How the U.S. is Modernizing its Toolchains to Enable Collaboration with Allies
Spectrum is by definition multi-domain and multi-national. Electrons do not abide by international nor physical boundaries between air, land, sea, and space. Because of this fact, spectrum-dependent operations must also be multi-domain and multi-national. The Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (JEMSO) construct identifies functional collaboration between the intelligence, operations, and spectrum communities. It also presents procedures and approaches to resolving these challenges but does not address the technical aspects of implementing them.
Congress and OSD have mandated additional effort for Joint Electro-Magnetic Spectrum Operations (JEMSO) and in response, US INDOPACOM has established a JEMSO Cell (JEMSOC). The lack of JEMSOC software tools is a critical operational gap. There are a number of tools available for electromagnetic spectrum awareness; however, the challenge with the current software tools is a combination of access to the software tools and data feeds for the software tools on SIPRnet as well as sharing of tool output with Australia and FVEY partners on SECRET networks.
Moving Battlespace Management to the Cloud
Today’s warfighters face an uphill battle getting access to, sharing, and understanding the complex relationships between the forces when trying to plan their missions. Chesapeake Technology International (CTI) worked alongside Major John Salvador to observe these challenges and hear what he needs to do his job. From those discussions and observations, it was clear that the current desktop solutions fail to meet the basic needs of our warfighters. Instead of investing more time and energy into maintaining these legacy desktop common operating pictures (COPs), CTI set out to develop a cloud-native solution that can scale to meet our end users’ needs. The Coalition Electro-Magnetic Battlespace Awareness (CEMBA) tools take a fundamentally different approach than what has been done in the past by focusing on enabling flexible data to ingest from any source and sharing situationally relevant information to create a real-time picture of the whole mission. This enables the product to take advantage of both publicly available as well as classified data sources and allows the users to see both high and low-level details to deconflict their requirements and better align their goals. Users can view and annotate layers of equipment, analytics, and spectrum information on their own or collaborate by synchronizing their configurations with other users. Deployments of these analytic tools take only a few minutes to configure and launch and can be scaled to support teams from a few users large up to hundreds of concurrent users. This solution is also cloud agnostic which allows us to support groups working with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or a locally hosted cluster.
Building a Platform to Enable Collaboration
The latest commercial off-the-shelf tools are driving CEMBA and facilitating collaboration with existing toolchains and data feeds. CEMBA leverages several tools produced by the Apache Foundation to provide industry-standard security, manage data integration with external sources, and provide reusable services. These tools allow users to create connections to their own sensors without the need to reach out to developers, CEMBA’s analytic results to be displayed in other tools, and for CEMBA to render information produced in other tools as well. CEMBA was built as a collection of modular services that can be augmented, replaced, or removed to create solutions that meet each user’s unique needs. This modular architecture was validated through efforts integrating Spectrum Consumption Models (SCMs) produced by the developers at MITRE and through continued demonstrations of the capability where users have provided new data sources to link to the tool.
Creating Low-Cost Solutions to Keep the Tools Warfighters Need Running
The Mercury toolchain has been critical to supporting U.S. INDOPACOM’s Chief Spectrum Manager’s planning for disaster relief deconfliction and enabling coordination with the US’ allies for spectrum allocation requests. The former company supporting this tool failed to deliver a cost-effective solution to hosting the product and ultimately lost funding to maintain their solution. To prevent the loss of these critical capabilities, the Mercury product was modernized and re-hosted under the CEMBA effort at less than 1/5 the original cost in spite of the former developers refusing to support the transition. As part of this effort, the source code behind the product has been re-hosted to make it government open source and remove one of the barriers that the previous company put in place to maintain their costly rates supporting updates.
Leading the Competition
CTI has developed, integrated, and deployed a wide array of Radio Frequency (R.F.) models. simulations (M&S), and real-time sensor integrated Situational Awareness (SA) tools across spectrum Electromagnetic Warfare (E.W.), interference, deconfliction, Electromagnetic Battle Management (EMBM), Navigation Warfare (NAVWAR), and Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (JEMSO) programs and efforts. CTI has been the primary implementer of the “Jammer Threat Analysis” (JTA) complex jammer-to-signal (or interference-to-signal) ratio algorithms developed by Naval Air Warface Center (NAWC) Weapons Division Point Mugu for the purposes of modeling airborne electronic attack. (AEA). Additionally, CTI has experience integrating with a variety of data sources such as JSDR, Spectrum 21, FADE MIST, the emerging IEEE Spectrum Consumption Model (SCM) within the CEMBA program, and Mercury for humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) communications scenarios. In addition to sensor and database integration, CTI is a key contributor to Government-owned platforms like Raptor and ATAK with unique capabilities like radar performance and link performance modeling either standalone or leveraging accepted models such as the EMPIRE propagation toolkit. These efforts continue to enable our warfighters to be successful as well as improve the US’ ability to more effectively plan with its partners moving forward.
