A Very Old Crow Reacts To The Brand-New US Army 'Terrestrial Layer System'
A Very Old Crow Reacts To The Brand-New US Army 'Terrestrial Layer System'
Tactical SIGINT/EW in the 21st Century
It has wheels, at least. Too many wheels, if you ask me. But at least it has wheels.
Not that anyone has asked me, because I am just a “Raven” or “Old Crow” from the 1990s-era of US Army tactical signals intelligence and electronic warfare (SIGINT and EW), not a defense consultant.
To be clear, I have not laid eyes on the real thing, either.
However, this was my first reaction to seeing the “Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team” (TLS-BCT), and my view is further informed by academic study of procurement and logistics issues in military history.
The wheels are good. I remain skeptical about the number of wheels.
Soft factors are too often unappreciated, and tires are one. They make the complex job of running a SIGINT/EW battle less complex than tracked systems by at least an order of magnitude.
Back in the 1990s, the US Army almost sold itself on a tracked system called XM5 that gave me shudders when I looked at it. (You can see pictures of that beast here and here.) The program was wisely cancelled.
In my company, we took care to avoid ever moving the few tracked vehicles assigned to us because they consume about an hour of maintenance time for every mile they travel.
Wheeled vehicles are a relief to the soldier, as well as the sergeant training the soldier. EMSO (electromagnetic spectrum operations) soldiers have enough to do already. Give them wheels, I say.
I would still prefer at least two fewer wheels than this, since a field soldier will be tasked with keeping each wheel inflated and lubed and inspected and combat-ready at all times, while each and every part was made by the lowest bidder.
Sadly, I was not consulted in the design of the Stryker vehicle, either.
Generals always need their electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) support to keep up with the armored division. During my time, though, the Army had not developed an armored wheeled vehicle like Stryker just yet.
Instead, there were M113s and M577s on our lot, early Cold War stuff that mainly belonged to the headquarters company. Thin-skinned but roomy, these were mainly used to set up tactical operation centers (TOCs), or field headquarters. Their rear gates can be sealed to the tents for security and camouflage.
Stryker was intended to replace those “light” tracked vehicles. But for Army EMSO, the gap got filled instead by Prophet, which was mounted in a four-wheeled MRAP ATV (photo here) during the 2000s.
That system was half the maintenance pain of this thing. So I have questions. For example, what capabilities does the Stryker-based platform have, that the Prophet system lacked, that justify the increased weight, time, energy, and resources?
The answer is of course classfied. By asking it, though, I have pointed you down my thought-path of possibilities: a bigger generator means higher jamming power.
At 17 tons, the Stryker will not survive a direct hit from a heavy weapon. However, it can mount its own heavier weapons, such as machine guns and grenade launchers, and this hard factor appeals to me.
EMSO requires teams to put up tall antenna masts in the field and advertise their presence to the enemy. At the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, our biggest barrier to training for the actual job of EMSO was the actual experience of getting “killed” in the sandbox by better-armed, light motorized OPFOR (opposing forces).
We were in soft HMMWVs that had nothing to shoot back with. The odds for a TLS-BCT crew are at least more even, even if they are not great.
Another key difference is that whereas the internet was called “AOL or Netscape” in my day, the TLS-BCT system is built to do cyber warfare. As a practical matter, that function has blurred over into EW and EMSO more largely thanks to 5G, wifi systems, and so on.
Discussing the TLS-BCT, Willie Utroska, deputy program manager for Electronic Warfare & Cyber at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, told a federal news website that radio frequency (RF) cyber warfare capability is getting built into all new Army EW platforms.
That would include the manpack version of the system. During July, project manager Ken Strayer told Breaking Defense that “the office was still deciding whether infantry brigades soldiers need a vehicle-mounted TLS-BCT or a man-packable one.”
A dismounted system can be deployed from a nearby hilltop by two soldiers using a light vehicle, or on foot, to set up a radio direction-finding network with the heavier system.
To me, it’s not even a question. Our old PRD-13s were terrific supplements to the vehicle-mounted sets we used, especially during movement or an equipment breakdown, and those were made with 1980s technology.
The choice of manpack was also obvious to the Ravens who will have to live with the results of it. Aberdeen asked them and sensibly chose the manpack model in September after their feedback. Some things never change.
Although some things should change. A complete manpack SIGINT system back then weighed 100 lbs, or about as much as one human being could reasonably carry any distance. Today, software-defined radios (SDRs) and radio frequency hacking systems are commercially available, thus cheaper than the consumer electronics of the 1990s, also more rugged, and lighter.
There’s just no excuse for putting a load that heavy on a soldier’s back anymore.
That’s why I am curious what the Army’s new EW company motor pool will include to supplement each of these TLS-BCT vehicles.
If I were taking a platoon to Fort Irwin today, I would want at least two of these as well as a chase and a support vehicle for each of them.
That way, my intelligence fusion team at the TOC can network up to six different ground sensors at a time, using two independent jammer-sensor networks to “leapfrog” my support of the brigade during rapid movement or replace losses.
Here is another difference with what we had in the 1990s. Our AN/TLQ-17A tactical jammer was a solid, if aged system. But Russian disasters in Ukraine notwithstanding, the tactical spectrum environment today is not confined to single channels between 20 and 80 MHz.
Consumer technologies like encryption and signal processing have democratized the threat. We had no manpack EW systems back then. The threat of radio-controlled improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made them necessary in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As we now see in Ukraine, the threat of small drones makes manpack EW a significant mobilization issue for the future.
Systems like TLS-BCT exist to solve the energy density problem of jamming somebody’s radio set at a distance. That is much harder to do with a manpack system, but its potential force-multiplier effect is magnified by networking with heavier, more capable systems.
Finally, SIGINT and EW are highly technical domains in which the human dimension is the most critical to success. We see this in the steady rate of failure by the Russian Army. EMSO is one of the hardest things to get right on the modern battlefield, and the people trained to get it right are more essential than the new equipment.
Survivability is more important than ever. For example, a manpack EW system might be even better if deployed on a ground drone, so that it can move away from the operators instead of drawing enemy fire on them.
As soldiers will learn in the baptism of electromagnetic live fire at Fort Irwin, jamming is a genuine battle. If your interference is effective, the enemy will try to locate and destroy your jammers.
My second thought, looking at this new system, is that I might survive an artillery strike. If the fire is not too close, I might have a minute to drop the masts and get away. Better yet, if I survive, I can relocate and resume the battle quickly.
This is a marked improvement over the past. The TLQ-17 had a “log periodic antenna” that took 45 minutes to set up the first time in training and at least 15 minutes for even an experienced crew. There was no fast getaway.
Deprecated after the Cold War ended, forgotten in the heady days of the War on Terror and its very different threat environment, the mechanized formation has been revived by revanchist Russian ambitions and the need for an integrated heavy SIGINT/EW system is finally being addressed.