COSTS M.I.A. FOR RADIO EFFORT

It’s been nearly three years since Boeing won an Army con­tract to develop the next gen­er­a­tion of mil­i­tary radios. But nei­ther the com­pany nor its gov­ern­ment part­ners have any idea how many bil­lions it’s going to cost, in the end, to build the Joint Tactical Radio System — “Jitters” for short. (I’ve seen esti­mates as low as $5 bil­lion, and as high as $15 bil­lion. That’s a major spread.)
On Monday, the Army told Boeing in a let­ter than the mega-​​corporation had 30 days to give a good rea­son do to some ’splain­ing about why they let Jitters get so screwed up. The note also gave out­siders a peek into just how wrong Jitters has gone.
“It is impos­si­ble to pre­dict with any con­fi­dence what the over­all pro­gram will cost or the asso­ci­ated sched­ule,” Defense Daily quotes the let­ter as say­ing. “Further, the gov­ern­ment has not seen suf­fi­cient evi­dence of the con­trac­tor teams under­stand­ing of the scale of inte­gra­tion required for [Jitters’ first phase] to ulti­mately achieve the pro­gram require­ments. Nor has the indus­try team dis­played suf­fi­cient abil­ity to esti­mate a cost and sched­ule base­line and rig­or­ously man­age to that base­line.“
As noted ear­lier, Jitters is not some minor exper­i­ment. It’s a cor­ner­stone to the Army’s mod­ern­iza­tion plans. Without it, sol­diers are stuck using a jury-​​rigged col­lec­tion of radios to talk. Figuring out how much the damn things are going to cost seems like a most basic of first steps. Three years into the pro­gram, it shouldn’t be that hard to take.

April 27th, 2005 | Comms, FCS Watch | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.