Published in Milsat Magazine.
By Dominic Perez, CTO at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions division
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) tactical/expeditionary networking and command post programs have a widely acknowledged the critical need to improve mobility. The current state of the art for tent-based command posts requires hours or days of setup, which includes thousands of feet of copper wiring that delays network availability.
To enable mobility for warfighting, the National Security Agency (NSA) established a program (with a set of guidelines) called “Commercial Solutions for Classified” (CSfC). CSfC-based mobility solutions are currently being fielded by the U.S. Marine Corps and by U.S. Army programs of record to provide command post mobility and soldier dismounted situational awareness, including using ground vehicles as network nodes and mobile command posts. However, the extensive requirements and processes involved are complex and not well-understood. This article compares various CSfC network architectures and proposes several approaches for CSfC solutions optimized for mobility use cases.