Gary Martin was appointed the program executive officer for Army PEO Command Control Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T) in June, and he now leads the approximately 1,600 soldiers and civilians responsible for the Army's tactical network, radios and satellite communications. He was previously deputy to the commanding general at Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM), and executive director to the commanding general of the Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM).

He spoke to C4ISR & Networks Editor Barry Rosenberg about 2016 plans for fielding radios, satellite communications and the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T), as well as the PEO's new strategy for buying radios.

C4ISRNET: Simplification of network systems has been a priority of the PEO for the last couple years. Where are you in that effort today?

GARY MARTIN: Some of that has occurred, particularly the SNE [Soldier Network Extension] on WIN-T. Soldiers used to go to about 15 menus to try to configure one of these systems. We have already gone to the one-button turn-on to initialize the [system]. That is done. It is deployed.

All of this [technology] requires IP addresses and frequency allocations for the radios. There is just a tremendous amount of data that has to be put into the system to get them ready to come online. With the advent of mobile wireless network radio, a lot of the configuration challenges are in that space. So we are working on a number of solutions now to do over-the-air programming of these radios so you do not have to go back and touch them if you have to take a battalion and align it to another [brigade combat team]. It needs new spectrum allocation, new subnet, new IP addresses. So all of that now is currently in the works of being automated. It is not deployed yet, but will be tested next year.

Another part is our NetOps. Today, we have a specific network operations capability that comes with WIN-T. It is our backbone network, so that is the largest part of our NetOps solution, but we have also [NetOps for] the tactical radio space. That was managed on the West Coast by the Navy under the JTRS [Joint Tactical Radio System] program office until about a year ago. That is all being integrated here at [Aberdeen Proving Ground]. It was realigned under WIN-T Increment 3, which is where our NetOps solution resides, so our S6 folks in the tactical space don't have to manage multiple, different NetOps solutions. That will be happening over the next year and a half to two years.

C4ISRNET:  Let's talk about fielding efforts in the coming year for WIN-T Increment 2, the on-the-move portion of the program, as well as tactical radios, satcom and other programs in your portfolio.

MARTIN: We have fielding yet to do. WIN-T Inc 2 just went through its full rate production decision this last summer. Just less than 20 percent of the Army has been fielded, so we'll be fielding WIN-T Inc 2 for quite some time.

The family of radios is now starting to come out of testing. We have LRIP [low-rate initial production contracts] for both the Rifleman radio and the Manpack that are being fielded today. The Rifleman is currently under customer testing through about April of next year, then it will go through it's [initial operational test and evaluation] and late next year we will start fielding.

The Manpack procurement is underway. We should get proposals in [early October]. We will award after the new year and then it will go through a sequence of testing. Late next year we will be looking to get it into operational testing.

The maneuver radio [the Mid-Tier Networking Vehicular Radio] is currently through technical testing. We had a [limited user test] last year so we have got that radio coming out and ready for operational tests.

All of our tactical radios, which really deliver the entire tactical data capability down to battalion and below, are all going to be fielded over the next two years.

We are going to start a new program next year, the T2C2 [Transportable Tactical Command Communications]. It is essentially a transportable satcom terminal, two different variants. [Similar] to some of the [commercial-off-the-shelf] products that we bought for Afghanistan and Iraq, the difference here is these will be able to operate over military satellite systems and also integrate into the WIN-T network. The T2C2 will be awarded next year.

[In addition], EMC2, the Enroute Mission Command and Control program, essentially allows our global response force to maintain situational awareness while they are deploying across the world. It is installed inside a C17 aircraft. Initial LRIPs are currently in place. We have a couple aircraft equipped, and it will continue going through testing and fielding over the next couple of years. That is actually proven very well in testing today, with a lot of great response from that.

[And there's also] JBC-P [Joint Battle Command-Platform], the follow on to [Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below] and Joint Capability Release. We fielded the 3rd Infantry Division this past spring and summer. It just went through a final reassessment of a couple of things that we were trying to close out. Then we will start fielding like gangbusters next year. We will be moving out rather quickly for JBC-P.

C4ISRNET:  What is the strategic direction for the PEO as you go forward?

MARTIN: Certainly to continue to deploy WIN-T Inc 2 because what we have not deployed to date is the mobile part of the network. Much of what we had in Afghanistan was support to tactical operations centers. WIN-T Inc 1 is comms at the halt. The rest of the network, the radios, WIN-T Inc 2, the early entry ops capability with the T2C2, the Enroute Mission Command Control, this is all really the mobile command-and-control on-the-move capability. That is coming. That will consume a significant part of what we do going forward.

On the Mission Command side, we have the common operating environment [COE]. JBC-P is the first foray into a product that is COE compliant. That is the mobile platform version of that. The Command Post Computing Environment, which is really going to be the major enhancement to the command post, is currently under development. We are looking at the fiscal year '19 time frame for fielding that capability. That is really going to bring ops and intel to converge into the [tactical operation center].

C4ISRNET: The PEO's strategy for acquiring radios has evolved in the last year, for example, transitioning to more of a nondevelopmental item strategy. Explain the thinking to me about how you are acquiring radios now versus how it was done a year ago.

MARTIN: The biggest difference is about two-plus years ago, the Army issued a development contract and typically a vendor won the development. We went through development with the intent of at some point in time reopening competition.

The model we have now really is leveraging the fact that we have got a number of companies in the radio marketplace who — even though they have not won a particular contract — continue to invest in their own [internal research and development]. In some cases, because they are not under a fixed contract with the government, they are able to accelerate innovation into the radio much quicker than we are.

The approach that we have taken now is to try to keep competition throughout the period of time that we are buying the procurement, and so we have multiple vendors on most of the buys that we get today. The Rifleman radio has two vendors. For the Manpack, we expect there will be two or more vendors.

We are really looking to industry to bring the best that they can. If you look at the original radio requirements for JTRS and look at what we are buying now, we are looking at much more incremental capabilities, rather than trying to buy everything that we could possibly need under the initial buy.

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