ARGUS Win Boosts Textron's Intelligent Battlefield Systems Work

Textron Systems' win of the U.S. Air Force's ARGUS unattended ground senor program contributes to a strategic thrust the company has had for the last several years, according to Bob Buckley, vice president for strategic development.

The Wilmington, Mass., company, a unit of Textron Inc., won a competition in July to develop ARGUS and the U.S. Marine Corps' related Advanced Air Delivered System (AADS). The system development and demonstration work now underway will lead to delivery of first production units in 2006 (DAILY, July 23).

"This is really a part of a series of unattended ground sensor programs that we've been able to become part of over the last three to five years, programs both in the United States and in Australia," Buckley said in a Sept. 15 telephone interview.

Textron has a role in Australia's Ninox system, slated to be deployed along the country's northern coast; it has just won a competition for the unattended ground sensor portion of the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS), and it's working on the Intelligent Munition System (IMS) for the U.S., a weapon system as well as an unattended ground sensor.

"These programs have been seriously pursued and worked on internally as well as in bidding programs for the last five years," Buckley said. "We've done programs involving unattended weapon systems and [related] things back even 10 or 15 years ago, but I would say in the last five years we've focused fairly intensely on operational unattended ground sensors - battlefield operational as opposed to security systems."

This area of intelligent battlefield systems, he said, "has been a fairly important strategic thrust for us over the last several years, and now with this family of programs, it seems to be going reasonably well."

Toni Cooper, systems development manager for unattended ground sensor systems at Textron Systems, said ARGUS "is both air-delivered and hand-emplaced and its goal is to find, fix, classify, identify and report time-sensitive targets in near-real time." Its purpose, she said, "is to shorten the kill chain for the warfighters [by giving] them faster information."

ARGUS differs from other unattended ground sensors in that it is the only one that is placed deep in hostile territory.

Mark Rafferty, Textron Systems' head of business development for air-launched weapons, said the high speed at which ARGUS can be delivered - it is designed to be dropped from an F-16 flying at Mach 1 - required the electronics in the communications system to be designed to survive a forceful impact with the ground. "It's not, by any stretch of the imagination, beyond the state of the art, but it certainly does add a little bit of complexity to the equation."

ARGUS is well advanced from the Igloo White ground sensor system of the Vietnam war, Buckley said. "The concept is the same but [there have been] a lot of advances in electronics and communications systems and technology for processing as well as hardening of electronics and things like that that."

The Marine Corps' AADS is generally similar to ARGUS, differing mainly in the mode of communications, Cooper said. The Marines will use their own communications network, while the Air Force will use Iridium satellites.

The Marines will get their sensors a little ahead of the Air Force. "This is a spiral development program and we should be on track to deliver our spiral 1 capabilities in June of '04 [to the Air Force]," Cooper said. "The Marine Corps would be before that time period." The first operational systems would be delivered about two years later. The numbers have not yet been defined, but some 500 of the spike-like sensors will be delivered under current plans.

Future spirals haven't been defined either, but Cooper said Textron Systems has the ability, assuming more funding becomes available, "to add additional sensors, maybe perhaps for hand-emplaced units, for example, electro-optical."

Buckley said there are "different types of sensors, different ways to network them ... and other processing schemes. ... These are all generic things that could be applied to unattended ground sensors in general."

Textron Systems' teammates for ARGUS/AADS include Northrop Grumman's Melbourne, Fla., operation; SRA and ENSCO of northern Virginia, and Nova Engineering of Cincinnati.