'No single solution' for Army's info-tech problems.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

When it comes to battlefield communications technology, the Army has lots of good ideas, but nowhere near enough money to equip the entire force with the most up-to-date systems, said Lt. Gen. Peter Cuviello, the Army's chief information officer.

A case in point: mobile satellite communications devices, which are coveted items in combat, but always in short supply.

"Trying to field equipment to 1.2 million people is costly," Cuviello said in a recent interview.

Ground, air and naval forces who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom had more access to satellite-based communications than they normally are used to, because the United States bought an extraordinary amount of commercial satellite capacity, Cuviello said.

"About 80 percent of our capability over there was commercial satellite. ... When [U.S. troops] go back to home station, they don't have that capability," he said

The reality is that when the Army goes to war, most soldiers still depend on old-fashioned line-of-sight voice radios with poor sound quality and no ability to send data electronically or to communicate with the other military services.

"There is no single solution that will fix all the Army's ills in this area," Cuviello said. However, "there are stopgap measures that can fix certain things. ... But the challenge is that we are not able to buy it all at one time for everybody."

Among the lessons the Army has learned from the war in Iraq is that its information systems are too stove-piped and that it needs more bandwidth, he said. "We still have soda-straw capabilities out there."

It is unlikely that things will change in the foreseeable future, Cuviello said, because there are not "enough resources."

To have interoperability in a digital battlefield, for example, the Army should standardize the software used in tactical applications. "Not everyone is on the same version of software," Cuviello said. "We know what the answer is: buy one version for everybody. ... The challenge is that there is not enough money in the world to be able to do that."

He noted that Army units in Iraq--the XVIII Airborne Corps, the V Corps and the III Corps--had different versions of the Army Battle Command System software. That limited their ability to share information. Contractors stepped in to correct the problem, but that was only an ad-hoc fix.

In remarks to an Association of the U.S. Army information technology conference, Cuviello said the Army needs more mobile and lighter communications...