• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

To improve Joint Interoperability, Navy restructures its CEC Program

NAVSEA News Wire

Release Date: 1/30/2004

By Naval Sea Systems Command Public Affairs

WASHINGTON, DC -- As part of the ongoing Navy-wide efforts aimed at improving joint interoperability, the Navy's acquisition strategy for the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) Program has recently been revised.

The decision to revise the CEC strategy follows a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) signed in August by Rear Admiral, Tom Bush, USN, Program Executive Officer for Integrated Warfare Systems (PEOIWS), and Brigadier General John Maluda, USAF, the Single Integrated Air Picture System Engineer (SIAP SE).

The MoA solidified Navy and Air Force plans to collaborate on creating Joint Tactical Battle Management Command and Controlling (BMC2) functionality. Considered as critical in solving current, and preventing future, interoperability problems, BMC2 is considered to be the most significant key in enabling single integrated air pictures across all of the Joint forces. In short, if fully implemented, commanders, pilots, and even infantrymen will share a single tactical picture, showing friendly and enemy units on land, sea, and in the air.

As the first programs to be affected by these joint efforts, CEC's Block 2 upgrade had originally been planned to provide the single Track Management function for the Navy's Open Architecture (OA) program. However, given the rapidly maturing SIAP, PEO-IWS determined it would not field a new CEC variant that would possibly conflict with SIAP's joint solution. "We need to deliver joint capabilities to our warfighters," according to Rear Adm. Bush. "If we are ever going to minimize the number of blue-on-blue engagements in a joint environment, we have to build our systems with joint capability. CEC is my first program out of the blocks and canceling the planned Block 2 competition is the right thing to do to further enable these goals."

Rear Adm. Bush has stated that overcoming traditional acquisition and development "stovepipes," both in a system development sense and a service-unique warfare systems sense, through conformance to Open Architecture standards, is an absolute must for the future of the United States Navy. "We must solve the combat ID (identification) problem in the U.S. Armed Forces," emphasized Bush. "We will go a long way toward that vital objective by building a common track management application with the SIAP SE Task Force, and ensure the product we build is in conformance with OA standards and protocols. If we do that, we will have done more for the warfighter than any other single initiative over the past decade."

In echoing Rear Adm. Bush's remarks, Brig. Gen. Maluda commented, "By focusing on the correctness of the data and making sure the data is available to all who need it, and the data is consistently processed, we can confidently engage on our terms."