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Technology companies enable our military's net-centric vision through smaller, faster, stronger computers.
Computers are integral to the U.S. Department of Defense's vision of a network-centric battlefield. They must be high-performance, economical, in many cases portable, and above all else, rugged. Rugged computing is essential to the goals that the military is trying to achieve on the battlefield.
"Warfare is changing, and information is now the key weapon," says Tony Franklin, military, aerospace, and government segment manager at the Intel Corp. Embedded and Communications Group in Chandler, Ariz. "Everything over IP (Internet Protocol) is the goal, to get the right information to the right person at the right time, so they can make the right decisions."
COTS in command
"The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the military, and specifically the U.S. Army are starting to use soldier-centric systems," explains Franklin. "In the past, the Air Force would have had far more advanced electronic equipment than the foot soldier on the ground; that's not the case anymore, and it's going to be even less so the case moving forward."
A typical soldier on the battlefield, if fully loaded, carries upwards of 120 pounds of gear. Given the weight of this load, the soldier cannot accommodate three different computers with three different security systems-such as a tablet computer, ruggedized laptop, and a manpack strapped to his back-and try to survive at the same time, Franklin acknowledges. "They need powerful compute platforms that will allow them to be on the move and on the go-that sounds a lot like what commercial customers want, and what mobile Internet devices are having to achieve to meet the needs of consumers today." It is littie wonder, then, that military organizations and defense firms are leveraging commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies to meet soldier-centric and network-centric objectives.
"Many of the objectives that the Army, the DOD, and others have are really the same type of objectives and workloads of the commercial world-just usually in different packages, and more secure and ruggedized," Franklin continues. "In the commercial world, people need plug-and-play; in the military environment, it's plug-and-fight. On the commercial side, it's performance per watt; in military terms, it's performance per SWAP (size, weight, and power)."
DOD officials want to use as much...