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.
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.