Common Technical/Tactical Fire Control Interface (CT2FC)

The future force battlespace will contain numerous different mounted and dismounted armament systems that must action fire directives from netted effects control cells which may mix and match weapon systems as required to attack targets. Each weapon system has different user interfaces and control stations with which to translate tactical fire control directives into technical fire control weapon pointing data. This leads to lack of interoperability between many systems, especially when one must combine BLOS, NLOS, and LOS weapon systems on a target in order to achieve desired effects. Making the systems interoperable tends to be extremely expensive. We propose to develop a user reconfigurable common fire control interface to perform tactical fire control at netted effects nodes, and to perform technical fire control at any NLOS, BLOS, or LOS weapon platform. We will develop a common interface description which accounts for multiple weapon systems technical fire control messaging and ballistic kernels, and then develop a prototype user interface demonstration at the end of Phase I. The effort will use existing netted fires components in the ARDEC CDAS architecture to perform tactical fire control, and interface these components to various technical fire control systems such as the NATO ballistic kernel.