CHIPS Articles: SPAWARSYSCEN Atlantic Demonstrates Engineering Excellence

Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic continually demonstrates the value of exceptional in-house engineering talent, as most recently acknowledged by an Office of Naval Research (ONR) initiative. SSC Atlantic provides enterprise software integration and systems engineering technical expertise to ONR's, Code 31, command and control (C2) department. Over the last two years, SSC Atlantic has been the technical engineering lead on several joint and DON limited technology experiments (LTEs) developing, examining and assessing emerging technologies designed to bridge current capability gaps internal to and between Navy, Army, Marine Corps and Air Force programs of record in a multi-service warfighting environment.

The experiments document best patterns and practices, and expose new technologies to enable rapid, fully integrated, and cross-platform warfare capabilities. The focus is on transparency of data and information services across disparate enclaves to support force-level integrated planning and execution. For fiscal year 2012, ONR was tasked by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to integrate, evaluate and construct a blueprint for the BiDirectional Remote Video Terminal (BDRVT) using the NATO Standardization Agreement 4586 (STANAG 4586), a document conceived to standardize UAS control segment (UCS) interfaces to help enable UAV systems interoperability. SSC Atlantic followed the STANAG 4586 Control Segment (UCS) 2.1/Common Control Services (CCS) for universal UxV tasking and control services.

The ability to effectively communicate and share mission critical data in a multi-service warfighting environment will result in an increased decision making capability for the warfighter. SSC Atlantic's Duane Hawkins, a Navy civilian computer scientist, was recently recognized for his superior engineering contributions and overall leadership abilities supporting this ONR FY12 prototyping and experimentation LTE. Wayne Perras, head of prototyping and experimentation for ONR Code 31, cited Hawkins for pulling together many disparate communities into a single enterprise solution for the LTE.

"Duane has been key and essential to ONR's success in LTEs over the past two years because he has the technical skills, operational vision and social graces to address difficult architectural and technical issues and develop a clear and cost-effective plan that ONR can execute on behalf of PEO (program executive office) sponsors," Perras said.

Hawkins led an SSC Atlantic-contracted software development team to develop a Force Federation and Discovery Service (FFDS) that assists in enabling the fleet to achieve the transparency of data and services required for rapid and automated force integration in challenging anti-access, area denial-disconnected, intermittent, low bandwidth scenarios. Hawkins' engineering and acquisition expertise directly contributed to ONR's goal of providing seamless, transparent, integrated and netted C2 capabilities to the fleet in the most cost-effective manner possible.

ONR noted that Mr. Hawkins' efforts made achieving information dominance a reality despite current budgetary challenges; a reality that gives warfighters the ability to perform both informed and rapid decision making in high pressure C2 scenarios, Perras said.

Hawkins' work in support of the warfighter exemplifies the value of the ASN RDA directive for using in-house engineering talent.

Maura K. Christensen provides support to SSC Atlantic.

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