US Army working on standardised weapon fire control

The US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Command (ARDEC) is working to build a common fire control system across weapons platforms, it was announced on 23 April.

This common system would include interface, software and hardware. Ralph Tillinghast, director of the collaboration and innovation laboratory at ARDEC, spoke about its efforts to build the system at the 2015 Armament Systems Forum.

Tillinghast noted that this commonality would decrease testing, cost, development time and training and increase reliability, maintainability and profitability for the army. Warfighters would benefit from a familiar interface for fire control and not have to learn new systems as new products are developed.

He said that another benefit could be that soldiers would get their hands on new weapons systems more quickly because software and hardware could be reused.

However, he mentioned that sharing a single fire control system would increase the risk of a technological glitch or cyber-attack affecting all weapons systems at the same time.

Tillinghast said that ARDEC has made major advancements in the development of a common fire control system. It was able to transplant the software and hardware of the 120mm Mortar Fire Control System – Heavy to the dismounted version, including the trucks, radios and displays. It has been able to do the same for other weapons systems, including the DragonFire II, M119 howitzer and expeditionary fire support system demo.

ARDEC is currently pulling legacy systems from older weapons and replacing them with common hardware and software.

Tillinghast said that commonality has been applied to mortars and towed artillery so far, but the common fire standards have yet to be applied to other systems, like missiles. Talks are underway for another facet that is yet to be addressed: cross-service commonality.

Discussions that are underway throughout the services include finding commonality for fire control that includes common networks, geodetic translation, mapping, peripheral interface and meteorological data.

Other discussions are focusing on how to make the systems secure, especially as the services move toward cloud-based computing. Besides software, there are discussions about getting to common hardware solutions.

Tillinghast said, ‘We want to get to the point where we can plug different displays in - such as an inertial navigation unit or weapons sensors - and the computer recognizes and accepts it.’