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.

Industry standards and guidelines such as MOSA, SOSA, CMOSS, SAVE, and FACE are driving the latest developments in enclosures, chassis, and backplane databuses, as small for factors are ready to take center stage.

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.

Military-display designers continue to face stringent size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) constraints while integrating commercial innovations like HD – and soon 4K – into systems that must work with legacy sensors and interfaces while also complying with a variety of open architectures and standards.

Today’s modern warfighters have grown up with smartphones and tablets with intuitive, multitouch projected capacitive (PCAP) touch screens. They rely heavily on these devices in their personal lives and they expect to have access to the same capabilities and conveniences in the field.

The advent of unmanned systems reflects a huge aspect of warfare – that of protecting the warfighter – through the development of platforms that can be operated by humans from a distance, keeping them out of harm’s way.