Defense looks for commercial alternative to its broadband battlefield radio

After more than 14 years of development, the Defense Department has decided to look to commercial sources for a key tactical radio system the Army wants for sending and receiving broadband data on the battlefield.

In a little noticed posting on April 29, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems (SPAWAR) Command in support of the Joint Program Executive Office Joint Tactical Radio System said it wanted to determine whether industry could provide it with nondevelopmental radios to replace the troubled ground mobile radio developed by Boeing Co.

SPAWAR, in a request for information, said it needs radios that can terrestrially transmit 2 megabytes per second in a tactical environment packaged with a narrow-band Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System. If it goes ahead with a procurement, SPAWAR said it plans to make an award by September 2012 and could buy between 10,000 and 25,000 commercially developed radios between 2013 and 2022.

Michael Gilmore, Defense's director of operational test and evaluation, told a House Armed Services Committee in March that the JTRS ground mobile radio had a 72 percent failure rate in tests last June at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.

The Army plans a limited user test of the ground mobile radio in June at White Sands as part of an integrated network test with the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored division, which will include JTRS manpack, vehicle-mounted and handheld JTS radios, as well as smartphones, top Army officials said at a press briefing today.

But as the Army gears up for that test, it faced another bad piece of news. On May 13, Army Secretary John McHugh sent a letter to Congress saying the unit cost for the ground mobile radios had grown by more than 50 percent.

This triggered what is known as a Nunn-McCurdy breach, referring to a congressional mandate calling for termination of programs whose total cost grew by more than 25 percent over the original estimate, unless the secretary of Defense provides to Congress a detailed explanation certifying that the program is essential to national security and that no suitable alternative of lesser cost is available.

Brig. Gen. Michael Williamson, who took command of the JTRS program office in March, told the media briefing today that the Nunn-McCurdy notification "will allow us to do an analysis to see if the ground mobile radio is the right solution." Williamson did not directly address if Defense or the Army planned to substitute radios it could acquire under the nondevelopmental procurement for the Boeing ground mobile radios.

Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, said at the press briefing that the broad network test the service plans next month will prove that the collective power of the integrated network is greater than the sum of its component parts, allowing it to work around any problems with the ground mobile radio.

Chiarelli added that since Defense owned the software waveforms that the radio is based on, "we don't care who builds the box."

The Government Accountability Office put the total cost of the ground mobile radio at $15.9 billion in a Marchreport, and James Mercer, a spokesman for the JTRS program office, said its search for commercial alternatives to the ground mobile radio was based on the Army's desire for a lower cost and smaller radio.

Matthew Billingsley, a Boeing spokesman, said, "In the current defense environment, we understand the need to evaluate alternative solutions. As the prime contractor for the development phase of the program, Boeing will respond to the request for information with options for the customer's consideration."