The Aegis System

Combat Information Center

I'll give you a short tour of the first Aegis System Combat Information Center and some of our capabilities at the time. Not only do all our combat ships now have Aegis, but so do many of our allies, like Japan. In fact, Aegis was recently incorporated into our anti-ballistic missile continental defense.

At the heart of Aegis is the Spy-1A radar. It revolutionized anti-air warfare. Previously, ships could track as many air contacts as a couple of guys could track by manually correlating symbols in the tactical data system overlay with blips on the air radar beneath it. Then the Naval Tactical Data Systems (NTDS) on one ship would link that picture (of symbols) to other ships, aircraft, subs, and land units. So a task force's air picture could easily grow to 50-100 contacts. But any one unit would track maybe a couple of handfuls at once. Furthermore, to target one of those air contacts, a combat ship would have 2-4 illuminators. These are radar dishes that stay focused on one target the entire time your missile is on its way. So, prior to the Ticonderoga, a ship could have four missiles in the air at once.

We also had a conventional air radar, the SPS-49. It rotated a lobe of energy 360 degrees, as you've seen in all the old movies. The Spy-1A, by contrast, was composed of four octagons (arrays), each covering slightly more than 90 degrees (1/4 of the horizon) and containing 1028 individual radar antennae, for a total of 4,096 beams of energy the computer could control. And since the Spy radar illuminates and automatically tracks targets, we could technically have all our missiles in the air at once.

With beam assignment, we could do all kinds of neat things I can't actually talk about for obvious reasons. But I can say we could track many hundreds of contacts simultaneously. We could make our radar signature extremely hard for enemies to detect (for electronic warfare purposes). It's also very hard to jam (overwhelm its sensitivity with energy). And every one of those octagons could assign all its beams to an area 15' away and roast an entire cow in less than 1 second if it were hanging there.

The hatchway into the Combat Information Center (CIC)is key-coded because the routine handling of classified materials makes the CIC a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility). As you enter, you step up onto the false deckplates beneath which all the electronics cabling runs. If underway, the compartment is dark but lit by a thousand indicators and screens. The compartment consists of an air "ally" and a surface "ally," connected at the front of the house by 4 large screen displays: 2 for when the Admiral and staff embark, and 2 for the Tactical Action Officer and Commanding Officer (when present).

Here are pics of exterior octagonal arrays, what a lit, modern air ally looks like, and a pic of the front of the house,

 

At the heart of CIC are the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) consoles:

The console on the left is an NTDS. All the red lights on the left are on the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) box. Almost all aircraft transmit ("squawk") identifying codes. US and NATO squawk in an encrypted mode. Commercial aircraft all squawk 1200 in Mode 3. You can see the standard radar scope, which lets you select any of our radars to display, plus the tracking-symbology overlay. The front of the house only sees the symbology. The console has a comms panel and about a couple hundred buttons beyond our level of detail here. At the very least, weapons release happens from an NTDS console.

Just to the lower right of the radar screen is the trackball, which is one reason I was so quick on the console: I used to leave the top scores on Centipede machines before the Navy, which used trackballs.

Typically, an Operations Specialist starts as a surface tracker and works their way to air tracker; then, on the air side, they become the Identification Supervisor (IDS) and, then ideally make it to Tactical Information Coordinator (TIC).  However, on the Ticonderoga, we were always the senior Aegis platform and the most advanced ship wherever we went when there wasn't another Aegis sister ship. Therefore, the TIC on Tico was responsible for every detail of "The Big Picture" (all the data and symbology) for "own ship," and was elevated to Force Track Coordinator (FTC), responsible for the entire operational force's big picture. Likewise, the IDS becomes the Force Identification Supervisor.
So you had to be near-perfect to serve as a TIC or IDS because we were top of the line.

You knew you were considered the best at a position when you were assigned to sit it for general quarters, AKA "battle stations."

But back to the beginning...