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Army Under Pressure to Bring Broadband to the Battlefield
The Army has more radios, computers and advanced networking technology than ever before. Soldiers at war, alas, are information-deprived.
Despite an information-technology buying spree over the past decade, the Army has yet to figure out how to sate troops’ gargantuan appetite for information and ever-growing needs for battlefield intelligence. Current battlefield networks are accessible by divisions, brigades and battalions. But smaller units remain digital orphans, even though they lead the day-to-day fighting in current wars. The squads, platoons and companies require high-bandwidth connectivity so they can share information and gain instant awareness of what is happening on the ground, Army officials said.
Help appears to be on the way. In the Army’s 2010 modernization roadmap, the “network” is billed as a top priority. After more than a decade of failed efforts and billions of dollars spent, the pressure is on for the Army to deliver a battlefield network that supports small, mobile units. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli characterized the network as essential to the future Army. “It will require an open architecture that will allow further plug-and-play development in the future as our network grows and matures,” Chiarelli said at an industry conference last year.
The Army since the early 1990s has made several attempts at building a battlefield Internet, but the technology has leapt way ahead of the military procurement bureaucracy. The closest the Army has come to having an IP network at the squad level is in the “land warrior” system — an ensemble that includes a communications and navigation computer-radio suite. In the land warrior network, each member can pinpoint other soldiers’ locations by simply looking at a display. But this is only a niche solution and does not solve the larger problem of connecting every element of a deployed brigade.
Visions of broadband connectivity in the field and smart phones that can be constantly updated with new applications, from a technical standpoint, are realistic, experts said. But they will never be realized as long as the Army continues to buy IT the same way it acquires tanks and helicopters. It simply takes too long to move technology to the field, and by the time it gets there, the market already has moved on.
The Army’s chief information officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, said at an industry conference that the service since 9/11 has tripled its inventory of radios to more than 900,000 and increased its ability to transmit data within U.S. Central Command networks from 46 megabytes per second to about 10 gigabytes per second.
Similar capabilities have not trickled down into the small units that don’t have access to the high-tech command centers and need mobile equipment they can operate from their trucks. Platoons and squads have line-of-sight radios — whose signals are blocked by buildings or mountains — with low-bandwidth and they are unable to chat online or transmit images. Soldiers at a typical forward base in Afghanistan using line-of-sight radios travel only a few miles down the road before they lose their connection to the base.
Under a program called Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team Increment 1, or E-IBCT, the Army is piecing together its most advanced information technologies into a deployable network that would allow soldiers to not only stay connected to each other but also to capture intelligence from unmanned sensors and disseminate it throughout the brigade. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in 2012, will be the launch customer for the new technologies. Soldiers from the brigade are testing the systems at Fort Bliss, Texas. If the Pentagon approves additional funding, more brigades could be equipped with the advanced network later this decade.
With this technology, the “company commander becomes the network quarterback for the Army,” said Lt. Col. Darby McNulty, deputy program manager for network systems integration. The future company “command post” is being designed to link all soldiers in a company and below, and also to connect the company with higher echelons and with national intelligence databases via satellite. The command post could be set up in a fixed site or could be installed in the cab of a large armored truck.
The nearly 1 million radios that the Army currently owns, however, are not part of this setup. The E-IBCT program is building the network with new software-programmable radios that were developed by the Defense Department’s “joint tactical radio system” or JTRS program. The radios can be programmed to operate a variety of software communication applications that are called “waveforms.”
JTRS program officials said that current radios cannot deliver the high bandwidth that deployed forces need and cannot run the required software applications.
For the company command post, three waveforms are required: The soldier radio waveform (for narrowband communications within a company), the wideband networking waveform (for broadband data transfer) and the network centric waveform (for satellite-based communications). The soldier radio waveform capacity to pass data is about 500 to 600 kilobits per second. The wideband networking waveform transfers five megabytes per second.
JTRS hardware includes a family of radios — a half-pound device for small robots, a two-pound handheld “rifleman” radio, a 14-pound “manpack” and a four-channel command-post system. The entire JTRS program includes nine waveforms not just for the Army but for the other branches of the military as well.
For the first time, the latest advances in radio communications are being brought together in a live exercise, McNulty said during a conference call with reporters. The recent tests at Fort Bliss proved that JTRS is an essential piece of the Army’s future network, he said. “It’s something you absolutely want to stick with.”
For the exercise, mobile company command posts installed aboard armored trucks were outfitted with “network integration kits,” which are the network hubs connecting the terrestrial and satellite layers of the network to one another. Each NIK consists of a command-and-control terminal, called the “integrated computer system,” a four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio and a blue-force tracker display screen. Dismounted soldiers carried either a JTRS rifleman radio or a manpack radio.
The radios in each vehicle create a “mobile ad-hoc network,” or manet. Each tactical radio functions as a cell phone tower. At the tests in Fort Bliss, engineers extended the range of the network by adding an “aerial layer” made up of unmanned aircraft and helicopters that were outfitted with small JTRS radios. “We were able to extend sensor and position data beyond 20 km, in some cases up to 40 km,” McNulty said.
The four-channel JTRS, made by The Boeing Co., runs the soldier radio waveform, the wideband networking waveform and the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or Sincgars, waveform, which allows the commander to talk to all the vehicles in the unit. Sincgars is the most commonly used radio net in the Army.
Details about how the network will be organized and what specific equipment will be acquired are still being hashed out, said McNulty. “We need to better understand who needs what information at what level so we can better optimize the network,” he said. “If you can eliminate extraneous information you can improve the quality of the network, if you send everything to everyone all at once the quality of your service decreases exponentially.”
Tests will continue over the next several months.
It is not an exaggeration to say that this program is under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon’s senior acquisition officials will be reviewing test results this fall, and will determine whether the program will continue to receive funding. A separate evaluation is under way within the Army. This “network capabilities portfolio review” will examine the entire litany of Army IT programs and nominate winners and losers. It will look at whether the Army can afford to acquire new equipment, whether it should stick with “legacy” systems or, a most likely outcome, whether it should have a mix. Overseeing this review is Chiarelli, who has expressed concern about the “affordability” of current programs and famously brandished his iPhone as an example of the low-cost apps-friendly IT that soldiers need but the Army’s plodding acquisition system is unable to provide.
Another contentious issue in the ongoing reviews is whether JTRS can make up for lost time and deliver hardware at prices that are competitive with other radios. JTRS has been in development since 1999 and originally was scheduled to be fielded by 2006. Delays dogged the program as the slippages coincided with the war buildup, when billions of dollars were being appropriated in emergency war budgets to purchase new radios. When it became clear that JTRS was not ready, the Army poured billions into other radios. The result is today’s inventory that has tripled in size.
JTRS program officials now are forecasting that the models that the Army needs — the JTRS HMS (handheld/manpack/small form-fit) radios will be ready for deployment by 2011.
“These radios provide digital connectivity, networking down to the soldier level. That has not been done before,” said Army Col. John V. Zavarelli, program manager for JTRS HMS. Orders of up to 215,000 HMS radios are expected, he said in an interview. “We believe they could increase to 250,000 based on service needs.”
Zavarelli said he was not familiar with the Army’s network review and could not comment on the affordability of JTRS. He said all the services have been funding their share of JTRS research and development expenses. “I’m not sure the costs are an issue,” he said. “I certainly haven’t been told it in that way.”
About 750 pre-production radios have been purchased so far from prime contractor General Dynamics. Once the radios are cleared for full-rate production, the JTRS program office will solicit competitive bids from vendors for each variant. The assumption is that competitors will challenge General Dynamics and help to drive down prices, Zavarelli said. Several industry sources told National Defense that current JTRS HMS handheld radios cost upwards of $75,000 each, but Zavarelli said he could not confirm or discuss prices.
“We are on the edge of operational testing and limited rate production decisions in the next year,” he said. “We’ve offered some alternatives for accelerating [the development] and are waiting for a decision.”
Radio suppliers are watching these events closely as they seek to position their products for future JTRS business. Several executives interviewed for this story said they fear that the JTRS program is too rigid in that only radios that strictly meet the technical specifications of JTRS will be allowed to compete. That means none of the radios that exist in the military’s inventory today are acceptable. Under that scenario, the Army would be in a position of having to replace hundreds of thousands of radios that already are paid for and installed. A radio installation kit for an average Army vehicle costs more than the radio itself. When JTRS was conceived in the late 1990s, it was assumed that the radios would be installed in new Future Combat Systems vehicles. But when the FCS vehicle program was terminated last year, some Army officials sounded alarms about what this meant for JTRS. “By losing FCS a lot of the Army’s network and communications programs seriously unraveled,” said a retired Army officer who was closely involved in FCS.
Ripping out existing radios and installing new JTRS systems across the Army’s fleets of vehicles would be an exorbitant expense, several industry sources said. They don’t see how the Army will go along with such a plan when the services are under pressure to cut costs and find $100 billion in savings across all defense programs over the next five years.
Officials from one of the Army’s major radio suppliers, ITT Corp., have for years been trying to sell the idea that its Sincgars combat radios could be modified to run the soldier radio waveform (SRW) so the Army would not have to replace them with more expensive JTRS systems. ITT is the prime contractor for the SRW software and also the manufacturer of the Sincgars radios that the U.S. military has been using since the early 1980s.
ITT has delivered more than 500,000 radios, nearly half of them during the past two years. War funds paid for a huge expansion of ITT’s manufacturing plant so it could ramp up production from 1,000 to 6,000 radios per month. The Army Science Board, an advisory panel, recommended in a 2007 report that the Army “stop buying Sincgars immediately” so it could invest the money in “future, not legacy hardware.” But Congress continued to fund Sincgars purchases, and production continues to this day, although Army orders are scheduled to end in a couple of years.
With such a large inventory in the force, it is hard to see how the Army can toss it and buy all new hardware, said David Prater, ITT vice president for network communications.
“We’ve proposed adding a single channel SRW [to current Sincgars] to keep the cost down,” he said. “For $10,000 to $15,000 you’d get a two-channel radio that does Sincgars or SRW,” compared to a $75,000 two-channel manpack that does those two waveforms plus perhaps one or two others,” Prater said.
“The Army is wrestling with this,” he said. The timing has worked against JTRS. “In the meantime you’ve got all these Sincgars radios,” Prater said. “JTRS kind of missed the war. A lot of [non-JTRS] equipment was bought” during the past eight years.
Zavarelli insists that none of these options meets the requirements of JTRS.
“Some radios by design are incapable of hosting narrowband and wideband waveforms,” he said. ITT has suggested adding a “sidehat” data radio to Sincgars that could run the SRW waveform, but Zavarelli is not convinced that it would work. “That’s a separate entire radio that’s added to the Sincgars. I have a requirement for SRW radios and that’s what we are doing.”
Other vendors also have questioned the radio-procurement strategy as well as the Army’s larger game plan for acquiring information technology.
The Defense Department spent the better part of a decade developing JTRS and during that time the industry has moved on to other products and the technology landscape has changed, said Steve Marschilok, president of defense business at Harris RF Communications.
Any company that competes for JTRS production contracts will have to build a custom radio that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the marketplace, Marschilok said.
“You can’t procure IT the way we always have,” said Dennis Moran, vice president of Harris Corp.’s government communications systems division. The Army is stuck with an “antiquated requirements process that goes from Fort Gordon, to Fort Monroe, to the Pentagon,” Moran said. “You can’t force technology to adapt to requirements that are out of touch before ink is even dried on paper at TRADOC [Training and Doctrine Command] headquarters.”
In the case of JTRS, the government could have saved billions it spent on development by purchasing off-the-shelf products, Moran said. That is how U.S. Special Operations Command does business these days, he noted.
Harris has supplied more than 120,000 radios to the Defense Department. The company is a JTRS contractor for single-channel radios and expects to compete for future production contracts for the JTRS rifleman and manpack systems. It plans to offer variants of its existing radios even though the program office says none of today’s commercial radios meet the JTRS requirements. Harris also is expected to bid its PRC/117G radio against competing systems from BAE Systems and Rockwell Collins for the four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio.
A commercial approach to building the Army’s networks would save billions of dollars, said Moran. If JTRS were to be canceled, “ITT and Harris radios could give you an extremely powerful architecture at a much better value than potentially the Defense Department has budgeted for JTRS,” he said. Still, JTRS is an important program for the Defense Department because it can help guide industry investments, he said. “We need the program to develop the standards, to ensure interoperability,” Moran said. “You want waveforms to be seamless to the soldier. We don’t want the program killed. But is there a better way to invest the dollars? Maybe there is.”
Paul D. Mueller, vice president of Motorola’s federal government market, said the military has failed to tap the commercial sector for new technology and remains bogged down in “programs of record” that take too long to deliver products. Defense Department IT users demand unique levels of security for information networks but there are ways to bridge their needs with commercially available technology, Mueller said.
“We’re excited about the adoption of the smart phone technology” for the U.S. military, he said. “That looks like a good bet for us.” There is growing interest in Motorola’s Android smart phone because of its open system and its potential for the military to be able to run its own software applications. Smart phones are regarded as the ticket to information sharing on the battlefield.
The Marine Corps has been ahead of the Army in modifying commercial radios and wireless networking technology for tactical communications, he said.
Motorola has designed a “gateway” box that would bridge cellular, Iridium satellite and land mobile radio networks so users of different cell phones and radios can talk to each other.
The JTRS waveforms could be installed in current radios such as the Marine Corps’ P-25 handheld devices as a low-cost alternative to the HMS radios, said Mueller.
Marines in small units communicate on the battlefield and back to their ships with a mix of commercial and military systems. The “distributed tactical communications system” employs military radios and Iridium commercial satellite services. They also have a terrestrial mobile network built by Trellisware, a commercial supplier of wireless systems.
www.nationaldefensemagazine.org
U.S. Consolidates Military Network in Asia-Pacific Region
“U.S. fast strike and first strike global missile and space strategy and its expansion of military alliances and networks in the Asia-Pacific area are rightly seen as threats to China and Russia. And to international security and peace.”
The United States has six naval fleets and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups patrolling the world’s oceans and seas. The U.S. Navy is as large as the world’s next thirteen biggest navies combined [1].
Washington has as many aircraft carriers as all other nations together. Russia has one; China has none. The U.S. and its NATO allies – Britain (2), Italy (2), France (1) and Spain (1) – account for 17 of 22 in service in the world. Ten of the eleven American carriers are Nimitz class nuclear-powered supercarriers, substantially larger than most all non-U.S. ones. The U.S. Navy has all ten supercarriers in the world at the moment. [2]
U.S. aircraft carriers contain 70-80 planes and are available for deployment in all the world’s oceans and most of its seas. They are escorted in their carrier groups by anti-air and anti-submarine warfare guided missile destroyers, anti-submarine warfare frigates, missile cruisers with long-range Tomahawks, and nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines. The U.S. also maintains between ten and twelve naval expeditionary strike groups which include amphibious assault ships and AH-1 Super Cobra attack helicopters in addition to destroyers, cruisers, frigates, attack submarines and P-3C Orion long-range anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircraft.
With the reestablishing of the Navy’s Fourth Fleet – its area of responsibility includes Central and South America and the Caribbean Sea – two years ago after a 58-year hiatus, the U.S. has six fleets that can be dispatched to all five oceans.
The Seventh Fleet (there is no First Fleet), based in Japan, is the largest of U.S. forward-deployed fleets and consists of as many as 40–60 ships, 200-350 aircraft and 20,000-60,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel. Its area of responsibility takes in more than 50 million square miles of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, from Russia’s Kuril Islands in the north to the Antarctic in the south, from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea, South Africa to the Korean Peninsula, the Strait of Malacca to the Taiwan Strait.
When on the occasion of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize last December President Barack Obama referred to himself as the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s sole military superpower he was not guilty of hyperbole if he was of hubris. His defense budget for next year is almost half as large as world military spending for 2008, the last year for which the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has compiled figures.
The U.S. has mutual defense treaties with six nations in the Asia-Pacific area: Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand. The Pentagon has bases in Japan and South Korea, troops and base camps in the Philippines, satellite surveillance sites in Australia and the use of air bases in Thailand.
Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are included in the American global missile interceptor network with Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and ship-based Standard Missile-3 deployments in those four nations. Last December it was announced that the U.S. will supply Taiwan with 200 Patriot anti-ballistic missiles and the following month it was revealed that Washington will also provide Taiwan with eight frigates capable of being upgraded to fire Standard Missile-3 interceptors. [3]
Last week the head of the Missile Defense Agency, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, told the U.S. Congress that, as Reuters summarized it, “Japan remains fully committed to building a linchpin multibillion-dollar missile interceptor with the United States,” despite hopes to the contrary entertained after the Democratic Party of Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama became prime minister last September.
Referring to the current Standard Missile-3 enhancement program, O’Reilly said that Japanese government officials “have indicated that they are in full support and their commitments are solid.”
In regards to the upgraded interceptor missile, the SM-3 Block IIA, he added, “Within the next year, we will begin our discussions on production arrangements between the United States and Japan.” [4]
On April 27 the U.S. renewed a military logistics agreement with Australia “allowing deployed Australian forces to exploit the vast logistics capability of the American military” and permitting “U.S. forces on operations to make use of Australian logistics.”
“Since its inception, the agreement had ensured supply support and services to Australian and U.S. forces deployed to all parts of the world wherever they were operating together….That included mutual support during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” [5]
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Marine General James Cartwright, is visiting New Zealand this week to consult with the country’s top military commanders and defense minister.
Cartwright is “the first vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to visit New Zealand since the position was established” in 1986. [6] His visit comes two weeks after NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, made similar trips to New Zealand and Australia.
Last month New Zealand’s Defence Minister Wayne Mapp announced that joint military exercises with the U.S. would resume after 23 years, since the nation’s 1987 ban on the docking of nuclear-powered warships and submarines.
New Zealand has been brought back into the fold in part by providing NATO with over 200 troops for the war in Afghanistan. Australia, with over 1,500 soldiers assigned to the International Security Assistance Force in the nation, is the largest non-NATO troop contributor to the war. Last year it unveiled plans for the most extensive military buildup in its post-World War Two history. [7]
On April 23 the U.S. and India launched the ten-day Malabar 2010 military exercises after “Ships, submarines and aircraft from the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet arrived in Goa” to engage in maneuvers which include training for “surface and anti-submarine warfare, coordinated gunnery exercises [and] air defense….” [8] The U.S. contribution consists of two guided missile destroyers, a guided missile frigate, a guided missile cruiser, a nuclear fast-attack submarine, P-3 Orion anti-submarine and surveillance aircraft, SH-60B Seahawk helicopters and Navy SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) special forces.
The Malabar war games have been conducted jointly by the U.S. and India since 1992 (except for 1998-2001 after India carried out nuclear tests), but last year included Japan, and Malabar 2007 was a five-nation operation held in the Bay of Bengal with the U.S. and India joined by Australia, Japan and Singapore, leading to suspicions of U.S. designs for an Asia-Pacific analogue of NATO.
As Malabar 2010 was underway, “warships, combat aircraft and soldiers” from Australia, Britain, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore (all Commonwealth nations) began Exercise Bersama Shield 2010 “on the Malaysian peninsula and in the South China Sea.” [9]
Malaysia is among a minority of maritime states not to have joined the U.S.-launched Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) whose architect was then U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton. Established in 2003 as “a global effort that aims to stop trafficking of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their delivery systems, and related materials to and from states and non-state actors,” [10], it has grown to incorporate over 90 of the world’s 148 coastal nations. [11]
China, Indonesia and Malaysia have refused to join, though South Korea did in May of last year, and the first three countries along with Iran and North Korea – the states used as justification for the PSI – view the U.S.-led global surveillance, interdiction and boarding operation with deep concern and doubts about its legality, as it operates without a United Nations mandate, can be argued to circumvent and violate international maritime law, and in effect grants the U.S. and its allies the self-arrogated right to conduct piracy on the high seas.
“Launched on May 31, 2003, U.S. involvement in the PSI stems from the U.S. National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction issued in December 2002. That strategy recognizes the need for more robust tools to stop proliferation of WMD around the world, and specifically identifies interdiction as an area where greater focus will be placed. President Obama strongly supports the PSI. On April 5, 2009 in Prague, the President called on the international community to make PSI a ‘durable international institution.’” [12]
The PSI has been effectively if not formally extended into the Indian Ocean and the Horn of Africa with the U.S.-run Combined Task Force 150 and Combined Task Force 151 warship deployments. Recently the South Korean navy assumed command of Combined Task Force 151 from Singapore. Combined Task Force 150 contributing navies include those of the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Portugal, Singapore, Spain and Turkey.
Last week it was announced that NATO welcomed South Korea as the 46th nation supplying it with troops for the war in Afghanistan. On March 29 Mongolia became the 45th. [13] Singapore also has troops serving under NATO in the country and until this year Japan was providing naval support to the U.S. war effort there.
On April 26 the China Daily reported that Rear Admiral Yang Yi, formerly in charge of strategic studies at the Chinese army’s National Defense University, said “The United States is the greatest perceived threat to the People’s Liberation Army” and that “the US was the only country capable of threatening China’s national security interests in an all-round way.” [14]
Another Chinese news source on the same day wrote of U.S. Prompt Global Strike (PGS) plans to be able to strike any target on earth within sixty minutes and the Pentagon’s recent test flights of the X-37B orbital space plane and the Falcon hypersonic spy plane, reporting that “Chinese space technology expert Pang Zhihao said the spaceship…aids the PGS program, which he said could be a potential threat to world peace.” [15]
The previous day London’s Sunday Times acknowledged that “Obama’s interest in Prompt Global Strike (PGS)…has alarmed China and Russia….” [16]
U.S. fast strike and first strike global missile and space strategy and its expansion of military alliances and networks in the Asia-Pacific area are rightly seen as threats to China and Russia. And to international security and peace.
Tariam Delivers Free Satellite Broadband Hardware for US & NATO Forces Personnel
Global Satellite Broadband ISP Tariam has launched an innovative new satellite broadband service aimed specifically at supporting serving NATO and ISAF forces and their subcontractors operating in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The service, dubbed ‘inet’, has been put together to facilitate welfare communications for personnel stationed thousands of miles from friends and family with no way of communicating with home.
Tariam’s Military and Aerospace Director, Selwyn Petterson, informed, inet is a revolutionary offering because we’re actually giving away the hardware with the service. We’ve constructed the product to make it as easy and quick as possible for these users to get online. We’ve got large stocks of hardware sitting in the appropriate countries to minimise delays in getting the equipment to where it’s needed most. We’re confident that we’ve got enough equipment to offer the deal to ALL serving NATO and ISAF personnel, and we can deliver service on a variety of satellites, wherever our forces are working.
“Most people don’t realise that the ordinary troops and serving personnel rarely have access to the internet in many of these places because it simply doesn’t exist there. We’ve made a name for ourselves supplying communications for the military, but inet is aimed really at the ordinary soldiers and airmen.
The Tariam inet kit includes everything the user with a PC needs to get online quickly enabling them to exchange emails, make and receive voice calls, browse the internet and even use a webcam to see their loved ones. There’s a list of bases and camps that can use the service on Tariam’s website, but all of Afghanistan and Iraq are well covered.
Selwyn said also, “The core of the solution is hardware that’s been extensively tested and is well proven in a variety of environments, but the key thing is that troops often transit through camps or bases and are only around for fairly short periods before moving on. The way the product works allows groups of individuals to club together to get a location online with no capital outlay and the users can then just pay as they come and go.
More information on Tariam inet is available now by browsing the Tariam website and clicking Afghanistan & Iraq.