A newly-established U.S. Army unit started deploying commercial-off-the-shelf equipment providing tactical network communications supporting both small and large units even in contested environments. The new Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced unit employed the communications tool for the first time at a recent live training mission at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the Army said Monday. Â
The equipment is designed to be scalable and fully interoperable with other systems to enable troops of any size to coordinate from initial entry to full scale operations.
“The ESB-E’s new equipment allows us to be a lot more flexible and expeditionary in nature,†said Lt. Col. David Short, commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Regiment, 108th ADA Brigade. “We can tailor defense design, and our network nodes can go wherever we need to go.”Â
The ESB-E equipment includes tactical network transport technologies providing signal pathway diversity and expanded data exchange, including:Â
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- Small, medium and large triband satellite dishes and network baseband equipment packages
- The transit case-based Terrestrial Line of Sight Radio
- Wi-Fi
- A Network Operations package
- The Army’s Global Agile Integrated Transport network architecture
