The Army is rolling out a new protocol it says will dramatically reduce the time it takes to provision vehicles for operation within the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical tactical communications network.
The recently unveiled Rapid Vehicle Provisioning System (RVPS) pares back the time it takes to provision a brigade’s approximately 70 networked vehicles from four weeks to less than five days.
"By giving the soldier back those weeks of time, he has more time to train for operational events and more time to actually use the network, instead of just playing with the network and trying to get it to work," said Patrick DeGroodt, deputy product manager for WIN-T Increment 2.
The Army unveiled RVPS in late February in a demonstration at Fort Bliss, Texas, where the system was used to install and configure all of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division's WIN-T Increment 2 equipped vehicles. Army developers plan to show off the system again at the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) 16.2 in May, with a field rollout set for January 2017.
The key to RVPS lies in automation. "Right now we've got between 45 and 70 WIN-T vehicles in a combat brigade and each of those has around 40 components: routers, switches, servers, satellite terminals. All of that needs to be configured," DeGroodt said. Manual installation is time-consuming and opens up the possibility of human error.
RVPS delivers the set-up process in automated fashion, installing all vital components simultaneously to multiple vehicles. That keeps configurations uniform and makes validation testing considerably easier to conduct.
Automatic network deployment also helps ensure security patches are implemented in a timely way. That's a serious matter, say industry observers.
"COTS [Commercial-off-the-shelf] software has holes," said Paul McCloskey, director of business development for federal markets at IT management solutions provider SolarWinds, whose tools are integrated into both WIN-T Increments 1 and 2.
"The vendors do their best to patch them, but you can just imagine what happens when you don't apply those patches, possibly for years. That can happen when you rely on manual implementation," he said.
Automation simplifies security, especially at a time when the Army is crafting its network apparatus using components from multiple vendors. "They don't want it to be complicated. They want it to be self-healing, they want it to be as bulletproof as possible despite having different operating systems, different vendors," McCloskey said.
In fact, the Army says the installation of quarterly software updates to the WIN-T Increment 2 vehicle configurations can total up to four months of labor in the course of a year, where RVPS can get the job done in a matter of days.
While speed and security are some of the driving forces behind RVPS, uniformity is of equal importance to Army network planners. Faced with the possibility that networked vehicles may be re-assigned between brigades, they have been anxious to ensure that configurations will be consistent across the tactical edge.
"It can take a long time to move a battalion or brigade around, and with [automation] it becomes much more definitive: You know what you are putting in the vehicle and you know it is going to work," DeGroodt said.
In addition to automating the network configuration process, RVPS also should help in troubleshooting. Engineers can conduct initial testing in big batches instead of rather than in one vehicle at a time. The system will likewise generate automatic notices when they systems appear deviate from the base configuration. This means problems can potentially be resolved before a unit heads into battle with an potentially undetected issue.
Even with the advances inherent in RVPS, managers of the WIN-T Increment 2 program say other hurdles remain to be overcome. In fall 2015 Col. Greg Coile, newly named project manager for the WIN-T program, told C4ISR & Networks that human issues remain.
"A big part of fielding is obviously doing the training," he said. "And it's not just training individual pieces, it's training the collective for both network and applications because, at the end of the day, we had to provide not just the gear but also the ability for a unit to take the gear and accomplish its mission."
