
DATE: Wednesday, October 22, 1997           TAG: 9710210395

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A14  EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: FUTURE OF THE FLEET

        COMMUNICATION

        The Cold War's end, advanced gadgetry and a new breed of sailor have

        upended the assumptions that have guided the Navy for decades. Each

        Wednesday through November, The Virginian-Pilot's Military Team will

        offer up a vision of the seagoing service of the early 21st century. 

SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: ABOARD THE CAPE ST. GEORGE        LENGTH:  297 lines

GETTING THE BIG PICTURE

As he drummed his fingers on his computer console and rocked in his chair, Capt. John Harvey knew - knew right then and there - that these were no ordinary fliers blazing toward his ship from the east.

Harvey and his men in the combat center of this guided-missile cruiser had spent the last 3 1/2 hours blasting one hostile jet fighter after another with simulated surface-to-air missiles.

Back in air alley, where a dozen young headset-clad petty officers helped their captain sort out the crowded air picture on their radar screens, ``splashing'' the bad guys had been almost too easy. And now suddenly here were a couple of shifty bogeys determined to turn this exercise in the Gulf of Mexico into as real a challenge as any mock battle could be.

``Those guys are doing some serious yanking and banking,'' Harvey called out over his closed-circuit radio as the red upside-down V symbols marking the hostile aircraft edged across his desktop display. ``OK, it's face-to-face out here, but we're not going to let 'em in. . . . Put some power on these guys. .

``Birds away!'' came the call from a back corner of the combat center. The missiles had been launched.

When the kill confirmations arrived matter-of-factly a half-minute later, Harvey practically leaped from his chair. ``All right! All right!'' he yelped, jerking his fist into the air. ``Way to go!'' In the pretend world of warfighting, both of the jets were history.

In the surface Navy, few commanding officers face such intense moments. As the air-warfare coordinators of battle groups, cruisers such as the Norfolk-based Cape are always out on the edge, ready to engage in the most harried and hurried action a Navy ship will see.

It takes an icy-veined warrior to man the center combat console of an Aegis cruiser and think and act quickly enough to knock enemy fighters and missiles out of the sky when they're screaming in at 10 to 20 miles a minute.

It takes a commander with a high tolerance for ambiguity to oversee a combat team scrambling to sort good guys from bad.

It takes a boss who's constantly open to revising his battle plan as a dozen or more voices crowd his headset with staccato bursts of new information.

And there's absolutely no doubt who's to blame if one of his ship's missiles hits the wrong target.

Risky and down-to-the-gut satisfying: This is Harvey's domain.

But as the Navy sails into a new era of ``network-centric warfare,'' dramatic changes are in store for commanding officers who'll succeed him at the front lines of air conflicts.

A future C.O. of the Cape St. George may witness one of his missiles being fired by a battle group commander hundreds of miles away. Or she may simply launch a missile skyward and let an aircraft or a Marine Corps unit ashore direct it toward a target.

In the future, decisions about whom, when and how to shoot during air conflicts will be based more and more on the recommendations of a network of warship computers continuously ``talking'' among themselves over the airwaves.

The vehicle for many of the anticipated changes is a technology known as Cooperative Engagement Capability - CEC, for short.

Cooperative is the key word in this futuristic technology.

Using wireless communications to tie together powerful computers on ships, aircraft and land stations, CEC combines each of their radar views into one vast mosaic of the battlespace. Each participant can see the whole picture. Each can use it to fire, even if the targets are outside the range of its own radars.

``The implications of this thing are really staggering,'' said Harvey, whose ship is one of the first outfitted with CEC. He's had several occasions to test it, including this exercise in the gulf in early September.

``I was very skeptical. I had 24 years in the Navy, and I've seen wonder weapons come and go,'' Harvey said. ``Operating this system for me has been like the story of Saul on the road to Damascus, who was blinded by the light and became one of the apostles. Now I'm John Harvey, the CEC apostle.''

This is why: Operating individually, even Aegis cruisers with super-sophisticated radars, like the Cape, have only a partial picture of the threats around them. Their radar range is limited. Their effectiveness at tracking a target varies with the speed, direction and altitude of the aircraft or missile. They can be undermined by jamming.

Factor in the ever-increasing difficulty of sorting out friends from foes, and it can all add up to a ``gunfight at the OK Corral, where I'm shooting the other guy in the face at 20 yards,'' Harvey said.

CEC, he said, helps push the ``engagement zone'' out over the horizon. By connecting ships, aircraft or even land stations into one network - and making the vantage points of each of their radars and other sensors available to all - CEC widens and clears up the picture that each unit has of the battlespace.

It's precise knowledge distributed throughout the operating theater. All of the data - from range to bearing to elevation - is coalesced into target tracks that are of ``fire-control quality.'' So for weapons-shooting purposes, all of the information is as good as if it were collected by the firing ship.

CEC is going to have a profound effect on the way the Navy fights,'' predicted Conrad Grant, who manages CEC research at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Research Lab, which pioneered the technology. ``Finally, it allows the Navy to now truly fight as a force and not as single ships.''

Because it threatens so many Navy conventions, Grant concedes, CEC's adoption won't be painless.

As it is rolled out over the next 20 years, C.O.s of cruisers like the Cape St. George will no longer be the bravura apexes of the complex, fast-moving contest of air warfare.

In the new way of fighting, decisions now made on the pointed end of the spear will migrate to ``the network'' - either the powerful data-crunching computers themselves or somebody who's using them to monitor all the action. And warship C.O.s will increasingly be judged by how well they work in concert with others to feed the network with information upon which step-by-step tactical combat decisions can be made.

``It's a drastic change,'' said Capt. Carl E. ``Gene'' Garrett Jr., who oversees combat systems as an assistant chief of staff for the Atlantic Fleet's surface force. ``Before you kind of said, `OK, captain, go out there. If you find this guy, kill him.' Now you network all that information and someone in position to make a bigger decision will tell when you kill the guy.''

Harvey predicted CEC will create ``huge issues for accountability.''

``Let's say you're the captain of a ship and you're holding this big missile magazine and you're steaming out there in a network that has a capability for launching your missiles,'' he said.

Another ship fires those missiles, he said. ``And let's say, it's a target you can't see. And then the network says, `Whoa! We hit an Airbus, captain. You screwed up.' ''

``Now, wait a minute,'' Harvey said, noting that little attention so far has been devoted to such scenarios.

Johns Hopkins' Grant doesn't entirely agree that CEC will take away the independence of warship C.Os. Technologically, it will enable more ``centralized control,'' he acknowledged. But philosophically, the Navy hasn't yet decided how far it wants to go in that direction. ``The system will provide recommendations, and some commander, whether it's at the C.O. level or the force-commander level, will then decide whether to accept them,'' he said.

Even if it does wipe out the last vestiges of the Navy's single-ship autonomy, its advocates say the cultural shock that it might cause would quickly settle as the technology's benefits were appreciated.

``The clarity of the battlespace is something we've never seen'' before CEC, said Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowksi, the Navy's top technologist. In demonstrations for Army and Air Force leaders, he said, ``they were all awed that we could do this.''

``The ability to target over the horizon and target not necessarily based on your own direct observation . . . is something that's necessary,'' added Vincent Vitto, the president of Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass.

The chair of a recent ``information-in-warfare'' panel of the National Research Council's Naval Studies Board, Vitto said CEC fits the ``information-centric, precision weapons, stand-off'' style of warfare he envisions for the future.

CEC should be viewed as ``an enabler,'' Grant said. ``It's not a weapons system and it's not a sensor system. But it enables the improved use of both of those systems in a number of important ways.''

Most importantly, CEC enthusiasts say, the technology promises to become the nation's first effective defense against the ever-faster ballistic cruise missiles owned by countries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

That would be no small achievement. As Iraq showed with Scud launches in the Persian Gulf War, America and its allies cannot now effectively defend against such attacks.

With a string of CEC-equipped cruisers or other missile-launching platforms, Harvey said, ``in about five or 10 years, we'll be able to say, `Hey, Country X, don't you go do anything stupid because we're going to shoot these guys down when they come in.' ''

In the shorter run, he said, CEC also will make it safer for the Navy to operate in shallow-water coastal areas - where it increasingly finds itself, now that it's no longer focused on outmaneuvering the Soviet Union in the deep blue seas.

Moving into these littoral waters within range of land-based enemy weapons, Harvey noted, ``your reaction time drops way, way down.'' There are also new threats designed to work in shallower waters, such as missile-wielding fast-patrol boats.

And because coasts worldwide are major population centers, the air and sea pictures become much more crowded - complicating the job of sorting the symbols moving across radar screens into friendly, neutral or hostile categories.

In such a setting, Harvey said, it's vital to ``expand the battlespace, and that means pushing back my engagement zone.''

Equipped with CEC, Aegis cruisers are well-suited for this challenge, he said, because their powerful SPY-1 radars are unusually tunable. Standing back from a coastline, a pair of cruisers can, instead of doing a traditional 360-degree sweep, focus the full power of their radars on separate sections of the coast. CEC then would assemble their separate pictures into a detailed full view of the coastal area.

If the coastline is mountainous, bolstering the CEC network with a Marine Corps radar that's optimized to search through such terrain will add even more clarity to the picture, Harvey said.

Pioneered in the 1970s, CEC has a multi-chambered heart - with each outfitted ship, aircraft or land station contributing a piece of it.

On the Cape St. George, the CEC chamber is housed in a tiny equipment room one deck above the combat center. It's normally quiet here. But that changed one morning during the recent exercise, when a technician opened a panel of a floor-to-ceiling cabinet. Suddenly, the room was engulfed in the roar of pure computing power: 30 Motorola PowerPC microprocessors crunching along at a combined 5 billion calculations per second.

``It's something,'' said Petty Officer 2nd Class Bryan Smith, the Cape's CEC technician.

A few feet away, a computer screen showed the result of all this numbers-crunching: several series of dotted lines that looped and zig-zagged across the picture. They were the tracks of individual aircraft. As one looked closely, it was clear that each of the squiggly lines was made up of different-colored dots - a series of blue ones, followed by a purple one, then yellow or orange.

Each dot represented the return of a different radar, correlated by the CEC computing unit into one continuous track. A cesium clock imbedded into the CEC equipment synchronized the radar fixes to within microseconds of accuracy.

One of the radars, a Marine Corps system, wasn't even on the Cape St. George. But through microwave signals from its CEC computing unit to the Cape's, the Marines' radar contributed to the overall picture - and so accurately that the ship could use it to fire upon an ``enemy'' target. Add more CEC-equipped units, and the composite tracks would become more detailed and each unit's view of the battlespace would grow wider.

Before CEC, Capt. Harvey said, it was difficult, if not impossible, to sort out aircraft in close combat. On radar screens, they'd knot into a ``fur ball'' of friendlies and hostiles and come out unknowns.

``I'd be looking at this and I'd say. . . `Who's good? Who's bad? I don't know.' And now maybe the bad guys are coming after me. I can't start shooting 'til I make sure they're not good guys. So now you had to re-establish your picture.''

But with CEC continuously incorporating the best of different radar angles, Harvey can enlarge the same knot on his display screen and follow each aircraft as it dances through combat.

``Track continuity,'' he said. In an exercise earlier this year in the English Channel, ``We watched them come in, dogfight and come out. And I was shooting bad guys while they were dogfighting. . . . I knew who the bad guys were. So boom. Shoot 'em. . . . I just shot the hell out of them.''

British Royal Navy and Air Force commanders stood behind him in combat during the exercise, ``and that blew them away,'' he said. ``They were very convinced this was something that they needed to get ahold of.''

Harvey said one helpful CEC design enables it to transmit ``if-then statements'' that establish criteria for identifying aircraft as friendly or hostile. ``You transmit that ID doctrine in real time and everyone sees the same guy come up as either a friendly or a hostile at the same time. So you don't have to try to trade information between different data links and risk what we call data babble, where you lose things electronically.''

CEC doesn't solve the problem of correctly identifying aircraft in the first place, he stressed. With longer-range missiles and deeper-searching radars and other sensors, ``Our ability to kill is way beyond our ability to know who we're killing,'' Harvey said.

It is a major shortcoming, and the point of this particular exercise in the Gulf of Mexico - the largest so-called ``combat ID'' exercise involving all the services. But Harvey said CEC offers hope by at least making it easier to maintain a correct ID once it's established.

It's also a ``bullet saver.'' CEC helps identify the weapons platform with the best shot and inhibits a second shooter from firing at the same time. With missiles that can cost millions of dollars apiece, that's an important feature, Harvey said.

Where it will all lead is unclear. Only four ships - the Cape St. George, its sister cruiser Anzio, the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and the amphibious assault ship Wasp - are CEC-equipped. But assuming CEC proves itself in a series of final operational tests next year, the Navy plans to eventually expand the program to all of its battle groups. Last month, Congress agreed to spend $288 million this fiscal year on the program - enough, according to trade-press reports, to add another 11 CEC units.

CEC also has been selected for a major role in the 1998 version of the military's largest joint air-defense exercise, Roving Sands. Some see that as an indicator that it eventually will be adopted by the Army and Air Force as well. The Army has already experimented with the program, using its Patriot missile-defense system.

Johns Hopkins' Grant said the services will have to overcome a ``nightmare'' of communications-related interoperability problems to make CEC a truly joint program.

But Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said there is no better candidate for multiplying the wartime effectiveness of joint forces. He predicted that satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles eventually will be woven into the CEC network, turning it from a purely defensive system into one that enables offensive strikes against targets far inland.

Grant said researchers ``have overcome the greatest technological hurdles.

``Our major hurdles at this point are . . . getting the cost down so that it is affordable in large numbers,'' he said, ``and making changes to each of the sensors and weapons aboard combat systems'' to make the most of CEC. ``We are currently striving to come up with cheaper and better ways to do that, too.''

In the long run, CEC advocates say it may actually save money. Along with other programs aimed at more effectively linking battle units, they say it may enable the Navy to sail with fewer ships.

CEC is one way the Navy is responding to the same imperative driving corporate America, Harvey said: Quickly distribute vital information to everybody who needs to know. ``It doesn't matter whether you're running a railroad or a battle group,'' he said.

In his case, the consequence of delay just happens to be life-threatening. ``There may be no chance to re-engage,'' he said, ``if we don't get it right the first time.'' MEMO: Staff Writer Dale Eisman contributed to this report.

Next week: Coping with the Navy's workload and tempo. ILLUSTRATION: D. KEVIN ELLIOTT

The Virginian-Pilot

Capt. John Harvey...

COOPERATIVE ENGAGEMENT CAPABILITY

SOURCE: U.S. Navy

JOHN EARLE

The Virginian-Pilot

[For a copy of the chart, see microfilm for this date.] KEYWORDS: SERIES MILITARY