Army has one name for networks

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Army decided last month to call all of its communications networks LandWarNet.

The Air Force calls all of its voice, video and data networks the Command and Control Constellation and the Navy refers to theirs as FORCEnet. But top Pentagon and military leaders got confused when discussing Army systems, calling them the Army Battle Command System, Blue Force Tracking or the Army Knowledge Enterprise, said Mark Farmer, military analyst at Training and Doctrine Command, during a March 4 interview at the Association of the United States Army's annual winter conference.

"Joint commanders understand the C2 Constellation and ForceNET, but not the Army's networks," said Farmer, who helped devise the LandWarNet strategy at Tradoc, located at Fort Monroe, Va.

LandWarNet refers to the Army's strategy for land network concept development. It fuses the service's future warfighting framework into the military's joint operational concepts, which will guide the United States' war strategy for the next 15 to 20 years, Farmer said.

In mid-February, Lt. Gen. Steve Boutelle, the Army's chief information officer, asked Gen. Kevin Byrnes, Tradoc's commanding general, if he could adopt the LandWarNet name for all service networks, and Byrnes agreed. In November, Tradoc coined the word to integrate Current Force systems with U.S. and coalition forces' ones and to develop concepts for future Army networks, Farmer said.

The new name marks the Army's second major name change in recent months. The service in October dropped the Legacy, Interim and Objective Force, titles for its older, newer and future warfighting units, in favor of Current Force and Future Force.