The US Navy has just announced that it is developing a sophisticated system that will allow coordination between various military assets to target enemies outside of radar range. What the Navy is deploying is called a “tactical cloud” that will collect targeting data from different vessels to make a “kill web.”
Read Admiral Mark Darrah, chief of the Navy's Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aviation program at the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), was reported by USNI News as saying, “We call it the tactical cloud.” He added, “We're going to put data up in the cloud and users are going to go grab it and use it as a contributor to a targeting solution.”
In one test, NAVAIR used the tactical cloud with space assets called National Technical Means and shared data to aircraft like the F/A-18s, E-2D sensor aircraft, and an unmanned MQ-4C Triton. The test also included surface ship information fed into the cloud from a Littoral Combat Ship and attack submarine, Engadget reported.
The tactical cloud uses a system that is similar to what carrier strike groups already use. The Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) allows ships in a strike group to share information with each other using high-capacity data links.
This means that targets out of radar range—but not weapons range—can still be eliminated. An example would be to use an E-2D's targeting information and transmit it to an Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer that cannot detect the target as it is out of range in its own radars.
The concept does look good on paper. However, there are already a couple of problems that are marring the progress of the tactical cloud. Darrah shared that there was the question of the “pedigree of the data.” He posed questions like, “Who generated it? How long has it been since it's been refreshed? Is it actually a fidelity that's meaningful to my weapon?”
A possible solution would be to create tools that can easily sort the data received from the many different sources. Darrah said, “We have to figure that out.”
