On the Tactical Network Problem

Yesterday, I shared an article about data and challenged readers to first think about the network necessary to move that data on the battlefield. The response to a comment deserves its own post, as it gets beneath the surface and touches the real underlying issue: Do you need a radio, or do you need a network?

Nearly every unit wearing green has a networking problem today that is misdignosed as a communications/radio problem of yesterday. It's why the Army is working overtime on their Network Modernization program.

There is a lot of talk of data streams to the edge. Just as the saying goes that no military ops plan survives first contact, no data stream survives the same first contact without a robust high-throughput network that connects the source to the destination. No reliable network, no stream, no data, no dice.

It's not a matter of the chicken or the egg. The Network must come first.

There are other options out there. Some have pretty good throughput, but the dirtly little secret is that they can't handle more than a dozen or so of their own radios in a single RF bubble before their internal overhead completely consumes their own total throughput. The customer is left with a network that won't trasnport their data, whether it's audio or anything else.

Some have decent scalability to accomodate more radios on the Network, but their throughput starts in the miniscule range and it only gets worse from there. The underlying problem for them is that they were never intended to function as a true network beyond the throughput needed for putting dots on a map and some digitized voice audio traffic. Neither voice data nor PLI data require much throughput, and their solution always did that fairly well: Pushed a little data.

But a just few radios or a little bit of data are significant limiting factors that plague their radio solutions to a massive networking challenge. The bottom line is that the users think they have a network, but when they try to actually leverage it as one in a battlefield environment in constant flux, they simply fail to scale to need, whether the Achilles heel is scale of nodes or scale of throughput.

Why? Because the 'solution' providers are not networking companies, they are radio companies. They are good radio companies who employ good people. But the military is not waking up to a radio problem. They are waking up to a Tactical Network problem. The problem reequires a Tactical Networking solution, and there's no successful path to cramming the square pegs into the round hole.

A radio solution cannot fix a Tactical Network problem. To try and do so will return the customer to Square One, with much time and money unwittingly squandered until either the radio companies supplying radios transform into networking companies - a massive undertaking - or the customer chooses a tactical networking solution for their tactical networking challenge. In the mean time, capabilities available will have been left on the table, unaccessed, unused and unfielded.

Anyone who has attended a training course I have led knows that Persistent Systems a networking company. First. Foremost. Always. Everything we do is about efficiently transporting more data in less time throughout a dynamic, constantly changing and highly mobile tactical network. The radio part is easy.