Equipment that cannot be plugged into the command and control system the British Army already runs is unlikely to be taken forward, however good it is, a Royal Artillery officer told the Apex Europe conference in London on Wednesday.
Lieutenant Colonel Chris Billups was asked for a closing message to the companies in the room at the end of a panel on deep precision effects, and he gave them one line to remember.
He said: “Please think open architecture. If we can’t plug you in, we’re never going to get everything from one single source. We’re going to need multiple things from multiple vendors. If we can’t plug you into the architecture relatively easily, it’ll be difficult for us to pitch for you and to use you on the day of the fight.”
The Army has already run into exactly this. “We are more concerned about a plug-and-play approach. If an industry partner is developing something that either operates in a silo or stovepipe, we can’t plug it into the system, or we need another standalone system to operate it,” he said.
Doing it the other way produced an effect he called data blindness. “We had that really early on where we were almost getting data blindness, because the only way you could put a new missile or system or drone in was by putting another screen there and another decision and another person to watch it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how exquisite the kit is. If you can’t plug into the existing C2 system, then it’s almost not worth taking on.”
His second theme was depth of magazine, which he said gets far less attention than mass does. If only a small percentage of what is fired gets through an integrated air defence, then the number of rounds behind the first salvo is what decides whether a campaign can be sustained. Asked how confident he is that NATO is heading in the right direction on interoperability, his answer was short. “The confidence level that we’re moving in the right direction is high,” he said.
Training as a multinational force by default has made British formations better at multinational targeting, in his account, and he was positive about the direction of travel in Eastern Europe while describing the organisations involved as still young. For immediate combat engagements, information security matters less because the information itself is perishable. Going deeper and more pre-planned is where national caveats and policy start to bite, since data sources cannot be revealed and material at the highest classifications cannot currently be pushed onto a NATO network.
He described a recent event at which a large number of nations shared information across a data fabric largely owned by NATO, with United States Army Europe and Africa holding the mechanism that allows classification to be derived and downgraded so material can move across the system. The arrangement is new, he said, but the future of it looks positive.
The same theme ran through what the two industry speakers alongside him had to say. Lukas Koester of SE3 Labs argued that armies have to force manufacturers to work together, since every company would rather its own sensor talked only to its own effector, and that where governments set the framework, as Ukraine has with Delta, interoperability follows. Bryan Grubert of Attalon said what his company needs most is visibility of what the prime contractors above it intend to build over the long term, instead of a succession of individual requests to tender.
