Darpa’s Next Drone Could Be a Datalink Between Planes and Ships

• By Spencer Ackerman
• 03.26.13            http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/darpa-tern-datalink/

The artists’ concept behind TERN, a drone Darpa wants to launch from the deck of a small warship.
Image: Darpa

The Pentagon’s far-out research scientists aren’t just trying to build a drone that can operate off the deck of a small warship. They’re starting to describe their new-mark flying robot as a device that bridges the communication systems between ships and aircraft. And if they can pull it off, Darpa will be giving the U.S. military a capability it badly needs for one of its major initiatives.
Last month, Darpa announced a program to design something called the TERN, for Tactically Exploitative Reconnaissance Node, a surveillance and strike drone that can fly up to 900 miles from the deck of a destroyer or Littoral Combat Ship. Darpa wants it to be “substantially beyond current state-of-the-art aviation capabilities from smaller ships,” according to the full, formal solicitation for the drone that the agency released Tuesday.
And how. The solicitation seems to emphasize the “Node” aspect of TERN. Among the intriguing requirements that Darpa “encouraged” its potential research teams to explore is the ability for the drone to “exploit cooperation between aircraft and ship to achieve enhanced performance. Such cooperation could potentially take the form of data exchange, external energy addition, or manipulation of the recovery environment.”
That doesn’t sound like too much, but the implications are significant, and they go way beyond drone warfare.

Most significantly, the Navy and the Air Force are working on a master concept for future partnered operations called AirSea Battle. AirSea Battle is inchoate and confusing. Its Pentagon architects have yet to articulate how specifically long-range bombers and stealth jets are supposed to work alongside carrier strike groups, submarines or close-to-shore fighters like the Littoral Combat Ship.
But even if they figure all that out, the leaders of the Navy and Air Force have conceded that they’ll still face another “foundational” challenge, as the former Air Force chief of staff put it in May. Navy ships and Air Force planes don’t have a common communications architecture. “Our links need to be similar,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert told a panel discussion on AirSea Battle back then, “or at least minimally compatible.” If you can’t talk to each other, you can’t fight together.
It’s unclear how the Navy and the Air Force will come to speak the same language. The TERN program points to a potential solution: Design the data links on a long-endurance drone at sea to be bilingual. It surely won’t be easy to build a software layer that can communicate with both Air Force planes and Navy ships. But it’s probably easier, and cheaper, than retrofitting the communications systems on planes, subs and ships for maximum compatibility or demanding that defense companies build future flying and sailing platforms with that goal in mind.
There are all sorts of reasons why Darpa might not go this way with TERN. It might ultimately value the “novel design approaches” the researchers want over making it a true communications node. And the drone is definitely designed with the Navy primarily in mind, with seemingly little buy-in from the Air Force, if any. But should the TERN designers explore the full implications of exchanging data between ships and aircraft, Darpa’s next robot might unlock a whole deeper set of solutions for the Navy and Air Force.