Fixed Wireless Technology

Wireless in Iraq

A DoD contractor told Wi-Fi Planet Conference and Expo attendees what it's like and what it takes to work in Iraq and participate in force transformation.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 3, 2005]

Michael Helfrich, CEO and founder of Boxford, Mass.-based Blueforce Development, has a background in collaboration software, having been at Groove before leaving to found his own company.

He sees the problems of the modern military as essentially about command and control, where his company comes in. "It's about adapting to a stochastic, asymmetric threat." Stochastic means difficult to forecast or partially random so a stochastic threat is not completely illogical—it's just difficult to prepare for.

If you don't know where the threat will strike beforehand, you have to respond quickly to what information you have.

"The modern, tactical military, is EDGE based," says Helfrich.

The center, the Pentagon, has blade servers and all the latest technology.

The headquarters, the near edge, has laptops.

The far edge, the individual on a field mission, has only a portable device.

The extreme edge consists of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, a.k.a. "eyes in the sky") and cameras—no people—and collects information. But that information has generally gone back to the Pentagon. In order to access real time information, troops in the field need reliable, powerful, wireless broadband. Often, they don't have it.

Objective Peach
He refers to the situation of Lt. Earnest "Rock" Marcone, as described in the November, 2004 MIT Technology Review (a five page article called How Technology Failed in Iraq which coincidentally notes that Blue Force tech equipment was just about the only thing that worked during the rapid advance).

"'Next to the fall of Baghdad,' says Marcone, 'that bridge was the most important piece of terrain in the theater, and no one can tell me whats defending it. Not how many troops, what units, what tanks, anything. There is zero information getting to me. Someone may have known above me, but the information didn't get to me on the ground.' Marcone's men were ambushed repeatedly on the approach to the bridge."

Then Marcone's situation got worse. He ran right into three Iraqi brigades (the entire U.S. presence in Iraq is about 16 brigades). He could see a USAF UAV fly by, but could not access the information it was gathering.

No CNN in the palace
"I lived in the Hussein presidential palace as an adviser to Bremmer," says Helfrich. "There's bandwidth at the last mile but no connectivity. We had 1 Gbps within the palace, but the CNN.com page would take 30 seconds to paint because it went over three satellite hops at 7200 ms latency each."

Technology needs to adapt. "You don't know how long a battle will last."

It has to be portable. "Equip the man, don't man the equipment. You cannot carry a laptop into battle. You need miniaturization and low power consumption."

You need a consistent set of standards, which were enumerated on April 14, 2004 in DoD Directive 8100.2 which "promotes joint interoperability using open standards throughout the Department of Defense for commercial wireless services, devices, and technological implementations."

Geeks on the lava field
He describes a test of these standards conducted during July 17 through 22, 2004 on Kona, Hawaii. "We used commercial, off the shelf hardware and software. We dropped 43 geeks onto a lava field and saw how fast they could set up an imaginary disaster response network. 40 organizations from 12 nations participated, including the Red Crescent."

Among various tests, the group tested prefab shelter types in 110 degree heat.

They deployed a mobile base station. There was an Exchange server and IM in the truck. The island had four bases, and the truck made a continuous circuit, delivering and picking up e-mail and IM.

Other tests included using a cantenna to download real time video from a fixed wing Cessna aircraft. The test achieved 15 fps at 700 feet, but was slower as the aircraft went higher.

For convoy security in Iraq, Blue Force is developing and improving a system that delivers a Wi-Fi field that moves with the convoy and gives each driver access to real time video from the front and rear of the convoy, so that if the convoy is attacked, everybody knows what's going on.

Military applications
Helfrich says his company's future involves higher level military applications. Affinity analysis could check to see whether the pilot of a plane is near it, and to deliver a camp's inventory to the central supply officer, who could use the information to determine what supplies the camp needs.

That would be quite an improvement over the tech situation of the U.S. ground forces during the capture of Baghdad in 2003.

—End