'Interim' fix: trials and tribulations persist in Joint Tactical Radio.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: COMMUNICATIONS

The military services are slashing by nearly two-thirds their expected buys of the Defense Department's troubled joint tactical radio system.

As the program continues to lose support across the military services, Defense Department officials are engineering a last-ditch effort to save what is increasingly a shaky procurement plan. They also are backing away from earlier demands that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps stop buying their own service-unique radios in favor of a "joint" family of radios.

A decade after it was conceived--and $2 billion spent on research and development--the joint tactical radio system, or JTRS, is hanging on for dear life.

The original goal was to replace more than 500,000 military radios with a family of interoperable devices that carry voice and data communications. The most significant feature of JTRS radios would be their ability to be programmed, like PCs, with software applications called "waveforms."

But the program got off to a slow start, and was beleaguered by bureaucratic infighting.

At the Pentagon, acquisition officials viewed JTRS as the poster child of joint programs, one that would finally allow the Defense Department to rein in the services' disjointed hardware procurements. As JTRS development got under way between 1998 and 2000, 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.

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.

The highest demand was for handheld and vehicular radios. The Army before Iraq did not issue radios to each soldier nor did it install them on every humvee, because it was deemed too expensive. But that changed once commanders in Iraq began to demand thousands more radios to keep soldiers and Marines from buying off-the-shelf products to make up for shortages of military-issued equipment.

During the past four years, the services (mostly the Army) have spent nearly $4 billion on new radios. By comparison, between 1998 and 2001, their radio purchases amounted to less than $1 billion, according to Defense Department estimates. More than 60 percent of all radios procured are either individual handheld or squad-level manpack.

Before the war, the services were not allowed to purchase radios unless they obtained a "JTRS waiver" from the office of the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration. The policy aimed to discourage purchases of non-JTRS radios.

But Army officials complained that the waiver was a bureaucratic burden that hindered their ability to rapidly deliver radios to troops in Iraq. The Pentagon subsequently agreed to suspend the waiver, although it recently approved a limited policy that only applies to single-channel handheld radios.

Radio manufacturers, who had...