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

We gave a Milestone B brief to the board of directors at the Dec. 14 meeting, and we are staffing the ADM (Acquisition Decision Memorandum) to get a Milestone B Decision on AMF.

The fifth ACAT I program is the software that is used across the enterprise. It is called NED, Network Enterprise Domain. We delivered version 2.5 of WNW, and we are already at the threshold throughput on that waveform. It increased the number of ad hoc nodes, and we have demonstrated this mobile ad hoc networking where nodes come into and out of the WNW network without preplanning. We're scheduled to deliver 3.0 the beginning of March. Version 4.0, the final version to be fielded, follows that.

The final one we are producing is SRW, the Soldier Radio Waveform, that's a smaller scale networking waveform for stub networking down to the Soldier or sensor level, primarily in HMS. However, it will be resident in GMR to allow the dismounted Soldier, as well as sensor fields and munitions, to gateway into the tactical backbone of a network provided by WNW on GMR. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed waveforms for SRW.

NED has delivered nine legacy waveforms that are in our repository and most have been through formal qualifications. Now we are in the process of porting them into a radio box.

Single-channel handheld radios, the old Cluster 5 of JTRS, developed a radio called JEM, the JTRS Enhanced MBITR (Multiband Inter/Intra Team Radio). It was developed under the auspices of U.S. Special Operations Command with a full and open competition. Thales Communications won the competition several years ago.

Thales built the JEM radio, a single-channel, handheld software-defined radio that can instantiate and connect multiple waveforms. It has embedded programmable crypto, certified by NSA, and it has demonstrated interoperability through Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) testing. Those are four fundamental JTRS characteristics. That is what we call a 'JTRS-approved radio,' and it passed operational tests a year and a half ago.

Normally, we would have gone into production, sole-sourced to Thales on the old business model, and that was what we planned. Instead of that, we had another competitor on the market, Harris Corp., who had built a similar radio with similar capabilities with its own money. We were aware of that, and in accordance with our business model, we competed production. About nine months ago, we awarded a multiple IDIQ (indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity) contract.

It was a full and open competition for any company that could bring in a single-channel JTRS-approved radio that met the fundamentals that I mentioned earlier. We awarded to Thales for the JEM radio and to Harris for the Falcon III handheld.

When we have a service customer who wants to buy a single-channel handheld JTRS-approved radio, we can compete based on best value, cost or any number of factors, or we can sole source if that is what our customer wants to do.

Recently, the Army came to us with an order for 39,000 singlechannel handheld radios. The Army sent $239 million based on the current price of those radios. We competed on the basis of cost between those two vendors, and we awarded that contract for 39,000 radios--and were able to return $104 million to the Army customer.