Systems

SCOMBA is a Combat Management System (CMS ) for military ships developed by Navantia for the Spanish Navy. It is the main component of the combat system and is already in-service in the following ships: Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) Juan Carlos I, Combat Support Ship (CSS) Cantabria, and the Meteoro Class Offshore PatrolVessels (OPV). It has been selected also for the new S80 submarines  and F110 frigates.

The SCOMBA program was born circa 2000, from a Spanish Navy initiative, as a response to the fact that “diversity does not facilitats the maintenance of combat systems, making more expensive software development and maintenance and preventing the reuse of codes between the various systems”. For this, a contractual strategy was established with R&D funds from the Ministry of Defense.

SCOMBA is a customer-oriented product, based mainly on commercial hardware and software and with an open, modular and redundant architecture. SCOMBA provides a common core of capabilities, which simplifies the development and maintenance of the system, on which additional capabilities can be added to meet the specific requirements of each platform.

This is a program conceived and developed with a vision of the future, so that the system can be used with minimal changes in any platform of the Spanish Navy. The implications are very significant from the operational and logistics point of view, since it supposes the unification between the SCOMBA platforms of the concept of operations, life cycle engineering, maintenance and operation of the system, to the point that an operator or maintainer can transfer between the LHD, CSS and OPV BAM without additional training.

SCOMBA Capabilities

SCOMBA provides ship crews and their commanders with the typical capabilities of a Naval CMS, such as:

• Status monitoring. SCOMBA presents to operators a comprehensive vision of the operational status of all elements of the combat system.
• Tactical Information Management. SCOMBA integrates various sources of information, both from the ship and from other units. Among the supported sensors are radars for aerial exploration and surveillance, surface and surface surveillance radars, tracking radars, approach radars, interrogators, transponders AIS (civil ships) and ADS-B (commercial aircraft), UAVs, navigation radars, ship navigation sensors, electro-optical monitoring and tracking systems, organic helicopters, electronic warfare equipment and sonar systems.
• Presentation of the tactical situation and HMI. SCOMBA allows the presentation of tactical information to operators on different surfaces, from 2 and 3 monitor consoles to giant “Video Wall” screens.
• Identification, evaluation of threats and selection of weapons. SCOMBA offers support to a wide range of weapons, including aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, guns and torpedoes. SCOMBA also allows the use of decoys and electronic warfare systems.
• Tactical data link. SCOMBA allows to establish digital data links with other units, both national and allied, using links type L11, L16, L22, VMF and JRE. These links allow the exchange of tactical information between the ship and other units or centers on land.

Additionally, SCOMBA includes:

• Training. SCOMBA includes training capabilities for operators on board, providing a realistic simulation of the environment. It also allows the training in ground centers with reduced equipment (sensors and real weapons are replaced by simulated elements).
• Post Mission Analysis. SCOMBA provides event reconstruction and information export capabilities to support the subsequent analysis of the missions carried out.
• Cybersecurity. SCOMBA has all the necessary means to protect the security of system information, including perimeter protection capabilities, asset monitoring, intrusion detection, analysis and storage of records, correlation of security events and registration of incidents for forensic analysis.

SCOMBA works in an integrated manner with other ship systems, including the integrated navigation and bridge system, integrated platform management system, integrated communications systems and messaging systems. SCOMBA allows integration with other C2 systems, both on board and on land, including other command and control systems of both national and coalition intelligence.