Pentagon's Communications Breakdown

Of all the high-tech programs the Pentagon has going on, there's one that's more important than all the rest. And that one is not going well at all.

The Defense Department knows how it wants to fight: with "network-centric warfare." Every soldier, every sensor, and every weapons system shares information instantly. And that allows our forces to know everything there is to know about a battlefield: where the enemy is, where friends are, and how best to out-maneuver a foe.

But to pull off this style of fighting, everyone needs to be connected. The program that's supposed to do that is called the Joint Tactical Radio System -- JTRS, or "Jitters," in Pentagon-speak. The idea was replace up to a half-million, often-incompatable radios with a single family of digital models, which could be programmed to talk to one another.

But "a decade after it was conceived — and $2 billion spent on research and development — the joint tactical radio system... is hanging on for dear life," National Defense magazine reports.

As JTRS development got under way... government officials and contractors were predicting prototypes would be in the hands of soldiers by 2003. But as early as 2001, it became more apparent that JTRS was an appealing concept that would be harder to execute than anyone had foreseen. ["The desire to use a single antenna for many different wavelengths bumps up against laws of physics," Defense News noted in '05.]

By the time the
Army marched into Iraq in 2003, no new radios were yet available, not even working prototypes. The service went to war with 1980s vintage radios, and supplemented those with commercial cell phones and satellite phones. After Army leaders realized they would be in Iraq for years to come, by late 2003 they began ordering thousands of tactical radios that vendors already were producing...

Radio manufacturers, who had envisaged a financial boon from JTRS
contracts, gradually realized that they could make better profits by ramping up production of existing radios in response to the military’s surging demand...

As it is now structured, JTRS includes multiple radio variants for the
Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Special Operations Command.

Just two years ago, the services had forecast they would buy nearly 458,000
JTRS radios... In February 2007, the services revised their expected buys down to 148,000.

One of the biggest hold-ups -- besides those physics problems -- has been getting the NSA's okay that the radios are, in fact, secure. "It took about two years for each radio manufacturer to secure NSA certification," National Defense notes. Meanwhile, insurgents can buy their own communications gear off the street -- and almost instantly become better networked than the average American soldier.