A good defense

The latest military ground-vehicle navigation and communications give crews unprecedented situational awareness and on-the-move capability.

Over the last several years, the Pentagon has embraced network-centric operations as the cornerstone of how it fights and defends in Iraq and Afghanistan. Increasingly, the concept of netcentricity-the collection, fusion, and dissemination of information-is finding its way to military ground vehicles, particularly under-development vehicles such as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (which will replace the Humvee) and the Ground Combat Vehicle (which will fill the gap left by the cancellation of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems program).

“You can think of network-centric operations as bringing the World Wide Web and 3G Internet connectivity to the military user for use with C4ISR software,” said Michael Carlo, U.S. Combat Systems C4ISR Integration Capability Lead for BAE's Land & Armaments Division, referring to the acronym for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance.