[FedCom] Failure to communicate: Inside the army's doomed quest for the 'perfect' radio (JTRS)

[lists at lazygranch.com]

I dumped Milcom years ago due to an excess of necons posting. 

Regarding this radio program, the buzzword in the DoD is "mission creep." In the consumer world, it is "creeping featurism." OK, both are two words and one is made up. 

Usually, but not universally true, the more things you make a product do, the worse it performs those features. But once DSP came on board, that became less true. 

I worked on a comm chip that had a FSK modem that detected frequency by computing the arcsin of the signal, phase unwrapping, and then fitting a linear regression to estimate the frequency. It was as good as a PLL demod, and way better than mark/space filters. If the product, only needed FSK, it would be a stupid approach to the problem. But we had to do DPSK as well, tjough not at the same time, so it merely took a bit more code. 

If they had to do these radios today from scratch, I don't think the result would have been so bleak.  The big drawback to digital solutions is power. 

-----Original Message-----
From: bernieS <bernies at netaxs.com>
Sender: fedcom-bounces at mailman.qth.net
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:42:16 
To: Discussion of Federal Government Communications<fedcom at mailman.qth.net>
Reply-To: Discussion of Federal Government Communications
	<fedcom at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: [FedCom] Failure to communicate: Inside the army's doomed quest for
 the 'perfect' radio (JTRS)

Sorry for the off-topic posting, but perhaps 
someone here who's on the Milcom list can forward it there for me.  Thank you.

-bernieS


http://www.iwatchnews.org/2012/01/10/7816/failure-communicate-inside-armys-doomed-quest-perfect-radio

Failure to communicate: Inside the army's doomed quest for the 'perfect' radio
By David Axe
01/10/2012

In mid-November, when the Army asked soldiers to 
test and appraise the high-tech communications 
devices that came from what’s left of the JTRS 
program, the answers they got were not exactly reassuring.

As several dozen soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 
Task Force Rock drove into Afghanistan’s Chowkay 
Valley one morning in March 2010, Taliban 
fighters immediately began moving into ambush 
positions along a higher ridge. The Force’s 
mission was to protect a U.S. reconstruction team 
as it met with local village leaders, but it was 
stuck in place as the Taliban reached their fighting posts.

What tied them down was their radios: a forest of 
plastic and metal cubes sprouting antennae of 
different lengths and sizes. They had short-range 
models for talking with the reconstruction team; 
longer-range versions for reaching headquarters 
25 miles away; and a backup satellite radio in 
case the mountains blocked the transmission. An 
Air Force controller carried his own radio for 
talking to jet fighters overhead and a separate 
radio for downloading streaming video from the aircraft.

Some of these radios worked only while the 
troopers were stationary; others were simply too 
cumbersome to operate on the move. “Not good,” 
said Spec. Geoff Pearman, as he watched farmers 
scurry indoors from their wheat fields — a sure 
sign that fighting was imminent.

Task Force Rock’s vulnerability that morning is 
routine for U.S. forces in Afghanistan today. But 
it was never supposed to occur at all.

Almost fifteen years ago, the Army launched an 
ambitious program, the Joint Tactical Radio 
System, aimed at developing several 
highly-compatible “universal” radios. Together, 
the JTRS radios would replace nearly all older 
radios in the American arsenal, greatly 
simplifying communications and freeing up combat 
units “to tap into the network on the move,” 
according to Paul Mehney, an Army spokesman.

But JTRS, pronounced “jitters,” failed to live up 
to its promise. Overly ambitious, poorly managed 
and saddled by incompatible goals, the program 
burned through $6 billion dollars while producing 
little working hardware. Delays forced the Army 
to spend $11 billion more on old-style radios to 
meet the urgent demands of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Army eventually reduced the planned purchase 
of JTRS radios and cut the types of radios in 
development. In October, it canceled the 
vehicle-mounted version of JTRS, the most 
important of the new radios, which by then had 
grown to the size of a dormitory-sized 
refrigerator. For all practical purposes, JTRS is 
dead — at least in its original guise.

But the need for simpler battlefield 
communications remains. After an investment of 15 
years and $17 billion, today the Army is still 
struggling to build better radios and estimates 
it may need to spend another $12 billion to get 
what it needs. The U.S. taxpayer has paid the 
bill, but frontline soldiers like those from Task 
Force Rock bear the true cost.

JTRS’ history is one of grand but naive 
technological ambition colliding with the 
unbending laws of physics and the unforgiving 
exigencies of modern warfare. After years of 
work, the Army discovered for itself what experts 
had been warning all along: It’s impossible for a 
single radio design to handle all the military’s 
different communications tasks.

The more capabilities that the Army and prime 
contractor Boeing packed into JTRS, the bigger, 
more complex and more expensive it became — until 
it was too bulky and unreliable for combat. In 
its relentless drive for conceptual simplicity, 
the Army found itself mired in mechanical complexity.

The Army wasn’t alone in its doomed pursuit of a 
technological pipe dream. The past decade has by 
many accounts been an era of grand ambition, 
flawed management and wasted treasure for all the 
military branches. A lengthy Harvard Business 
School study for the Pentagon concluded in April 
that despite many attempts at reform, “major 
defense programs still require more than 15 years 
to deliver less capability than planned, often at 
two to three times the planned cost.”

But the Army has arguably had more failures than 
other services. An internal report in 2010 noted 
that every year since 1996, the Army has spent 
more than a billion dollars annually “on programs 
that were ultimately cancelled” – including 15 
cancelled since 2001. More than a third of its 
weapons development funds over the past seven 
years were spent on weapons systems deemed unusable in the end.

“I feel sorry for the Army,” said Thomas 
Christie, the Pentagon’s top weapons tester from 
2001 to 2005. “Everything they’ve touched has turned to crap.”

Now the Pentagon faces a round of budget-cutting. 
So if the Army is to acquire new radios to keep 
its forces moving, it must do so on the cheap. 
That means reforming the vast, slow-moving 
bureaucracy entrusted to developing, testing and 
buying new military gear — a goal the Army is 
finally taking steps to reach. But it also means 
separating the good ideas from the bad ones at 
the outset, an ability that independent experts 
say continues to elude the world’s most powerful ground fighting force.
A Program Born in Frustration

The Army’s latest plan for overhauling its 
battlefield communication system was forged after 
the ground war to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi 
Army in February 1991. While preparing for the 
lightning Left Hook drive north and east in 
southern Iraq, Pentagon planners were frustrated 
by their need to decide everything in advance 
because of the Army’s inability to communicate well on the move.

They developed a plan to create a “cyberwar” 
force on the battlefield, upending a tradition 
that only leaders carry radios, and information 
flows not between individuals, but between 
squads, platoons, companies, and other units. 
Instead of merely pointing their rifles and 
scanning with their eyes, every soldier in the 
networked force would be an information node with 
his own cameras, GPS tracker and radio, all 
communicating perfectly with others.

The Army formally started the program in 1997, 
calling it the “Joint Tactical Radio.” The JTR — 
the “S” for “System” was soon added — was to be 
compatible with all previous Army radio models 
plus almost every radio used by the Marines, Air 
Force, Navy and even civilian organizations such as local police departments.

The architecture was meant to be flexible, 
matching the communications needs of every 
imaginable user, from an individual private 
soldier lugging a rifle across the battlefield to 
top generals in their high-tech headquarters deep 
inside friendly territory. JTRS would even work in space.

The new radio, moreover, was a key component of 
an even more ambitious program — a collection of 
new lightweight armored vehicles and 
weapons-carrying robots collectively known as the 
Future Combat Systems. They would be fast-moving, 
widely-spread and plugged into a vast information 
network. Each would carry its own JTRS radio, as 
would every soldier riding inside.

After a series of war games to refine the 
cyberwar concept, in June 2000 the Defense 
Department awarded Chicago-based Boeing, 
America’s number-two defense contractor after 
Lockheed Martin, a $2-million contract to begin 
preparing JTRS blueprints. By Pentagon standards, 
it was a tiny contract. The overall JTRS program, 
including design and production, was expected to 
cost at least $6 billion over the first 10 years 
— and up to $40 billion by the time every last 
JTRS radio was bought, many years later.

For Boeing, that first contract was a foot in the 
door for both JTRS and Future Combat Systems, 
which by itself was expected to cost at least 
$120 billion over a period of decades. Boeing was 
not an experienced radio maker, nor did it 
manufacture armored vehicles. But the company 
sold itself to the Army on the strength of its 
intellectual prowess and management skills, 
stressing in a press release its “proven 
experience in large-scale system design, development and deployment.”

A little over a year later, 9/11 opened the 
floodgates for defense spending. After a series 
of high-level Pentagon meetings in 2002, the Army 
got a green light to give Boeing the major 
contracts for both JTRS and Future Combat 
Systems. Under the latter contract, Boeing was to 
receive 10 to 15 percent profit margins, 
regardless of the program’s success or eventual cost.

During the review, Christie, the Pentagon’s top 
weapons tester, warned top officials that the 
Army’s plans were unrealistic. “I said there’s no 
way this is going to happen,” he recalls. “But 
they got the go-ahead anyway, by claiming there was little technical risk.”
One Size Does Not Fit All

The Army figured it would need 230,000 copies of 
the main JTRS radios to replace 750,000 of its 
older radios and lighten unit commanders’ loads. 
The other military branches together would buy 
another 90,000 or so radios, and they would all 
connect with a quarter-million related devices. 
The new radios had to be phased in gradually due 
to manufacturing constraints, which meant each 
JTRS radio had to be compatible not only with 
other JTRS radios and the radios belonging to the 
other armed services, but also with all the Army’s old-style radios.

Achieving such broad compatibility posed a 
daunting challenge. Traditionally, the size and 
shape of military radios is determined by their 
task. A vehicle-mounted radio piping in data from 
some distant headquarters is large enough to 
accommodate a larger antenna, more processing 
power and more sophisticated encryption. A radio 
for an infantry squad is small enough for one man 
to carry; it has less range, power and encryption.

In addition, radios must be equipped to interpret 
particular radio “languages” known as a 
“waveforms,” tailored for specific types of 
transmissions. Some are better for moving data; 
others are better for voice or a mix of data and 
voice. The Army wanted JTRS to be compatible with 
the 30 or so most important military waveforms, 
including several ideally suited for the new 
radios. But it gradually grasped that it was 
impossible for a single radio design to handle all tasks and all waveforms.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all,” admits Brig. Gen. 
Michael Williamson, who since March has overseen 
the rapidly fading JTRS program. So JTRS split 
into several sub-programs between 2000 and 2004, 
each developing a different version. Boeing 
handled the bulk of the work in California and 
Missouri, but other defense contractors – 
including BAE Sytems in New Jersey and Rockwell 
Collins in Iowa -- got slices, as well. There 
were sea-, air- and space-based versions.

The ground-combat branch settled on one major 
JTRS radio, the so-called “Ground Mobile Radio” 
meant for vehicles, plus a smaller version for 
small units marching on foot, and the handheld 
version for individual soldiers. The ground radio 
was the main focus, a key to getting Army units 
talking on the move to each other, to aircraft 
overhead, to the Navy offshore and to senior commanders far away.

“JTRS would largely lift the fog of war,” Loren 
Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute 
in Virginia, crowed on his blog in December 2010. 
The Lexington Institute receives funding from 
Boeing and other military contractors, and 
Thompson now describes JTRS as “a mixed bag.”

JTRS’ collapse began when reality intervened, 
after unit commanders in the 2003 U.S. invasion 
of Iraq struggled to stay in contact while on the 
move. Just as the Army’s war needs expanded the 
demand for innovation, software problems with the 
new radios slowed testing. So the Army had no 
choice but to buy non-JTRS radios from other 
manufacturers -- 300,000 radios in all, worth nearly $11 billion through 2006.

Frustrated by the delays and freshly equipped 
with new copies of old-style radios, the Army 
began losing its appetite for JTRS. Between 2006 
and 2008, the Army scaled back its JTRS 
purchasing plans by 20 percent and decided the 
new radio would understand just eight waveforms instead of 33.

The reductions shaved billions of dollars off the 
cost of developing JTRS, but also increased the 
overall pricetag for each one, including research 
and development expenses. The Army suddenly 
expected to pay up to $300,000 for each JTRS 
ground radio — roughly double its estimate in 
2002. By comparison, a factory-fresh, 
vehicle-mounted, non-JTRS radio from another 
major military supplier, the Harris Corp., costs just $57,000.
Technical Problems Worsen

The technical challenges of transmitting huge 
amounts of data over complex new waveforms became 
so acute that in 2005, the Army briefly ordered 
Boeing to stop work on JTRS. But the Pentagon has 
a hard time cancelling any program – often 
because the contracts it signs impose steep 
penalties on the government for any major change 
of heart -- and so the Army decided to reorganize 
the management office while allowing Boeing to proceed.

The program did not improve. Col. Dan Hughes, who 
oversaw ground radio development between 2006 and 
2009, watched the radio grow in complexity and 
cost, while continually missing design deadlines. 
“We tried to make it better and better and 
better,” he says. But in the first two years 
after full-scale development was approved, the 
number of pages in the blueprint for the ground 
radio design tripled, according to a Government 
Accountability Office report in 2005. The radio 
also tipped the scales at 207 pounds — several 
times the weight of existing radios.

Plans to hand over prototypes to the troops for 
realistic testing got bumped back one year, then 
two, then three. With each delay, the Army was 
forced to buy more old-style radios for soldiers 
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manufacturers took the 
opportunity to upgrade their existing radio 
designs with enhanced processors, software and 
encryption and new waveforms, bringing them closer to the ground radio’s specs.

The Harris firm tweaked one of its popular radios 
to accommodate the main JTRS waveforms, and 
quickly sold 16,000 of the new radios, mostly to the Army.

Then, in 2010, the Army assembled 1,000 
battlefield veterans at a desert training range 
at Fort Bliss, just outside of El Paso, to try 
out the key bits of JTRS technology. They 
criticized its size, its weight, its short range 
and its tendency to break down. Michael Gilmore, 
the Army’s top weapons tester, cited the 
soldiers’ complaints in testimony before the 
House Armed Services Committee. He said the 
ground radio “demonstrated little military utility.”

Meanwhile, the federal government’s ballooning 
deficits prompted several rounds of defense cuts 
that shaved billions from the Army’s research and 
development accounts. Future Combat Systems was 
killed first, around the same time the evaluation troops were testing JTRS.

In October, the Army also canceled the ground 
radio. “The technical challenges of mobile, ad 
hoc networks and scalability were not well 
understood due to the immaturity of technology at 
that time,” Acting Under Secretary of Defense for 
Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank 
Kendall explained in letters to the chairmen of 
the congressional armed services committees, Sen. 
Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Howard McKeon (R-Cal.)..

Aspects of the overall JTRS program survive. The 
two main JTRS waveforms are still in development. 
So are the air-, sea- and space-based versions of 
the radio, plus some of the smaller Army models — 
in particular, the soldiers’ hand-held version. 
“We don’t want more monolithic programs,” says 
Col. John Morrison, who oversees the Army’s 
network-based battle-command efforts. Under the 
best of circumstances, the GAO estimates, the 
radios will cost another $12 billion to complete.

Although the Pentagon sometimes tries to recoup 
money invested in failed weapons, in the case of 
the ground radio, the Army said it would simply 
allow the Boeing contract, which was good through 
2012, to lapse. Boeing would not be paid to 
continue ground-radio work — nor would the company be penalized.

A spokesman for Boeing, Matthew Billingsley, 
declined to say if the nonpublic contract allowed 
for the company to be penalized. He said that 
Boeing was disappointed at the program’s 
cancellation, and that the company looked forward 
to “applying our experience and knowledge in future competitions.”

Task Force Rock, anchored to the floor of 
Afghanistan’s Chowkay Valley by its radios in 
March 2010, was lucky. It escaped an attack by 
fleeing the valley under the cover of U.S. 
helicopters firing white phosphorus rockets. 
Burdened with radios the Army has spent more than 
20 years trying to replace, other American combat units might not be so lucky.

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