A forward observer uses the PFED. (USMC Systems Command photo.)

A personal digital assistant (PDA) can be a critical piece of equipment to today’s business people because it remembers contact information and displays important meeting reminders. Without the ability to rely on such a device, a business person might feel lost or disconnected to the point where efforts to complete one’s daily workload slow significantly.

For a warfighter requesting that a round of artillery be fired at an enemy location, there is no margin for error. When one’s attention to detail cannot be compromised, a Soldier’s digital support must be completely unfailing.

The U.S. Army’s Project Manager Battle Command (PM BC) connects Soldiers to each other, their commanders, their support and to Joint combat power, making them more Joint, powerful and aware. Its efforts have provided reliability to Soldiers who complete missions in an environment where inaccurate information will place others’ lives in danger. They also use PDAs on the battlefield that resemble those used in the business world.

“Fires planning that was once done over the radio is now accomplished through digital systems. This shift has significantly shortened the margin of error,” said Jeffrey Weiss, Product Director (PD), Hand-Held Systems.

Like the business person who previously carried most of his or her data on paper and shared it over the phone, warfighters of the past would transmit numbers over the radio. For both, the lack of digital systems left room for more mistakes.

“When I was younger, we didn’t have these digital systems,” said COL Harold Greene, PM BC. “So, if you wanted to call for fire, it was a radio, it was calculating reels, it was pretty archaic. You used an FM radio and you literally called for fire on the radio.”

Centaur on a howitzer. (U.S. Army photo by Jeffrey Weiss.)

Now, Soldiers in the field use a rugged PDA (R-PDA) known as the Pocket-Sized Forward Entry Device (PFED) to send a call-for-fire to the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) used by commanders from platoon level to echelons above corps.

“Using PFED, a digital call-for-fire can be performed within 10 seconds,” Weiss said. “The only thing really slowing it down is double-checking the information. You just want to make sure you are correct. The message will get down there pretty fast.”

“AFATDS exceeds its own objective of 750 fire missions-per-hour,” said Gary Notte, Deputy PD, Fire Support Command and Control (FSC2). “So, going to digitization is light years better than what we had before.”

PM BC’s PD FSC2 has modernized the method of sending firing data and has reduced errors as a result. “Anytime you introduce the human element of talking out of a radio, writing data down and entering it, you introduce the opportunity for error,” Greene said.

In the artillery world, errors might lead to cases of potential fratricide. “So, we have a tremendous challenge in FSC2 to modernize a huge customer base,” Greene said.

The artillery community was among the first to adopt the digitization concept. Digital systems were first used for fires planning in the 1980s, but many of those systems were rudimentary. The effort to field PDAs began in 2000, when an organization within what is now the U.S. Army’s Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command approached the U.S. Military Academy faculty at West Point, NY, to conduct a 45-day market survey. The survey reviewed the latest commercial-off-the-shelf hand-held PDAs based on common and mission-essential tactical requirements.

Just prior to that, PM Intelligence and Effects identified the Ruggedized Hand-held Computer as a replacement for the Hand-Held Terminal Unit, an aging lightweight forward entry device. However, because of its form, weight, power consumption and unit cost, an organization known then as the Effects Systems Office turned to the commercial market to find a more suitable solution for dismounted warfighters. Over time, commercial technology has remedied the obsolescence of those older systems.

“The unique thing that FSC2 has done is that we’ve gone from purpose-built military pieces of a kit to leveraging commercial technologies and doing spinoffs of hand-held PDAs — the same kind of stuff you can go down to the store and buy — to rapidly refresh what’s in the field,” Greene said.

PFED is not the only PDA-based digital system used to support artillery missions in the field. PD FSC2 has two other systems of record — Centaur and the Gun Display Unit-Replacement (GDU-R) — using R-PDAs in the field. They also work closely with the Lightweight Hand-Held Mortar Ballistic Computer Office at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ, and two U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) programs — the Dismounted Data Automated Communications Terminal and the Target Location, Designation and Hand-Off System.

Centaur computes technical fire solutions — a task once relegated to a Hewlett-Packard Co. calculator that is now completed on a PDA. Used by both the Army and USMC, Centaur meets the military’s requirements for a modern, lightweight hand-held product that can safely and accurately calculate firing data for rapid deployment units. It provides cannon and mortar weapon firing solutions in training and combat. Though Centaur is used as an independent means of validating AFATDS technical fire direction solutions, it is not a replacement for AFATDS. Commanders use AFATDS to plan and execute fires during each phase of action, whether it is a deliberate attack or defensive operation. Commanders can use the system to give orders, reposition radars and communicate to the lowest levels of units.

GDU-R. (U.S. Army photo by Jeffrey Weiss.)

PFED is a hand-held forward entry device used by forward observers and fire support teams to transmit and receive fire support messages over standard military line-of-sight, high-frequency and satellite communications radios.

GDU-R, once large and not portable, is now also housed in an R-PDA. The system provides automated transfer of fire mission data from the fire direction center to each gun crew for towed and non-digital self-propelled howitzer artillery firing weapons.

Efforts are underway among the PD FSC2 staff to modernize the entire fires chain. Digital systems are used to support that entire chain, which spans from the Soldier who chooses the enemy target to fire upon, to the Soldier who uses the gun that launches the artillery round.

“We have a tremendous challenge within the fire support community, with the size of the community, the number of artillery units and the number of the devices out there,” Greene said. “We have a lot of very old hardware that’s out there in the field and Centaur was a replacement for some of that hardware.”

PM BC is assigned to the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications Tactical (PEO C3T), which has developed and fielded battle command and communications systems and enablers that allow warfighters to connect to the future now.