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Promoting Airborne Cooperation—On a Global Scale July 2004
Imagine you're heading to the Grand Canyon for vacation. Instead of hunting for service stations along the interstate, you signal fuel trucks on the highway and they refuel your car while you continue to drive. Sound far-fetched? It's standard operating procedure for military jets. Aircraft such as B2 bombers traditionally receive their mid-mission refueling from airborne tankers as they cross the thousands of miles between, for instance, the United States and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as pulling off the highway into the nearest gas station. Getting a bomber to its target destination and back again—with several refueling rendezvous along the way—takes painstaking coordination among several groups. At various times, there must be cooperation among the Combat Air Force (which operates Global Strike missions), the Mobility Air Force (which operates Global Mobility missions, such as air refueling), and the Federal Aviation Administration (or the International Civil Aviation Organization). Additionally, it's usually necessary to acquire permission from foreign governments to fly in their sovereign airspace. Although a bomber's ultimate goal is to strike its target on time and in the "area of responsibility" (the battle theater), the aircraft may in fact spend up to 90 percent of its time (tens of hours) in civilian airspace. At the request of the Air Force, MITRE led a cross-center team to develop a revolutionary prototype for improving the management of military assets outside of the battle theater. Called Global CONOPS (concept of operations) Synchronization (or GCS), the prototype is expected to usher in a new era of coordination and cooperation both between Air Force and civil authorities and among various elements within the Air Force itself. GCS will save resources by reducing redundant tankers and aborted missions, and tankers will no longer waste fuel waiting for delayed bombers. Because GCS leverages a set of software tools that use already available technology and information (such as Web-enabled XML messaging and civil air data), there's no need for the Air Force to change data links or install new equipment on aircraft, making GCS a cost-effective solution to a long-standing problem. As an additional bonus, the team developed the first model of GCS in 180 days, making it a prime example of MITRE's ability to develop prototypes rapidly. So Many Tankers, So Little Time
Even the best-planned mission can hit unexpected bumps. Anything from bad weather to restricted airspace can force a pilot to alter his or her route over the course of thousands of miles, which in turn affects scheduled air refuelings. Because there are so many factors involved, the Mobility Air Force currently deploys as many as three tankers per rendezvous to ensure a bomber receives its fuel. As more missions begin from bases in the United States rather than Europe or the Middle East, these extra-long missions are becoming commonplace. A round trip from the States to Southwest Asia may require five or more air refuelings, so the numbers add up quickly. Coordinating all the necessary information between Combat's planes and Mobility's tankers traditionally takes place reactively, person to person, by phone, fax, or radio. The current system rarely fails, thanks to what Air Force personnel call "human heroics and workarounds," but the redundancies and inefficiencies cost the government large amounts of time, money, and staff effort. Part of the problem lies in classic military "stovepipes," where each segment does its assigned job well but hasn't been directed to share information with others. In particular, there hasn't been much information sharing between the military and civil sectors. Before the GCS team received a specific request to examine these issues, MITRE's Al Graff and Tim Szczerbinski were already considering ways to bring greater integration to the combat and mobility sides of the Air Force. Graff is chief architect of the Global Air Traffic Operations/Mobility Command and Control program office; Szczerbinski is the program office's chief engineer. They've spent the last few years working on the Global Air Traffic Management program for the Air Force's Electronic Systems Center (ESC) at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts. The program will help the Air Force's cargo and tanker fleet comply with international standards for communications, navigation, and surveillance. As part of their work, Graff and Szczerbinski use an advanced aviation lab designed by MITRE called the Reconfigurable Cockpit and Avionics Testbed, or RCAT. The RCAT employs a setup involving computer models and a realistic cockpit to simulate aircraft in real time, enabling researchers to collect data on various systems configurations without the expense or risk of actual flights. In late 2002, Maj. Gen. Craig Weston, ESC's vice commander at the time, asked the two men to demonstrate some of their Combat-Mobility integration ideas while simultaneously showing off the capabilities of the RCAT. Within 30 days, they came up with the initial GCS idea. Roundtrip Enterprise Szczerbinski and Graff decided the best way to achieve the GCS capability was to pull in as many players as possible from all sides. This would help them achieve an enterprise-oriented solution, instead of something that satisfied the needs of only one segment of the Air Force. The MITRE team gained support and input from personnel at ESC, the Air Mobility Command, Air Combat Command, and the Air Force Research Laboratory at both Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, and Rome, New York. "Developing GCS was the perfect way to start a cross-domain enterprise integration activity," Graff says, "and we had some domain knowledge in both of those major areas [combat and mobility]. We wanted an approach that could help us bridge the gaps among the combat, mobility, and civilian pieces, and we looked for opportunities to exchange information." One of the key players on the team, former Air Force pilot Steve Hofmann, is a MITRE employee located at Scott Air Force Base, home of the Air Mobility Command. He agrees that the GSC project was a prime example of across-the-board teamwork. "GCS started with a simple idea," Hofmann says. "From this simple idea, we selected a simple scenario [the U.S. to Southwest Asia roundtrip mission] that could articulate the need for Global Strike and Global Mobility to interact. We then looked at who could—or was attempting to—provide capabilities to accomplish these objectives, and then asked them to participate. The response was overwhelming. Each team member understood the objective—to facilitate a global strike mission—then crafted solutions to improve the potential of mission success. Everyone involved rolled up his sleeves, pitched in, and provided innovative solutions to get the job done." "GCS enables all the organizations involved to seamlessly provide information to each other about the status of their mission and to dynamically retask a tanker to support a bomber mission," Szczerbinski says. "The team was able to create that by knowing a lot about data in the civil domain—something we gained from working with the Federal Aviation Administration on the Global Air Traffic Management program." Graff notes that the GCS team took some of its inspiration from other MITRE programs designed to achieve a synchronized mission with the least amount of information flow. "We've used machine-to-machine transfer of data to send messages that are readable by computers, such as the onboard navigator's laptop," he says. "It's all about passing the necessary information between the folks who are responsible for these missions as efficiently as possible." For example, GCS lets the tanker pilot know his bomber's on the way and lets the bomber know that his tanker took off. "A Grand-slam Home Run" The team pulled together ideas, information, and operational experience from across MITRE and our Air Force partners during the first part of 2003. Using the RCAT to test its theories, the team developed software tools that used existing Web-enabled technology and communications data links to pass along vital information. The GCS prototype made its official debut in a briefing to Gen. Weston and other Air Force officers in June 2003. We demonstrated how each side of the Air Force equation—Combat and Mobility—handled the challenges of long missions and how using the GCS concepts and tools could help reduce redundant tankers by making strategic use of current technology and real-time information from civil sources. For instance, a civil air traffic center could relay a report of restricted airspace several hundred miles ahead to both the bomber and tanker pilots' computers, allowing them to change their rendezvous point well ahead of time. For the first time, bombers flying through civilian airspace would have access to the kind of command and control information they rely on in the area of responsibility. The result, according to Maj. Gen. Weston, was a "grand-slam home run" that "exceeded my expectations 100-fold." Predicting the Future As GCS moves from prototype to deployed capability, the MITRE team is adding features to the system, such as a set of predictive tools (developed by the Air Force Research Lab for Air Mobility Command) that would put an intelligent software agent into the computer program that holds an aircraft's intended flight plan. The agent will continually query real-time information, such as weather and wind reports and civil airspace disruptions, and then send the bomber pilot information about potential flight pattern changes well ahead of schedule. Instead of being "surprised" by flying right into a problem and then "reacting" to find a work-around (which is what happens now), the pilot will be presented with planned alternate routes ahead of time. Although GCS hasn't yet been deployed in the field, it took a giant step in that direction when it was selected as one of only 16 initiatives to be demonstrated during this year's Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment (JEFX). JEFX '04 is a series of highly focused, large-scale Air Force experiments designed to demonstrate and assess new or evolving capabilities for the warfighter. It's the proving ground for many tools and concepts on their way to operational reality. Because GCS presents a concept requiring the support or cooperation of no fewer than a dozen "traditional" Air Force programs, the MITRE team believes that GCS is a big step forward in promoting cross-domain partnerships—a fact that may ultimately prove more valuable than the initial enhancement to the tanker-bomber scenario. —by Alison Stern-Dunyak Related Information Articles and News |
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