The Joint Tactical Radio System: competition in production, open standards, software reuse through a repository and a joint governance structure turn the once struggling program into a winner providing capabilities to warfighters at the tactical edge

CHIPS, April-June, 2008

For production, we compete in lots at least annually among multiple vendors. One example is the MIDS (Multifunctional Information Distribution System) Low Volume Terminal (LVT). That is not a software-defined radio; it's a legacy radio that my MIDS program produces. There is also a JTRS MIDS.

The EDMs (engineering development models) on MIDS LVT were around $600,000 each. The first models that came off the production line were somewhat cheaper, in the $400,000 range. We've competed every year for about six or seven years and driven the cost of those terminals down to $185,000 a terminal.

It's not all through competition, but a significant contributor is that we compete every year in lots. We can award 0-100 percent, but we traditionally award somewhere between a ratio of 60-40 and 70-30 between the two vendors. We are using that model across the board in our enterprise.

The second thing is we want to stay out of a closed proprietary situation. We are obtaining government purpose rights or better on all the software that we are having developed under our contracts. All the software we have developed is open standards-based. It is based on the Software Communications Architecture, or SCA. We have 26 application program interfaces that are rigorously defined and baselined. We have our developers use those 26 APIs and build according to the SCA. The reason to do that is for portability so that later on in the life cycle we can switch out vendors. It is like a plug-and-play approach to the development of software. We didn't invent it, but we use it.

Third, since we obtain government purpose rights or better on all of our software, we place all that software code in a repository and make it available to our vendor base within our contracts. We also make it available to contractors who may not have a contract with or may not be developing products for JTRS.

We have 13 waveforms and three operating environments in that repository--more than 4 million lines of code. We give out library cards to our repository to vendors who ask for it based on certain criteria. Number one, vendors have to show that they're going to use it for government purposes. They have to demonstrate that they are going to use it in the government's best interest for government purposes.

Second, they have to agree that if they take software out of the repository and make changes to it, they have to put the changed software back into the repository with government purpose rights so we can share it.

This is not exactly a Linux model, but it is an open model compared to what the Department of Defense traditionally uses. It promotes multiple sources, ease of porting and interoperability. This is our enterprise business model: competition in production, open standards-based, software reuse through the repository and a joint governing structure.

AT&L Secretary Krieg gave me a homework assignment three years ago to propose a model for developing a joint program. This is a joint program, and it has to deliver a joint capability. If you have service-domination of the governing structure, you threaten that interoperability, that jointness.