First Responder Radio
INTEGRATED WIRELESS NETWORK WOULD
LINK LAW ENFORCEMENT AND
EMERGENCY PERSONNEL DURING TIMES OF CRISIS.
Responding to a communications problem that has continued to vex first responders during major disasters, the federal government is pushing ahead with development of a nationwide radio system linking some 80,000 federal, state and local law enforcement and emergency management personnel.
The departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Treasury have been teaming up to establish the Integrated Wireless Network (IWN), which targets the interoperability woes that have plagued public safety workers during times of crisis.
Although the Department of Defense is not directly involved in the procurement, companies competing to become the prime contractor for IWN say that their experiences putting together systems for DoD has convinced them that achieving the goals of IWN are feasible.
Four contractor teams—led by Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Motorola and Raytheon—are competing to become the lead systems integrator for IWN. These teams survived a first-phase competition last year—along with the Boeing, which has since dropped out of the competition—after the Justice Department certified their initial proposals as satisfactory for IWN requirements.
The remaining teams face another possible down-selection this spring, when Justice may drop one or two of them and then let the remaining companies compete until the final award at the end of the year. Experts predict that the government will select one systems integrator to run the final network of integrated voice and data communications.
IWN has a $10-billion ceiling over a possible lifespan of 15 years, according to the IWN Joint Program Office, although the estimated total value of the program tops out at $2.5 billion. The IWN competition is designed to result in an indefinitedelivery, indefinite-quantity contract with a base period of five years and two additional five-year option periods. The IWN Joint Program Office estimates that IWN will serve more than 80,000 law enforcement officials across the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Treasury as well as at the state and local levels, while reaching up to 2,500 sites across the United States.
The IWN network is also required to integrate legacy systems with new equipment while using strict security and encryption measures. The joint program office also requires that the system support new technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol.
“The scope of this effort, while currently focused on voice and data communications, includes wireless information transmission, such as data, files, streaming video, images, and applications yet to emerge,” according to the IWN request for proposals for phase two of the program.
MANAGEMENT ENABLER
Given the size and complexity of the proposed program, observers suggest, it’s not surprising that key competitors in the IWN project point to their DoD experience as evidence that they and the government are on the right path with IWN plans and strategies.
The depth of Lockheed Martin’s experience with integrating complex military communications systems has positioned the company as a successful competitor in the IWN race, according to Gordon McElroy, vice president of intelligence and homeland security at Lockheed Martin.
“With most complex DoD systems, technology is not the key enabler,” McElroy said. “The key enabler is the management of products, technologies, subsystems, requirements and people to produce a system of systems that meets its requirements in a reliable manner. This is system integration, and system integration is an essential element of any complex program.”
Lockheed Martin manages bigger and more complex systems than IWN for DoD on a daily basis, providing the company with the seasoning to tackle complex communications programs that involve different users in separate agencies with different missions and needs, McElroy explained.
“We learned long ago from the military that the problem is so much more than picking an equipment manufacturer and buying radios, but rather it’s all about the approach to ensure a highperformance network is focused on satisfying multiple missions with a solid infrastructure,” he added.
While acknowledging that the challenges in IWN are unique to that project and its contracting agencies, McElroy argued that his company has gained the tools, experience and people required to run a robust and challenging program on the scale represented by IWN.
“You are not going to see an analogous communications program per se at DoD that is similar to IWN, but what you will see is analogous integration of technologies or subsystems and requirements to produce a systemsintegrated architecture that is essentially a system of systems,” McElroy said. “There are numerous platforms out there for communication. There are numerous data transport layers. There are numerous formats and all that kind of stuff that we have architected in a number of networks for DoD.”
But technology developed under the auspices of military programs also would have direct application to IWN, McElroy noted. Specifically, Lockheed Martin is very interested in the ability of the Internet Protocol to interconnect systems both old and new.
“We have applied IP to numerous communication programs such as WIN-T, MUOS, net-centric warfare and our recent TMOS win,” McElroy said, referring to the Transformational Satellite (TSAT) Communications program’s ground-based Mission Operations System (TMOS). “IP has the ability to enable the secure interconnection of both new and legacy communication systems providing the IWN user access not only to his/her fellow agents or officers, but also access a wide variety of network application and databases.”
The use of IP applications would enable law enforcement personnel using an IWN network to enjoy the same interoperability that many military warfighters share under net-centric warfare concepts, McElroy said. Such an approach will enable FBI agents to talk to Customs agents without using extra radios and juggling several of them, depending on who needs to talk to whom.
In the future, IWN also may enable users to talk to military personnel.
“DoD has different kinds of security requirements, different kinds of protocols for getting on that system. But once a need is identified or once a mission is identified, having DoD or IWN users be able to integrate together or network for a specific task force or whatever is not outside the realm of possibility,” McElroy said.
RESCUE 21
General Dynamics C4 Systems, meanwhile, has capitalized on its experiences with the departments of Defense and Homeland Security in its development of an IWN solution, according to Lee Wright, director of national communications and homeland security.
“Our experience in developing, deploying and supporting the nationwide wireless communication system for the Coast Guard points to the fact that larger-scale system-integration projects must be architected as a total system and dynamically managed in order to meet the most pressing interoperability objectives,” Wright said. “As the prime integrator and logistics provider for the Common Ground Station [GCS], we enabled the DoD’s communications and situational awareness with a global real-time data, video and voice network.”
General Dynamics is leading a team to overhaul the Coast Guard’s national distress-communications system with a new project called Rescue 21. Rescue 21 would serve more than 78 million boaters and 13 million vessels navigating coastal and intra-coastal waters as the primary U.S. maritime emergency system, according to Coast Guard estimates.
In the case of the CGS, the Army sought tactical communications to provide real-time C4ISR capabilities from multiple sensors. According to General Dynamics, the company has implemented a solution that provides the Army with the ability to “acquire, process, display and disseminate” data from a variety of sources on the ground, in the air and in space.
The challenge of providing interoperable communications for more than 80,000 law-enforcement officers and federal agents presents large-scale and critical needs similar to those in the individual Coast Guard and Army projects, Wright said.
“The technology solution is all about interoperability and the ability for users on the network to have access to all relevant information,” Wright explained. “IWN is the first communications system to be procured by multiple departments—versus having every agency buy its own small system—so it can really solve the interoperability problem.”
For example, such interoperability would enable customs and border-protection officials at the Department of Homeland Security to access intelligence databases owned by the FBI, Wright noted. The ability to network such information also provides everyone involved with access to a common operating picture at a central location, such as a joint command center.
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
In making their case, Raytheon executives point to their company’s work as the prime mission systems integrator for the Navy DD(X), the fleet’s next-generation destroyer, as well as a provider of military tactical communications across a range of programs.
The company also recently finished a program for Brazil for monitoring the Amazonian rain forest with a network of communications, sensors, radars and other technologies. That has strengthened the company’s experience in establishing a network of networks across a large geographic area, according to Jerry Powlen, Raytheon vice president of integrated communications systems.
“Raytheon offers a unique capability in that not only do we have the large systems integration capabilities, we also have a lot of deep roots in wireless technology itself,” Powlen said. “Raytheon is one of the leaders in wireless technology for the military from a tactical communications point of view. So while it’s great and it’s important for a system to have the capability to manage suppliers, people, processes and requirements, if you don’t really have an underlying knowledge of the base technology domain itself, sometimes these programs get away from you.”
The Raytheon IWN team consists of AT&T, Bechtel, Hewlett-Packard and Cap Gemini. AT&T originally led the team during phase one of the IWN program, but quickly concluded that Raytheon’s capabilities were best suited for leading the team into the second and third phases of the competition phase.
The IWN Joint Program Office has never set goals for interoperability with DoD, Powlen noted. But the military’s assistance to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina has underscored the need for wireless interoperability between first responders and DoD.
“So while the customer clearly hasn’t defined the requirement to achieve interoperability between IWN and DoD, I think anybody who can sit here and see what we have lived through for the past nine months, can clearly see the value in the bridging of these networks between DoD so you can achieve interoperability. Currently, that is not the path IWN is on,” Powlen said.
But the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Treasury have made it clear that they recognize IWN is an evolving program, Powlen emphasized, and they learned some of the lessons that have been incorporated into it from challenges faced by DoD.
“Technologies will continue to evolve, and one of the issues that DoD continually faces is that they launch a program that takes three to five years of development, and by the time they are ready to field the technology, the technology is obsolete. It certainly is not state-of-the-art,” Powlen said. “Homeland Security and Justice are painfully aware of how the world works. While they set up this IWN capability, they are looking for some of the same things that DoD is looking for, which is open architecture, non-proprietary systems and open standards.” ♦
