being able to see a live UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] video feed.” VICTORY initiative A key venture driving interoperability in vetronics is the Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW (VICTORY) initiative. It is intended to resolve problems created by the “bolt-on” approach to fielding equipment on U.S. Army vehicles. It is also a way to get vehicles’ many systems “communicating” with each other. VICTORY’s technical approach involves a data bus-centric design, sharable ­hardware components, open standard physical and logical interfaces between the system and C4ISR/EW [electronic warfare] components, a set of shared data bus services, and shared hardware and software information assurance components to build security designs that protect and control access to infor- mation. (For more on VICTORY see article on page 22.) Most people in the defense industry would be surprised if they really dug into VICTORY and discovered that it’s intended to leverage plug-and-play and the capabilities that are proven out in software and network abstraction of ser- vices and service-oriented architectures that are common in the information tech- nology market, according to Jedynak. “It’s really a combination of ‘bullets and water’ tools that we see in the IT industry, but within a defense concept. It isn’t pie- in-the-sky R&D stuff; it’s built on a very strong foundation,” he notes. Upgrade activity Major vehicle platforms such as Abrams, Bowman, Bradley, and Stryker are under­- going various upgrades focused on enhancing C4ISR and improving per- formance through reduced SWaP-C and VICTORY-related requirements for product and technology integration. “They’re leveraging VICTORY in their engineering updates to claw back some of the SWaP capabilities that have been consumed by having so many separate systems,” points out Jedynak. The first step of VICTORY involves laying down an Ethernet switch before you can start plugging systems into it. “Right now, people are working on this initial requirement for their vehicles,” Jedynak explains. “And systems that typically came from isolated ‘stovepiped’ orga- nizations are starting to move toward producing VICTORY-compliant systems that can talk to the VICTORY system, as opposed to proprietary systems.” Once the Ethernet switch is in place it can be used as a connection between a remote weapons system, battle com- mand system, and turret protection system – among others – to put all of their information on one data box to be shared, he continues. (See Figure 2.) “Once everything is on the VICTORY data bus, if a shot rings out, the data pops up in the battle command and the remote weapons station turns around and is ready to fire at a target as soon as someone pulls the trigger,” Jedynak says. “It all happens automatically; there are no data entry errors and it’s a much faster response. We probably won’t see the in-the-field benefit of VICTORY until the latter part of this decade, but once it gets there it’ll be a big deal.” www.mil-embedded.com MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS July/August 2014 19