Technology shifts, development failures and funding cuts have forced major changes to two of the three communications pillars of the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.

The three underpinnings of FCS are the Joint Tactical Radio System, Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, and System of Systems Common Operating Environment. JTRS is supposed to provide network communications to mobile warfighters. WIN-T, a high-speed and high-connectivity­ backbone network, will connect the Army’s tactical systems to the larger Defense Department information enterprise. And SOSCOE, which has had a degree of success, is the webbing to tie all of FCS together.

The Communications–Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., leads these three efforts as part of its mission is to acquire, sustain and support Army battlespace systems. The service expects to spend $161 billion on FCS and at least another $34 billion beyond that on JTRS and WIN-T. These figures reflect an upward creep in scope and costs; the Army originally pegged total FCS costs at around $91 billion.

“Any agencies pursuing transformational projects have to focus as much or more on process and people issues as they do on technological issues.” —Capgemini’s Val Lyons

Obviously, the program has been under scrutiny on Capitol Hill. The Government Accountability Office has criticized CECOM for faltering on both JTRS and WIN-T requirements and schedules. Last year, GAO noted that the two programs’ missteps raise “uncertainty about the ability of the FCS network to perform as intended.” GAO recommended that the command establish new schedules to reduce the risks of the initiatives. CECOM has done just that.

The price for following a lower-risk strategy in the case of JTRS has been program retrenchment. WIN-T has taken a hit in funding and scheduling. Only SOSCOE has a fairly unblemished track record in implementing processes to incorporate the dynamic requirements of FCS.

Pillar 1: JTRS
In 2005, JTRS hit a brick wall, leading to a temporary work stoppage and consolidation of programming in a single office. A review conducted by Dennis Bauman, who has since been appointed JTRS joint program executive officer, identified two chief reasons for the program’s stalling: the five service-oriented clusters and its evolution from a legacy radio replacement effort to a mobile, ad hoc networking capability.

“The requirements changed significantly without a corresponding adjustment in the budget or the implementation schedule,” says Bauman, who spoke about JTRS during a recent briefing. The Defense Acquisitions Board compounded JTRS’s woes in August 2005, when it ordered a $4 billion reduction in the $6 billion of funding earmarked for future R&D.

In response to the budget change, Bauman’s team offered the board three options:

• Deliver only what $2 billion could buy
• Provide only the networking waveforms (The waveforms are the radio signal types that JTRS will handle; obviously, the more waveforms available, the more interoperable JTRS will be with legacy systems.)
• Deliver “transformational waveforms with some of the legacy waveforms attached.”

The board OK’d the third option in March and rechristened it JTRS Increment 1. It then approved an additional $2 billion for future R&D. The program team concurrently reduced the total number of waveforms for JTRS from 32 to nine.

The needs of current warfighters also led to the JTRS retrenchment, says Greg Giaquinto, a senior electronics analyst at Forecast International in Newtown, Conn. “They can’t wait another five or six years to get the perfect radio,“ he says, because soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan need JTRS now.

Pillar 2: WIN-T
Meanwhile, funding cutbacks led CECOM to push back the date for the WIN-T low-rate initial production (LRIP), which had been slated for 2008, says Col. Angel Colon, WIN-T program manager. “The Army was contending with other priorities,” he says.

The changes in the broader FCS program have created additional requirements for WIN-T. In particular, he pointed to the changes in the JTRS radios’ size, weight and power consumption—or SWaP—constraints. Ultimately, Colon’s team created a new baseline set of requirements for the program.

CECOM has now set LRIP rollout for 2011, with full-production deliveries to begin in 2013. Despite the requirements changes and funding cutbacks, WIN-T has had some success. The program began operational testing in November and “met the 14 criteria with some minor anticipated shortcomings,” Colon says.

Pillar 3: SOSCOE
SOSCOE is inherently risky because “other product teams depend on SOSCOE to achieve their goals,” says Col. Dave Bassett, product manager for FCS software integration at CECOM. It is essentially the integration program for FCS.

Bassett’s team has endeavored to mitigate the risks by following an incremental and spiral development model for the program. So far, this approach has led to “continuing success in cost and development milestones,” Bassett says. “By proactively gathering performance requirements from the FCS family, we can minimize any redesign as a result of requirements delivered to the team later in the development cycle.”

The use of a service-oriented architecture lets SOSCOE absorb FCS requirements as they evolve, adds Don DePree, director for FCS C4ISR systems at Boeing Corp., SOSCOE’s prime contractor. The SOA provides the “flexibility to adapt to changing requirements without decomposing the whole system architecture,” he says.

CECOM demonstrated FCS systems interoperability using SOSCOE earlier this year, when the Army used battle command software to pass red-force situational awareness data to the Air Force for close air support. At this point, “SOSCOE is doing what we’re asking it to,” DePree says.

Indeed, GAO gave SOSCOE high marks in a March report. It lauded the Army for defining current requirements, establishing a functional baseline and allocating functional requirements to the FCS system level.

Whether CECOM can regroup to bring FCS’ other two pillars in line with SOSCOE will be seen in the coming year. GAO has granted the JTRS and WIN-T teams a reprieve of sorts based on the recent efforts by the Army to force the programs back on track. The watchdog agency says the restructuring of the JTRS development strategy and the revising of the WIN-T baseline are promising and show “the programs will focus on delivering incremental capabilities to support the needs of FCS.”

To read GAO’s most recent report on FCS, go to www.defensesystems.com and enter 114 in the Quickfind search box. For its 2005 review, enter 115.

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