Task Force Interoperability

Written by Peter Buxbaum

MIT 2011 Volume: 15 Issue: 2 (March)

As joint task forces increasingly become the organizational format of choice for missions ranging from responding to the earthquake in Haiti to improving the Afghan system of justice, the military is working hard to improve communications interoperability among the many and diverse organizations participating in a JTF.

Joint Task Force-Haiti, for example, was a six-month enterprise, at its height comprising over 22,000 personnel, that was tasked with saving lives, alleviating suffering and coordinating humanitarian missions to Haiti in the aftermath of last year’s earthquake.

Combined Joint Interagency Task Force-435 is a partnership among U.S. military and civilian agencies, their international counterparts and the government of Afghanistan that conducts detention, corrections, judicial sector and biometrics operations. JTF Guantanamo is in charge of the detention center at that location and of its inmates. JTF North, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, supports federal law enforcement agencies in protecting U.S. borders. Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa partners with coalition forces and host nations to promote regional security and stability.

The makeup of these joint task forces suggests a number of challenges associated with the necessary communications and information sharing that must take place among their various constituent parts. If their communications equipment and networks are not interoperable, it will be difficult if not impossible to coordinate the activities of the JTF partners, particularly in emergency situations. The interoperability issue was first brought to public notice during 1983 operations in Grenada by U.S. forces, which were marked by serious inter-service communications problems.

For this reason, the U.S. military conducts exercises throughout the year to test the interoperability of systems and to work on ways to make systems interoperable which were not designed for that purpose.

Much of the ongoing DoD Interoperability Communications Exercise (DICE), for example, is focusing on the transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next-generation standard for routing data packets over networks, as well as testing smartphone-like devices for the battlefield.

“We are testing how tactical systems are integrating with big networks with IPv6,” said Bradley Clark, chief of the Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) Transport Systems Branch, “and how information is being pushed out protocols to certified products. We also expect to see more tactical cell system requirements. People want to use smartphones to see what is going on on the battlefield and to connect to their home bases.”

System-Level Assessments

These tests are important in facing the interoperability challenges faced by joint task forces. DICE’s principal purpose is to generate system-level interoperability assessments and certifications to support the fielding of interoperable systems to warfighters. Participants include communications equipment and personnel from each of the armed services, combatant commands, Joint Communications Support Element (JCSE), National Guard and Department of Homeland Security, as well as private companies whose technologies are being tested or which are offering interoperability solutions.

“There are a number of issues associated with joint task forces that have come about due to unintended consequences,” said Colonel Joseph Puett, commander of JITC, a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) unit that conducts the DICE on behalf of the Department of Defense. “JTFs are stood up for a particular reason, and no one necessarily expects that certain partners would be associated with a JTF. Yet they all need to interconnect in one way, shape or form. Just about every JTF that we have fielded in recent history has had some kind of interoperability issue. Providing a mechanism for establishing interoperability across domains once a JTF is stood up is one of the key missions of JITC.”

JTFs in Haiti and Afghanistan, among others, comprise diverse groups of military, government and private organizations. “They each operate their own system,” said Puett. “Each was designed with one set of requirements in mind, but in a JTF, they must be made interoperable with other systems designed for separate set of requirements.”

Interoperability issues often arise when different JTF partners use equipment provided by different vendors, noted Karl Fuchs, vice president of engineering at iDirect Government Technologies, a provider of satellite communications to the military and government. “Some of this equipment was not designed to be interoperable,” he explained. “But even when it is, issues have arisen when different vendors are running different versions of the software code and they turn out not be compatible.”

Activities like DICE come to test the compatibility of new technologies with existing systems, said Clark. “Tactical users want to integrate new technologies that are coming up, like handheld radios that transmit voice, data and video,” he explained. “When these things come out, we do the interoperability assessment to see how these work within the existing environments.”

The migration of communications equipment and networks to commercial standards, such as IPv6, has helped promote interoperability, but even then kinks in the systems must be smoothed out.

“There are still differences in how people set up networks,” said Bill Berger, director of sales and sales engineering at Ultra Electronics DNE Technologies. “Different networks treat IP packets in different ways. These need to be standardized in order, for example, for video to be streamed across networks in real time.”

JITC routinely tests communications systems before they are fielded to warfighters to make sure they comply with DoD interoperability standards and to otherwise integrate systems from JTF partners that do not interoperate. JITC labs simulate large, complex networks and are designed to test the incoming software, systems, and equipment for interoperability.

“We also emulate the network usage of particular users and virtualize machines,” said Puett. “DoD is also investing in federating testing infrastructures so that we can leverage the testing facilities of each of the armed services together with JITC’s. We can leverage the best each of these facilities has to offer and that way we do not have to repeat the standardized testing for information assurance and security.”

Compatibility Issues

Increasingly, the leveraging of the various labs’ capabilities involves linking these various labs over network infrastructures. There are several DoD and service networks specifically designed for this type of activity.

“These new technologies are helping us assure that interoperability requirements are actually satisfied by systems designed to meet those particular requirements,” said Puett. Systems designed to be interoperable “are pretty much ready to go. They function as advertised.”

JITC’s chief challenge is how to make systems that are not designed as such to be interoperable, or at least compatible with DoD systems, according to Puett. This issue almost always arises when older, legacy equipment is being brought to the table.

The diversity of equipment brought to the joint task force by coalition armed services, civilian government agencies and non-governmental organizations represents one issue. “Another issue is that these entities typically come to the mission with commercial off-the-shelf products,” he explained. “Quite frequently, those COTS products are not designed with same set of security parameters that we require in the Department of Defense.”

Systems not designed to be interoperable take follow-on work in order to create some level of compatibility or interoperability with other systems. “Sometimes it is as simple as a procedure that operators need to undertake,” said Puett. “Sometimes it takes a workaround, like ‘swivel chair’ integration, in which users hand-code information from one system to another. It could also be hardware or software configuration items, turning switches on or off or using a particular port. In the worst case scenario, it requires significant hardware or software changes to the systems.”

The kinds of workarounds JITF recommends depend on what systems are involved in any particular situation, the mission at hand and what level of interoperability the participants are willing to live with. “Can you live with the swivel chair or do you require an application to pull data directly from another,” said Puett. “Do you require one application to understand the metadata associated with other application?”

Some coalition countries that sought to join the Afghan Mission Network, for example, brought COTS equipment that did not meet DoD security requirements. “In the first instance we told them to use the swivel chair,” said Puett. “Meanwhile, we worked with those nations’ acquisition directorates to update their systems so that can later achieve a better level of automated interoperability. This often takes the form of a software patch that can be pushed to a particular system and can take anywhere from six months to two years to be put in place.”

Humanitarian missions are often of short duration, “but they are critical operations,” said Puett, noting that sometimes a decision is made to push everything to the NIPRNet, which handles sensitive but unclassified traffic, rather than the SIPRNet, which carries classified communications. “If we’ve got to be able to talk to the Red Cross, we might be willing to make the operational decision to operate on the NIPRNet and accept some of the vulnerabilities associated with the Red Cross system. It all depends on the individual situation, the operational need, and how much time we have to deal with it.”

The DICE exercises are designed to demonstrate the interoperability capabilities of new technologies as they approach the marketplace. “Much of the emphasis has been on devices that are pushing information to the edge of the network, to the warfighter,” said Clark. “DICE provides our industry partners with the operational environment they would be expected to work including a simulated system complete with a mix of network traffic. We run testing scenarios appropriate for a given system and work with the companies to improve their systems.”

The 2010 DICE saw the introduction of a number of handheld devices seeking entry to DoD’s approved product list. In addition to the emphasis on IPv6, the 2011 tests are expected to focus on testing of requirements for tactical cellular systems that would allow the eventual introduction of smartphone-like devices to warfighters.

“Industry is pushing the leading edge of technology,” said Clark. “We hope to provide the latest products and technologies to warfighters while making sure they provide the required level of information assurance and security.”

Network standards and protocols, usually developed by industry, also promote a certain level of interoperability, added Puett. “Industry standards form the backbone of interoperability,” he said. “If you can identify ahead of time the standards that the technology needs to conform to and industry builds to those established standards, interoperability becomes relatively easy. It is not easy when you are not able to anticipate the interoperability requirements and specify the standards beforehand. Most of the standards we rely on are commercial standards specified by commercial industry through organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the IEEE.

“The Internet Protocol requires everybody who wants to operate on the Internet to meet those standards,” Puett added. “We are finding that things are becoming more interoperable on the data level and that our efforts are focused more on the application and messaging layers of the architecture.”

Packet Priority

But conformity with standards like IP does not eliminate all interoperability issues, according to Berger. One interoperability challenge that remains, even among IP networks, involves the configuration that controls how packets are routed and with what level of priority.

“Voice and video must get priority in networks, in order to avoid latency and jitter,” Berger explained. “E-mails can bounce around 15 times and still be delivered in a timely fashion. Commanders in the field need to be able to knock everyone else off a busy network if need be. Command and control communications have to get through as a top priority.”

The problem is that different networks may assign different priority values to different types of traffic, and this compromises the transmission of data as they cross from one network to another. “One network might assign video a priority value of 50 while it might be 55 on another network,” said Berger.

DISA has issued standards for the Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP) on military networks, but they have not received universal acceptance, according to Berger. The DSCP is the value attached to each IP packet on a network that specifies the service level assigned to it.

Ultra Electronics DNE has a gateway product that has been demonstrated at both DICE and the Joint User Interoperability Communications Exercise (JUICE), which is able to reconcile the data priority configurations among networks based on DISA’s DSCP standards.

The Ultra Electronics DNE gateway is a piece of hardware that sits at the connection point between networks. “The gateway looks at each packet and assigns it priority based on established policy,” said Berger. “Eventually the DISA standards will be controlling on military networks. But even then, DoD may require the use of commercial networks and those networks might not comply with the DISA standard.”

IDirect Government Technologies has also participated and continues to participate in JUICE, which will be taking place this year during June across dozens of locations worldwide. The objective is to evaluate emerging technologies in a joint task force environment. “Some interoperability issues that we have seen have been relatively mundane,” said Fuchs, “such as the interoperability between a particular modem solution and an antenna. Where things get tricky is at the network management level. Can device A talk to device B? How do you intelligently manage all of the devices that are now connected to the network?”

To answer those challenges, iDirect has introduced a product called SatManage, a suite of web-based software tools for automation, monitoring and integration of hybrid networks and networks-on-chipbased applications. “SatManage allows the network operator to understand more graphically what is happening on a satellite network,” said Fuchs.” “The biggest sticking point for network management has to do with companies changing their codes. As they improve their products and add new features, the code changes, and that has an impact on interoperability.”

The approach iDirect is taking to tackle this problem focuses on cooperative and collaborative engineering with other hardware vendors. “The ultimate goal of any network management system would be to develop a capability to click on one end-device, and then click on a second end-device, and then have the system automatically and intelligently build the equivalent of a switch virtual circuit through which all network elements, from quality of service to per-hop behaviors, would be matched,” said Fuchs. “This would encompass satellites, routers and terrestrial components of the network end to end. It is a daunting goal, but we are making great strides in that direction.” ♦

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