Based at Camp H. M. Smith outside of downtown Honolulu, the responsibilities of the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) are awe-inspiring. More than 500 officers and enlisted personnel from all of Americas armed services, with the help of 110 civilians (and 1,500 additional military personnel in support units in Hawaii and PACOMs territory), oversee the security of more than half of the Earth.
This translates into approximately 105 million square miles of land and sea stretching from the U.S. West Coast to the east coast of Africa, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Its a territory containing about 60 percent of the worlds population, as well as the planets six largest armed forces (in order of size, China, the United States, Russia, India, North Korea, and South Korea).
Until recently, PACOM executed its duties from a series of aging WWII buildings. No longer: The recent construction of the new six-story Nimitz-MacArthur Pacific Command Center has provided PACOM with the leading-edge facility it needs to fight successfully in the 21st century. As PACOM commander Adm. Tom Fargo said during the NMPCCs opening ceremonies on April 14, What you see beside you tonight ... is that exceptional idea transformed into a magnificent reality.
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Network Architecture
Not surprisingly, a major feature of the $86 million NMPCC is a state-of-the-art video teleconferencing (VTC) facility, which bridges the gap between ships, PACOM, and the Pentagon in real time. In addition, 16 of the NMPCCs 20 VTC-equipped rooms can operate as independent battle cells, each one commanding a different aspect of a real-time engagement in PACOMs area of responsibility.
The NMPCCs AV system was custom designed by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego (SSC San Diego) and was built for the government by General Projection Systems. The innovative thinking behind this HQ21 design was explained in Video Enabling The Combatant Commanders Headquarters, the SSC San Diego paper written for the Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, co-authored by HQ21 project manager Arthur Nakagawa and HQ21 AV manager Justin Lee.
The NMPCCs AV system is tasked with coordinating the multitude of video intelligence sources including imagery from intelligence and weather satellites, plus tactical reconnaissance and to distribute it to the facilitys VTC-equipped rooms. A combatant commanders video and graphical information display system must provide the operations team a venue for collaboration in the crisis action decision making process, wrote Nakagawa and Lee.
Thanks to SSC San Diegos use of distributed networking throughout the NMPCC, 16 of these rooms known as Directorate Conference Rooms (DCRs) can operate as standalone battle cells, or join with other rooms to share information and coordinate their actions.
To help coordinate such multi-cell sessions, all of the NMPCCs VTC rooms are connected to an Audio Video Control Facility. Located in the central section of the new PACOM HQ, the AVCF is designed to act as a network distribution center in order to uniformly route incoming and outgoing VTC feeds to the rooms, said Chris Wachendorf, PACOMs AV director. We have 23 separate monitoring stations in the AVCF. Basically, we have the ability to troubleshoot any network issues without leaving the room.
All of PACOMs VTC feeds are transported through NMPCCs fiber optic network as IP-based H.323 packets. (H.323 is essentially an IP version of the popular H.320 VTC protocol.) Most PACOM feeds are encoded using TANDBERG Television codecs, although PACOM does have codecs from a number of other suppliers.
We use H.323 because it is a robust multimedia standard that is easy to control and troubleshoot, Wachendorf said. Typically, we run it at 384 kbps for full motion videoconferencing, although the system can be doubled to 768 kbps for presentations that require really high resolution.
In general, PACOM receives its VTC feeds over high-speed ISDN lines. There are instances where we connect using MILSATCOM satellites, but most times we use land lines, noted Wachendorf. The AVCF can interconnect 16 different inputs into a single videoconference, whether the sources be local or remote battle cells. Ships at sea can connect to the NMPCC via MILSATCOM at 128 or 256 kbps.
Room With A View
Visually, PACOMs Joint Operations Center (JOC) and 16 DCRs resemble standard corporate meeting halls. (The NMPCC also has three breakout rooms, each equipped with a ceiling-mounted video projector.) There are heavy wooden tables and comfortably appointed chairs, all facing a lectern at the front of the room. Behind the lectern in each DCR are three rear projection screens.
In the JOC, PACOM staff rely on 12 video display cubes configured in a 2x6 layout and controlled by the JOCs own video router. Each monitor can display an independent video or data feed, as selected remotely by the AVCF or an operator within the room when in battle cell mode.
To support VTC operations, SSC San Diego has equipped the JOC and each DCR with three Sony video cameras. One camera covers the lectern, the second looks out from the front of the room toward the audience, and the third shoots forward from the back of the room. The rooms are fully miked, with both desk and ceiling microphones, said Wachendorf. Meanwhile, each room has three desktop PCs available, laptop computer inputs at the tabletops, and DVD, tape, and computer playback available through the operators station.
The JOC and DCRs come with built-in loudspeakers, lighting presets, and lighted LED signs to signal the conferences security status. While the actual hardware has slight variations from room to room, each DCR is identical from an AV standpoint, designed to serve as a building block for a battle cell, according to officials.
One amenity NMPCCs JOC and DCRs do not have is wireless networking, a security precaution, according to Wachendorf. But banning Wi-Fi is just the starting point for the NMPCCs VTC security arrangements.
In order to allow PACOM to stage anything from unclassified to top secret VTC meetings, the communications channels for the JOC and DCRs have been designed to function in various modes. Each VTC system supports a specific security classification unclassified, secret, special purpose, or top secret. Because the NMPCC only uses a single VTC codec for each room, SSC San Diego designed the system to erase the previous security system configuration whenever the classification of the JOC/DCR is changed.
The NMPCCs VTC services went live in February 2004, two months before the NMPCC was officially dedicated by Fargo. Since then, the new facility has performed reliably on a 24/7 basis, reported Wachendorf. It is helping us stay in touch with our chips at sea and the East Coast at all times, he said. It is light years ahead of what we had before.
MORE INFO
Nimitz-MacArthur Pacific Command Center
www.pacom.mil
General Projection Systems www.genproj.com
Sony www.sony.com
SSC San Diego www.spawar.navy.mil/sandiego
TANDBERG Television www.tandbergtv.com
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