![]() The past decade has by many accounts been an era of grand ambition, flawed management and wasted treasure for all the military branches. The Army wasn’t alone in its doomed pursuit of a technological pipe dream. In its relentless drive for conceptual simplicity, the Army found itself mired in mechanical complexity. The more capabilities that the Army and prime contractor Boeing packed into JTRS, the bigger, more complex and more expensive it became - until it was too bulky and unreliable for combat. After years of work, the Army discovered for itself what experts had been warning all along: It’s impossible for a single radio design to handle all the military’s different communications tasks. JTRS’ history is one of grand but naive technological ambition colliding with the unbending laws of physics and the unforgiving exigencies of modern warfare. taxpayer has paid the bill, but frontline soldiers like those from Task Force Rock bear the true cost. After an investment of 15 years and $17 billion, today the Army is still struggling to build better radios and estimates it may need to spend another $12 billion to get what it needs. For all practical purposes, JTRS is dead - at least in its original guise.īut the need for simpler battlefield communications remains. In October, it canceled the vehicle-mounted version of JTRS, the most important of the new radios, which by then had grown to the size of a dormitory-sized refrigerator. The Army eventually reduced the planned purchase of JTRS radios and cut the types of radios in development. Delays forced the Army to spend $11 billion more on old-style radios to meet the urgent demands of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. ![]() Overly ambitious, poorly managed and saddled by incompatible goals, the program burned through $6 billion dollars while producing little working hardware. Together, the JTRS radios would replace nearly all older radios in the American arsenal, greatly simplifying communications and freeing up combat units “to tap into the network on the move,” according to Paul Mehney, an Army spokesman.īut JTRS, pronounced “jitters,” failed to live up to its promise. But it was never supposed to occur at all.Īlmost fifteen years ago, the Army launched an ambitious program, the Joint Tactical Radio System, aimed at developing several highly-compatible “universal” radios. Task Force Rock’s vulnerability that morning is routine for U.S. Geoff Pearman, as he watched farmers scurry indoors from their wheat fields - a sure sign that fighting was imminent. Some of these radios worked only while the troopers were stationary others were simply too cumbersome to operate on the move. Chris Munoz of the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment uses a manpack radio while on patrol in the vicinity of Baqer Kheyl, Paktika, eastern Afghanistan, on April 8, 2011.
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