Systems Integrator - in The Defense Industry

In The Defense Industry

In the defense industry, the job of 'Systems Integration' engineer is growing in importance as defense systems become more 'connected'. As well as integrating new systems, the task of integrating current systems is attracting a lot of research and effort. It is only in recent years that systems have started to be deployed that can interconnect with each other; most systems were designed as 'stovepipe' designs with no thought to future connectivity.

The current problem is how to harness all the information available, from the various information generators (or sensors) into one complete picture.

As well as the design of the actual interfaces much effort is being put into presenting the information in a useful manner. The level of information, needed by the different levels in the military structure, and the relevance of the information (information can become outdated in seconds) is so variable that it may be necessary to have more than one system connected.

Another problem is how information is networked. The Internet may seem to be an obvious solution, but it is vulnerable to denial of service and physical destruction of the key 'hubs'. One answer is to use a dedicated military communication system, but the bandwidth needed would be astronomical in such a system.

Army Warrant Officer (United States) military occupational specialty (MOS) 140A - Command and Control Systems Technician is an example of a systems integrator in the defense industry. 140A Warrant Officers assigned to Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) integrate systems with multiple operating systems (OS) and hardware configurations – that include: UNIX, Linux & Microsoft Windows Others can fill a similar role at the Division level and higher.