Much like military conflict, manmade and natural disasters present similar challenges of uncertainty, complexity and variability. These time-constrained and chaotic decision environments require rapid adaptation and an ability to pivot quickly to changes in the environment. The complexity of the event, coupled with time compressed decision space and the severity of the potential consequences, creates conditions that are unforgiving of error. Given the austere and sometimes contested communications in a post-disaster environment, decision aids for commanders must be bandwidth-aware and possess the ability to change their mode of transmission accordingly to accommodate a volatile network. The “golden ring” is affecting mutual understanding specific to the incident with limited exchanges of data.

Establishing a core competency around “speed of command” saves live and property, and Distributed Command and Control (C2) systems play a central role in disaster management. Blueforce has supported scores of complex disasters and post-conflict environments and common to all of them was damage and/or sporadic accessibility to existing communication systems across the terrestrial landscape. Critical to post-disaster environments is a mobile C2 capability that delivers rapidly deployable and fully self-contained communications, compute, and decision aids that are optimized for austere and even denied cloud backhaul.

Blueforce’s new BlueforceMOBILE Command Post in a Box (BlueforceMOBILE-CP) powered by T-Mobile 5G is a turnkey and “turn-on-and-go” solution that builds upon more than 10 years of experience deploying to complex disasters and for use during fully self-contained border counter-terrorism joint task forces (JTF). BlueforceMOBILE-CP is a “man portable” and can be carried on to domestic flights and provides communications, compute, sensor fusion, and a distributed common operating picture that crosses domains, agencies, and networks, powered by Blueforce software. More importantly, it is a kit that isn’t confined to a single vehicle and can be moved in minutes featuring a footprint that is military and civilian transport friendly. As important, the kit is a future-proof and sustainable platform that can embrace and extend today’s ground sensors, autonomous platforms, and information services, with tomorrow’s. The kit delivers compute, communications, and a single pane of glass operational view enabling far edge operations with minimal and even zero backhaul. With support for location services, unattended ground sensors, body worn sensors, drones, and various information services, this kit stands up quickly and includes the following core capabilities:

• Compute: Intel i7 edge compute with loads of RAM for localized incident services, but also for video streaming services and forward sensor and AI fusion.
• Comms: Peplink 4G or 5G router w/options for satcom backhaul failover
• Samsung Industrial Display: Available with industrial grade flat screen or curved screen monitor which tucks securely into the rollaway kit.
• Edge-Based Sensor Fusion: One BlueforceEDGE license with support for video or service endpoints to support drones, robotics, K9 video, and more.
• Blueforce MEC HyperLocal Services: Plugins for BlueforceEDGE that provide hyperlocal services, map services, discovery services, localized video distribution, and iFrame services (for localized weather, and/or customer supplied information services).
• BlueforceCOMMAND Common Operating Picture: Build YOUR view of the incident scene through enduser constructible dashboards and teams for a truly single pane of glass view enabling superior decision support in time constrained decision environments.
• BlueforcePATROL Mobile Licenses: Twelve (12) licenses for BlueforcePATROL (Android or iOS) to track your people, accountability services to keep track of your people, distributed POI, and more with devices brought to the event by your people.

Want to see it live? Contact your T-Mobile representative, send an email to info@blueforcedev.com, or call us at +1 866-960-0204.