JITTERS FOR RADIO PROJECT

During the early days of the Iraq inva­sion, some Marines were forced to use as many as seven dif­fer­ent radios to com­mu­ni­cate with col­leagues and supe­ri­ors. That’s why the Defense Department has been work­ing so fever­ishly on “Jitters,” or JTRS, the $5 bil­lion Joint Tactical Radio System effort to replace 750,000 old-​​school radios with software-​​based mod­els.
But now, National Defense mag­a­zine reports, Jitters may be in trou­ble.

Encryption prob­lems and an array of other tech­ni­cal short­com­ings are throw­ing the entire project into ques­tion, said indus­try sources…
The JTRS ver­sion known as clus­ter 1, intended for use aboard Army heli­copters and ground vehi­cles, is sched­uled for a major Defense Department review this sum­mer.
An Army tech­ni­cal review, known as early oper­a­tional assess­ment, is slated for April. In January, how­ever, the Army ordered the con­trac­tors to halt JTRS-​​related work for at least six weeks.
Technical chal­lenges were encoun­tered dur­ing devel­op­ment and inte­gra­tion that indi­cated the need for upgrades in per­for­mance and mod­i­fi­ca­tions in design, said Timothy Rider, spokesman for the Army Communications and Electronics Command.
This marks a sharp rever­sal of for­tune for JTRS, which was hailed by Pentagon offi­cials in 2002 as a trans­for­ma­tional pro­gram that would under­pin the Defense Departments vision of an inter­con­nected network-​​centric mil­i­tary force…
The Army declined to elab­o­rate on what exactly the tech­ni­cal issues are that poten­tially could derail this pro­gram. Industry sources con­tacted by National Defense indi­cated that one key area of con­cern is the encryp­tion tech­nol­ogy, which is over­seen by the National Security Agency. Changes in the JTRS secu­rity archi­tec­ture requested by the NSA poten­tially could delay the deliv­er­ies of JTRS clus­ter 1 by two years. Unlike pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions of mil­i­tary radios, JTRS is entirely software-​​based, mak­ing the sys­tem more sus­cep­ti­ble to hack­ing and prompt­ing NSA to tighten the encryp­tion requirements.

THERE’S MORE: NSA con­cerns aren’t the only rea­son Jitters is being delayed, Inside Defense notes.

The sys­tems pro­cess­ing and mem­ory capac­ity included no room for growth. Studies showed that the limit of the sys­tems ran­dom access mem­ory was likely to be exceeded and would lead to pos­si­ble erratic per­for­mance that would be dif­fi­cult to iso­late, said Tim Rider, a spokesman for the Army’s the Communications-​​Electronics Life Cycle Management Command.
As a result, pro­gram offi­cials deter­mined that mov­ing from the pro­to­types early lim­ited func­tion­al­ity to the final design would not be pos­si­ble, Rider said…
Program offi­cials real­ized the chal­lenges would lead to cost increases by October 2004, Rider wrote in response to ques­tions. There were three key signs. First, Boeing needed more resources to fin­ish hard­ware and non-​​waveform soft­ware require­ments that would address mem­ory short­falls. Next, new base­line require­ments emerged. Also, evolv­ing oper­a­tional sce­nar­ios and the devel­op­ment of the Defense Departments Global Information Grid expanded the under­stand­ing of a net­worked sys­tem of sys­tems, which has dri­ven upgrades to the radio sys­tem archi­tec­ture that are needed to com­ply with National Security Agency stan­dards…
In January 2004, the pro­gram received a reserve fund of $159 mil­lion for poten­tial finan­cial risks that were known to exist before the con­tract award. Boeing and the Army pro­gram office are prepar­ing a plan and cost esti­mate for any addi­tional cost increases and can­not pro­vide spe­cific fig­ures until that process is com­plete, Rider said.

February 25th, 2005 | Comms, FCS Watch | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.