Search

Defense electronics contractors are going commercial in a bid to equip the United Kingdom with a rapidly deployable battlefield communications network. The country's Ministry of Defence is seeking a commercial off-the-shelf solution that is low-risk, easy to enhance and ready for deployment in about two years.

The United Kingdom is implementing acquisition reforms designed to produce less costly military systems faster and more effectively. These choice program innovations are being applied across the entire spectrum of defense purchases as the country revamps its procurement process for changing missions in a changing time.

Germany has accelerated a longtime move toward acquisition reform by consolidating diverse activities in its main procurement agency. These changes have been driven largely by Germany's new security mission and by the need to incorporate substantial amounts of high technology into hardware and doctrine.

Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, other barriers are crumbling within the German defense community. The private sector is playing a key role in convincing the military to abandon its old ways of doing business and adapt to the dynamism of the information age.

A U.S.-German security education institution is seizing on discussion animated by international differences to build closer ties among North American, European and Central Asian nations. Military and government participants are encouraged to explore new ideas and approaches, rather than follow the lead of existing institutions and methodologies.

Moving rapidly to gain information dominance on the battlefield, the U.S. Army will fully equip and deploy a digitized division by next year. This continuing quest for information dominance and situational awareness also calls for outfitting a fully digitized Army corps by 2004.

A British firm is embracing the military's trend toward using commercial electronics by developing a growing range of ruggedized products and systems. The focus of this longtime battlefield platform equipment provider has shifted from ruggedizing specific commercial hardware to providing complete off-the-shelf technology systems that are suited for military environments.

A telecommunications company is seeking to lead the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence into the information age with its own information technology experience. Beginning with converting the British military's communications system to a commercial enterprise, the company is extending its menu of services and systems to fit a governmentwide approach to information access.

Engineers are applying information technology practices to create complex simulations that go beyond the reach of existing single systems. Extensive simulations that model large-scale military operations can be generated by networking established systems to produce data in near real time.

Engineers are using a new class of algorithms capable of encoding and decoding communications at speeds close to transmission channel maximum capacities, a feat that has eluded engineers since the 1940s when a theoretical limit to channel capacity was first defined. Under development since the early 1990s, these algorithms are now being tested in proof-of-concept devices.