ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. – Artillery fire-control experts at RTX Corp. will upgrade a U.S. Army fire-support command and control system designed to coordinate fire support from many different artillery batteries under terms of a $15.4 million contract announced last week.
Officials of the Officials of the U.S. Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., are asking the RTX Raytheon segment in Fort Wayne, Ind., to update the Army's Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS).
This artillery command-and-control system, developed originally in the 1980s, is the fire support command and control (C2) system employed by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to provide automated support for planning, coordination, controlling and executing fires and effects.
AFATDS ranks targets in importance based on sensor data, and performs attack analysis using situational data combined with commander's guidance, RTX officials say.
Coordinated fire support
The system is designed to produce timely, accurate, and coordinated fire control options to attack targets using Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force weapon systems. It seeks to manage attacks on preplanned and time-sensitive targets.
AFATDS supports battlefield weapons like mortars, field artillery, rockets, close-air support, attack helicopters, and naval surface fire support.
AFATDS also acts as a fire support server to local-area and tactical internet-based users, including the AFATDS Effects Management Tool (EMT), and the Marine Corps Command and Control Personal Computer (C2PC) EMT.
AFATDS is part of all U.S. Army echelons from weapons platoon to corps and in the Marine Corps from firing battery to Marine Expeditionary Forces. AFATDS also is installed aboard the U.S. Navy big-deck amphibious assault ships to support marine expeditionary strike groups during amphibious operations.
Current and planned systems
AFATDS operates with current and planned U.S. fire support systems, as well as allied field artillery C2 systems such as the United Kingdom's BATES, the German ADLER, French ATLAS, and Italian SIR. AFATDS is approved for foreign military sales.
AFATDS represents one of the U.S. military's first attempts to implement artificial intelligence (AI) on the battlefield. The system began development in the mid-1980s as a rules-based expert system for target analysis, fire mission assignment, and situational awareness, under supervision of Magnavox Electronic Systems in Fort Wayne, Ind., which RTX Raytheon acquired in 1995.
Rule-based expert systems use if-then logic that in the 1980s were considered artificial intelligence, but since have been folded into conventional computing architectures.
Rule-based expert systems store domain knowledge in a structured knowledge base and use an inference engine to match inputs against those rules for conclusions or recommendations. This technology emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as early AI tools for tasks that require consistency and transparency.
TACFIRE replacement
AFATDS in the early 1980s was to succeed the Tactical Fire Direction System (TACFIRE) by providing automated fire support command, control, and communications for joint forces including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and allies.
Magnavox work on AFATDS made a transition from pure research to procurement in 1989 under the Pentagon's AirLand Battle Doctrine requirements. It was designed to process as many as 120 fire support requests per hour at brigade level, and interface with systems like the Northrop Grumman E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint-STARS), supporting mortars, naval gunfire.
AFATDS became operational in 1996, first with the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas. Version 1 focused on automated digital coordination across echelons from platoon to corps, and by the early 2000s, iterations like Version 6.4 enhanced joint targeting, including the Tactical Air Support Module (TASM) for close air support and suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) missions. Today AFATDS is integrated into the Army Battle Command System (ABCS) and supports network-centric warfare and time-sensitive targeting.
On this contract RTX will do the work in Fort Wayne, Ind., and should be finished by December 2029. For more information contact RTX Raytheon online at www.rtx.com/raytheon, or the Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground at https://acc.army.mil/contractingcenters/acc-apg/.
