General Dynamics to Work On Command Post System

General Dynamics of Falls Church has received the first task order under a new Army contract to furnish engineering and support services for a system that enables commanders to share information about battlefield conditions.

The contract may be worth as much as $200 million over five years, the company said. The initial task order is worth $18.4 million.

The system, Command Post of the Future, allows up to 300 authorized users to exchange data simultaneously. More than 1,000 such systems have been deployed in Iraq, and more in other parts of the globe, said Don Schmidli, director of battle command systems at the company's C4 Systems business unit in Arizona, which will perform the work.

The system does not replace anything the Army currently uses, Schmidli said. Instead, it complements existing battle command systems. General Dynamics C4 Systems will continue improving and maintaining the systems over the course of the contract.

General Dynamics first got involved with the project when it acquired a company called Maya Viz in 2005, Schmidli said. The electronic command system began as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency experiment in the late 1990s, with Maya Viz doing the initial development. Army commanders took notice and first began using it in Iraq in 2004, Schmidli said.

The system features a work station with three computer screens that let a user look simultaneously at several sets of data. For example, a commander using the system could see a map with icons showing where recent firefights have occurred. The commander could select some of the icons and move them to a spreadsheet which would automatically plug the underlying data into the proper fields, or into a scheduling application that would provide a detailed chronology.

Users can easily move information, including video and graphics, to shared areas to make it immediately available to other registered users. For example, if an analyst in Baghdad finds a pattern in recent insurgent attacks, that fresh analysis can be sent immediately to other military officials. When there's a new attack to report, the commander who first gets the information can immediately update everyone else by adding it to the system.

Because of the high volume of data flowing into the command post, commanders need to be able to access quickly, Schmidli said.

It's almost as good as being in the same room, he said. "They can go in and look over the shoulder virtually and see the thought process that [another] person has gone through."

The Army's Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications, Tactical of Fort Monmouth, N.J., manages the system.

Michael Hardy is an associate editor with Washington Technology magazine. For more information on this and other contracts, go tohttp://www.washingtontechnology.com