The Navy's TacMobile program, managed out of PMW 750 and supporting the Maritime Patrol Reconnaissance Force, is playing an outsize role in the Persian Gulf. The Navy's 5th Fleet, which is based out of Bahrain and responsible for patrolling the Middle East, is currently without a carrier, leaving a gap in coverage. This is where TacMobile comes in, according to its program executive officer, Capt. Andy Gibbons.
TacMobile "is the entire ground support facility capability for the Maritime Patrol Reconnaissance Force – P-3s [Orion], P-8s [Poseidon], soon to be [MQ-4C] Triton," Gibbons, who also serves as the program manager for carrier and integration, said Dec. 12 at the C5ISR Summit in Charleston, South Carolina.
"What does that mean to you? We're not just C4I infrastructure; we're the actual mission planning and post-flight dissemination analysis capability for an expeditionary P-8, P-3, Triton. We're all around the world and we're doing that today to ensure that MPRF is successful."
TacMobile provides these aircraft with persistent operational and tactical C4I infrastructure, battle management, weapons systems interfaces, tactical decision aids, post-mission ISR processing, exploitation and dissemination, anti-submarine warfare acoustic analysis, and mission reconstruct. Gibbons said that while the P-8, the Navy's newest manned maritime surveillance aircraft, is a "fantastic aircraft," with a "tremendous capability," without TacMobile "it's a 21-seat bus."
Gibbons described that on a recent trip to the 5th Fleet, "everyone's talking about the fact that we have a gap in carrier presence in the Persian Gulf … we don't have a carrier out there," he said. As C4ISRNET's sister publication Navy Times reported earlier this month, the carrier Eisenhower and its strike group left the Gulf, leaving "the troubled region without a carrier, which has been a happening more often as the Navy fights to reign in its deployment lengths, which have dropped from 9 to 10 months to about 8 months.
This leaves allies taking greater control in the region, Gibbons said. "What does [Vice Adm
.
Kevin "Kid" Donegan, commander of 5
Fleet] get to utilize to offset the fact that he doesn’t have a carrier in 5
Fleet?" Gibbons asked the audience full of mainly defense contractors. "He’s using the MPRF. He’s using P-3s and P-8s to fly all over the [area of responsibility] to sprint from place to place to place." From Bahrain to Djibouti to the Red Sea to everything that’s going on there, "to assure he has the situational awareness on the command and control to manage that AOR," Gibbons continued.
"We’re not building carriers fast enough, they’re taking too long to build … so we’re gapping coverage in 5
Fleet. And now 5
Fleet’s being covered now by this program called TacMobile and P-8," Gibbons said, adding, "I bring that to your attention because we need your help. We need your help to continue to be successful."
The challenge with TacMobile, he said, is that it comes with specific software requirements that associate with acoustic analysis, flight insertion data and a lot of specific technical software challenges that require contractor support.
"Because this is a kind of hard skill set to keep refreshed, it’s not very common, so we’re really leveraging industry to make sure we’re successful," he said.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
