ATI's Combat Systems Engineering Course

The increasing level of combat system integration and communications requirements, coupled with shrinking defense budgets and shorter product life cycles, offers many challenges and opportunities in the design and acquisition of new combat systems. This three-day course teaches the systems engineering discipline that has built some of the modern military’s greatest combat and communications systems, using state-of-the-art systems engineering techniques. It details the decomposition and mapping of war-fighting requirements into combat system functional designs. A step-by-step description of the combat system design process is presented emphasizing the trades made necessary because of growing performance, operational, cost, constraints and ever increasing system complexities. Topics include the fire control loop and its closure by the combat system, human-system interfaces, command and communication systems architectures, autonomous and net-centric operation, induced information exchange requirements, role of communications systems, and multi-mission capabilities. Engineers, scientists, program managers, and graduate students will find the lessons learned in this course valuable for architecting, integration, and modeling of combat system. Emphasis is given to sound system engineering principles realized through the application of strict processes and controls, thereby avoiding common mistakes. Each attendee will receive a complete set of detailed notes for the class.