Three years ago, the Army embarked on a process of Network Integration Evaluations that were designed to test new systems in the hands of soldiers before those technologies made their way into live-fire battlefields. But the Army is making changes to the process to include more of an emphasis on laboratory testing, and it’s also tempered its hopes that commercial technologies can fill the gaps in its current capabilities.

In many ways, the NIE process met its initial objectives. Instead of forcing soldiers to figure out how to make different parts of the tactical network work together while they were under fire in Afghanistan, much of that trial-and-error work was handed ahead of time by a fully-trained brigade combat team at Fort Bliss, Texas.

But as the NIE process has evolved, officials say they’ve come to realize they were asking too much from the process itself. Even though soldiers were safe from the distractions of enemy fire, integrating a series of semi-mature technologies into a cohesive set of capabilities proved tough to pull off in the middle of the desert, even if it was in the U.S. southwest instead of central Asia.

“We’ve gotten smarter about this,” Maj. Gen. Dan Hughes, the Army’s program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical (PEO-C3T) said in an interview with Federal News Radio. “I was there in the beginning, and we would take as many folks as we could down to Fort Bliss, let them jump in a vehicle and try to work the integration problem right there. And of course, as soon as we got to the field, some cable would go missing or something else would go wrong.”

Hughes said the Army has moved toward a more tightly-controlled process for determining which systems make the cut for the NIE from now on.

“What we have right now is a very rigid process on how we bring systems into the NIE. Now, we can bring the entire tactical network up in the lab at [Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland], which is something we had planned three years ago. We can see what the issues are there in the lab before I bring them down to Bliss so that I’m not wasting soldiers’ time.”

Too many unpleasant surprises

Hughes said the strategy seems to be delivering results so far. Since the Army now is testing out the components of the network it wants to try during NIEs ahead of time in laboratory settings, it’s been able to significantly reduce the number of unpleasant surprises soldiers encounter at the start of the twice-a-year exercises in Texas and New Mexico.

Hughes said during one recent NIE, the Army never actually managed to get the tactical network up-and-running and fully in control of the brigade that was supposed to run it through its paces. Things are dramatically different during the NIE that’s underway right now, he said.

“The soldiers brought the network up two days early,” he said. “Under the [Warfighter Information Network-Tactical Increment 2] follow-on test and evaluation, that network has been pretty solid for the past several weeks. We have gotten smarter because we brought in a rigorous configuration management process. No one can go in and randomly change a parameter or piece of software without going through the process. It still happens every once in a while, but we find it and we fix it and move on. Once you do that, you also have a lot more ability to secure the network.”

The Army also is exploring new ways to test systems long before they turn into a piece of hardware or software that’s ready to field — and even before they’re ready for testing in a laboratory.

The service has been using modeling and simulation capabilities for a long time, but a new program, called MODESTA (Modeling, Emulation, Simulation Tool for Analysis), aims to create a single, centralized virtualized environment that can test new tactical networking components in software simulators.

Answering questions before they’re asked

The hope is that MODESTA will let the Army test its own concepts against theoretical environments and ask questions long before the decision points that turn those ideas into expensive products. For example: Will the system continue to work once temperatures fall below a certain level? Will a radio that seems to work just fine in a remote desert also do the job in a dense, urban environment?

“Some of the existing modeling and simulation capabilities don’t go far enough to answer the networking questions you have to deal with in a complex system of systems,” said Noah Weston, who leads the modeling and simulation division at the Army’s Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center

(CERDEC). “The existing tools can’t scale up to what you need to do if you want to analyze the entire tactical network, so you’re looking at a number of stovepiped processes. If you want to analyze, let’s say, the routing between the network that makes up a company and a battalion and do it with high fidelity, you would have to use at least two simulation tools. It requires a lot of redundant effort.”

The Army expects MODESTA to reach initial operating capability by the end of this calendar year. A fully integrated environment that can simulate the Army’s entire tactical network should be operational by the end of 2015.

And Weston said the interplay between the NIE process and what happens in the Army’s labs and in its simulators should be a two-way process. Simulators, by definition, use a computer’s best guesses about what will happen in the real world. And while MODESTA’s computer models might be able to predict a lot of details about how the Army’s systems will perform, the modeling system itself also needs feedback from the real world to improve its ability to simulate various scenarios in cyberspace.

“There should be a constant feedback loop where you’re basically verifying the results you got from the lab or the simulation while you’re in the field,” Weston said. “As you go from simulation to the lab to the field, as improvements are made, we should be a proving ground for quick changes. We’re pushing for the highest- fidelity models we can get. That means a shared-code model so that we’re using the same software code that’s running on, for example, a hardware radio. But we’re using it in a virtualized, simulated environment, so you’re getting most of the characteristics that you would get to see in the live hardware. There’s very little that has to be hacked. Most of it is the actual code.”

The NIE process also is undergoing some fundamental changes.

Earlier NIEs led to the full fielding of major components of the Army’s tactical network, called Capability Set 13. Soldiers tested that set of technologies and integrated them during the NIE process, but Hughes said the process still led to sub-optimal results.

NIE is taking a new focus in 2015

Asked to give Capability Set 13 a letter grade, Hughes said he’d assign it a “C.” The Army did a fairly good job of making sure its systems were interoperable, but it also went overboard — loading up its tactical vehicles with more servers, switches and computer screens than a commander can actually be expected to make use of during a mission.

“I shoved I lot of stuff in that vehicle,” Hughes said. “There’s so much gear that a commander is hunched over and crammed in there. We need to understand what a commander really needs to see, so we’re looking at the human engineering piece of this. A brigade commander doesn’t need to be sitting there as the tactical commander of the vehicle and trying to log into several different systems. That’s not what he’s there to do. He’s trying to execute the fight.”

In future NIEs, the Army will undertake a significant shift in its focus: The entire endeavor began as an effort to blend commercial innovation with government- guided programs of record, but the Army now says its NIEs, beginning with next year’s cycle, will focus entirely on integrating established systems.

Commercial technologies, officials say, will be examined through a separate, and so far, mostly unexplained process: the “Army Warfighter Assessment.” Beginning in 2016, the NIE process will pivot entirely toward integrating the Army’s existing programs into its tactical network and will stop soliciting new ideas from commercial providers, according to a brief fact sheet the service published on Tuesday.

“When I was running the NIE, what I was looking for was the idea that one [commercial] device could solve a capability gap and we’d buy 10,000 of them,” Hughes said. “We haven’t seen that. We’ve seen evolutionary changes. One of the things we have to be better at is finding those technologies and bringing them forward. I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault, it just hasn’t shown up and been very obvious to us at an NIE.”

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