Now that the Army has chosen its preferred Future Long Range Assault Aircraft in Bell’s V-280 advanced tiltrotor, the race is on to populate it with mission systems that will allow the machine to operate through adversaries’ sophisticated air defense systems.

The U.S. Army has long pursued a standardized infrastructure and architecture for ground-combat vehicle hardware and networking.

From the outside, the turret system on a ground vehicle may appear a straightforward mechanism.

To lower the cost and help speed the pace of technology upgrades for C5ISR [command, control, computers, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] systems on Army vehicles, the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Officer (PEO) for Ground Combat Systems (GCS) has issued an Interface Description Document (IDD).

Backed by broad support from government and industry, the release of SOSA Technical Standard 1.0 promises a new era of open standards-based system integration with flexibility and interoperability as its hallmarks.

Some environmental constraints for deployed military computing systems are operational temperature, humidity, sand, dust, vibration, shock/basic, leakage (immersion), steam and water jet cleaning, rapid decompression, contamination by fluids (e.g. oil, fuel, cleaning), nuclear hardness, and input voltage.

Industrial participation is seen as a way to develop and maintain production, technology and expertise, so that critical defense products and services can continue to be produced under emergency conditions.

The proliferation of connected systems has been enabled by the U.S. military embrace of the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) revolution.