Foot-Soldier Modernization Effort Regaining Credibility.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

When a weapons project gets wounded at the Pentagon, the bleeding is hard to contain. "Once you start bleeding in the building, the sharks come after you," said Army Col. Bruce D. Jette. The casualty in this case was the "land warrior," a command-and-control system for infantry soldiers intended to provide information on the location of friendly and enemy forces and to facilitate communication between the soldier and higher command levels.

The land-warrior system consists of a computer, a radio, weapon and helmet-mounted display eyepiece--all of which are linked together for transmission of voice, data and imagery between soldiers and other battle-field systems.

The program officially began in January 1996.

By 1998, the system had turned into a laughingstock. It failed critical tests and was over budget. But what made the system the butt of jokes was the way the hardware fit on the soldier. The gear was cumbersome for even the toughest infantrymen to wear. The computer, mounted on the soldier's back, created a "turtle-shell" effect when a soldier would drop and roll.

After serious test failures in the spring of 1998, the Army assigned Jette to take over the program and try to save it.

At the time, the prime contractor was the Raytheon Co., in El Segundo, Calif. Jette said that he believed the program was failing, because it was not focused on the use of commercial technology and, most importantly, because it was not emphasizing ergonomics. To be successful, a system such as land warrior had to be comfortable.

"Our business paths were diverging," Jette said in an interview in Fort Belvoir, Va., last fall. "As a good defense contractor, they tended to be focused on those things that weren't necessarily readily available in the commercial sector. ... We were trying to go in a direction where we leveraged commercial technology." The program was being led by the engineers, "and all the human factors were a problem," he said.

When Jette became the program manager, the land warrior's computer motherboard was not only obsolete by commercial standards, but its price tag topped $32,000. The entire electronics package exceeded $85,000 per soldier.

By 1999, Raytheon was being phased out of the program. The official letter of termination arrived in the summer of 2000, said spokeswoman Janet Kopec.

To save the program, Jette sought "guns for hire" in Silicon Valley. These typically are small, high-tech firms that design cutting-edge equipment and outsource the manufacturing.

After a competition in 1999 that included a Raytheon-led team and General Dynamics Corp., the Army selected Pacific Consultants LLC, a Mountain View, Calif. engineering firm, to develop the computer, the radio and the software for land warrior. For the squad leader, the Army chose a hand-held multi-band radio made by Thales Communications Inc., in Rockville, Md.

"We are guns for hire," said Hugh Duffy, a electronics engineer and the chief executive of Pacific Consultants. The company, which employs...