Procurement rules remain disconnected from reality.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

A wealth of Pentagon rhetoric, and lip service to the wonders of 'network-centric" warfare has conveniently ignored a sticky issue: The purchase of information-age technologies often is entirely incompatible with the Defense Department's buying habits.

Procurement experts and industry analysts for years have pointed out the obvious disconnect between the fast and furious pace of technology and a plodding Pentagon bureaucracy that historically has taken 12 to 15 years to move a weapon system from design to production.

Despite significant advances in weapons technology, for the most part, the military services have continued to operate many "legacy" communications networks and have stated wishfully their grand plans for things such as "global information grids," "force nets," and "command-and-control constellations."

In the case of the Army, it wasn't until the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that it came face-to-face with the sobering reality that soldiers' ability to communicate in the battlefield had not changed much since World War II.

When the Army's 3rd Infantry Division rolled into Iraq and began its speedy march towards Baghdad, commanders immediately concluded that the unit's Cold War communications network was entirely useless. The system, known as "mobile subscriber equipment," required the brigade commander to stop advancing and wait for the technical staff to set up the "tactical operations center" inside a large tent. This is not only time consuming, but also an entirely risky proposition when an army is operating in hostile territory. In the absence of the usual means of communications, "We were back to World War II push-to-talk line-of-sight tactical radios," says Lt. Col. Chuck Gabrielson, an Army battalion commander who served in Iraq.

At times, even the radios didn't work because the distances between units were so vast. One of the 3rd ID battalions leading the way to Baghdad, Gabrielson recalls, was so far forward that it did not even have voice communications with the brigade. Soldiers then resorted to their satellite tracking devices to send brief text messages.

When the 3rd ID returned from its first Iraq rotation, the Army decided it was finally time to ditch the outdated technology and equip units with modern communications systems. For the past two years, units deploying to Iraq have seen a drastically improved communications network, called "joint network nodes," or JNN.

Commanders have so praised the performance of JNN...