Prez's New Top-Secret Net

The Pentagon's IT geeks are putting together plans for a new White House "top-secret network and multimedia Crisis Management System (CMS) designed to operate in a wide range of fixed locations, on Air Force One and on a new fleet of presidential helicopters." That's according to the fine folks at FCW.com. The idea is to "provide the president, cabinet secretaries, and designated agency directors and their staffs with a secure, dedicated network capable of handling full motion video, voice graphics and data at 64 fixed and mobile locations."

The new network will also feature a collaborative tool suite similar to Microsoft Share Point. It will allow the top federal leaders to view and work on documents on the network’s video displays. Ten locations will be equipped with the new technology in 2008 at a cost of $12 million, according to the DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] budget documents.

DISA said it will equip two next-generation Boeing 747s that serve as Air Force One and nine new presidential helicopters with the new network and CMS. They will also be on six 757 and two 737 VIP aircraft used by the vice president and cabinet secretaries. The new network will provide the leaders with “near perfect reliability and communications survivability,” the DISA budget documents state.

Hez Hack Mystery Unfolds

Back in September, Newsday sparked a furious debate when it reported that Hezbollah had hacked into Israel's best-protected radios. At stake was more than that security of Israeli communications; American radios, which rely on similar technologies and designs, would also be at risk if the terror group was now able to listen in.

Now, Aviation Week is weighing in, to say that the hack never happened.

Hezbollah is incapable of penetrating and exploiting the Israeli army's tactical radio systems as it claimed it did during the recent fighting in Lebanon, say senior U.S. electronics industry officials.

Even so, the militant Islamic organization is parlaying the results of a relatively common signals intelligence capability for analyzing communications traffic and intercepting cell-phone calls into a major psychological warfare victory, say U.S. officials. The success has been so complete that both Israel Defense Force (IDF) and U.S. Army users of advanced encrypted, frequency-hopping radios have raised doubts about the security of their communications.

"What they're really doing is a very good psychological operation," says a senior information operations specialist and industry executive. "One of the things you want to do is instill doubt. Hezbollah makes the pronouncement that they can read encrypted radios. They wanted the IDF troops to believe they weren't as invulnerable as they thought... They scored big time."

"What was more relevant was monitoring cell phones," [a] signals intelligence specialist tells the magazine, echoing what we said here when the Newsday story broke.

"Everybody out there has a cell phone. You see any picture of troops on the street in Baghdad and they've got a Blackberry or a cell phone. That's what is monitored... With something like a police radio scanner, if you're in the right frequency, you can listen to a cell phone."

Except... it's not that simple. The Northeast Intelligence Network got a hold of some IDF pictures, showing a Hezbollah hideout with equipment that's a whole lot more sophisticated than police scanners.

So what really happened? Many Defense Tech readers -- guys who know a thing or two about secure communications -- believe that Hezbollah never actually decrypted Israel's communications, which rely on "spread-spectrum" (bouncing from one frequency to the next) technologies. They didn't have to, as Nicholas Weaver noted:

Just some high speed triangulation of spread-spectrum sources (which actually, the spread-spectrum nature probably helps, just a bunch of antennas looking at ONE frequency with high-precision timing, and take advantage that it "hops on, hops off" cleanly to get start-end time for each signal source) can give you a huge amount of information as to where the communicating enemy is.

Av Week's specialist basically draws the same conclusion.

"It's not the hopping but the encryption that's very difficult, if not impossible, to break," the specialist says. "What they did is use direction finding [DF] to locate frequency hoppers. In fact, they're easier to DF than conventional signals because you have more shots at it. With a commercially available system, you can probably find at least one of the frequencies."

Paint-On Antennas Take Off

The military would like to use blimps as eyes -- and cell towers -- in the sky. But, for the plan to really work, the antennas attached to those airships have to be light, flexible, and fit perfectly on the blimp's hull. And so far, building those antennas has been hard to do.

A crew of Air Force-funded companies has a new approach: paint-on antennas that can be slopped right on the side of an airship. The goop is "a combination of polymer-based dielectrics and highly conductive paint," Aviation Week says. And during a recent flight test, a spherical blimp with "paint-on electromagnetic antennas communicated voice and data to an Iridium Global satellite."

The key, apparently, is a product called Unishield, a coating which "creates an electrical field that can be specifically tuned to absorb or reflect radar frequencies." Which means that the stuff can not only be used to make paint-on antennas -- but can create magnetic fields to make planes more stealthy, too.

Hez Hacked Israeli Radios

This is downright shocking, if true. "Hezbollah guerrillas were able to hack into Israeli radio communications during last month's battles in south Lebanon, an intelligence breakthrough that helped them thwart Israeli tank assaults," Newsday reports.

Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes. It also allowed Hezbollah anti-tank units to more effectively target advancing Israeli armor, according to the officials...

The Israeli military refused to comment on whether its radio communications were compromised, citing security concerns. But a former Israeli general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah's ability to secretly hack into military transmissions had "disastrous" consequences for the Israeli offensive...

Like most modern militaries, Israeli forces use a practice known as "frequency-hopping" - rapidly switching among dozens of frequencies per second - to prevent radio messages from being jammed or intercepted. It also uses encryption devices to make it difficult for enemy forces to decipher transmissions even if they are intercepted. The Israelis mostly rely on a U.S.-designed communication system called the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System...

With frequency-hopping and encryption, most radio communications become very difficult to hack. But troops in the battlefield sometimes make mistakes in following secure radio procedures and can give an enemy a way to break into the frequency-hopping patterns. That might have happened during some battles between Israel and Hezbollah, according to the Lebanese official. Hezbollah teams likely also had sophisticated reconnaissance devices that could intercept radio signals even while they were frequency-hopping.

During one raid in southern Lebanon, Israeli special forces said they found a Hezbollah office equipped with jamming and eavesdropping devices.

It was my impression that this kind of signal interception was really, really hard to do -- especially for an irregular force like Hezbollah. I know there are some radio and commsec gurus who read the site regularly. Weigh in here, guys.

Or maybe the article itself contains the seed of what actually happened. "Besides radio transmissions, the official said Hezbollah also monitored cell phone calls among Israeli troops," Newsday notes. A raided Hezbollah base had list of "cell phone numbers for Israeli commanders."

Cells are, of course, way easier to intercept. "Israeli forces were under strict orders not to divulge sensitive information over the phone." But maybe they talked anyway. Maybe they thought Hezbollah would never be sophisticated enough to grab their calls.

UPDATE 3:25 PM: Weeks ago, the Times of London and Asia Times had hints of this.

Apparently using techniques learnt from their paymasters in Iran, they were even able to crack the codes and follow the fast-changing frequencies of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports of the casualties they had inflicted again and again. This enabled them to dominate the media war by announcing Israeli fatalities first.

“They monitored our secure radio communications in the most professional way,” one Israeli officer admitted. “When we lose a man, the fighting unit immediately gives the location and the number back to headquarters. What Hezbollah did was to monitor our radio and immediately send it to their Al-Manar TV, which broadcast it almost live, long before the official Israeli radio.”

(Big ups: JQP, /.)

Lasers Speak to Subs

Communicating with subs underwater is beyond tough. Sound moves through seawater in very strange ways, with water temperature, salinity, and density speeding up and slowing things down -- garbling conversations in the process. Electromagnetic transmissions (like radio) are no better -- the sea has some funky electrical conductivity. During the Cold War, sub authority Joe Buff notes, the Navy managed to get super-simple, one-way messages to its subs, with a pair of giant (28-mile!) extremely low frequency transmitters, based in the Midwest. But those transmitters were shut down, a few years back.

The Navy's new idea is to get specially-tuned lasers to handle the job, instead. The service has handed out a pair of small business innovation research contracts to Bothell, WA's Aculight Corporation and Bedford, MA-based Q-Peak to build blue-green, quick-burst lasers for transmitting messages across the deep. Acluight, for example, wants to use a combination of semiconductor and fiber lasers to produce a low power beam (around 10 watts) at about 532nm spectrum range. The idea is to get pulses as quick as half a nanosecond, repeating as much as 10 million times per second.

Blue-green lasers have been discussed for a while as potential sub-talkers, with good reason. Seawater has a lot of organic junk floating around inside, which makes it "turbid" -- "nearly opaque to light over much of any distance," Buff explains.

Blue-green light's frequency is best at penetrating through this turbidity, given the mix of sizes in microns of the particles and other stuff that prevents seawater from being transparent. (Of course, some areas such as the Bahamas are famous for the clarity of their water, but this is very much the exception, not the rule, globally speaking.) This same turbidity is essential to giving submarines their invisibility while submerged, so it's a double edged sword.

TSAT Aces Laser Test

If any current U.S. space program deserves the name "Transformational," it’s the Department of Defense’s ambitious Transformational Satellite Communications System (TSAT) program. The aim of the program is to provide real-time, high bandwidth connections between military assets – ships, planes, drones, units, even individual ground vehicles – anywhere in the world, providing a critical component of network-centric warfare.

Unfortunately, "transformational" is a synonym for another word: risky. Estimates currently project that the program, when and if completed, will cost as much as $18 billion – highlighting the program for close scrutiny from Congress.

But for this week, team TSAT can celebrate a success. In a test conducted in conjunction with MIT, Boeing & Ball Aerospace demonstrated the inter-satellite laser link (Boeing) and pointing system (Ball Aerospace). This laser link will ultimately provide the 40 gigabits per second backbone that connects the planned 5 satellites together, which are slated to be launched in 2013.

For more information, check out Defense Industry Daily’s Special Report on TSAT.

-- Ryan Caron, CDI

The Tech That Took Out Zarqawi

Ten years ago, taking out Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi with F-16s would have been an impossible task. Air strikes were planned days or even weeks in advance. Pilots weren't trained to change missions mid-stream. Sensors and weapons weren't accurate and flexible enough to spot and hit fleeting targets.

But during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Air Force pioneered the prosecution of what it calls Time Sensitive Targets, or TSTs. Since then, the Navy and Marine Corps have gotten in on the game too, and these days, over Iraq, it's typical for jets to launch with only the vaguest idea of what's out there. New sensors and weapons, high-tech surveillance drones and better training have resulted in a minor revolution of which the Zarqawi attack is just one result.

The Air Force has been mum on the subject, but it's entirely possible that the F-16 drivers who eliminated Zarqawi were just flying a routine patrol before orders came to hit the safehouse. In stark contrast to the rigid preplanned sorties that were typical during the 1991 Gulf War, these days over Iraq, fighters from the Air Force and its sister services launch in two-jet sections carrying sensor pods and laser- and satellite-guided bombs. They have no specific targets in mind. Orbiting over their assigned areas, they scan the ground below with sensor pods and helmet-mounted sights, use datalinks to pass around video imagery and the GPS coordinates of potential targets and coordinate with ground-based forward air controllers to hit insurgents who appear in crowded cities or crawl onto highway medians to plant improvised explosive devices. Hitting a safehouse is relatively easy by comparison.

Sensor pods are perhaps the most visible technology in the military's efforts to take on TSTs. Pods contain day and night cameras, GPS for employing satellite-guided bombs and laser designators and trackers for laser-guided bombs. The cigar-shaped pods are slung under jets' wings or fuselages.

Lt. Col. David Wilbur, commander of Marine All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 332, which returned from Iraq in February, says that the new Litening AT pod enables Marine fighter crews to switch easily between looking for insurgents and attacking them, even in bad weather. Litening AT made its combat debut on Marine Corps jets during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and since have become standard equipment.

"There's no reason to take off without one," says Lt. Col. Wilbert Thomas, commander of Marine All-Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 224, which served in Iraq between January and August 2005.

The Air Force is buying a number of different pod designs for nearly all of its combat aircraft types. In recent years, F-16s, F-15Es, A-10s, B-52s and B-1Bs have been fitted with pods.

The newest sensor pods include datalinks tied to a laptop computer-based terminals called Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receivers, or ROVER. The system allow crews to beam pod imagery to troops and commanders on the ground, letting them see what the crews see and facilitating close coordination between U.S. personnel on the ground and personnel in the air. A datalink called Link 16 performs a complementary role. Link 16-equipped jets can transmit a graphical target schematic based on and including GPS coordinates to other jets and to ground stations.

Air Force 77th Fighter Squadron commander Lt. Col. Donavan Godier says that Link-16 means a "large jump forward". "In the past we needed a lot of [voice] comms." Godier says that, in a combat scenario, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft like the RC-135 Rivet Joint and E-8C J-STARS can "feed targets to us via datalink". "We can refine that data or pick up new threats. We can populate the network ... [and] pass data to link-equipped fighters."

Navy Lt. Comm. Trenton Lennard used Link 16 in conjunction with the new Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System, or JHMCS, a visor that allows pilots to direct their radars, targeting pods and weapons just by looking at a target. "With that helmet, on the [Link 16 terminal], a pilot can look down, designate a target and put it out to everybody. ... It gets target pods, sensors and eyeballs on to the same piece of dirt."

With pods, datalinks and JHMCS, if one pilot or sensor operator sees a target, so can every other friendly force in the area. A target need enter only one person's situational awareness to enter everyone's. That makes it hard to hide and allows commanders ands controllers to assign the best shooter to a given target, cutting the time between spotting the target and attacking it.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), blanketing Iraq in cameras and radars around the clock, only reinforce what is already a robust network of sensors and shooters. The Air Force flies 20 small Predator drones and a handful of larger Global Hawks on continuous orbits that cover almost every corner of the country. The service calls this "persistent" surveillance. Navy Capt. Steve Wright, a UAV manager for the Chief of Naval Operations, says that UAVs help the military maintain a "common operational picture" -- in other words, a universal, constantly-updated picture of the battlefield, with which it can quickly assign on-station pilots to hit new targets.

While most attacks are carried out by high-performance manned aircraft, Predators themselves have been armed to give commanders more options. It was an early armed Predator that killed U.S.S. Cole bombing suspect Abu Ali in 2002. A new version of the versatile UAV will carry more ordnance.

Despite the depth and breadth of the military's sensor/shooter network, single human beings who don't want to be found represent a daunting targeting challenge. The system is in place to quickly kill high-value targets such as Zarqawi, but it depends on someone on the ground pointing out the target's location to begin with, accurately and in a timely manner. This is where previous decapitation strikes failed. An air raid in Fallujah in June 2004 narrowly missed Zarqawi. Notorious Ba'ath Party leader Ali Hassan Al Majeed, aka "Chemical" Ali, had already left his safehouse in Samawah when it was hit in March 2003. Several attacks on suspected safehouses in Baghdad failed to kill Saddam Hussein in the early months of the war. Indeed, the opening shot of the U.S. invasion was a bomb dropped on Dora Farms, one of Saddam's country retreats, on March 20, 2003. The strike was launched based on reports that the Iraqi leader was at the site, when in fact he hadn't visited in months.

Despite the sophistication of U.S. warplanes, sensors and ordnance, all results of billions of dollars of investment -- and despite great progress in prosecuting TSTs -- most decapitation strikes have been undermined by tardy or faulty intelligence at the ground level. The Zarqawi killing represents the first time in more than four years that intelligence has allowed the technology of surgical strikes to fulfill its potential.

-- David Axe, cross-posted to Tech Central Station

Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War

This war in Iraq was launched on a theory: That, with the right communication and reconnaissance gear, American armed forces would be quicksilver-fast and supremely lethal. A country could be conquered with only a fraction of the soldiers needed in the past.

During the initial invasion in March 2003, this idea of "network-centric warfare" worked more or less as promised -- even though most of the frontline troops weren't wired up. It was enough that the commanders were connected.

But now, more than three years into the Iraq conflict, the network is still largely incomplete. Local command centers have a torrent of information pouring in. For soldiers and marines on the ground, this war isn't any more wired that the last one. "There is a connectivity gap," a draft Army War College report notes. "Information is not reaching the lowest levels."

And that's a problem, because the insurgents are stitching together a newtwork of their own. Using throwaway cellphones and anonymous e-mail accounts, these guerrillas rely on a loose web of connections, not a top-down command structure. And they don't fight in large groups that can be easily tracked by high-tech command posts. They have to be hunted down in dark neighborhoods, found amid thousands of civilians, and taken out one by one.

David Axe -- recently back from his 6th trip to Iraq -- and I have a special report in this month's Popular Science, on "Winning (and Losing) the First Wired War." Give it a read. And see how this network-centric ideal is playing out, for real.

Early Roll-out for Battlefield Net?

The Pentagon's next-gen radio program may be in rotten shape. But there's some good news in battlefield comms: the new wireless network for frontline soldiers may be deployed earlier than expected, says Defense News. Parts of it, anyway.

The Army envisions Warfighter Information Network — Tactical (WIN-T) as a communication system that will help troops on the battlefield plug into the Pentagon’s information networks through satellite, airborne and terrestrial links, even while they are on the move.

[WIN-T will be able to hop between a whole heap of cellular and satellite connections, contractor General Dynamics promises. Admins can design networks on the fly, based on what the terrain is like, which signals are available, and who's using the most bandwidth. --ed.]

The initial plan for WIN-T saw delivery [of network ground stations] beginning in 2009, but operations in Iraq and Afghanistan led the Army to ask the team to look at speeding that up, said Bill Weiss, vice president for tactical networks at General Dynamics C4 Systems.

The testing convinced General Dynamics that WIN-T can “provide immediate benefit to soldiers” and be ready as early as 2007, Weiss said. November testing [of the system] included live communications and simulated traffic fed into the system, according to a Dec. 1 Army news release.

Recon on Radio Project

Over the last year, we've spent a whole lot of time chronicling the woes of the Joint Tactical Radio System. That's the Pentagon's star-crossed $6.8 billion effort to replace their with just a few digital ones. It's the backbone of the military's effort to modernize itself. And it is not going well.

But "Jitters," as the program is Pentagonese, hasn't gotten much mainstream press attention -- largely, I think, because its sprawling and confusing, even for a Defense Department project. (Jitters has four "clusters" of radios, for example -- the last of which is "Cluster 5.")

The current issue of Defense Technology International (pgs 30-34) does the best job I've seen so far at picking through the Jitters tangle, detailing what's working, and what's holding the radio project back. Check it out.

Curtains for "Jitters"?

The idea was simple: take the military's tangled mess of radios, any replace 'em all with a single, software-based model.

But executing the idea has been anything but easy. And now, generals are talking about dropping the notion of a universal radio altogether, Defense News' Greg Grant reports -- right when Pentagon chiefs are trying to decide what to do with about the troubled, $6.8 billion Joint Tactical Radio System.

Essentially, the JTRS program [known as "Jitters"] is aiming for something that’s almost physically impossible, or at least extremely expensive, experts say... The desire to use a single antenna for many different wavelengths bumps up against laws of physics, which make it difficult to pull in strong signals across the spectrum. An amplifier that works across the whole spectrum will use much more electrical power than one tuned for a specific frequency band. Waveforms and transmissions that are speedily handled by analog systems, such as the widely used Link-16, are much tougher to achieve with digital computation...

A better solution... is using such software-defined radios only when absolutely needed. More and more communication of data and even voice can be routed via the Pentagon’s burgeoning digital network. Such relays could allow the new radios to coexist with older ones...

Initially, every JTRS box has to host all the waveforms and all the software for the network. To do so requires high-performance computer processors, which translates into more heat and power.

But for the JTRS radio to be carried on missiles to provide guidance and on other platforms such as unattended ground sensors, there is no requirement for all that processing power.

“So maybe one size does not fit all,” [Maj. Gen. Michael Mazzucchi, who commands the Army’s Communications-Electronics Lifecycle Management Command] said. “Maybe we can have it run just one wave form, then you wouldn’t have the same battery, heat and processing speed challenges.”

Mazzucchi said JTRS also ran into the reality of an ongoing war when the Army realized it needed a lot more tactical network radios and so ordered another 100,000 radios. “Those radios are going to last a long time, we’re not going to now go out and replace those radios in three years with JTRS.”

The Army is no longer looking at JTRS as a radio replacement program. Instead, it’s being viewed as a gateway into the network.

The article is "absolutely right," one Air Force radio specialist tells Defense Tech.

Yes, we'd all love a one-size-fits-all radio -- especially one which can tie into larger networks without a lot of mucking around with settings for an hour beforehand. But there are huge technical obstacles to be overcome in the meantime, and the Pentagon is being unrealistic about the timeline for deploying the system. (2 MHz to 2GHz? They're not kidding about laws of physics needing to be overcome.)

In the meantime, they could save a lot of trouble by procuring more of the newer do-it-all radios like the PSC-5D, PRC-117F, or the PRC-148. These radios already have impressive do-it-all capabilities and save a lot of hassle when it comes to interoperability.

Simply, the miltary has finally started using radios that can talk to different services, in different transmission modes, with different encryption, in addition to their normal mission. Our ETACS [Enlisted Terminal Attack Controllers, the guys who help bring in air support] used to need one radio to talk to the Army, a completely different one to talk to the planes, and yet another (different) radio to talk to the next echelon via SATCOM or HF. Each of these needs an encryption device (external, and bulky of course) plus associated power supply, audio cabling, and antennas…

Anyway, since the late 90's companies like Racal and Harris have been making radios which have multi-algorithm encryption built right into the radio, can handle lots of transmission modes (aside from the one or two a given service needs), and cover very broad frequency ranges. As an example, an old PRC-77 (the Army radio operators hauled around on their backs) covered 30-78MHz in FM voice mode only, with no internal encryption. (Mind you, that's just the Army; there's the USMC, USAF, USN, etc. to worry about, plus third parties.) A newer "do-it-all" radio like the PRC-148 MBITR covers 30 to 512 MHZ in AM, FM, SINCGARS (Army frequency hopping), HAVEQUICK II (Air Force frequency hopping) for both voice and data, with internal software that can simulate all sorts of external encryption devices.

AND the damn thing can talk through satellites.

This is typical of what similar radios like the PSC-5D and PRC-117 can do. The only real difference is form factor; the PRC-148 is the size of a largish walkie-talkie (slightly larger if you include the amplifier which makes SATCOM possible), the -5D and -117F are backpack-sized.

So now your ETAC doesn't need a Humvee full of radios and encryption devices; he can carry one radio to talk to anyone he wants. Or maybe two if he needs to talk to two people simultaneously.

...and don't forget that the software-based nature of these new radios means they can learn all sorts of unheard of tricks. For instance, the PSC-5 series of radios can pair up to make a repeater, or retransmit a SATCOM channel over an Army SINCGARS net (for instance) AND vice versa.

Well, to a radio guy, that's pure dynamite.

JTRS wants to take it further, but in my opinion they're trying to turn over two pages at once. There's simply no precedent for tactical radios which self-program to switch nets (the way that cellphones do when changing service areas) and it could take a decade - easily - to get this off the ground.

Internet Phone, Lifesaver

During New York's blackout in 2003, it was easier to get online than to make a phone call. Apparently, the same was true last week in New Orleans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The only way the Mayor's office was able contact anyone was over an Internet-enabled phone.

For days after Hurricane Katrina's devastating rampage through this city, a small corps of city leaders holed up at the Hyatt Hotel. They had virtually no way to communicate with the outside world.

A command center set up before the storm stopped working when the backup generator ran out of diesel fuel. Cellphone towers had been knocked out by high winds. Many land lines in the area were unusable.

When emergency power finally returned to the Hyatt, Scott Domke, a member of the city's technology team, remembered that he had recently set up an Internet phone account with Vonage Holdings Corp. He was able to find a working socket in a conference room and linked his laptop to an Internet connection.

At 12:27 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 31, the mayor's inner circle made its first outside call in two days. Eventually, the team was able to get eight lines running from the single Vonage account. That evening, the phone rang and it was President Bush calling from Air Force One.

(Big ups: War & Piece)

"JITTERS," BROKEN DOWN

The Army's massive modernization project, Future Combat Systems, isn't just one program. It's hundreds of interlocking, interwoven efforts to update armor, uniforms, logistics, medical care, and much, much more. A few key threads hold the whole tapestry together. And one of them is rapidly coming undone.

Without communications -- specifically, without the Joint Tactical Radio System, or "Jitters" -- many of FCS' most innovative efforts just won't work. FCS is an attempt to turn the Army into a force that takes out opponents with ultra-precise attacks and almost Godlike knowledge of the battlefield instead of with overwhelming firepower. To make this nimbly lethal dream come true, the Army needs almost-instant information-sharing, both between soldiers and with FCS' new fleet of robots. It needs Jitters.

Right now, the Army isn't getting what it needs. Jitters is flailing, badly. As we noted the other day, the Army has put one of the program's main contractors, Boeing, on notice that it could cancel one component, or "cluster," of Jitters in a month.

Winds of Change offers today some stellar background on the program -- what Jitters does, the problems it faces, and what might happen next. And it the site's comments section, a Jitters engineer weighs in on how the program got so tangled up. Good stuff.

THERE'S MORE: Meanwhile, Inside Defense reports, the Army is starting to look around for alternatives to Jitters.

The Army's next-gen set of rockets is called the Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS). It's supposed to rely on Jitters' "Cluster Five" to direct its assaults. But, like Boeing's component of the radio system, Cluster Five "has hit its own program snags," says Inside Defense. As a result, the Army is considering the possible use of surrogate systems.

NLOS-LS is made up of three key components: the Precision Attack Munition, a direct-attack missile that can autonomously acquire a target; the Loitering Attack Munition, which is being designed to fly to a target up to 70 km away and loiter above it for up to 30 minutes before striking; and the Container Launch Unit, the box that stores, commands and fires the missiles.

The CLU, which officials call “the heart and soul of the program” because it contains the… information that… will tell the PAM where to go, depends on [Jitters].

“The number one risk to the NLOS-LS program currently is the network,” said Ric Magness, president of NetFires LLC, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon established to build NLOS-LS.

NLOS-LS is supposed to rely on a future software programmable radio called the Joint Tactical Radio System’s Cluster Five, but that program has hit its own program snags. As a result, the Army is considering the possible use of a surrogate for the PAM and the CLU.

According to a Government Accountability Office report, JTRS -- designed to transmit voice, video and data -- was put on a system development and demonstration path with immature technologies and few well-defined requirements. The program faces technical challenges because of its size, weight, power and data processing requirements. Its early development was delayed because of a contracting dispute.

“Consequently, the report said, "the Cluster 5 radios are not likely to be available" for the initial roll-out of FCS." And that includes the new rocket system.

AND MORE: Winds' sister site, Defense Industry Daily, is tracking the criminal investigation into the disfunctional search and rescue radios L-3 Communications has built for the Army.

COSTS M.I.A. FOR RADIO EFFORT

It's been nearly three years since Boeing won an Army contract to develop the next generation of military radios. But neither the company nor its government partners have any idea how many billions it's going to cost, in the end, to build the Joint Tactical Radio System -- "Jitters" for short. (I've seen estimates as low as $5 billion, and as high as $15 billion. That's a major spread.)

On Monday, the Army told Boeing in a letter than the mega-corporation had 30 days to give a good reason do to some 'splaining about why they let Jitters get so screwed up. The note also gave outsiders a peek into just how wrong Jitters has gone.

"It is impossible to predict with any confidence what the overall program will cost or the associated schedule," Defense Daily quotes the letter as saying. "Further, the government has not seen sufficient evidence of the contractor teams’ understanding of the scale of integration required for [Jitters' first phase] to ultimately achieve the program requirements. Nor has the industry team displayed sufficient ability to estimate a cost and schedule baseline and rigorously manage to that baseline."

As noted earlier, Jitters is not some minor experiment. It's a cornerstone to the Army's modernization plans. Without it, soldiers are stuck using a jury-rigged collection of radios to talk. Figuring out how much the damn things are going to cost seems like a most basic of first steps. Three years into the program, it shouldn't be that hard to take.

ARMY READY TO UNPLUG RADIO PROJECT

Boeing has a whole lot more to worry about today than its weak earnings this quarter. Another giant Boeing defense contract is in deep, deep trouble.

First, the company came under fire for its shady, $23.5 billion deal to lease tankers to the Air Force -- and fleece $5.6 billion from taxpayers. Then, projected costs for the its hulking Army modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, grew from $92 billion to a possible $450 billion (all while operating under some quirky purchasing rules that kept government auditors from getting too nosy).

Now, Inside Defense reports, "the Army has put Boeing on notice that within 30 days, the government could terminate" the company's $15 billion contract to replace 750,000 old-school radios with software-based models.

The Army stopped work on the Joint Tactical Radio System ("Jitters") back in January -- partly because of technical screw-ups, partly because of trouble getting the National Security Agency to sign off on the encryption algorithms.

"The government is also concerned that the contractor won't be able to produce a radio that meets the Army's requirements for processing, heat dispersion, size, weight and power. In addition, the software remains immature, and the contractor lacks proper controls," Inside Defense says.

For all these reasons, Boeing now has 30 days to come up with a reason why the Army should not pull the plug on the Jitters contract.

If that happens, it won't just be a couple of Boeing execs who suffer the consequences. Soldiers today need a backpack full of radios to talk to their commanders and comrades. Jitters was supposed to be the way to reduce that load, and get a single communication system for G.I.s, marines, sailors, and airmen. But thanks to another blown defense contract, it looks like they're still going to be forced to carry that burden.

THERE'S MORE: The Washington Post's take is here.

JITTERS FOR RADIO PROJECT

During the early days of the Iraq invasion, some Marines were forced to use as many as seven different radios to communicate with colleagues and superiors. That's why the Defense Department has been working so feverishly on "Jitters," or JTRS, the $5 billion Joint Tactical Radio System effort to replace 750,000 old-school radios with software-based models.

But now, National Defense magazine reports, Jitters may be in trouble.

Encryption problems and an array of other technical shortcomings are throwing the entire project into question, said industry sources...

The JTRS version known as “cluster 1,” intended for use aboard Army helicopters and ground vehicles, is scheduled for a major Defense Department review this summer.

An Army technical review, known as “early operational assessment,” is slated for April. In January, however, the Army ordered the contractors to halt JTRS-related work for at least six weeks.

“Technical challenges were encountered during development and integration that indicated the need for upgrades in performance and modifications in design,” said Timothy Rider, spokesman for the Army Communications and Electronics Command.

This marks a sharp reversal of fortune for JTRS, which was hailed by Pentagon officials in 2002 as a “transformational” program that would underpin the Defense Department’s vision of an interconnected “network-centric” military force...

The Army declined to elaborate on what exactly the technical issues are that potentially could derail this program. Industry sources contacted by National Defense indicated that one key area of concern is the encryption technology, which is overseen by the National Security Agency. Changes in the JTRS “security architecture” requested by the NSA potentially could delay the deliveries of JTRS cluster 1 by two years. Unlike previous generations of military radios, JTRS is entirely software-based, making the system more susceptible to hacking and prompting NSA to tighten the encryption requirements.

THERE'S MORE: NSA concerns aren't the only reason Jitters is being delayed, Inside Defense notes.

The system’s processing and memory capacity included no room for growth. Studies showed that the limit of the system’s random access memory was likely to be exceeded and would lead to “possible erratic performance that would be difficult to isolate,” said Tim Rider, a spokesman for the Army's the Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command.

As a result, program officials determined that moving from the prototype’s early limited functionality to the final design “would not be possible,” Rider said...

Program officials realized the challenges would lead to cost increases by October 2004, Rider wrote in response to questions. There were three key signs. First, Boeing needed more resources to finish hardware and non-waveform software requirements that would address memory shortfalls. Next, new baseline requirements emerged. Also, evolving operational scenarios and the development of the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid expanded the understanding of a networked system of systems, which has driven upgrades to the radio system architecture that are needed to comply with National Security Agency standards...

In January 2004, the program received a reserve fund of $159 million for potential financial risks that were known to exist before the contract award. Boeing and the Army program office are preparing a plan and cost estimate for any additional cost increases and cannot provide specific figures until that process is complete, Rider said.

COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN IN IRAQ

The Pentagon's master plan for the future relies on networking together every grunt, every general, and every drone -- so information is instantly available to everyone on the battlefield and in headquarters. The Iraq invasion was supposed to the beta test for this military "transformation." And for the top brass, it all worked great. But for many of the front line soldiers in Iraq, this tranformed military looked like a combat force, circa 1944, reports Technology Review.

Take Lt. Col. Ernest “Rock” Marcone, a battalion commander with the 69th Armor of the Third Infantry Division. He was supposed to capture a key bridge on the Euphrates River.

“Next to the fall of Baghdad,” says Marcone, “that bridge was the most important piece of terrain in the theater, and no one can tell me what’s defending it. Not how many troops, what units, what tanks, anything. There is zero information getting to me. Someone may have known above me, but the information didn’t get to me on the ground.”

Marcone’s men were ambushed repeatedly on the approach to the bridge. But the scale of the intelligence deficit was clear after Marcone took the bridge on April 2.

As night fell, the situation grew threatening. Marcone arrayed his battalion in a defensive position on the far side of the bridge and awaited the arrival of bogged-down reinforcements. One communications intercept did reach him: a single Iraqi brigade was moving south from the airport. But Marcone says no sensors, no network, conveyed the far more dangerous reality, which confronted him at 3:00 a.m. April 3. He faced not one brigade but three: between 25 and 30 tanks, plus 70 to 80 armored personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and soldiers attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and 14 Bradley fighting vehicles. The Iraqi deployment was just the kind of conventional, massed force that’s easiest to detect. Yet “We got nothing until they slammed into us,” Marcone recalls.

Microwave relays, meant to transmit satellite and spy plane images, were not more reliable.

Critically, these relays—sometimes called “Ma Bell for the army”—needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. “A lot of the guys said, ‘Enough of this shit,’ and turned it off,” says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. “‘We can’t afford to wait for this.’”

One Third Infantry Division brigade intelligence officer reported to Rand that when his unit moved, its communications links would fail, except for the GPS tracking system. The unit would travel for a few hours, stop, hoist up the antenna, log back onto the intelligence network, and attempt to download whatever information it could. But bandwidth and software problems caused its computer system to lock up for ten to 12 hours at a time, rendering it useless.

All of this jives with earlier "after action" reports on the invasion, where communication problems were the norm. Some members of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, for example, had to use a helmet headset, four radios and two laptops at once to communicate with their comrades and commanders.

3RD ID RETURNS - WITH A BIG, NEW HUB

When the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division returns to Iraq later this year, it'll be taking a giant, new-fangled, multi-truckload network node to the battlefield.

The Joint Network Transport Capability (JNTC) "gives units — down to the maneuver battalion — access to the Army’s Internet protocol router networks, the Defense Red Switch Network, secure video teleconferencing and voice-over-internet protocol capabilities," notes Defense News.

The system also "gives the Army an early version of Warrior Information Network-Tactical capabilities," according to the magazine. That's the mobile data network that's supposed to become the backbone of Future Combat Systems, the Army's $117 billion push to digitize its forces.

Like so many military communications projects these days, most of JNTC's connectivity will come from commercial satellites. But the Army is hoping to change that, relying on a new wave of military satellites, due to come on line by 2007 or so.

"In the meantime, the Army will continue to expand JNTC to other combat units during the next four years," Defense News says. "The 101st Airborne Division will receive JNTC capabilities in January or February, followed by the 10th Mountain Division next spring, and the 4th Infantry Division by the end of 2005."