FBCB2 Fielding

The Army has approved for fielding the Joint Capabilities Release, an upgrade to the Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below situational awareness communication platform developed by Northrop Grumman, the company announced this morning in a statement. Further:

FBCB2 is the key situational awareness and command-and-control system used by U.S. and coalition forces. More than 95,000 FBCB2 systems have been deployed worldwide, forming the world's largest tactical network. The system has been successfully fielded for 16 years.

JCR will be incorporated into the LandWarNet/Battle Command Baseline for fielding to deploying units scheduled to receive software block 2.

JCR upgrades include an increase in network bandwidth that allows the system to move more information to more users within seconds rather than in minutes. JCR also provides a common FBCB2 platform solution for both the Army and U.S. Marine Corps.

"The ability to receive and share battlefield data through a broad-based, reliable network is increasingly important and critical to the mission. JCR provides new collaboration tools and other enhancements that are orders of magnitude more capable than what is available to soldiers and Marines today," said Joe G. Taylor, Jr., vice president of the Ground Combat Systems business unit within Northrop Grumman's Information Systems sector.

The service had completed the formal evaluation of the JCR upgrade last March, Inside the Army reported at the time:

The JCR upgrade, also a Northrop Grumman product, is intended to act as an interim operating system until the service can replace FBCB2 with the Joint Battle Command Platform, a system still in development and not expected until 2013. JCR will then act as a foundation upon which JBC-P can be built.

Kevin Anastas, an Army account manager at Northrop Grumman, told Inside the Army JCR improves upon FBCB2 in several ways by providing significantly increased bandwidth and a joint forces platform for the Army and Marines.

"Soldiers can do things now in seconds instead of minutes," he said in a March 9 interview. "And the Army and the Marines are now going to converge on the same situation awareness software."

JCR also offers several features that provide the FBCB2 system with greater utility and make it more user-friendly. One such application is called "Self-Descriptive Situational Awareness," which allows JCR to transition between tactical service gateways with uninterrupted connectivity.

"In the old system, you need to have a pre-published address book," Anastas said. "So, if a unit were going to deploy to Iraq, somebody had to build the address book for that unit before they left. They took it with them and when they got there, they weren't allowed to change the addresses. You can imagine how frustrating that was because if they wanted to cross-attach part of a unit to another unit, they couldn't talk together because the addresses were all fixed. We got good at changing them, but it was a huge headache."

The upgrade will also be outfitted with Convoy Patrol Group, a program that will allow users to group units on their screens and color code them to make monitoring friendly forces more manageable.