Such timing – this appeared the morning I was turning in my government laptop and ID.  I began my 21 years of contractual servitude for DoD on the Joint Tactical Radio System, first in a supporting lab environment and later when the Joint Program Executive Office (to consolidate/coordinate the various service efforts) was stood up, working under the chief engineer.  JTRS was about replacing single-purpose radios built on custom hardware with multi-purpose software-defined-radios (SDRs).  This was not a fundamentally bad idea.  I should note that this predates all smartphone technology, which embraced the SDR concept without ever going near the DoD’s “standard” for SDRs, the Software Communications Architecture (SCA)*.  As it turns out, you can do a lot of signal processing in programmable processing units, be those general purpose, DSPs or FPGAs (the latter two being programmed with tools other than generic programming languages).  Smartphones would end up bypassing all of those in favor of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) because they are far less power-consumptive (and therefore produce less thermal waste and longer battery life) and, when manufactured by the million**, are much cheaper than the reprogrammable parts.

It turns out though that RF systems still have to do RF things, like transmitting and receiving – and that comes with demands that really can’t be met in software, right out to the antenna and including filters and amplifiers.  Once you start into the physical components, you’ve lost a lot of the flexibility that software has to offer.  That’s without even getting into the esoterics of military radios – encryption, hardening against jamming, etc. – that you will never find in a commercial product.  So let’s stipulate, this isn’t easy when you want a product with more capability and reliability than a cheap Chinese ham radio (which happen to work pretty well for their intended use).  I’ve got a Yaesu, and Baofeng is even cheaper.  I carry a Harris radio (cost about $1500 per) for my fire company and public service radios (which use foreign sourced components) still are nowhere near the level of military.

OK, so it’s hard, just at some fundamental technical levels.  Being DoD that’s just the beginning.  Now you have to account for Congress providing funding, and everyone within Army agreeing to what should be bought, and for who; then you throw in coordination with the other service branches and allied nations with their militaries.  Oh, and in the infinite wisdom of defense acquisition, you take the systems life cycle and break it apart giving responsibility over each part to different commands with no single over-arching authority (below say the service chief of staff).  So the “program manager” doesn’t really own the entire life cycle, just one piece; whereas under almost any private sector development the PM is god (and his career lives or dies with the success of the program).  The DoD PM is an officer doing a rotation, 4 years, and is in and out without regard to the long term success (or failure) of the program.  In short, you could not devise an implementation of the systems life cycle more prone to fail if that was your express intent.  That any program ever delivers functioning product, it is in spite of the government’s approach.

All of which leads to the linked story about buying radios as a service.

What makes this approach peak stupidity is the failure to understand why any tech product – mostly software – was ever offered “as a service” in the first place.  It was not for the benefit of the customer, it was to create a better income stream for the software vendor after realizing markets get saturated.  It’s a business model not a technical solution and the major beneficiary is the seller.  In the 20 years I’ve been playing this game, the people running things – civilian and uniform leadership – have gotten progressively stupider.  I say this not because I’ve met all of them and measured them up, but because having seen the preceding government program fail, they take failure as the starting point for the next one and wonder why they are not succeeding.  If you haven’t clicked on the JTRS link above, there is ample discussion on just that.  From the exposure I’ve had to other programs (after all, radios are carried by dismounted soldiers, installed in trucks, tanks and other ground vehicles as well as in aircraft – fixed and rotary wing) there are very, very few exceptions.

Here’s the basic premise that every one of the idiots operate from – we want a thing, and business sells things.  All we have to do is tell business what we want, and what we will pay, and it us up to business to give us that***.  If they tell us that the thing can’t work the way we want, or that it can’t be produced for the price we want – we will just go find a business that will!  And some business will, because that business will fall into one of two categories.  The first is incompetence – they simply are as dumb as the government people.  This of course doesn’t end well.  The second is a business that says yes when they know the truth, but they have the ethics of a leech; we’ll bleed you for all we can, all while telling you what you want to hear and how with just a little more money we can make it work.  At the end of this, the DoD has blown the budget, and schedule, all to hell and with even worse luck get hauled up in front of Congress for a spanking.  Even if the people themselves aren’t dumb, they are dumbed down by the groupthink and the fact that promotions and pay increases don’t really depend on success of the work you are doing.  The smartest that don’t leave eventually become cynical burnt-out shells of human beings, knowing the futility but simply running the clock out ****.

This is the abbreviated and condensed version of what is wrong.  I may eventually circle-back (no, I’m not a lying red-head) and go a little more in-depth on some parts.  It can be as stomach-curdling as the worst that SugarFree might throw at you, because it ain’t fiction.

 

* – The Software Communications Architecture was a document that on the very first page said “this is not an architecture”.  Rarely has a government document been more honest.  It was essentially a design pattern (for you software geeks that remember that) and it was the wrong pattern for the application.  This apparently was written by some computer science guys, not electrical engineers.

** – Contrast the multiple millions of any given smartphone model with the Army’s “vast” inventory of 350,000 radios of various flavors.  One USAF Colonel learned this painfully in the early days when he went to an SDR conference and bragged about the hundreds of thousands of units the U.S. government would be buying, only to be very dryly informed that wasn’t even rounding error for unit sales of cellular phones.

*** – I cannot tell you how many times I have been told that vendors will implement a standard, or some feature, just because the government wants it – all at no additional cost.  I can only be thankful I never consumed exactly what it was that all these people had consumed that had rotted their brains.

**** – Are you looking at me?