This Elite 6 award recognizes Project Manager Mission Command, part of the Army's Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T), for reaching the milestone of first unit equipped with Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P), which is the next-generation Blue Force Tracker.
In February, the 4th Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, become the first unit in the Army to begin field testing JBC-P. Installed mainly in vehicles, the system displays position data for friendly forces and foes. It has an interface similar to Google Earth that allows soldiers to communicate wirelessly through real-time chats, and send photos and other graphical material. It even lets soldiers draw revised attack plans directly on the screen and send them to other commanders.
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COL Michael Thurston, PM Mission Command , accepted the award.
"(JBC-P) is built on a long heritage of successful situational awareness capability that people most know as the Blue Force Tracking family of systems," Thurston said. In the recent Vanguard Focus exercise at Ft. Stewart the JBC-P system not only provided the brigade commander with position location information, it "ended up being his number one communication and command control system."
Added Thurston: "On one day, with 165 systems, they transmitted 27,000 C2 messages — predominately chat messages, reports and graphics that they used during the height of their attack."
