Sunday, June 24, 2012

The U.S. Military's Failed 15-Year Quest To Develop The Perfect Radio

The Army's cancelled Ground Mobile Radio cost $6 billion to fail.

How To Blow $6 Billion On a Tech Project -- Ars Technica

Military's 15-year quest for the perfect radio is a blueprint for failing big.

In 1997, the Defense Department began its quest for the perfect family of radios: software-defined radios that, like computers, could be reprogrammed for different missions and could communicate with everything the US military used. Digital signal processing could adaptively use available radio spectrum based on the needs of the moment, turning soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships into nodes of a broadband radio-based network.

The goal was to solve radio problems like this one in Afghanistan, detailed by the Center for Public Integrity in January 2012. Soldiers who watched an ambush forming on a ridge nearby found themselves limited by the hugely variable needs of their many radio systems:

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My Comment: A text book case on how NOT to run a military research and development program. Sober reading .... especially when one looks at the billions that have been squandered on it.

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