The firm’s chief executive says possible applications include a remote-controlled, unmanned version of the propeller-powered aircraft – which has the potential to fly at heights of up to 10,000 feet (3048m) – being used as an “airborne missile platform”.

Speaking to the Weekend Herald, company founder Glenn Martin said major US aerospace companies Boeing, Raytheon and Rockwell Collins were also interested in the Kiwi firm’s technology.

Joint ventures were a possibility, he said.

“We’re already dealing with Rockwell Collins. We’ve got conversations going with those companies and more, in particular those conversations are being led by the US Department of Defence.”

Controversy erupted in 2006 when it was suggested products made by Auckland high-tech crystal manufacturer Rakon were finding their way into smart bomb technology made by Rockwell Collins.

Rakon’s Mt Wellington head office was targeted by peace protesters when Israel – a large-scale user of smart bomb technology – launched offensives against Lebanon and Gaza.

Mr Martin said the military applications being considered for the Jetpack would not primarily involve weapons.

The military could instead use an unmanned machine to deliver supplies – such as medicine and food – to troops in the field, he said.

But Martin Aircraft Company chief executive Richard Lauder appeared to have a different view from the company’s founder, saying the Jetpack’s ability to carry weapons was one of the applications under consideration.

“[It would be] something they [the military] can put up at about 500 to 1000 metres to look around and see if there’s any bad guys.”

Mr Lauder said Martin Aircraft did not “have any bias” against its products being used for combat military applications.

Mr Martin, contrary to his chief executive’s claims, said he would”be pretty pissed off” if the Jetpack technology he began work on inhis garage in 1981 ended upbeing used to carry weapons.

“But unless you never sell a product, how can you stop it?”

The NZ Government – through the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST) – has provided around $1 million in funding to the Jetpack project.

A spokeswoman for the foundation said it was unaware of Martin Aircraft Company’s talks with the US Department of Defence.

The foundation provided funding for specific projects, she said, and the funding received by Martin Aircraft had been for the development of the Jetpack only.

Research, Science and Technology Minister Wayne Mapp said there were no restrictions on New Zealand firms bidding for defence contracts as long as there was no breach of rules on nuclear applications, mines or cluster munitions.

Mr Martin said civilian applications for the unmanned Jetpack, such as search and rescue and disaster relief, were also a possibility. One machine could carry up to 100kg of food and clean water to disaster victims.

He said he had not lost his initial vision for his creation to be used as a recreational vehicle.

About 1600 people had expressed interest in spending $140,000 on a jet pack for personal use, he said.

The company was also considering a public listing on the NZX within the next 18 months.

One of the flight tests involved ejecting 60 percent of the right wing, 30 percent of the right fin rudder, and 30 percent of the right stabilizer. Despite the damage, the UAV remained steady in-flight and was able to land. Another flight test demonstrated the ability for the aircraft to continue to fly a fixed trajectory and land safely after the engine was turned off.

The last test involved blowing up about 80 percent of the UAV’s right wing after which the aircraft landed safely, says David Vos senior director of Rockwell Collins Control Technologies and Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Once on the ground the aircraft was on the ground it still fought to maintain its equilibrium.

The trajectory is stabilized in a fraction of second, enabling the UAV to stay on its mission — which in this case is to fly a particular trajectory and land safely, Vos says.

All flight tests included auto take off and landing.

Vos says the next step will be to port the technology onto an operational UAV. He declined to say which UAV, only that the reporters in the room would recognize it.

“This latest flight test campaign is an important step toward our ultimate goal of offering our damage tolerance control software to the UAV market,” Vos says. “Our solution improves the survivability of UAVs in theater, while simultaneously improving the reliability of UAVs flying in civilian airspace. By detecting and instantly and automatically compensating for failure or damage in flight, UAVs and manned aircraft can soon achieve coexistence.”

Damage tolerance is an enabling capability for increasing the mission reliability of UAVs operating in hazardous and high-threat environments, according to Rockwell Collins. The technology provides for real-time autonomous accommodation of damage, followed by an adaptation process that alters the flight control system to compensate for the effects of the damage.

Emergency management of UAVs is a big concern of the Federal Aviation Administration this test is a big step in improving the reliability of UAVs when somethign goes wrong during flight, Vos says.

Vos says he believes that the damage tolerance technology for UAVs will be transferred into manned commercial aircraft one day. He says he has a dream that at some point planes will be pilot optional — in other words if the pilot doesn’t feel like flying he doesn’t have to, the autonomous controls will handle everything — including emergencies. “Before I’m in the ground I want to be able to get in the cockpit flying to see my mother-in-law, and decide that I don’t feel like piloting, so I will read the paper instead and enjoy a cup of coffee.”

Other maneuvers demonstrating failure and immediate automatic recovery through damage tolerance controls that were conducted during flight tests include: locking the right aileron in neutral position in-line with the rest of the airplane, which caused an uncontrolled roll and an engine idle test where engine command is idle, which means there is no throttle up or down.

During other flight tests DARPA and Rockwell Collins demonstrated the first UAV to fly aerobatics with position tracking. This demonstration is part of the third phase of a damage tolerance contract awarded to Rockwell Collins.

Vos says the technology is now set to be ported to an operational UAV. He indicated that while others have flown aerobatics of autonomous UAVs, the most recent DARPA test was the first UAV to fly aerobatics with position tracking with a fixed aerobatic trajectory in space.

“This all-attitude control technology supplies UAVs with damage tolerance and the ability to fight — through evasive maneuvers — and to counter threats such as missiles,” Vos says. “This technology will also enable UAVs to fly at low altitude, in urban environments and even in confined places such as inside buildings and caves.”

The Navy and Marine Corps recently awarded the STUAS contract to Insitu for its Integrator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The Integrator uses Rockwell Collins’ Athena 111m flight control system, which enables the UAV to perform with high accuracy and autonomy using a lightweight, small form factor avionics package.

The Integrator also flies with Rockwell Collins’ global positioning system (GPS) that improves the position accuracy of the UAV and its subsystems. For example, the flight control system uses the GPS to autonomously and accurately position the UAV to capture the aircraft using the SkyHook retrieval system.

Rockwell Collins will work with Insitu during a two-year engineering and manufacturing development effort to mature the UAS design to meet the STUAS requirements. STUAS will provide ISR support for U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy.

“We are pleased to be working closely with Insitu on this important program,” says David Vos, Rockwell Collins senior director of UAS and Control Technology. “Rockwell Collins’ role in the STUAS contract validates the reliability and performance of our Athena flight control and navigation systems.”

The CRIIS program will replace the Advanced Range Data System currently in use at major U.S. military test ranges. The program fulfills a critical Department of Defense (DoD) requirement to provide Time, Space, and Position Information (TSPI) and system test data to support weapon system testing for a variety of platforms, including advanced aircraft, ships, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles, ground vehicles and dismounted soldiers.

“Rockwell Collins’ proven technology, coupled with our open systems approach, enables the Air Force to deliver a low-risk solution for military test ranges today and for the coming decades,” said Ron Hornish, vice president and general manager of Precision Strike Solutions for Rockwell Collins. “Ultimately, this approach gives the military the ability to more effectively test and evaluate system performance, so that those next generation systems can be deployed to the field more rapidly and with a high degree of confidence.”

Rockwell Collins was one of two companies awarded phase I risk reduction contracts in 2008. Phase I — which was completed in June 2010 — required contractors to demonstrate technology that delivers enhanced TSPI, data links and encryption technology. The Rockwell Collins team includes Cubic Defense Applications, Honeywell and ArgonST.

This press release contains statements that are forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to U.S. Air Force spending and budgetary policies; potential cancellation or amendments of awards or orders by the U.S. Air Force; challenges in the design, development and production of advanced technologies; and competitive product and pricing pressures; as well as other risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those detailed from time to time in the Rockwell Collins Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including without limitation the Rockwell Collins Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2010 and its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended June 30, 2010 and September 30, 2010. These forward-looking statements are made only as of the date hereof.

The CRIIS program will replace the Advanced Range Data System currently in use at major U.S. military test ranges. The program fulfills a critical Department of Defense (DoD) requirement to provide Time, Space, and Position Information (TSPI) and system test data to support weapon system testing for a variety of platforms, including advanced aircraft, ships, helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles, ground vehicles and dismounted soldiers.

“Rockwell Collins’ proven technology, coupled with our open systems approach, enables the Air Force to deliver a low-risk solution for military test ranges today and for the coming decades,” said Ron Hornish, vice president and general manager of Precision Strike Solutions for Rockwell Collins. “Ultimately, this approach gives the military the ability to more effectively test and evaluate system performance, so that those next generation systems can be deployed to the field more rapidly and with a high degree of confidence.”

Rockwell Collins was one of two companies awarded phase I risk reduction contracts in 2008. Phase I — which was completed in June 2010 — required contractors to demonstrate technology that delivers enhanced TSPI, data links and encryption technology. The Rockwell Collins team includes Cubic Defense Applications, Honeywell and ArgonST.

This press release contains statements that are forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those projected as a result of certain risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to U.S. Air Force spending and budgetary policies; potential cancellation or amendments of awards or orders by the U.S. Air Force; challenges in the design, development and production of advanced technologies; and competitive product and pricing pressures; as well as other risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those detailed from time to time in the Rockwell Collins Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including without limitation the Rockwell Collins Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended September 30, 2010 and its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended June 30, 2010 and September 30, 2010. These forward-looking statements are made only as of the date hereof.

Despite an information-technology buying spree over the past decade, the Army has yet to figure out how to sate troops’ gargantuan appetite for information and ever-growing needs for battlefield intelligence. Current battlefield networks are accessible by divisions, brigades and battalions. But smaller units remain digital orphans, even though they lead the day-to-day fighting in current wars. The squads, platoons and companies require high-bandwidth connectivity so they can share information and gain instant awareness of what is happening on the ground, Army officials said.

Help appears to be on the way. In the Army’s 2010 modernization roadmap, the “network” is billed as a top priority. After more than a decade of failed efforts and billions of dollars spent, the pressure is on for the Army to deliver a battlefield network that supports small, mobile units. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli characterized the network as essential to the future Army. “It will require an open architecture that will allow further plug-and-play development in the future as our network grows and matures,” Chiarelli said at an industry conference last year.

The Army since the early 1990s has made several attempts at building a battlefield Internet, but the technology has leapt way ahead of the military procurement bureaucracy. The closest the Army has come to having an IP network at the squad level is in the “land warrior” system — an ensemble that includes a communications and navigation computer-radio suite. In the land warrior network, each member can pinpoint other soldiers’ locations by simply looking at a display. But this is only a niche solution and does not solve the larger problem of connecting every element of a deployed brigade.

Visions of broadband connectivity in the field and smart phones that can be constantly updated with new applications, from a technical standpoint, are realistic, experts said. But they will never be realized as long as the Army continues to buy IT the same way it acquires tanks and helicopters. It simply takes too long to move technology to the field, and by the time it gets there, the market already has moved on.

The Army’s chief information officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, said at an industry conference that the service since 9/11 has tripled its inventory of radios to more than 900,000 and increased its ability to transmit data within U.S. Central Command networks from 46 megabytes per second to about 10 gigabytes per second.

Similar capabilities have not trickled down into the small units that don’t have access to the high-tech command centers and need mobile equipment they can operate from their trucks. Platoons and squads have line-of-sight radios — whose signals are blocked by buildings or mountains — with low-bandwidth and they are unable to chat online or transmit images. Soldiers at a typical forward base in Afghanistan using line-of-sight radios travel only a few miles down the road before they lose their connection to the base.

Under a program called Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team Increment 1, or E-IBCT, the Army is piecing together its most advanced information technologies into a deployable network that would allow soldiers to not only stay connected to each other but also to capture intelligence from unmanned sensors and disseminate it throughout the brigade. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in 2012, will be the launch customer for the new technologies. Soldiers from the brigade are testing the systems at Fort Bliss, Texas. If the Pentagon approves additional funding, more brigades could be equipped with the advanced network later this decade.

With this technology, the “company commander becomes the network quarterback for the Army,” said Lt. Col. Darby McNulty, deputy program manager for network systems integration. The future company “command post” is being designed to link all soldiers in a company and below, and also to connect the company with higher echelons and with national intelligence databases via satellite. The command post could be set up in a fixed site or could be installed in the cab of a large armored truck.

The nearly 1 million radios that the Army currently owns, however, are not part of this setup. The E-IBCT program is building the network with new software-programmable radios that were developed by the Defense Department’s “joint tactical radio system” or JTRS program. The radios can be programmed to operate a variety of software communication applications that are called “waveforms.”

JTRS program officials said that current radios cannot deliver the high bandwidth that deployed forces need and cannot run the required software applications.

For the company command post, three waveforms are required: The soldier radio waveform (for narrowband communications within a company), the wideband networking waveform (for broadband data transfer) and the network centric waveform (for satellite-based communications). The soldier radio waveform capacity to pass data is about 500 to 600 kilobits per second. The wideband networking waveform transfers five megabytes per second.

JTRS hardware includes a family of radios — a half-pound device for small robots, a two-pound handheld “rifleman” radio, a 14-pound “manpack” and a four-channel command-post system. The entire JTRS program includes nine waveforms not just for the Army but for the other branches of the military as well.

For the first time, the latest advances in radio communications are being brought together in a live exercise, McNulty said during a conference call with reporters. The recent tests at Fort Bliss proved that JTRS is an essential piece of the Army’s future network, he said. “It’s something you absolutely want to stick with.”

For the exercise, mobile company command posts installed aboard armored trucks were outfitted with “network integration kits,” which are the network hubs connecting the terrestrial and satellite layers of the network to one another. Each NIK consists of a command-and-control terminal, called the “integrated computer system,” a four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio and a blue-force tracker display screen. Dismounted soldiers carried either a JTRS rifleman radio or a manpack radio.

The radios in each vehicle create a “mobile ad-hoc network,” or manet. Each tactical radio functions as a cell phone tower. At the tests in Fort Bliss, engineers extended the range of the network by adding an “aerial layer” made up of unmanned aircraft and helicopters that were outfitted with small JTRS radios. “We were able to extend sensor and position data beyond 20 km, in some cases up to 40 km,” McNulty said.

The four-channel JTRS, made by The Boeing Co., runs the soldier radio waveform, the wideband networking waveform and the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or Sincgars, waveform, which allows the commander to talk to all the vehicles in the unit. Sincgars is the most commonly used radio net in the Army.

Details about how the network will be organized and what specific equipment will be acquired are still being hashed out, said McNulty. “We need to better understand who needs what information at what level so we can better optimize the network,” he said. “If you can eliminate extraneous information you can improve the quality of the network, if you send everything to everyone all at once the quality of your service decreases exponentially.”

Tests will continue over the next several months.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this program is under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon’s senior acquisition officials will be reviewing test results this fall, and will determine whether the program will continue to receive funding. A separate evaluation is under way within the Army. This “network capabilities portfolio review” will examine the entire litany of Army IT programs and nominate winners and losers. It will look at whether the Army can afford to acquire new equipment, whether it should stick with “legacy” systems or, a most likely outcome, whether it should have a mix. Overseeing this review is Chiarelli, who has expressed concern about the “affordability” of current programs and famously brandished his iPhone as an example of the low-cost apps-friendly IT that soldiers need but the Army’s plodding acquisition system is unable to provide.

Another contentious issue in the ongoing reviews is whether JTRS can make up for lost time and deliver hardware at prices that are competitive with other radios. JTRS has been in development since 1999 and originally was scheduled to be fielded by 2006. Delays dogged the program as the slippages coincided with the war buildup, when billions of dollars were being appropriated in emergency war budgets to purchase new radios. When it became clear that JTRS was not ready, the Army poured billions into other radios. The result is today’s inventory that has tripled in size.

JTRS program officials now are forecasting that the models that the Army needs — the JTRS HMS (handheld/manpack/small form-fit) radios will be ready for deployment by 2011.
“These radios provide digital connectivity, networking down to the soldier level. That has not been done before,” said Army Col. John V. Zavarelli, program manager for JTRS HMS. Orders of up to 215,000 HMS radios are expected, he said in an interview. “We believe they could increase to 250,000 based on service needs.”

Zavarelli said he was not familiar with the Army’s network review and could not comment on the affordability of JTRS. He said all the services have been funding their share of JTRS research and development expenses. “I’m not sure the costs are an issue,” he said. “I certainly haven’t been told it in that way.”

About 750 pre-production radios have been purchased so far from prime contractor General Dynamics. Once the radios are cleared for full-rate production, the JTRS program office will solicit competitive bids from vendors for each variant. The assumption is that competitors will challenge General Dynamics and help to drive down prices, Zavarelli said. Several industry sources told National Defense that current JTRS HMS handheld radios cost upwards of $75,000 each, but Zavarelli said he could not confirm or discuss prices.

“We are on the edge of operational testing and limited rate production decisions in the next year,” he said. “We’ve offered some alternatives for accelerating [the development] and are waiting for a decision.”

Radio suppliers are watching these events closely as they seek to position their products for future JTRS business. Several executives interviewed for this story said they fear that the JTRS program is too rigid in that only radios that strictly meet the technical specifications of JTRS will be allowed to compete. That means none of the radios that exist in the military’s inventory today are acceptable. Under that scenario, the Army would be in a position of having to replace hundreds of thousands of radios that already are paid for and installed. A radio installation kit for an average Army vehicle costs more than the radio itself. When JTRS was conceived in the late 1990s, it was assumed that the radios would be installed in new Future Combat Systems vehicles. But when the FCS vehicle program was terminated last year, some Army officials sounded alarms about what this meant for JTRS. “By losing FCS a lot of the Army’s network and communications programs seriously unraveled,” said a retired Army officer who was closely involved in FCS.

Ripping out existing radios and installing new JTRS systems across the Army’s fleets of vehicles would be an exorbitant expense, several industry sources said. They don’t see how the Army will go along with such a plan when the services are under pressure to cut costs and find $100 billion in savings across all defense programs over the next five years.

Officials from one of the Army’s major radio suppliers, ITT Corp., have for years been trying to sell the idea that its Sincgars combat radios could be modified to run the soldier radio waveform (SRW) so the Army would not have to replace them with more expensive JTRS systems. ITT is the prime contractor for the SRW software and also the manufacturer of the Sincgars radios that the U.S. military has been using since the early 1980s.

ITT has delivered more than 500,000 radios, nearly half of them during the past two years. War funds paid for a huge expansion of ITT’s manufacturing plant so it could ramp up production from 1,000 to 6,000 radios per month. The Army Science Board, an advisory panel, recommended in a 2007 report that the Army “stop buying Sincgars immediately” so it could invest the money in “future, not legacy hardware.” But Congress continued to fund Sincgars purchases, and production continues to this day, although Army orders are scheduled to end in a couple of years.

With such a large inventory in the force, it is hard to see how the Army can toss it and buy all new hardware, said David Prater, ITT vice president for network communications.

“We’ve proposed adding a single channel SRW [to current Sincgars] to keep the cost down,” he said. “For $10,000 to $15,000 you’d get a two-channel radio that does Sincgars or SRW,” compared to a $75,000 two-channel manpack that does those two waveforms plus perhaps one or two others,” Prater said.

“The Army is wrestling with this,” he said. The timing has worked against JTRS. “In the meantime you’ve got all these Sincgars radios,” Prater said. “JTRS kind of missed the war. A lot of [non-JTRS] equipment was bought” during the past eight years.

Zavarelli insists that none of these options meets the requirements of JTRS.

“Some radios by design are incapable of hosting narrowband and wideband waveforms,” he said. ITT has suggested adding a “sidehat” data radio to Sincgars that could run the SRW waveform, but Zavarelli is not convinced that it would work. “That’s a separate entire radio that’s added to the Sincgars. I have a requirement for SRW radios and that’s what we are doing.”

Other vendors also have questioned the radio-procurement strategy as well as the Army’s larger game plan for acquiring information technology.

The Defense Department spent the better part of a decade developing JTRS and during that time the industry has moved on to other products and the technology landscape has changed, said Steve Marschilok, president of defense business at Harris RF Communications.

Any company that competes for JTRS production contracts will have to build a custom radio that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the marketplace, Marschilok said.

“You can’t procure IT the way we always have,” said Dennis Moran, vice president of Harris Corp.’s government communications systems division. The Army is stuck with an “antiquated requirements process that goes from Fort Gordon, to Fort Monroe, to the Pentagon,” Moran said. “You can’t force technology to adapt to requirements that are out of touch before ink is even dried on paper at TRADOC [Training and Doctrine Command] headquarters.”

In the case of JTRS, the government could have saved billions it spent on development by purchasing off-the-shelf products, Moran said. That is how U.S. Special Operations Command does business these days, he noted.

Harris has supplied more than 120,000 radios to the Defense Department. The company is a JTRS contractor for single-channel radios and expects to compete for future production contracts for the JTRS rifleman and manpack systems. It plans to offer variants of its existing radios even though the program office says none of today’s commercial radios meet the JTRS requirements. Harris also is expected to bid its PRC/117G radio against competing systems from BAE Systems and Rockwell Collins for the four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio.

A commercial approach to building the Army’s networks would save billions of dollars, said Moran. If JTRS were to be canceled, “ITT and Harris radios could give you an extremely powerful architecture at a much better value than potentially the Defense Department has budgeted for JTRS,” he said. Still, JTRS is an important program for the Defense Department because it can help guide industry investments, he said. “We need the program to develop the standards, to ensure interoperability,” Moran said. “You want waveforms to be seamless to the soldier. We don’t want the program killed. But is there a better way to invest the dollars? Maybe there is.”

Paul D. Mueller, vice president of Motorola’s federal government market, said the military has failed to tap the commercial sector for new technology and remains bogged down in “programs of record” that take too long to deliver products. Defense Department IT users demand unique levels of security for information networks but there are ways to bridge their needs with commercially available technology, Mueller said.

“We’re excited about the adoption of the smart phone technology” for the U.S. military, he said. “That looks like a good bet for us.” There is growing interest in Motorola’s Android smart phone because of its open system and its potential for the military to be able to run its own software applications. Smart phones are regarded as the ticket to information sharing on the battlefield.

The Marine Corps has been ahead of the Army in modifying commercial radios and wireless networking technology for tactical communications, he said.

Motorola has designed a “gateway” box that would bridge cellular, Iridium satellite and land mobile radio networks so users of different cell phones and radios can talk to each other.

The JTRS waveforms could be installed in current radios such as the Marine Corps’ P-25 handheld devices as a low-cost alternative to the HMS radios, said Mueller.

Marines in small units communicate on the battlefield and back to their ships with a mix of commercial and military systems. The “distributed tactical communications system” employs military radios and Iridium commercial satellite services. They also have a terrestrial mobile network built by Trellisware, a commercial supplier of wireless systems.

Despite an information-technology buying spree over the past decade, the Army has yet to figure out how to sate troops’ gargantuan appetite for information and ever-growing needs for battlefield intelligence. Current battlefield networks are accessible by divisions, brigades and battalions. But smaller units remain digital orphans, even though they lead the day-to-day fighting in current wars. The squads, platoons and companies require high-bandwidth connectivity so they can share information and gain instant awareness of what is happening on the ground, Army officials said.

Help appears to be on the way. In the Army’s 2010 modernization roadmap, the “network” is billed as a top priority. After more than a decade of failed efforts and billions of dollars spent, the pressure is on for the Army to deliver a battlefield network that supports small, mobile units. Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli characterized the network as essential to the future Army. “It will require an open architecture that will allow further plug-and-play development in the future as our network grows and matures,” Chiarelli said at an industry conference last year.

The Army since the early 1990s has made several attempts at building a battlefield Internet, but the technology has leapt way ahead of the military procurement bureaucracy. The closest the Army has come to having an IP network at the squad level is in the “land warrior” system — an ensemble that includes a communications and navigation computer-radio suite. In the land warrior network, each member can pinpoint other soldiers’ locations by simply looking at a display. But this is only a niche solution and does not solve the larger problem of connecting every element of a deployed brigade.

Visions of broadband connectivity in the field and smart phones that can be constantly updated with new applications, from a technical standpoint, are realistic, experts said. But they will never be realized as long as the Army continues to buy IT the same way it acquires tanks and helicopters. It simply takes too long to move technology to the field, and by the time it gets there, the market already has moved on.

The Army’s chief information officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, said at an industry conference that the service since 9/11 has tripled its inventory of radios to more than 900,000 and increased its ability to transmit data within U.S. Central Command networks from 46 megabytes per second to about 10 gigabytes per second.

Similar capabilities have not trickled down into the small units that don’t have access to the high-tech command centers and need mobile equipment they can operate from their trucks. Platoons and squads have line-of-sight radios — whose signals are blocked by buildings or mountains — with low-bandwidth and they are unable to chat online or transmit images. Soldiers at a typical forward base in Afghanistan using line-of-sight radios travel only a few miles down the road before they lose their connection to the base.

Under a program called Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team Increment 1, or E-IBCT, the Army is piecing together its most advanced information technologies into a deployable network that would allow soldiers to not only stay connected to each other but also to capture intelligence from unmanned sensors and disseminate it throughout the brigade. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, which is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in 2012, will be the launch customer for the new technologies. Soldiers from the brigade are testing the systems at Fort Bliss, Texas. If the Pentagon approves additional funding, more brigades could be equipped with the advanced network later this decade.

With this technology, the “company commander becomes the network quarterback for the Army,” said Lt. Col. Darby McNulty, deputy program manager for network systems integration. The future company “command post” is being designed to link all soldiers in a company and below, and also to connect the company with higher echelons and with national intelligence databases via satellite. The command post could be set up in a fixed site or could be installed in the cab of a large armored truck.

The nearly 1 million radios that the Army currently owns, however, are not part of this setup. The E-IBCT program is building the network with new software-programmable radios that were developed by the Defense Department’s “joint tactical radio system” or JTRS program. The radios can be programmed to operate a variety of software communication applications that are called “waveforms.”

JTRS program officials said that current radios cannot deliver the high bandwidth that deployed forces need and cannot run the required software applications.

For the company command post, three waveforms are required: The soldier radio waveform (for narrowband communications within a company), the wideband networking waveform (for broadband data transfer) and the network centric waveform (for satellite-based communications). The soldier radio waveform capacity to pass data is about 500 to 600 kilobits per second. The wideband networking waveform transfers five megabytes per second.

JTRS hardware includes a family of radios — a half-pound device for small robots, a two-pound handheld “rifleman” radio, a 14-pound “manpack” and a four-channel command-post system. The entire JTRS program includes nine waveforms not just for the Army but for the other branches of the military as well.

For the first time, the latest advances in radio communications are being brought together in a live exercise, McNulty said during a conference call with reporters. The recent tests at Fort Bliss proved that JTRS is an essential piece of the Army’s future network, he said. “It’s something you absolutely want to stick with.”

For the exercise, mobile company command posts installed aboard armored trucks were outfitted with “network integration kits,” which are the network hubs connecting the terrestrial and satellite layers of the network to one another. Each NIK consists of a command-and-control terminal, called the “integrated computer system,” a four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio and a blue-force tracker display screen. Dismounted soldiers carried either a JTRS rifleman radio or a manpack radio.

The radios in each vehicle create a “mobile ad-hoc network,” or manet. Each tactical radio functions as a cell phone tower. At the tests in Fort Bliss, engineers extended the range of the network by adding an “aerial layer” made up of unmanned aircraft and helicopters that were outfitted with small JTRS radios. “We were able to extend sensor and position data beyond 20 km, in some cases up to 40 km,” McNulty said.

The four-channel JTRS, made by The Boeing Co., runs the soldier radio waveform, the wideband networking waveform and the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System, or Sincgars, waveform, which allows the commander to talk to all the vehicles in the unit. Sincgars is the most commonly used radio net in the Army.

Details about how the network will be organized and what specific equipment will be acquired are still being hashed out, said McNulty. “We need to better understand who needs what information at what level so we can better optimize the network,” he said. “If you can eliminate extraneous information you can improve the quality of the network, if you send everything to everyone all at once the quality of your service decreases exponentially.”

Tests will continue over the next several months.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this program is under intense scrutiny. The Pentagon’s senior acquisition officials will be reviewing test results this fall, and will determine whether the program will continue to receive funding. A separate evaluation is under way within the Army. This “network capabilities portfolio review” will examine the entire litany of Army IT programs and nominate winners and losers. It will look at whether the Army can afford to acquire new equipment, whether it should stick with “legacy” systems or, a most likely outcome, whether it should have a mix. Overseeing this review is Chiarelli, who has expressed concern about the “affordability” of current programs and famously brandished his iPhone as an example of the low-cost apps-friendly IT that soldiers need but the Army’s plodding acquisition system is unable to provide.

Another contentious issue in the ongoing reviews is whether JTRS can make up for lost time and deliver hardware at prices that are competitive with other radios. JTRS has been in development since 1999 and originally was scheduled to be fielded by 2006. Delays dogged the program as the slippages coincided with the war buildup, when billions of dollars were being appropriated in emergency war budgets to purchase new radios. When it became clear that JTRS was not ready, the Army poured billions into other radios. The result is today’s inventory that has tripled in size.

JTRS program officials now are forecasting that the models that the Army needs — the JTRS HMS (handheld/manpack/small form-fit) radios will be ready for deployment by 2011.
“These radios provide digital connectivity, networking down to the soldier level. That has not been done before,” said Army Col. John V. Zavarelli, program manager for JTRS HMS. Orders of up to 215,000 HMS radios are expected, he said in an interview. “We believe they could increase to 250,000 based on service needs.”

Zavarelli said he was not familiar with the Army’s network review and could not comment on the affordability of JTRS. He said all the services have been funding their share of JTRS research and development expenses. “I’m not sure the costs are an issue,” he said. “I certainly haven’t been told it in that way.”

About 750 pre-production radios have been purchased so far from prime contractor General Dynamics. Once the radios are cleared for full-rate production, the JTRS program office will solicit competitive bids from vendors for each variant. The assumption is that competitors will challenge General Dynamics and help to drive down prices, Zavarelli said. Several industry sources told National Defense that current JTRS HMS handheld radios cost upwards of $75,000 each, but Zavarelli said he could not confirm or discuss prices.

“We are on the edge of operational testing and limited rate production decisions in the next year,” he said. “We’ve offered some alternatives for accelerating [the development] and are waiting for a decision.”

Radio suppliers are watching these events closely as they seek to position their products for future JTRS business. Several executives interviewed for this story said they fear that the JTRS program is too rigid in that only radios that strictly meet the technical specifications of JTRS will be allowed to compete. That means none of the radios that exist in the military’s inventory today are acceptable. Under that scenario, the Army would be in a position of having to replace hundreds of thousands of radios that already are paid for and installed. A radio installation kit for an average Army vehicle costs more than the radio itself. When JTRS was conceived in the late 1990s, it was assumed that the radios would be installed in new Future Combat Systems vehicles. But when the FCS vehicle program was terminated last year, some Army officials sounded alarms about what this meant for JTRS. “By losing FCS a lot of the Army’s network and communications programs seriously unraveled,” said a retired Army officer who was closely involved in FCS.

Ripping out existing radios and installing new JTRS systems across the Army’s fleets of vehicles would be an exorbitant expense, several industry sources said. They don’t see how the Army will go along with such a plan when the services are under pressure to cut costs and find $100 billion in savings across all defense programs over the next five years.

Officials from one of the Army’s major radio suppliers, ITT Corp., have for years been trying to sell the idea that its Sincgars combat radios could be modified to run the soldier radio waveform (SRW) so the Army would not have to replace them with more expensive JTRS systems. ITT is the prime contractor for the SRW software and also the manufacturer of the Sincgars radios that the U.S. military has been using since the early 1980s.

ITT has delivered more than 500,000 radios, nearly half of them during the past two years. War funds paid for a huge expansion of ITT’s manufacturing plant so it could ramp up production from 1,000 to 6,000 radios per month. The Army Science Board, an advisory panel, recommended in a 2007 report that the Army “stop buying Sincgars immediately” so it could invest the money in “future, not legacy hardware.” But Congress continued to fund Sincgars purchases, and production continues to this day, although Army orders are scheduled to end in a couple of years.

With such a large inventory in the force, it is hard to see how the Army can toss it and buy all new hardware, said David Prater, ITT vice president for network communications.

“We’ve proposed adding a single channel SRW [to current Sincgars] to keep the cost down,” he said. “For $10,000 to $15,000 you’d get a two-channel radio that does Sincgars or SRW,” compared to a $75,000 two-channel manpack that does those two waveforms plus perhaps one or two others,” Prater said.

“The Army is wrestling with this,” he said. The timing has worked against JTRS. “In the meantime you’ve got all these Sincgars radios,” Prater said. “JTRS kind of missed the war. A lot of [non-JTRS] equipment was bought” during the past eight years.

Zavarelli insists that none of these options meets the requirements of JTRS.

“Some radios by design are incapable of hosting narrowband and wideband waveforms,” he said. ITT has suggested adding a “sidehat” data radio to Sincgars that could run the SRW waveform, but Zavarelli is not convinced that it would work. “That’s a separate entire radio that’s added to the Sincgars. I have a requirement for SRW radios and that’s what we are doing.”

Other vendors also have questioned the radio-procurement strategy as well as the Army’s larger game plan for acquiring information technology.

The Defense Department spent the better part of a decade developing JTRS and during that time the industry has moved on to other products and the technology landscape has changed, said Steve Marschilok, president of defense business at Harris RF Communications.

Any company that competes for JTRS production contracts will have to build a custom radio that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the marketplace, Marschilok said.

“You can’t procure IT the way we always have,” said Dennis Moran, vice president of Harris Corp.’s government communications systems division. The Army is stuck with an “antiquated requirements process that goes from Fort Gordon, to Fort Monroe, to the Pentagon,” Moran said. “You can’t force technology to adapt to requirements that are out of touch before ink is even dried on paper at TRADOC [Training and Doctrine Command] headquarters.”

In the case of JTRS, the government could have saved billions it spent on development by purchasing off-the-shelf products, Moran said. That is how U.S. Special Operations Command does business these days, he noted.

Harris has supplied more than 120,000 radios to the Defense Department. The company is a JTRS contractor for single-channel radios and expects to compete for future production contracts for the JTRS rifleman and manpack systems. It plans to offer variants of its existing radios even though the program office says none of today’s commercial radios meet the JTRS requirements. Harris also is expected to bid its PRC/117G radio against competing systems from BAE Systems and Rockwell Collins for the four-channel JTRS ground mobile radio.

A commercial approach to building the Army’s networks would save billions of dollars, said Moran. If JTRS were to be canceled, “ITT and Harris radios could give you an extremely powerful architecture at a much better value than potentially the Defense Department has budgeted for JTRS,” he said. Still, JTRS is an important program for the Defense Department because it can help guide industry investments, he said. “We need the program to develop the standards, to ensure interoperability,” Moran said. “You want waveforms to be seamless to the soldier. We don’t want the program killed. But is there a better way to invest the dollars? Maybe there is.”

Paul D. Mueller, vice president of Motorola’s federal government market, said the military has failed to tap the commercial sector for new technology and remains bogged down in “programs of record” that take too long to deliver products. Defense Department IT users demand unique levels of security for information networks but there are ways to bridge their needs with commercially available technology, Mueller said.

“We’re excited about the adoption of the smart phone technology” for the U.S. military, he said. “That looks like a good bet for us.” There is growing interest in Motorola’s Android smart phone because of its open system and its potential for the military to be able to run its own software applications. Smart phones are regarded as the ticket to information sharing on the battlefield.

The Marine Corps has been ahead of the Army in modifying commercial radios and wireless networking technology for tactical communications, he said.

Motorola has designed a “gateway” box that would bridge cellular, Iridium satellite and land mobile radio networks so users of different cell phones and radios can talk to each other.

The JTRS waveforms could be installed in current radios such as the Marine Corps’ P-25 handheld devices as a low-cost alternative to the HMS radios, said Mueller.

Marines in small units communicate on the battlefield and back to their ships with a mix of commercial and military systems. The “distributed tactical communications system” employs military radios and Iridium commercial satellite services. They also have a terrestrial mobile network built by Trellisware, a commercial supplier of wireless systems.

In addition to the flight deck, Rockwell Collins has been selected by Boeing to deliver Communication, Navigation, Surveillance/Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM), aircraft networks and situational awareness capability to support the aircraft’s mission.

“Rockwell Collins’ ability to leverage our flight deck technology across our commercial and government businesses, along with our tanker/transport avionics expertise, will result in providing the Air Force with the most advanced technology and best value solution available,” informed Kelly Ortberg, executive vice president and chief operating officer for Rockwell Collins Government Systems. “Our track record of on-time, on-budget delivery has set Rockwell Collins apart as a trusted provider of avionics for our customers.”

Rockwell Collins continues to build on a strong tradition of success providing integrated avionics solutions for military aircraft programs. By leveraging key avionics and communications developments across the company’s commercial and military businesses and applying commercial off-the-shelf technology along with an open systems approach, Rockwell Collins is able to deliver its consumers with best value solutions.

The company’s broad portfolio of capabilities ranges from offering total avionics solutions such as priming and managing the aircraft installation and acceptance tasks, to delivering leading edge products and subsystems for new aircraft, to solving obsolescence issues for aging platforms.

Rockwell Collins is a pioneer in the development and deployment of innovative communication and aviation electronic solutions for both commercial and government applications. Our expertise in flight deck avionics, cabin electronics, mission communications, information management and simulation and training is delivered by nearly 20,000 employees, and a global service and support network that crosses 27 countries.

The ARC-210 has over 30,000 units used in the military and it is now the standard radio for over 180 ships, aircrafts and other platforms in the military.

Ralphy Portnoy, a captain in the U.S. Navy, informed about the great thing about the ARC-210 is that they never have to think about it because it just works.

The ARC-210 Radio delivers for voice and data communications, and for encrypted and jam-resistant communications. It is unlike any radio a civilian could encounter. The ARC-210 is bigger that a car radio but small enough to fit in platforms varying from unmanned aerial vehicles to helicopters.

Ralphy Portnoy and Kelly Ortberg, the executive vice president for government systems at Rockwell Collins, both commended the hundreds of Rockwell Collins employees in Cedar Rapids that were part of the radio’s production, engineering and support.

Military officials anticipated to purchasing only a few thousand of the ARC-210 radio due to its high price. Company officials said that the ARC-210 radio’s price was predicted to be approximately $55,000 per unit when its first-generation version was created in the middle of the 1980s.

A new procurement contract, giving Rockwell Collins incentives to keep the price low, and to apply in commercial technology and production methods in specific phases of the project, brought the price down.

Rockwell Collins recently showcased the ARC-210’s fifth generation model to military officials. The fifth generation radio will go into production next.

Bruce King, the vice president and general manager of Rockwell Collins Surface Solutions, stated that this new model is intended to push the technology forward to meet requirements like the next generation of satellite communications and automated aircraft carrier landing systems.

JSOW is a family of low-cost, air-to-ground weapons that employs an integrated GPS- inertial navigation system and terminal imaging infrared seeker that guide the weapon to the target. JSOW C-1 adds moving maritime target capability and the two-way Rockwell Collins Strike Common Weapon Datalink to the combat-proven weapon.

“This test demonstrates the ability of the Strike Common Weapon Datalink to operate in a challenging flight environment,” informed Phyllis McEnroe, Raytheon’s JSOW program director. “Working closely with our U.S. Navy teammates, we intend to add additional functionality to the weapon, culminating in a free-flight test later this year.”

The test demonstrated the JSOW’s ability to enter the Link-16 network and transmit networked-enabled weapon messages.

“This test is a crucial step forward in giving the warfighter the world’s first Link-16 networked standoff weapon capable of engaging moving maritime targets,” informed Cmdr. Douglas Phelan, JSOW Integrated Product Team leader.

Raytheon Company, with 2009 sales of $25 billion, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other government markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 88 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as a broad range of mission support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 75,000 people worldwide.

Note to Editors:

Raytheon has produced more than 4,000 JSOWs to date, with more than 100 months of continuous on-time delivery. The JSOW C is currently in production, and Raytheon will continue producing it for international customers.