Page 34 - Australian Defence Magazine Nov 2018

C4I
ARCHITECTURE
emerging 5th Gen operational require- ments. Networks will be the transportation layer or grid in broader 5th Gen IME with data, information, knowledge and insight across the Joint environment being the pri- mary requirement.
The need for the future CONOPS dis- cussed previously is emerging as one of the main roadblocks to realising a 5th Gen Force in Australia. The development of such a force level concept is a complex un- dertaking which has not been achieved to date despite a number of attempts; it is a key missing piece in this 5th Gen puzzle. Much of the work effort today related to com- munications and information networks is focused on the current CONOPS and, at the technical level, on the mapping of the complete “as is” state within the ADF across IP and non-IP based systems and commu- nications infrastructure in order to develop an Integration Interoperability Framework. The present technical architecture focus on the “as is” state is commendable; however, it may remain constrained to the current state, as a technical architecture for a 5th
Gen Force cannot be started until a future operational architecture, based on a future CONOPS, is developed. This is not an en- gineering design issue, it is an operational design issue.
Moving to a future
5th Gen IME infrastructure?
The existing stove piped model of networks creates bottlenecks for the passage of essen- tial, time-critical information and will also constrain the passage of that information to a number of limited bandwidth classified pathways. Changes in technology of net- works suggests that we need to look to inno- vative industry developments and how they could support a new IME architectural ap- proach. There is an opportunity to rethink the problem by using a broader framework than that used to acquire the component parts to date. This will however require a change in thinking and therefore culture.
Emerging technologies offer numerous options to consider; today’s commercial infrastructure connects us in our everyday lives and we take for granted the bandwidth
and the ability to have video calls across the globe, yet we struggle to achieve that con- nectivity and resilience with our military systems. The technology developments discussed earlier, such as the space-based internet, should come to market in the near-to-mid term. In addition, multi-link broadband communications systems, that can create IP based relay networks across air and surface platforms, will provide resil- ience through multiple link pathways that are not satcom dependent.
The major impediment to the use of such diverse pathways by the military to date has been that of security. A technology example that could also help reframe our IME design in this case is the potential to move encryp- tion from the existing network level to the node or component, which could in turn permit the use of multiple, independent, commercial, as well as military, pathways for communications and information. This could improve the ADF’s overall capacity and operational resilience in that the use of multiple pathways would significantly com- plicate an adversary’s interdiction task. A
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34 | November 2018 | www.australiandefence.com.au