Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/304887
C
C4ISR
30 APRIL/MAY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com
T
he screen on the wall shows a jumble – strange lines, odd
words and letters in bizarre colours and fonts, a mish-
mash of who knows what.
We're gathered at the Thales offices in suburban Ottawa in a
room whose large windows give it the name the fishbowl. Alain
Gauthier, vice-president, Secure Comms and Information Sys-
tems, has brought me in here for a visual tour of the Battlefield
Command System Thales has created for the Canadian Army.
The cheerful multi-coloured insanity I am seeing is a contrast
to the more somber displays of maps and military units visible on
laptops scattered about the room on long tables. In fact, it is an
attempt by some army end-user to break the system. This isn't
vandalism. It's the final step that Thales takes before it rolls out
yet another iteration of the Battlefield Command System. Says
Gauthier: "You don't want to find out that something doesn't
work at 2 o'clock in the morning in Afghanistan."
Look inside any army command post in the field, visit an exer-
cise at the staff college, and you'll see Thales's Battlefield Com-
mand System (BCS) displayed on PCs or ruggedized laptops.
This is the system that brought the army into the digital battle of
the 21st century. And Thales can claim much of the credit.
At its heart, you could call the BCS a fancy way of displaying maps.
And when you look at a computer running it, that is what you typi-
cally see – a topographical map. That's not surprising. As Gauthier, a
former army officer, says of the military, "It's what we know." But it
is much more. Working directly on the screen, a commanding officer
and his staff can plot units and vehicles – both friendly and other-
wise – and move them, outline areas of particular significance (say,
a zone to be hit by artillery fire), stay up-to-date on developments
in the battle space thanks to a running tickertape, and chat with one
another in real time using a social media function.
These various add-ons are accessed through on-screen, touch-
sensitive toggles. The system can bring in feeds from elsewhere
– overlaying the video from a UAV onto the map interface, for
example, a technique Gauthier calls "layering."
In the interest of security and efficiency, BCS also allows infor-
mation to be controlled by "profiles" – while
the commander would see everything. "If
you're an intelligence guy, you see what you
need to see, if you're logistics, you see that."
Equally important in a coalition battle
space, the BCS is interoperable with similar
systems used by allies, thanks to JC3IEDM, a
"data model" used by all NATO nations. "All the nations," says
Gauthier, "sign up to define how information is shared." If the
Canadian system shows three tanks or an enemy platoon and it
shares this information with allies using different systems, they see
the same thing.
The origins of Thales's BCS lie back in the 1990s when the
army was looking to make its transition from "maps on the wall,"
as Gauthier puts it, to the digital realm. Rather than creating
something from scratch, the army went looking for an existing
system that could be modified to suit Canada's needs. The French
SCIF system, created by Thales, seemed a good starting point.
Thales was initially brought in as a sub-contractor by General Dy-
namics in the late 1990s, and then began working directly with
the army in 2002.
In 2008, Thales was awarded a five-year contract to be Canada's
prime contractor for command and control software.
"This was at the height of the Afghan deployment," says Gauth-
ier. "They [the army] were evolving their requirements based on
the operations they were conducting, and we had to be very flex-
ible and responsive to bring in the mission-critical functionality
needed by the Joint Task Force." Thales technicians deployed to
Afghanistan to assist in the management of the Land Command
Support System.
"Something that we had to come up with really fast was the
ability to bring in the feeds from UAVs (unmanned air vehicles).
All of a sudden, we had to bring in live video. It's not only a
challenge to bring it in, you have to find the bandwidth and then
show it in a fashion that is legible to the commander." It's a sign
of how satisfied the army is with Thales's work that their contract
has been extended for three more years, to 2016, with an option
for a further two after that.
What's the future? "The system started off at the formation
level, the brigade HQ," says Gauthier, "then we brought it down
to the battle group – in the turrets of the vehicles. The next itera-
tion will be the dismounted soldier. You want to have 'shooter' to
'decider' integration."
From the brigade to the dismounted soldier
Battlefield Command:
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