Buying Regs Gumming Up IED Fight

Until American mil­i­tary chiefs start think­ing and maneu­ver­ing faster than the gueril­las they are fight­ing, this insur­gency is never going to put fully under con­trol. Pentagon-​​funded researchers are build­ing new tech­nolo­gies to help the fight in Iraq. But the Defense Department is buy­ing the goods with a “slow-​​moving 20th-​​century pro­cure­ment sys­tem built for a dif­fer­ent kind of enemy,” the Wall Street Journal notes.

Consider the case of the “jam­mer,” a device about the size of a bread­box that blocks radio waves emit­ted from remote-​​control devices that rebels use to det­o­nate road­side bombs.
Last sum­mer TMC Design Inc. signed a con­tract with the Army to deliver 845 “Warlock-​​S” jam­mers, built to inter­fere with cer­tain explosion-​​triggering sig­nals. [These appear to be dif­fer­ent from the Warlock Red and Green jam­mers we’ve men­tioned before — ed.] …
When insur­gents found a way around TMC’s jam­mer, TMC approached the Army in March with a plan to upgrade the prod­uct so that it could block some of those “hard to kill” radio sig­nals…
The Army expressed inter­est, but it took two months to invite TMC to its lab to prove the upgrade worked against some of the sig­nals — a cru­cial step to mak­ing the change.
One rea­son for the delay is that the Army was in the mid­dle of prepar­ing to award a new con­tract for the next gen­er­a­tion of jam­ming devices. The con­tract could be val­ued at sev­eral hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars… [And] Army offi­cials wor­ried that TMC might have gained an unfair advan­tage over rivals com­pet­ing for the larger con­tract, since it would have had advance access to the test cham­bers.
This month, TMC was elim­i­nated from the com­pe­ti­tion for that larger con­tract. It also was finally allowed to test the mod­i­fied, or Warlock-​​S 1.5, jam­mer. The upgraded device per­formed well against sev­eral “hard to kill” radio fre­quen­cies the Army had iden­ti­fied in February when it first informed TMC that it needed a bet­ter device, the com­pany said.
But the TMC jam­mer couldn’t block new fre­quen­cies that had appeared since the com­pany was first told by the Army of the prob­lem. “We took care of what we knew about. But there was some stuff we didn’t know about that we couldn’t han­dle,” said TMC’s Mr. Scoughton. (Thanks Eric for the tip)

May 25th, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.