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

[bernieS]

I was thinking the same thing: that if DoD had to 
do these JTRS radios from scratch today, it might 
not have been such a failure.  DSP and SDR stuff 
has gotten *way* better in just the few 
years.  The old technology DoD started with for 
JTRS 15 years ago is far bigger, more expensive, 
and more power-hungry than today's DSP/SDR 
technology.  Pity they jumped the gun..

-bernieS



At 05:02 PM 1/10/2012, you wrote:
>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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