NAVAIR AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, Patuxent River, Md. – A team from NAVAIR participated in the Navy’s Trident Warrior sea trial experiment June 24 to July 7 aboard USS George Washington (CVN 73) to demonstrate a capability that will enhance the carrier strike group’s battlespace awareness in the future.
Paul Weinstein, Common Standards and Interoperability deputy program manager, and his team supported the exercise in the Western Pacific, and tested a technology that allows commanders to receive multiple feeds of real-time video, and exchange data with intelligence centers ashore.
“We understood the need to for operational commanders to have greater situational awareness in the vast, complex maritime environment,” said Weinstein. “This event allowed us to prove a new capability that will help decision makers at-sea assess vulnerability and risks during ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] missions.”
Today, ships do not have a centralized process for handling multiple video and data feeds, Weinstein said. There is limited bandwidth to collect large quantities of information. As a result, carrier strike groups have limited access to battlespace Full-Motion Video (FMV) and moving target indication data.
Weinstein’s team modified an existing Unified Video Portal (UVP) currently located at multiple intelligence agencies and integrated the system aboard the ship. A UVP is a Unified Video Dissemination System (UVDS) node which provides the DoD and intelligence community with a solution for both dissemination of ISR data and real-time viewing of FMV streams and metadata.
“During a portion of the exercise, we streamed video from a battlegroup DDG [guided missile destroyer] back to an intelligence center ashore for 48 hours with no issues, while the GW monitored the feed with its UVP server,” said Garret Hart, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) support engineer.
The UVP minimized usage of data/communication bandwidth and provided the ship with the capability to simultaneously receive multiple video feeds and transmit and receive metadata and audio to multiple classified workstations ashore.
“I was impressed with the capabilities of the system to provide streaming full motion video in near real-time from both organic strike group and non-organic sources,” said Rear Adm. John Alexander, Commander, Battle Force 7th Fleet, Task Force 70, Carrier Strike Group 5.
The Navy plans to implement this capability aboard an aircraft carrier in 2016.
Trident Warrior is an annual sea trial experiment that focuses on the experimentation of approximately 100 critical maritime technologies which focuses on evaluating how to use technologies and equipment more effectively and efficiently in order to reduce costs for the Navy.
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