JFCom leader: Systems should be ‘born’ joint  By Gopal Ratnam Air Force Times May 22, 2006 Joint Forces Command has stepped in numerous times to fix weapons and communication systems in Iraq that kept the military services from working with each other, the command’s top official said. Among them were blue-force tracking systems that identify friendly forces; hundreds of databases tracking improvised explosive devices; and unmanned aerial vehicles developed for one service and inaccessible to others, said Air Force Gen. Lance Smith, commander of Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. “We ended up with seven different blue-force tracking systems,” said Smith, who called them the “most significant example” of equipment that did not meet joint needs or allow the services to work together. He said a Marine Corps commander might know where his troops were, but the Army commander “right next to him only had visibility into the Army units.” Joint Forces Command solicited defense firms’ help in “putting together a joint translator so [data] from the seven could be fed into everyone’s common picture,” Smith told reporters May 1. Similarly, UAVs developed and deployed by one service did not always communicate with their counterparts in other branches. Smith, who took over the command in November, said the effort and money going to develop such fixes for “stovepiped systems” could be avoided if “systems were born joint.” The command, which was created out of Atlantic Command in 1999, is the only one of the nine combatant commands that has both a geographic and functional responsibility: It is the lead command for developing and ensuring joint war-fighting capabilities. Still, it has limited authority to buy weapons and command-and-control systems because federal law gives weapons-development authority to the individual military services, Smith said. Although weapons under development are often called “joint,” it’s not clear who may give them the designation, he said. “Right now, I don’t know who’s authorized to put a J in front of an acquisition system. It’s not me.” A recent Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment panel study on weapons acquisition and the Quadrennial Defense Review released in February said that combatant commanders who execute military actions should have more say in what weapons are bought and how they are developed. Smith said he is discussing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff how his command can help define requirements for weapons. Right now, there is “no great advocate for joint programs, so they can compete within services for funding at the right level,” he said. “I’m in the process of evaluating authorities that Joint Forces Command would need to set standards and enforce them.” Meanwhile, the command’s Joint Requirements and Integration Directorate is busy developing ideas and technologies that would bridge the gap among various systems used by military services. Blue-force tracking, close-air support and coalition combat identification systems are among the projects being pursued by the directorate, command officials said May 4. Within the military services and Special Operations Command, “there are several efforts going on that are not synchronized,” said Bobby Clegg, branch chief of the Blue Force Tracking division at the directorate. “One of our roles is to synchronize those efforts, particularly in the case of disparate systems.” When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, the Army, Marine Corps and special operations units deployed with systems they had developed that were readily available — in some cases early prototypes — but that couldn’t communicate with each other. The blue-force tracking systems “were pretty close to an embryonic stage,” said Danny Allen, chief of the Joint Fires division of the directorate. A mid-2004 Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program — usually created to speed up the use of emerging technologies to solve military problems — allowed the disparate blue-force tracking systems to communicate with one another at the brigade level, Allen and Clegg said. Subsequently, the Marine Corps blue-force tracking system was identified as suitable for use by the Marine and Army units operating at the battalion level, and an effort is underway to extend the use of these systems to coalition partners, Clegg said. Joint Forces Command also is working on stitching together the systems used in close-air support, involving aircraft attacking enemy ground targets close to friendly forces, said Conway Twiddy, chief of the Joint Close Air Support branch. For the future, the command is working on the Joint Effects Targeting System, which is envisaged as a single system that will replace nearly 20 noninteroperable targeting systems being operated by the services, Twiddy said. The Coalition Combat Identification system, also an Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program, began in 2003 and will allow all shooters in a coalition team who “pull triggers and drop bombs to sort the targets and identify friend from foe and avoid fratricide,” said John Miller, operational manager for the effort. The technologies underlying the combat identification system were demonstrated at an exercise in the United Kingdom in September that involved nine nations, Miller said. (Archives)