Future soldier
The MOD’s ability to use technological advancements in tactical operations has made it one of the leading defence organisations in the world.
programme has been initiated, and the path to achieve it. It also ostensibly allows the British Army to be competitive at all times, relying on combat readiness, nimble logistics and technological superiority and agility to be decisive. To achieve that, forces need to not only have the technological capability, but also the capacity to procure and integrate new technologies with minimal configuration. As Ric Green, GSA systems architect and the man tasked with designing the entire technological platform this future force will operate on, wrote in Soldier Modernisation: “GSA is focused on the personal soldier domain for an Integrated Soldier System, with the architecture specifying intra soldier requirements.
“These white papers are intended to provide an avenue for dealing with the practicalities of undergoing one of the most ambitious military modernisation packages in British history.”
“The Integrated Soldier System has three main sub- systems: the Torso, Helmet and Weapon, all of which have the power, data and physical interfaces defined with open standards.”
10,000
The number of cuts to British Army personnel by 2025 following the MOD’s
Integrated review in March 2021.
UK MOD 26
Middleware as software’s middleman But what are these “open standards”? And how can the UK future-proof its efforts and ensure interoperability as part of multinational military alliances such as Nato? The answer lies in the use of middleware – essentially a set of common standards that allows systems to be extensible, enabling the GSA to add new features to an existing architecture without the benefit of hindsight. In other words, the British Army will not have to reinvent the wheel each time.
“Having a middleware that is open, built in a modular way and fully owned by the MOD is seen as critical,” Green wrote. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) middleware has been taken forward for consideration for final selection “due to its strong governance processes, maturity as a standard and its perceived low barrier for entry for software application developers and integrators”, he added. MQTT is designed to make integrating with the GSA platform as seamless as possible. It will deliver a standardised application programming interface and a software development kit to allow third-party contractors to innovate technological solutions but to an existing architecture. According to Green, MQTT will also be enhanced to standardise the way messaging is exchanged on the system to future-proof it and enable intra-node communication. It was seemingly also selected due to its compatibility with GOSSRA, the EU’s GSA equivalent, and Nato standards, ensuring international interoperability in multinational deterrence operations or active warfighting. While this all sounds like heady and ambitious stuff, it must have concrete application to enable the army to achieve its goals in line with policy. As such, the next phase of development will now undertake a series of white paper studies to address a number of practical issues, including: wireless data links between subsystems; optimising the soldier power supply chain while on operations; investigating the anticipated power demand for the 24-hour integrated soldier; and assessing whether it is technically viable to mandate GPS as a shared service across the GSA platform, among others.
These white papers are intended to provide an avenue for dealing with the practicalities of conducting one of the most ambitious military modernisation packages in British history. If successful, then the British Army will maintain and perhaps even enhance its effectiveness across a breadth of operations despite troop numbers being slashed by 10,000 by 2025 following the MOD’s Integrated Review of Security and Defence published in March 2021. However, as with all great overhauls, there is a chance that the programme may be unsuccessful, or at least not as successful as intended. Arguably, senior policymakers are aware of this, which is presumably why Conservative MP, chair of the Commons Select Defence Committee and former soldier, Tobias Ellwood, urged Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reverse the cuts to British troop levels in March 2021 – likely cognisant of the fact that modernisation alone may not be enough of a deterrence against a foe like Russia that is currently invading Ukraine. In an increasingly insecure world where war is once again in Europe and therefore closer to home than at any point in recent history, the British government may be prudent to consider expanding its defence policy to have a plan B ready – just in case. ●
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
UK MOD, Crown copyright 2022
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
