The Science & Art of Operational Sustainment – Part 2 

Battlefield, disaster response, and public safety sustainment is both an art and science; it’s about synchronizing, integrating, and transporting commodities in a highly “just-in-time” manner to provide maneuver and incident commanders with freedom of action, extended operational reach, and prolonged endurance.  

Wilcox Industries has partnered with Blueforce Development Corporation and Thunderbolt Solutions, to develop a packaged capability for operational sustainment based on deployed fire teams using the Wilcox FUSION System. The FUSION System houses an integrated maintenance counter which monitors the number of rounds fired, as well as barrel temperature and other rail sensors, and moves weapon data using BlueforceTACTICAL (BTAC) where the data is shared amongst the fire team and their commander but is also shared with the Wilcox Armorers Module in an armory. FUSION System data is also monitored in real-time by Blueforce’s new Autonomous Orchestration Plugin for BlueforceEDGE, which monitors a wide array of soldier systems to include the Wilcox FUSION System, physiological wearables, CBRN, laser rangefinders/targeting, and others for single-variant and multi-variant threats. The Plugin contains sets of business rules that can detect active engagement and shot counts, but also looks across an entire deployed fire team versus a single operator.  

Once certain thresholds are reached or a team requests support, the Plugin engages Thunderbolt’s Manned-unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) framework, which autonomously monitors, selects and dispatches unmanned assets to perform situation based resupply, reconnaissance and overwatch missions.   This creates a  fully extensible environment capable of integrating additional components, sensors, datasets, UxVs and missions. These products house an integrated maintenance counter which monitors the number of rounds fired as well as barrel temperature and other rail sensors and moves weapon data using BlueforceTACTICAL (BTAC) where the data is shared amongst the fire team and their commander but is also shared with the Wilcox Armorers Module in an armory.

BTAC (BlueforceTACTICAL) is an extensible situational awareness mobile application that enables the rapid formation of mobile teams and fuses sensor data of attached or proximate sensors to provide real-time location and sensor sharing… providing teams the information they need in the palm of their hands. BTAC obliterates traditional IoT and AI information stovepipes by fusing real-time human and sensor data across multiple incident modalities, collapsing the distance from sensor-to-decision maker-to-responder, and accelerating recognitional support by widening the decision-makers aperture to greater numbers and types of sensor inputs. BTAC is secure, field-proven, and enables operators to extend their capabilities, share information horizontally, and swarm faster than their adversaries by communicating with devices that they carry and those installed at fixed locations, mounted on manned and unmanned systems, or worn on the body.  

FEATURES 

  • Fusion and coordination between body worn and/or proximate sensors, like the Wilcox RAPTAR S, FUSION SYSTEM, HYBRID PATRIOT 5510 and the Wilcox Xe Line of Products.     
  • Tracking and shared location services: Real-time LAT, LON, and/or MGRS with plugins for subterranean, external, and/ or GPS denied/dead reckoning trackers. 
  • Rapid and secure formation of people, sensors, and AI services via simple email-like addresses or QR code scans. 
  • Online/offline moving maps with full support for the capture and/or consumption of geospatial/targeting information 
  • Secure 1:1/mass broadcast text; Push-to-Talk (can also support LMR bridging); and native “Android as a bodycam”  with ultra-low latency streaming. 

Future-proof extensibility and rapid adaptation through off-the-shelf software plugins or leverage of the Blueforce API/SDK (Android and Windows) for new best-in-class  sensors or systems. 275+ commercially available sensors supported today 

Additional information can be downloaded in our full Sustainment Technical Brief or by viewing our Operational Sustainment: Autonomous Replenishment Technical Demonstration.