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MITRE History Moments: Command & Control in the Air and Undersea June 2008
As we approach MITRE's 50th anniversary, we take a moment to look back at some key milestones in our history. Airborne Systems Engineering in the Nation's Defense MITRE has been a vital partner to the Department of Defense throughout our history, but our work on two especially critical airborne surveillance programs exemplifies our commitment to enhancing the nation's air defenses. Since 1977, AWACS—or the Airborne Warning and Control System—has been integral to the national security of more than a dozen countries. The specialized search and surveillance radar can go anywhere on short notice, providing peerless battle management capabilities. AWACS has proven itself in allied operations from the Gulf War, through the conflicts in the Balkans, to the present day in Iraq and Afghanistan. MITRE has been a key part of the AWACS program from the start, and we continue to work on the technology upgrades that keep AWACS as the Air Force's mainstay command and control platform. NATO also uses it, as well as the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, and Japan. What AWACS does for detecting and tracking airborne threats, Joint STARS (for Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar) does for stationary and ground moving targets. Joint STARS can electronically paint a detailed ground picture of thousands of square miles of topography during an eight-hour sortie. For this cooperative Air Force/Army development program, MITRE was selected as chief engineer for design, analysis, and testing. The story does not end there. We are also applying what we have learned from these complex systems engineering challenges and using that knowledge for the in-development next-generation surveillance program, the Global Information Grid, and myriad other essential defense programs. Command of the Seas Enabled by Effective Undersea Warfare Since the 1970s, MITRE has enabled customer success in fielding effective undersea warfare capabilities. In the 1980s, we embarked on a major anti-submarine warfare (ASW) initiative. We first focused on transient acoustic processing and noise spectrum equalization techniques to detect and classify threat submarines that were becoming increasingly quiet and alluding conventional systems. Our signal processing and software engineering staff also made significant contributions to three key ASW programs of the era.
During the 1990s, we helped identify a cost-effective way to modernize and improve the Navy's submarine sonar systems. The innovative approach, known as Acoustic Rapid Commercial-off-the-shelf-Technology Initiative with Advanced Processing Builds, received a Vice Presidential Hammer Award. Today, we continue to create and validate analytical performance prediction models for sonar systems to improve Fleet undersea warfare capabilities. In the past decade, we helped upgrade several submarine classes to a common radio room configuration and convert legacy networks to an Internet Protocol (IP)-based capability. As part of the Valiant Shield 2007 exercise in the Pacific Fleet, we helped design, coordinate, and field a Joint Range Extension Tactical Data Link prototype aboard the attack submarine USS Houston. This prototype let USS Houston attain a near real-time common tactical picture using IP-over SATCOM (satellite communications) circuits. As a result, USS Houston had the same tactical picture as the rest of the Navy's battle forces in the exercise—a first for an attack submarine. Also in 2007, we began assisting with experimentation for the Undersea Warfare Decision Support System, an integrated near real-time, net-centric ASW command and control capability that will improve situational awareness and enable the Fleet to plan and control integrated undersea warfare operations. —by Maria S. Lee For these and other MITRE moments in history, we invite you to read the 2007 MITRE Annual Report. Related Information Articles and News
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| Page last updated: June 20, 2008 | Top of page |
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