"Give us the requirement, not the definition," said Rick Lober, vice president and general manager, Defense & Intelligence Systems, for Hughes, an EchoStar company.
Moderated by Eron Miller, DISA's Services Division chief, COMSATCOM Center, Network Services, the four-person panel discussed the positives of a system-level approach drawing on commercial innovations to promote flexibility for the military.
Mobility needs to be seen as more than communications on the move or airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, said Rebecca Cowen-Hirsch, Inmarsat Inc.'s senior vice president of Government Policy and Strategy. It should be, in a word, "ubiquity," she said, and the way to achieve that "anytime, anyplace, anyway" connectivity is through compact convergence devices that can leverage both commercial tool sets and milcom bands.
Jim Chambers, vice president of engineering at XTAR, highlighted the potential of multiband terminals when asked how to deal with legacy Ku-band gear in the field while getting Ka-band (as well as X-band) task orders into the system. Lober reinforced the value of a managed-services model that included hardware upgrades/software-defined components and waveform development in order to focus on the top-level requirements and address issues of interoperability. "Buy megabits, not megahertz," he said.
A customer wants to communicate regardless of band, and the best solution is cost-effective and differentiates between needs (such as lighter, longer lasting and above all secure equipment) and wants, stressed Shaum Mittal, DISA's chief of the COMSATCOM Technical Support Branch.
Cowen-Hirsch agreed that integrators can't address all similar questions with one answer. Managed services could put some challenges of reinforcing and refining network management on commercial industry, which could result in an integrated architecture of enriched capabilities. The intellectual capital investment, redefining acquisition methodologies and partnerships could result in needed elasticity for overall system adaptability, even in a budget-constrained environment, she said.
