Network for a Mission
Written by Peter Buxbaum
MIT 2010 Volume: 14 Issue: 9 (October)
New U.S.-Allied Communications Network In
Afghanistan Represents A Major Success Both
For Technology And International Cooperation.
Although the United States and its allies have been conducting operations in Afghanistan for nearly nine years, it has only been since this summer that all 46 nations participating in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been linked up over the same network.
Two reasons explain the time lag. First, it wasn’t easy to make it happen technologically. Second, the counterinsurgency strategy confirmed under the Obama administration— and its information sharing requirements—provided an impetus to finally get the project off the ground.
The Afghan Mission Network (AMN), as the new system is known, provides the connective tissue between the U.S. CENTRIXS (Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System), which is the theater version of SIPRNet, and NATO’s ISAF Secret network, to which the networks of the other ISAF nations connect. By law, SIPRnet does not allow access to non-U.S. users.
Initial operating capability for the network was declared in July, signifying the availability of the network to at least 50 percent of all ISAF forces. AMN’s initial capabilities facilitate human-to-human contact that includes chat, VoIP telephone connectivity, e-mail, Web browsing, friendly force tracking exchange and video teleconferencing. Full operational capability, which is expected to be completed within a year, will see AMN positioned as ISAF’s primary communications network, with key information systems also connected to it.
“It took a lot of planning and engineering resources from all the nations to put this infrastructure in place,” said U.S. Army Colonel Pete Gallagher, chief of the ISAF CJ6 branch, at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan. CJ6 is in charge of providing communications and information systems to ISAF.
“AMN required a breakdown of barriers,” he explained. “Some nations were overly protective of their networks. We had to work through some policy barriers to open up the networks to sharing while maintaining information assurance.” These required several planning and negotiating sessions involving the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and its NATO counterpart.
“The exchange of information between the U.S. and other nations has always been a difficult problem,” noted Mike Masters, vice president for secure messaging solutions at Telos Corp. “But communications modalities have evolved to become more adaptive to being able to do something like this.”
More important, for Masters, is what the future holds. “NATO is creating a model on how it plans to go forward with information sharing,” he said. “The network is being constructed to support Afghanistan, but it will also create a model that can be put elsewhere as the need might arise.”
INFORMATION FOR
COUNTERINSURGENCY
The idea for AMN originally came from General Stanley McChrystal, the former ISAF commander, a few months before he was relieved of that command by President Obama in June.
“He had something like three different computers and seven phones on his desk” in order to be fully connected, recalled Lieutenant Colonel Andy McClelland, who is attached to NATO Allied Command Transformation headquarters in Norfolk, Va.
The emphasis by the Obama administration on counterinsurgency operations and the accompanying surge of warfighters to the region made information sharing all the more critical during that time period. “Information sharing is critical to counterinsurgency operations,” said McClelland. “This is what drove the development of a common mission network.”
Before AMN, each nation had its own network, and they were not federated, McClelland explained. “Federating the networks requires a common core,” he said. “Before we stood up AMN, information sharing was possible but difficult because of the many disparate domains on the network.”
AMN’s common core is the ISAF Secret network. “If Italy wants to talk to us, they can transition across the ISAF core from their network and talk to us over CENTRIXS,” said McClelland. “The core is the glue the binds all of the networks together.”
The main benefit of AMN to commanders and warfighters will be the establishment of a common operational environment across all ISAF forces, according to Gallagher. “AMN will provide the seamless data exchange of data and a common operational picture that is available to anyone connected to the network,” he said. “Instead of the U.S. seeing what we see on SIPRnet and others seeing what is on their networks, all 46 members of ISAF will share a common picture. That is a significant leap in information sharing.”
For example, different national networks use different viewers to examine data, Gallagher explained. The Canadians use a system called BattleView, the U.S. uses Command Post of the Future and the British have a system called JADOCS. The job of AMN is to make data available to all these viewers. “Data is published on a server,” Gallagher said, “and users subscribe to that data.”
“Information gathered in the west could be relevant in the north and central sections of Afghanistan,” added McClelland. “AMN allows the sharing of information among forces that are traditionally not located next to each other. The enemy doesn’t recognize these lines.”
What this information allows through the faster and more thorough access to tactical data is to accelerate the OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop, noted Laurent Maury, Paris-based vice president for customer service of Thales Communications S.A. “The operational concept behind modern warfare is to close that loop faster than your opponents,” he said. “The aim of the current concept of network enabled capabilities is to network all of the actors in a theater of operations to exchange information faster and become more results driven.”
COMMON ENVIRONMENT
AMN’s genesis can be traced back to 2008, when the Afghanistan campaign plan was revised and the U.S. brass began to look for a way to develop a true mission network for Afghanistan. “At that point the U.S. was mainly operating on SIPRnet and NIPRnet,” said Gallagher. “NATO and the coalition members were on the ISAF secret network. NATO funded an effort to provide voice, chat and Web access over a United Kingdom network called Overtask. But there was still not a real capability for the U.S. to communicate with coalition members at the secret level.”
Later, the United States migrated a version of Central Command’s CENTRIXS network to Afghanistan, which provided some additional e-mail and document sharing capabilities with the coalition. “But it was still not a true mission network,” said Gallagher.
The plan to stand up an Afghan Mission Network would involve a direct connection between CENTRIXS and the ISAF Secret network. As the concept evolved, the higher-ups decided not to settle for voice and e-mail connectivity only, but also to establish a network where battle management systems would operate in a common environment and share a common operating picture.
“The inability to share theater related intelligence and guidance across a common network was creating an information gap that was believed to create increased risk to lives and had a negative impact on efficiency and effect,” said Gallagher.
Last spring NATO spent $15 million to thicken the defenses of the ISAF Secret network, and nations were given joining instructions, which included a requirement for compliance with specific security standards. At this point Canadian, Italian, British and German forces are connected, or are in the process of connecting, to the network.
The NATO C3 (Consultation, Command and Control Agency) contracted with Thales to provide a significant part of the communications backbone for AMN. “Following the NATO decision for creating a single and global network in Afghanistan, an innovative Thales proposal was chosen for connecting the NATO core network to national mission networks,” said Maury.
The system is designed to be resilient and secure, said Maury, and to provide high levels of reliability and connectivity. “In the framework of a long-term service provision contract with NC3A, Thales provides, operates and maintains a highly robust secure communications capability,” he added. “The end-to-end communications and information system includes the ability to share voice, data, multimedia and applications. The service is being delivered according to the stringent service level agreement.”
Thales’ solution is based on the provision of network interconnection points (NIPs) installed at the six regional commands in Afghanistan. “Each NIP gives connected nations the capability to seamlessly exchange information on the same level of security with the rest of the coalition,” said Maury. “We are now operating and maintaining the backbone for the benefit of users of several nations.”
Thales has stationed more than 130 people at over 50 locations in country to support the system, which includes remote outposts accommodating a handful of users to workstations that serve more than 1,000 users at ISAF headquarters in Kabul.
FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS
Other defense contractors see future opportunities for themselves to enhance AMN’s capabilities. Telos, for example, is planning to offer a solution that will include chat, instant messaging and e-mail messaging, and make those capabilities faster.
E-mail connectivity generally requires a global directory of all authorized system users, which may be difficult to assemble for all 46 member nations of the ISAF coalition, Masters noted. On the other hand, instant messaging and chat services don’t require a directory. Instead, standards such as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol allow connectivity by detecting presence on the network.
“You don’t have to address a directory for those services,” said Masters. “You can pretty much do things ad hoc for IM and chat.” Telos’ messaging offering will be somewhat different than what the U.S. military is used to. “We’re talking about using SMTP as the transport layer,” said Masters. “What we are offering is a way to do what we call an XML-over-SMTP. It is not e-mail, but XML payloads carried over SMTP.”
SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is an Internet standard for e-mail transmission across IP networks. The current defense message system is based on X.400, an older and less-used e-mail standard.
Telos’ plan also includes a different way to construct a directory. “If we are able to provide IM and chat,” Masters contended, “in a few months we could develop a directory would allow addressable information to flow as well.”
Telos also offers archiving and searching of chat communications and instant messages. “A user can later go back and retrieve conversations, based on names, topics or key words,” said Masters. “Normally those kinds of exchanges are lost to the ether after they are over with.”
A recently deployed enhancement to AMN is a capability that allows full motion video to be shared across network domains. “This is a bridging capability that connects the ISAF Secret, NATO Secret and U.S. SIPRnet domains,” said Gallagher.
As the project heads toward full operational capability, projected for July 2011, McClelland sees AMN replacing national networks for communications and information sharing at all levels. “We expect tactical information systems to be fully operational on the network at that time as well,” he said.
As battle command information systems are connected to AMN, Gallagher expects applications to be continually added that will enhance collaboration among coalition members. Already in the pipeline is a plan to make the Microsoft SharePoint and Adobe collaboration tools used by U.S. forces available to coalition members across the AMN. Another enhancement will be a capability to attach small satellite terminals to the network, to allow commanders the flexibility to add additional network connectivity to newly deployed command posts on an as-needed basis.
Finally, an AMN operations center will be established at the ISAF Joint Command headquarters “with the tools and technical expertise required to operate, defend and improve the network,” said Gallagher. “As we improve the network, the operations center will be focused on making sure this is done through a common set of standards.
“This is a whole new way of coalition warfare,” Gallagher concluded. “One of the priorities of the Joint Staff has been multinational information sharing, but we were never really able to crack the code on how to do that right. With AMN we are breaking the code, and the lessons we are learning will improve coalition information sharing in the future.” ♦
