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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (14624)	4/13/2006 7:48:02 AM
From: Peter Ecclesine	Respond to of 46821

Speaking of overstated, Project XG is reorganized, DARPA's Preston Marshall has moved on, and "The government has now determined that its original goals were unrealistic and is scaling back the requirements and increasing the amount of money for the program," Pentagon restructures software radio program By Andrea Shalal-Esa, Tue Apr 11, 2006 07:02 PM ET tinylink.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Tuesday released a long-awaited restructuring plan for a $30 billion program to develop advanced military radios, saying it would pursue a more incremental approach that was less risky. Boeing Co., General Dynamics Corp., Thales SA and Rockwell Collins Corp. are among companies with big stakes in the Joint Tactical Radio System, which aims to develop new radios that allow better communication among various parts of the U.S. military. The new networked radios are seen as an essential part of the U.S. Army's Future Combat System and the Pentagon's overall effort to modernize how it fights wars. "This new incremental strategy will allow JTRS to get software-based radios to the war fighters as quickly as possible," said a senior defense official, who asked not to be named. In an acquisition decision memorandum released on Tuesday, the Pentagon said it had simplified the overall structure of the project to focus on three main areas -- ground-based radios for vehicles and soldiers; airborne, maritime and fixed-site radios; and networking solutions. The Pentagon said it also approved the formal launch of an industry competition to begin developing the airborne, maritime and fixed radios under the program, as well as a separate competition to develop a new "soldier radio waveform." The program, meant to give the U.S. military a new networked communications backbone, ran into delays due to the Pentagon's too-ambitious goals for the project and industry's reluctance to acknowledge problems, analysts said. It was also poorly structured, with too little central oversight until the Pentagon last spring appointed a senior official to get the program back on track, they said. "What happened here is that the technology enthusiasts got far beyond what the laws of physics would allow," said Loren Thompson at the Virginia-based Lexington Institute. "The government has now determined that its original goals were unrealistic and is scaling back the requirements and increasing the amount of money for the program," he said. Program spokesman Steven Davis had no immediate details on the timing of the new competitions or the restructuring. In the memorandum, which was first reported by Inside Defense, Pentagon acquisition chief Kenneth Krieg said the JTRS program office needed to continue its efforts to tighten control over various parts of the program. In a separate notice to Congress, the Pentagon said funding for the part of JTRS formerly known as Cluster 1, for which Boeing is the prime contractor, would by cut by $1.2 billion to $20.5 billion, as a result of the restructuring. No comment was immediately available from Boeing. The cost of develop a new Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW) for the overall program would increase by $465 million to $1.79 billion, the Pentagon said.