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

Joint is difficult. We came back with a recommendation to adopt a corporate model where we have a board of directors. The board of directors is chaired by USD (AT&L) and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The PA&E (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Director for Program Analysis and Evaluation), the OSD (Office of Secretary of Defense) comptroller, the three-star programmers from the services, as well as the service acquisition executives, are on that board of directors.

The beauty is that you have everybody in the room needed to make and enforce a decision. That is not always true with acquisition programs because you have acquisition authority, you have requirements authority, you have resource authority, and each one has its own process. They are parallel processes and they intersect, but they are not necessarily under the control of one entity.

Underneath the board of directors is the JTRS Executive Council or JEC, which I chair along with the J-6 (C4 Systems Directorate) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It has a similar parallel structure.

We hold a JEC meeting preparatory to every board of directors meeting quarterly. We have held six or seven of them now, and the structure is well in use and has history. It still is in place as we transition under Secretary Young.

For the long-term, we believe in getting a critical mass of talent in one place, if you are going to take an enterprise approach. To that end, we have moved all the program offices except one, to San Diego. We are close to being done with that. We have here in San Diego a critical mass of acquisition folks and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) helps us with this. Second, we have a critical mass of technical people from the government within SPAWAR Systems Center San Diego.

San Diego is the wireless hub of the world so this is an appropriate place to be for our enterprise to tap into, both with industry as well as with academia. Finally, the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers have a presence in San Diego, and they have beefed up their presence to support JPEO JTRS.

I asserted earlier that we have turned this thing around so let me tell you why I think that is the case.

The GMR program, the Ground Mobile Radio, is a four-channel ground radio that goes in vehicles, and it is key to the success of Future Combat Systems because it provides the networking capability in the FCS vehicles.

We re-baselined the contract with our prime, Boeing Corp., and we have delivered greater than 50 pre-EDMs to the Army for experimentation into FCS. They have them in the desert and are experimenting with them running four simultaneous waveforms on the four channels. Any of the four channels will run any of the waveforms because they have a universal transceiver.

The four simultaneous waveforms that we are running on the pre-EDMs are Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (SINCGARS) voice, SINCGARS data, Enhanced Position Location Reporting System (EPLRS) and Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW).