret US Only) San Diego, CA Undersea Superiority - Realities, Challenges and Opportunities • Topics will include …. developments and requirements in undersea warfare, countering submarine and mine threats to the free and open flow of sea-borne commerce, aviation USW, C4I and combat systems, mine warfare, and undersea sensors and vehicles. www.ndia.org/meetings/1260

28-31

MAY

11-14 46th Annual Gun & Missile Systems Conference & Exhibition Miami, FL Shaping Weapon Systems for Rapid Deployment: Development, Interoperability & Flexible Response • Topics include direct/indirect/precision fire systems, tactical rockets and missiles, energetics, effectiveness, modeling and simulation, platform integration and emerging technologies. www.ndia.org/meetings/1590

27th Annual National Logistics Conference & Exhibition Miami, FL Global Sustainment in an Uncertain Future • A premier national-level forum for exchanging ideas and sharing insights into improving logistics support to our nation’s warfighters across the spectrum of military operations. www.ndia.org/meetings/1730

APRIL C4ISR Breakfast Pentagon City, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/192D

2011 Joint Service Power Expo Myrtle Beach, SC Smaller, Better, Greener - Reducing the Energy Footprint • Join users and decision-makers from the DoD and DHS in pursuit of practical, near-term solutions for sustained power and energy for warfighters. www. ndia.org/meetings/1670

3-5

11-15 DoD Enterprise Architecture Conference 2011 Hampton, VA • For anyone working with Government Architectures. Featuring: breakout sessions, networking opportunities, pre-conference tutorials, and informational plenary sessions. www.dodenterprisearchitecture.org

12-14 7

2-5

12th Annual Science & Engineering Technology Conference/DoD Tech Exposition Charleston, SC Linking the DoD S&T Program to Key Mission Areas • This is a highly focused, concen-

Global Explosive Ordnance Disposal Conference & Exhibition Fort Walton Beach, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/1950

9-12 2011 Environment, Energy Security & Sustainability ( (E2S2) New Orleans, LA • This symposium will bring increased attention to the strategic and executable practices needed to preserve and enhance the global environment, maximizing energy efficiencies and resource conservation. www.ndiae2s2.com

17-19 MDA SBIR Industry Day Orlando, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/1160

For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org. Or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.

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NDIACALENDAR

17-19

15 - 16

Special Operations Forces Industry Conference Tampa, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/1890

Mastering Business Development Workshop Cincinnati, OH www.ndia.org/meetings/107C

23-26

Joint CBRN Conference & Exhibition Ft. Leonard Wood, MO www.ndia.org/meetings/1300

Small Arms Systems Symposium, Exhibition & Firing Demonstration Indianapolis, IN www.ndia.org/meetings/1610

24-26 55th Annual FUZE Conference Salt Lake City, UT www.ndia.org/meetings/1560

21-23

22-23 Expeditionary Warfare Division Wargame MCB Quantico, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/1850 For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org. Or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.

JUNE

2

C4ISR Breakfast Pentagon City, VA www.ndia.org/meetings/192E

6-9 Live Fire Test & Evaluation Conference Eglin AF Base, FL www.ndia.org/meetings/1390

7-8 8th Annual National Small Business Conference San Diego, CA www.ndia.org/meetings/1140

13-17 Defense Systems Acquisition Management Course (DSAM) Newport Beach, CA www.ndia.org/meetings/102C

14-15 Precision Strike Armaments Technology Fire Power Forum Whippany, NJ www.precisionstrike.org

This Conference will investigate what roles unmanned ground systems can play in gaining efficiencies, what capabilities the systems can provide, and how the Department of Defense can measure these contributions.

Supported by the Department of Defense Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise.

Orlando, FL • March 22-24 • www.ndia.org/meetings/1380

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N D I A

F E A T U R E D

2010 BIOMETRICS CONFERENCE “National Security Through Biometric Collaboration A Roadmap to Tomorrow”

E V E N T S

NDIA’S STABILITY, SECURITY, TRANSITION & RECONSTRUCTION OPERATIONS (SSTRO) CONFERENCE “Building Partnerships: Planning For Uncertainty, Preparing for Success” Marriott Crystal Gateway Arlington, VA December 15-16, 2010

February 23-24, 2010 Sheraton National Hotel Arlington, Virginia The Nation is protected by two key communities of interest: Civil Law Enforcement and Federal Intelligence. The Nation’s goal is that biometric technologies and jurisdictional policies simultaneously support both communities.

Strong collaboration among researchers, policy-makers and community stakeholders is essential for identifying and implementing sustainable solutions that are relevant to the Warfighter and national interests.

Researchers & Academics - Policy makers Biometrics Experts - Commercial users Battlefield users - International users Arlington, VA • February 23-24 • www.ndia.org/meetings/1860

MUNITIONS EXECUTIVE SUMMIT (MES)

Top leaders discuss international outreach, diplomacy, development & defense in this critical collaborative environment.

Do not miss this chance to hear experts speak of defining how the U.S. military, U.S. diplomatic, international, and non-governmental partners support SSTRO globally.

Space is limited. Register today at www.ndia.org/meetings/1450

Arlington, VA • December 15-16 • www.ndia.org/meetings/1450

22ND ANNUAL SO/LIC SYMPOSIUM & EXHIBITION

RESPONSIVE MUNITIONS SUPPORT TO THE U.S. WARFIGHTER Achieving Efficiencies in an Uncertain Budget Environment This Summit will: • Address challenges related to maintaining a stable munitions enterprise in light of an unstable DoD budget outlook • Explore dynamics affecting the current & future industrial manufacturing complex that services our war-fighting capability • Create a thoughtful and meaningful discourse on the critical factors that will shape the future munitions landscape

Tampa, FL • February 2-4 • www.ndia.org/meetings/1650

“Defense, Diplomacy, and Development: Translating Policy into Operational Capability” • Discuss operational constructs required to implement a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach to national security • Examine national security objectives and the requirement for multidimensional special operations forces that can perform the full spectrum of defense, diplomacy, and development activities • Explore the flow of information and requirements to industry from policy through operations to meet the needs of the defense and interagency actors addressing the challenges of our times

Washington, DC • February 8-9 • www.ndia.org/meetings/1880

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International Advertising Headquarters

December 2010 Index of Advertisers

Interact with the companies whose products and services are advertised in National Defense.

Advertiser

Interact

Page No.

BAE Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.baesystems.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 The Boeing Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.boeing.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 2 CAE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.cae.com/iitsec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4 Cases2Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.cases2go.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 CHRISTIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.christiedigital.com/NationalDefense . . . . . . . . . . . 27 CoorsTek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.coorstek.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Defense Technical Information Center . . . . . . . . . . . https://www.dtic.mil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 DSEi 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.dsei.co.uk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Finmeccanica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.finmec.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 FlightSafety International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.flightsafety.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Immersive Display Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.immersivedisplayinc.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 ISR Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.ISRGroup.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Israel Aerospace Industries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.iai.co.il . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 ITEC 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.itec.co.uk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 L-3 Communications, Link, Simulation & Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.link.com & www.L-3com.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 L-3 MPRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.mpri.com & www.L-3com.com . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 3 Land Info Worldwide Mapping LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.landinfo.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Laser Design & GKS Global Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.gksitar.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

For information on advertising in National Defense, contact the International Advertising Headquarters or your regional advertising office.

Vice President, Advertising Dino K. Pignotti (703) 247–2541 Fax: (703) 522-4602 dpignotti@ndia.org Advertising COORDINATOR Leo Gomez (703) 247–2576 Fax: (703) 522-4602 lgomez@ndia.org Advertising Headquarters is located at: 2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 400 Arlington, VA 22201 Advertising Fax: (703) 522-4602

advertising regional offices • Northeastern United States & Canada (CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT) Jo B. Lievsay, Partner (203) 698–1884 Fax: (203) 698–1869 jblein@optonline.net Lievsay Associates 20 Center Drive, Old Greenwich, CT 06870

Lockheed Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.lockheedmartin.com/gtl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

• Southeastern United States and Metro DC Area (AL, FL, GA, KY, MD, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA,

MetaVR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.metavr.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

WV & DC)

NGRAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.ngrain.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Jim Barros (805) 584-2130 Fax: (805) 584-3796 jim@barrossales.com

Old Dominion University Distance Learning & VMASC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.dl.odu.edu/ModSimME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 PARSONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.parsons.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Plexsys Interface Products, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.plexsysipi.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 Presagis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.presagis.com/aeria_suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 QinetiQ North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.QinetiQ-NA.com/GetTraining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Raydon Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.raydon.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Rhino Linings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.RhinoLiningsIndustrial.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 RUAG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.ruag.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 SAAB Training Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.saabgroup.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 SAIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.saic.com/ess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Scalable Display Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.scalabledisplay.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Spartan Chassis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.spartanchassis.com/defense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 The Tatitlek Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.tatitlek.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Tek Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.TekPanel.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Wittenstein aerospace & simulation Inc. . . . . . . . . . www.wittenstein-us.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

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6480 Katherine Road # 72 Simi Valley, CA 93063 • South Central United States (AR, KS, LA, MO, OK, TX)

Bill Powell (281) 376–2368 Fax: (281) 251–8555 citadel62@aol.com J/J/H/S Inc. 18103 Mahogany Forest Drive Spring (Houston), TX 77379 • Western and North Central United States (AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, MI, MN, MT, ND, NE, NM, NV, OH, OR, SD, UT, WA, WI, WY)

Jim Barros (805) 584-2130 Fax: (805) 584-3796 jim@barrossales.com 6480 Katherine Road # 72 Simi Valley, CA 93063

L-3 MPRI. WHAT WE DO MAKES THE DIFFERENCE.

Use of this U.S. DoD image does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

For People. For Communities. For Nations. For the World.

From supporting the development of workable government in Afghanistan to assisting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in delivering clean, renewable energy solutions, L-3 MPRI provides seasoned professionals to augment civilian and military staff in training, transportation and environmental operations worldwide. Wherever the location, whatever the need, that’s where you’ll find us. To learn more about how L-3 MPRI is making a difference on behalf of government and private industry customers, visit www.mpri.com.

MPRI

L-3com.com

innovation Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are reshaping the battlefield of the 21st century and helping deliver persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. As UASs take on a growing role, military forces are re-evaluating the requirements for UAS operators, and there is an increasing need for more robust and capable mission training solutions.

As a global leader in modeling and simulation and integrated training solutions, CAE is applying its expertise and experience to support UAS mission training. We are focusing on the training required by the mission team – including the pilot, payload specialist and mission commander.

Our solutions are non-proprietary, flexible, adaptable and interoperable to enable distributed mission operations. Our simulation technology leadership in areas such a sensor simulation, weapons effects, computer-generated forces, artificial intelligence, common databases and true fidelity modeling – combined with our training systems integration expertise – come together to help our customers stay one step ahead and prepare the UAS mission team for mission success.

Come visit CAE’s booth (#2341) at I/ITSEC 2010 to see a demonstration of our UAS Mission Training Solutions.

CAE’s UAS mission training solutions feature a fully immersive synthetic environment, state-of-the-art sensor simulations, common database (CDB) architecture and additional simulation technologies to support complete mission crew training and rehearsal requirements.

one step ahead

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