U.S. Second Fleet—the fleet lead in Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment 2006

CHIPS, July-Sept, 2006 by Sharon Anderson

The Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment 2006 is the sixth in a series of U.S. Air Force biennial highly focused, multinational, multi-Service military experiments. JEFX supports multi-functional exploration, spiral development rigorous assessment of initiatives in the areas of command and control, space, information management, combat forces, mobility, combat and logistics support, and homeland defense. The Main Experiment (MAINEX) executed April 18-28, 2006.

JEFX 06 is the first experiment to leverage the integration efforts of experimentation and link them directly with test and evaluation to prepare the Combined Air and Space Operations Center (CAOC) weapon system for expedited operational fielding.

The goals for this experiment are to better integrate CAOC processes, expand the use of data links, extend networks linking operational and tactical levels of execution, and improve coordination processes for collecting, fusing and disseminating information in support of homeland security and defense.

"JEFX 06 is a true experiment. It is Air Force directed," said Second Fleet science adviser, Tom Forbes. "Navy plays in JEFX to interoperate, to be interdependent with the Air Force on the same operational level. We experiment with the latest and greatest in technology. We take away lessons learned, and we make recommendations as to what to do with the 'so what' after we have finished with the experiment and the analysis work. Do we accelerate production or do we let it mature more in the laboratories and industry floors before we turn it over to the warfighters?"

The Navy portion of JEFX 06 is sponsored and led by the Naval Network Warfare Command (NETWARCOM), the operational agent for the Navy's FORCEnet program under Sea Power 21. Second Fleet is the overall fleet lead for JEFX 06.

STIMS

The Navy Warfare Development Command (NWDC) coordinates the Sea Trial component of the Sea Power 21 vision, the Navy's experimentation program. The Sea Trial Information Management System (STIMS) for concept development and experimentation, developed by the NWDC, is an interactive, secure database located on the NWDC SIPRNET Web site (nwdc.navy.smil.mil/stims). STIMS serves as the central library of initiatives, events and projects to manage Sea Trial events and related activities, as well as to support cataloging all experimentation.

After the experiment, the evaluation process includes the appropriate Fleet Collaborative Team, the operational agent, and ultimately the Sea Trial Executive Steering Group. STIMS is also the repository of analysis and assessment documents that are linked to Sea Trial experimentation proposals and initiatives.

The Experiments

Each of the Navy's four JEFX 06 initiatives has its own STIMS unique identifier, Forbes explained. The objective of STIMS No. 2042, Global Hawk Maritime Demonstrator (GHMD)/Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), is to explore the processes, procedures, systems and time lines for GHMD to support and provide maritime operational and intelligence data to maritime homeland security/maritime homeland defense (MHLS/MHLD) nodes across military components in support of specific maritime domain awareness surveillance requirements.

The GHMD system will also be used to further develop long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) concept of operations (CONOPS) and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP).

The Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) acquired two Global Hawk aircraft as part of the GHMD project administered by the Program Executive Office for Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aviation (PEO(W)) and its subordinate Program Management Office for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (PMA-263).

The Navy is committed to buying a high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned air system, according to Forbes. The Navy's plan is to use the unmanned air system as a surrogate for the procurement plan. The experiment used simulation testing due to delays in delivery of the first air system to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. One test flight of about two hours duration was conducted during the experiment; however, it was not a data collection flight for purposes of the experiment.

"The first airplane will probably show up around 2012. The Air Force had already developed Global Hawk as a part of an advanced concept technology demonstration. Navy decided if we are going to buy into a program like this, a unique, revolutionary airplane that flies for a long time (a day and a half, perhaps) at high altitudes so it is not interfering with commercial aircraft, we ought to learn how to operate it before we develop the procurement program," Forbes said.

The air system consists of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI), maritime surveillance and Inverse SAR Radar. The Global Hawk came with existing Air Force sensor software, which the Navy modified. The Air Force model was optimized for land search and surveillance. But the boundary conditions are different between land search and water search. In the land environment, the only thing that is moving is the target, but over water, the ocean surface is moving continuously, but targets do not move rapidly. ISAR records the echo signals of moving targets such as ships and displays the unique characteristics that make them different from land targets.