Over the past 15 years the Army has spent $17 billion on a doomed attempt to build a “universal” radio — that is, a single radio model capable of replacing the many different radio types in everyday use by front-line troops. After struggling for years with escalating size, weight and complexity, in October the Army finally canceled the Ground Mobile Radio, the main version of this so-called Joint Tactical Radio System.
The ill-fated JTRS — or “Jitters,” as it’s known — isn’t the military’s most expensive gear-buying faceplant. Not by a long shot. But it is a uniquely damaging one. For while the Army tried and failed to replace many radios with one, combat units have had to make do with outdated systems that have left them vulnerable on the battlefield. Today, as in years past, soldiers have to slow down or even stop in order to deploy their vast, complex arsenal of old-fashioned radios.
Jitters’ troubled history, and its implications for the present day, are the subjects of my first feature for the Center for Public Integrity, published in partnership with McClatchy newspapers. I also spoke to NPR’s All Things Considered about the program.
Jitters became a formal military requirement in 1997, when the Army announced its intention to develop a “software-programmable and hardware-configurable digital radio system … to provide increased interoperability, flexibility and adaptability.” That requirement spawned a planned decade-long initiative, led by Boeing but including several other big defense contractors. Jitters was projected to cost $30 billion for a quarter-million radios, each replacing no fewer than three old-style radios.
The idea of simpler and therefore more mobile comms was a sound one. It was the extremely high degree of simplification the Army sought that proved to be Jitters’ fatal flaw.
Each of the three radios a single Jitters device was meant to replace is tailored for a different purpose, meaning a different combination of antenna, waveform, power, processing and encryption. Blending all those radios into a single system is essentially impossible.
Ace reporter Greg Grant, before he became a speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, parsed this problem in a piece for Defense News that is sadly no longer on-line, but is quoted here. “The desire to use a single antenna for many different wavelengths bumps up against laws of physics, which make it difficult to pull in strong signals across the spectrum,” Grant wrote. He also pointed out that an amplifier that works across a wide spectrum “will use much more electrical power than one tuned for a specific frequency band.”
In short, the more different capabilities that the Army and Boeing packed into the universal Jitters ground radio, 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 for its new radio, the Army found itself mired in mechanical complexity. By the time the Army canceled it, the ground radio had tripled in complexity and bulked up to the size of a small refrigerator. “JTRS really bit off more than it could chew,” says Lewis Johnston, a vice president at Thales, a major radio-maker.
Continue Reading “Inside the Army’s Doomed Quest for the ‘Perfect’ Radio” »
