Link 16 Capability Sustainment

摘要

Link 16 is the current primary international Tactical Data Link (TDL) used for the acquisition and assembly of sensor information from mobile surveillance and reconnaissance assets, and dissemination of the recognised tactical picture to combat units. It was originally conceived in the 1970s, but has been fielded in large numbers of platforms only in the last 10 years. It has become a victim of its own success, in that the increasing numbers of users have placed demands on transmission capacity that have proved difficult to accommodate with the original design and concept of use. This has led many to start promoting alternative technologies to satisfy the need for data exchanges in the tactical domain, which either would compete with Link 16 for the spectrum it uses, or would require total equipment replacement across the users.