1998 NATIONAL FIRE CONTROL SYMPOSIUM The 1998 National Fire Control Symposium will be held at the Town and Country Resort & Convention Center in San Diego, California on August 3 -- 6. This year's theme is Theater Air and Missile Defense; Our Expanding Horizons and is sponsored by the Navy, PEO Theater Air Defense, and co-sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Army Space and Missile Defense Command. Registration is $265. You must have a secret clearance to attend the conference. All presentations will fall into the following categories: Major Exercises: Lessons Learned (Fire Control) Exercises test warfighting concepts, capabilities, and technologies in realistic environments with a focus on solving current capability shortfalls and/or ushering in new capabilities. The results from an exercise often determine the direction technology will take in the future. This session will present papers dealing with lessons learned from recent joint or service exercises that demonstrated, validated, or explored technologies, capabilities or strategies relevant to fire control. Some examples of applicable exercises are: Roving Sands 98, ASCIET 97, Ulchi Focus Lens, Counter MRI, TMDI 98, Fleet Battle Experiment Bravo, Army After Next, SIT 98, and Red Crow. Battle Management, Command, Communications, Control, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (BMC4ISR) BMC4ISR, in its broadest interpretation, encompasses the entire information architecture of the fighting force and its support forces. This symposium section addresses some aspects of BMC4ISR that are relevant to theater air and missile defense. These include: (1) Force-wide situational awareness, or common operating picture (COP): the tasks that a COP should (and should not) support; concepts, technologies, and performance evaluations for combat identification, discrimination, multisensor data fusion, data correlation, and registration ("gridlock"); infrastructure requirements; and multiservice and multinational force interoperability and joint command relationships. (2) Weapon situational awareness or "sensor-to-shooter", e.g., passing surface imagery to strike aircraft or target-object maps (TOMs) to ballistic missile interceptors: sensor-to-shooter technologies and concepts and requirements for integration within the BMC4ISR infrastructure. (3) Engagement scheduling and resource management: algorithms for coordinated defense; rapid assessment and retasking tools; integration of weapons systems including multiservice, multinational, and future weapons; and proper processes, procedures, concepts and communications for joint engagement. (4) Hardware and software systems: data traffic requirements versus available data links; shared data bases; hardware/software infrastructure (formats, protocols, interfaces, robustness); security, antijamming, and antispoofing requirements and solutions; novel technologies, e.g., shared apertures, compression, error detection and correction, and miniaturization (for small platforms); and strategies for integrating systems with disparate communications and software and networking infrastructures including multiservice and multinational forces. Theater Air Missile Defense (TAMD) -- Maintaining the Perspective TAMD is broadly defined as those actions necessary to protect friendly forces from enemy air and missile threats. Since the Gulf War, DoD has concentrated much of its energies on improving defense of our troops against theater ballistic missiles. Recently, Joint Commands and the Components, influenced by updated intelligence estimates and budget constraints, have begun to re-evaluate how we should be defining and defeating future theater air threats. War planners and requirements drafters now realize that defeats of theater missiles must be integrated into a seamless construct of the total counterair picture. This session will begin with a presentation by the recently chartered Joint Theater Air & Missile Defense Office (JTAMDO) on its role in developing the TAMD architecture and weapon systems of the future. Papers will address one of the following topics: (1) sensor and interceptor technologies for defeating a particular target set (TBM, CM, UAV, Manned AC, Asymmetric Threat, etc.), or (2) CONOPS, program status, funding concerns, and technical briefings. Demonstration & Simulation Displays Demonstrators will provide hands-on interaction with hardware and software systems currently under development to perform the Joint Theater Air Defense mission. Each demonstration, simulation display and exhibit will be in place for the duration of the symposium. E-MAIL: click here to contact the focal point, psisson@dayton.anteon.com.

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