The US Navy is ushering in a new era of warfare with a breakthrough innovation: a fully virtualized combat system that can run on any server and be updated in hours. This system, being tested on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Winston Churchill, promises to enhance the Navy’s connectivity, flexibility, and speed in the face of evolving threats.
Aegis Combat System
The virtualized combat system, also known as the Aegis Combat System, is a software-based solution that decouples the hardware and the software of the Navy’s weapons and sensors. This means that the combat system can run on any generic server instead of relying on proprietary hardware that is costly and cumbersome to maintain and upgrade.
As Defense News reported, Rear Adm. Seiko Okano, the program executive officer for integrated warfare systems, told the publication that the virtualized combat system has been operating on Winston Churchill since June and is undergoing qualification trials to certify it for operations. During the past six months, the ship has conducted various tests to ensure the combat system performs as expected at sea and onshore.
One of the main advantages of the virtualized combat system is that it can receive software updates much faster than the traditional system, which can take weeks to upgrade and render the ship offline. Okano said the Navy has already completed one update in just days and will soon do one in hours. Moreover, the Navy has pushed an over-the-air software update to Winston Churchill, similar to how a cellphone gets updated automatically.
Winston Churchill is one of many ships that will benefit from the virtualized combat system. Okano said that another destroyer, Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee, who joined the fleet earlier this year, is moving to the virtualized combat system. Five more ships and four land-based test sites will follow suit in 2024.
What will the virtualized combat system enable?
The virtualized combat system results from a collaborative effort between the Navy and its industry partners, led by Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Aegis Combat System. To enable virtualization, the Navy and Lockheed Martin had to separate the hardware and the software, which have been developed, managed, and modernized together for decades.
Lockheed Martin and the Navy have also demonstrated the ability to run the virtualized Aegis software from computers much smaller than those on ships, thanks to the information-as-a-service model, which allows ships to access the software they need on demand instead of storing the entire software library on board, Defense News reported.
The Navy and its industry partners are now running a parallel development effort for the virtualized combat system's hardware and software. On the hardware side, the Navy has established the Foundry in Dahlgren, Virginia, where a team of contractors is creating a hardware package that can be easily installed on ships and run the virtualized combat system software. Their goal is to make the installation non-invasive, unlike the current practice of cutting holes into the ships’ sides to remove and install bulky hardware.
The team at the Foundry is taking inspiration from various sources, such as the telecommunications industry, Amazon and Microsoft server farms, and even Taylor Swift concerts, where complex stages and displays are quickly disassembled into small pieces that can be moved easily, to develop a hardware package that can be carried onto the ship for easy setup.
Modern computing architecture and software updates
On the software side, the Navy has awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to serve as the Integrated Combat System systems engineering and software integration agent. Through this contract, Lockheed Martin will lead a team of contractors in taking the Aegis Combat System code and transforming it into a modern computing architecture. They will end up with microservices that each control various aspects of the Aegis functionality and can be updated independently. This effort largely occurs at the Forge software factory outside College Park, Maryland.
The ultimate goal of the virtualized combat system is to not only allow for smoother software updates in the future but also to integrate the Aegis Combat System functionality with that of the Ship Self-Defense System, creating a single Integrated Combat System that can run on the new hardware. This will enable the Navy to field a common combat system across its fleet and bring new capabilities faster and more efficiently.
The virtualized combat system will also address the current challenge of having different combat systems for different types of ships. Today, destroyers, cruisers, littoral combat ships, and some unmanned surface vessels use variants of the Aegis system, while aircraft carriers and amphibious ships use the Ship Self-Defense System. These systems have been managed independently, leading to redundancies in developing new capabilities, fleet training, and logistics.
Rear Adm. Fred Pyle, the director of surface warfare on the chief of naval operations staff, said in a separate interview with Defense News that “one system is much better than multiple from a training standpoint, from a funding standpoint.”
“The warfighting aspect is what’s most exciting from [a surface warfare directorate] perspective because it gives us the ability to pair any decision-maker, any sensor, and any desired effect at machine speed,” he added. “We strongly believe that’s where we need to go in the future.”
Pyle said the Navy wants to deploy an entire strike group operating the Integrated Combat System by the fiscal year 2028 or 2029. This would give the Navy a significant edge over its adversaries, as it could share information and coordinate actions across a network of ships, sensors, and weapons.
Originally published on Interesting Engineering : Original article