GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Revolutionizing warfare

BY KRIS HUNDLEY

ST. PETERSBURG - Over the past decade, about $1-billion has been quietly funneled into the Raytheon Systems Co. facility here and its manufacturing plant in Largo. The purpose: developing a missile defense system for the U.S. Navy's fleets.

Now operational and being deployed in the Middle East, the high-tech communications network known as CEC, for Cooperative Engagement Capability, has attracted interest from other branches of the military, as well as from international allies. It also has possible applications for ensuring homeland security. The rollout and continued development of CEC could be a major windfall for Raytheon, the nation's third-largest defense contractor. And in Pinellas County, it could mean an additional $2-billion in design and production contracts for Raytheon's two local operations over the next 10 years.

The project has grown with little public awareness beyond the gates of the defense contractor's facilities near Tyrone Square Mall and at the Young-Rainey STAR Center in Largo. Now, Raytheon officials are willing to talk about nonclassified aspects of the system, which is one of the biggest projects ever run by the St. Petersburg location.

CEC pulls together radar data from every ship in a fleet and every plane overhead to create a comprehensive picture of the surrounding airspace. Raytheon has been the prime contractor on the project, which has received about $3-billion in total funding. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore has been a partner in the project.

Mitchell R. Lee, who heads the CEC effort at Raytheon in St. Petersburg, remembers the first time he saw the system in operation, during an early trial in 2000 off the coast of Virginia.

"We were able to see the entire Eastern seaboard from Maine to Atlanta to Cincinnati," Lee said of the test, which involved combining data from nearly a dozen land, sea and air-based radars. "We could see over 1,100 objects in the air simultaneously - every military, private and commercial plane that happened to be up there. And we were the only ones who could see it all."

Seeing it all - especially enemy missiles - is the holy grail for naval commanders, whose ships have long been floating targets for enemy fire. Though ships are equipped with radar, those images can be dropped, jammed and disrupted by bad weather. They are also limited to line of sight. A Navy plane overhead or neighboring ship can see more, but in the past communication between battlefield components was by voice or teletype only.

John Pike, director of the independent defense policy group GlobalSecurity.org, said the Navy was historically at a disadvantage when it came to coordinating ships in a fleet.

"Ship's radios didn't have the sort of wideband connectivity the Army and Air Force were using," Pike said. "They were out there waving flags and flashing searchlights. It wasn't until the early 1990s that they started having satellite communications small enough to put on ships. Then the Navy got really focused on using that connectivity to strap the battle group together."

Using high-speed wireless transmissions, CEC collects and integrates data from dozens of different radars into a single comprehensive image that appears on each participant's radar screen within thousandths of a second.

CEC's designers say their system might have helped prevent incidents like the deadly attack on the USS Stark in 1987. In that case, an Iraqi jet fired two Exocet sea-skimming missiles at the Navy frigate, which was on duty in the Persian Gulf. The ship's radar failed to detect the missiles, which were spotted by a sailor lookout on the ship only seconds before they struck. Thirty-seven sailors died.

CEC will be especially important against emerging threats, said Jack Spencer, defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"What the military achieves through CEC is full battlefield awareness," he said. "It's a revolutionary way of conducting warfare that assures the Navy informational superiority for years to come."

Spencer said CEC technology has the potential to transform the Navy.

"It allows a few ships to do more work by utilizing the digital world we've all become familiar with for target acquisition and defense," he said. "I would argue that CEC is critical to the future success of the Navy."

Early development of the CEC system began nearly a decade before the Stark incident, when it became clear that sophisticated missile technology was capable of evading a ship's traditional radar defense system.

Of special concern were low-flying cruise missiles, which can travel at variable speeds, be launched from sea, land or air and are highly maneuverable during flight. Such missiles also often have the ability to jam a ship's radar so that it cannot detect the weapon's approach. Cruise missiles are even hard to detect by eye: Seen head-on, they are no bigger than a basketball.

As missile technology has improved, so has proliferation of the weapons. Today, more than 70 countries, including Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and China, have cruise missiles in their arsenals.

Though radar systems may pick up traces of an incoming missile, a single sensor is often unable to maintain a continuous track of the missile's path. That leaves radar operators unsure how many threats are in the area and exactly where they're coming from.

At Raytheon's offices in the Tyrone area, about 425 employees have spent the past 10 years tackling the shortcomings of traditional radar defense systems.

"We have some of the brightest and most advanced engineers in the world working on this," Lee said. In addition to mechanical and electrical engineers, the team includes mathematicians, network programmers and software developers. Together they have designed a system using sophisticated algorithms and processing techniques to create a single accurate image based on thousands of bits of data.

In the CEC system, which is manufactured at Raytheon's plant in Largo, radar data is transmitted via antenna to a supercomputer aboard each vessel and aircraft. Within subseconds, the fused data zips back through the system, giving each party identical information.

"With CEC's use of data from overlapping sensors, all the dots are connected," Lee said. "Everybody has an identical view of the threat, though a human is always in the loop making the decision about whether to fire."

With advanced and accurate warning about a threat, Navy commanders also have the luxury of taking second shots at an enemy missile should the first response miss. "CEC doubles the engagement zone," Lee said. "Space is time, which is safety. This is about saving sailors' and soldiers' lives."

CEC was tested by the Navy in February and March 2001 off the coasts of Puerto Rico and Virginia. Lee was present at both evaluations.

"We stood in front of the radar screen, watching the two tracks," he said of the radar images from a drone missile and the ship's interceptorweapon. "Talk about suspense. When they intersected, then disappeared, everybody cheered."

Rear Admiral Kate Paige, of the Navy's Program Executive Office, was also at test sessions. "We confirmed that CEC enables our ships to put ordnance on target under conditions that would otherwise be impossible," she said in a Defense Department news release from March 2001. "The challenges we threw against CEC and the combat system were tremendous and again, they proved themselves to be an awesome combination. I'm proud of the entire government/industry team."

After successfully completing additional evaluation in mid 2001, this time with no Raytheon representatives present, CEC was declared operational. Today, 35 CEC systems are being used by the Navy, 67 are in production and another 211 systems will be ordered for full deployment.

The systems are mounted on 17 ships, eight aircraft, nine land-based sites and even one military Humvee.

The USS John F. Kennedy "just returned from duty in the Middle East with glowing reports"about CEC, said Lee, who participated in an evaluation of the ship's new system while the massive aircraft carrier was underway. "The Navy is getting more and more confident. We've had captains say that before CEC, when they looked at a radar picture, they didn't trust what they were looking at. Now they can run a battle from a CEC picture."

Though Lee confirmed CEC has been deployed in the Middle East, he said to his knowledge all its interceptions have been in test scenarios, not against enemy fire.

Based on the Navy's experience with CEC, the Army has purchased two systems, installing them on Patriot missile batteries.

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior analyst at Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said once CEC is tested by the Navy, it should be rolled out to the other armed services.

"Networking in the civil or military world is top priority," he said. "It's not enough for the Navy to talk to the Navy; there should be interoperability so all branches of the military share information more quickly, in real time."

Lee said he is hopeful CEC will be adopted by the Army and Air Force. Foreign military are interested as well. "We've already sold systems to the United Kingdom," he said. "And there has been interest from Japan, Canada, Australia, Spain and Italy."

The CEC system might also be expanded to work with the Federal Aviation Administration for domestic defense. Lee said a mobile CEC system could be deployed if there were intelligence reports of possible enemy action against targets such as U.S. airports, water supplies or military bases. "There are a lot of possible targets," he said, "But right now the activity is not well-coordinated."

Protection doesn't come cheap. The first CEC systems, which are manufactured by a team of about 50 workers in Largo, cost $5-million to $6-million each and take 18 months to build.

The most complex and expensive part is the system's antenna, a circular steel composite structure about 4 feet in diameter. Mounted on the belly of a plane or the mast of a ship, it contains 120 delicate transceivers which transmit and receive information to the data processing terminal. The system's computer, filled with racks of more than 80 circuit cards, is housed in a sturdy gray metal case to withstand the moisture, salt and turbulence aboard a ship.

Lee said the challenge now is to build the CEC systems to be lighter, smaller and less expensive. "We've been sole source contractor on the initial orders," he said. "We expect there will be competition in the future."

O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who is author of How to Be a Cheap Hawk, said he understands the need to fund CEC.

"I don't want to give such absolute support to CEC that it trumps out every other Navy priority, but frankly it's necessary now," he said. "But there will come a time when it's no longer an intelligent use of military dollars."

Spencer, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the cost of the CEC system should be put into perspective.

"It's an overall bargain," he said, "given what it ensures."

Copyright 2002 Times Publishing Company