Seven years ago, the U.S. Air Force awarded a contract to develop a new kind of communications terminal as a linchpin in the service’s plan to assure command and control of the country’s nuclear-armed bombers during a nuclear war.

The Family of Aerial Beyond-line-of-sight Terminals (FAB-T) would link bomber crews to the forthcoming constellation of Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) communications satellites, which the Air Force is almost ready to start launching to replace the Milstar nuclear command-and-control satellites. In a nuclear war, ground antennas would be knocked out, the U.S. president would take to the air in a mobile command post, and FAB-T computers on the bombers would become the president’s last link to the bombers. The president does not have that kind of satellite link today because B-2 and B-52 bombers do not carry Milstar terminals.

“The nuclear C2 community has required this capability since the launch of Milstar, and FAB-T is the solution,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Davis, commander of the squadron that oversees the FAB-T work at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass.

The AEHF constellation also might be the only communications network available after nuclear detonations, and bomber crews would use the FAB-T terminals to take over command and control of the constellation. In better times, the higher data rates of the AEHF satellites and FAB-T equipment would improve dissemination of intelligence to bombers and to and from ISR aircraft, such the RC-135.

With the first AEHF satellite scheduled for launch in September, contractors and the Air Force are working through a major hitch in the FAB-T plan. Development of the terminals is years behind schedule, and in June the Air Force issued a notice to industry announcing that it will conduct “market research” toward finding an alternative supplier for the terminals, which are in development by Boeing. As it stands, the Air Force will not decide until 2012 whether to begin production, a decision that was originally planned for 2007, and then February 2010.

Software problems

The Government Accountability Office, in an October report, cited “significant software development problems” by Boeing. GAO said the AEHF and FAB-T programs are prime examples of space programs that are in desperate need of schedule “synchronization” between satellite construction and development of user equipment and software. It calculates that just 2 percent of the FAB-T terminals will be ready when AEHF is declared operationally capable, which is defined as two satellites operating in orbit. After the September launch, the Air Force plans to launch two more AEHFs through 2012.

The FAB-T delay does not mean no one will be able to use AEHF, however. Other engineers are upgrading software for the Army Secure Mobile Anti-jam Reliable Tactical Terminal, known as SMART-T, and the Navy Multiband Terminal to make them compatible with AEHF. The Air Force is upgrading its Minuteman Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network to assure AEHF links to missile commanders.

As for the airborne terminals, a Boeing official said the company understands the GAO criticism. “That’s one thing we have to do: synchronize with the satellites,” said Kirk Warburton, who heads business development for FAB-T for Boeing.

Without production terminals, Boeing last year delivered engineering model FAB-Ts to the Air Force’s B-2, B-52 and RC-135 programs, and to Hanscom. Tests on a Boeing 707 test bed at Hanscom went well, but they were conducted with low-data-rate terminals because software to exploit the AEHF Extended Data Rate waveform was not ready.

“The System Development and Demonstration Program is going to be complete, but we’re in the process of replanning the schedule,” Warburton said. “We’re in reprogramming, aligning the schedule with the capabilities.”

If the first AEHF satellite goes up as planned, the Air Force hopes to test an engineering version of FAB-T with it late this year, said Davis of Hanscom. GAO, in 2009, warned against testing with “an interim, nonproduction-representative” terminal, and Warburton said Boeing is addressing that problem. “We’re completing the qualification for the hardware and the qualification of the Block 8 software, which is going to be the production [Extended Data Rate] software,” he said.

Boeing is forging ahead on its terminals, which are an amalgamation that includes a modem processor by L-3 Communications, AEHF waveform management by Northrop Grumman, and communications and information security by ViaSat.

The Air Force’s move to postpone a decision on low-rate initial production until 2012 was to allow development to catch up. It also will allow much more testing, including tests to determine if the FAB-T can interact with the other terminals of the AEHF network.

Full-implementation of FAB–T will involve 243 terminals and might take until 2019 to complete. The AEHF constellation would replace Milstar’s low data rate of 2,400 bytes-per-second with up to eight megabytes on multiple channels.

When defense officials outlined the user equipment for AEHF, they decided on software upgrades to the SMART-T and Navy terminals. The Air Force is developing the Minuteman Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network upgrade for ground use.

But the new AEHF satellite offered something else: An opportunity to develop a radiation-hardened, aircraft-qualified terminal to provide faster voice and data transmission to the bombers and RC-135 intelligence planes and, after that, to the E-4B, the converted Boeing 747 that would serve as a mobile command post for the national command authority in a nuclear war. A FAB-T terminal eventually would be installed on the Navy’s E-6B, an airborne command post and communications center. The E-4s and E-6s have Milstar terminals, but the bombers do not.

“You need to know that if you send a B-2 on a nuclear mission, and it comes time to recall it, that you can reach out anywhere in the world and deliver that message,” Warburton said.

The Air Force established that as a priority: “Several years ago, it was determined that the most critical need was for survivable communications for the nuclear force elements, airborne and ground command posts and AEHF satellite control,” Davis said.

In 2003, Boeing won a $273 million, six–year design and development contract to produce FAB-T. It would use layered and open architecture and a software-defined-radio approach with an eye to future technology development.

“For instance, externally developed components can be used with the same core hardware/software, and that enables platforms like the B-2 to develop their own antenna and operate interface, per its own needs and still be linked to the FAB-T core,” Davis said. “The architecture employs common modules along the terminal configurations, simplifying the logistics effort for the enterprise.”

But since 2003, engineering changes related to both hardware and software have more than trebled development costs and delayed production, according to GAO’s October report. In a March report, “Assessment of Major Weapons Programs,” GAO warns that the troubles might not be over. The Air Force FAB-T office “continues to monitor two areas — certification by the National Security Agency and software development — that could cause cost increases and schedule delays,” according to the report. FAB-T designers have had to increase the amount of software code by about 8 percent over the last year, and software costs have risen by 12 percent, according to the report.

Warburton, who has been on the program less than two years, spoke of the difficulty involved in development.

“The government has set up a set of requirements to provide a set of terminals that are hardened” — meaning engineered to resist nuclear radiation — “for the nuclear control mission, which is a lot tougher than delivering nonhardened terminals,” he said. “And, by the way, they must be secure all the way up through top secret, because you can imagine that the nuclear command and control mission is classified all the way to the highest levels.”

Boeing is looking ahead toward the 2012 decision on low-rate initial production.

“Based on a schedule the Air Force gave us [in January], we will give them a proposal for how we would do the first lots of low-rate initial production, because that’s all they’re going to be asking for,” Warburton said. What happens beyond that “is dependent on how they lay out their funding.”

At the same time, Boeing continues to work on future increments of the FAB-T program, to take advantage of its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, the better to exploit the data-transmission speed of the AEHF satellites.

“The RC-135 will incorporate FAB-T to provide a protected and beyond-line-of-sight capability to rapidly and securely pass ISR to ground sites,” Davis said. ”AEHF is an important segment of the suite of communications system used by the ISR community.”

Turner Brinton contributed to this report.