Congress guts Army's tactical radio program funding for fiscal 2010

Congress slashed funding for the Army's tactical radio program and all but killed a program to build a command-and-control system modeled on commercial Web sites such as Travelocity.

The Army had requested $90.2 million for its Joint Tactical Radio System in fiscal 2010, but Congress cut $55.2 million from the program in the Defense Department authorization bill, which the House approved on Oct. 8.

The service also requested $134.2 million to buy VHF-FM single channel ground and airborne radio system , the standard manpack and vehicle radio ground troops use. But Congress also cut that budget by $75 million.

"The Army lacks clear requirements or a comprehensive acquisition strategy for the procurement and upgrade of its tactical radio systems," House and Senate conferees said in the report that accompanies the bill.

"Given the billions of dollars requested each year by the Army for communications equipment and the importance of this equipment in ongoing combat operations, the conferees are alarmed that the Army has been unable to put a disciplined acquisition process in place to procure the needed equipment in a manner that avoids waste, fosters true competition, moves the Army away from reliance on legacy radio systems, and anticipates and bridges to next-generation radio communications," the conferees added.

Defense launched its tactical radio program in 1998 to develop radios that would use software to operate on various bands and could handle voice as well as narrow and wide band data traffic. But the Government Accountability Office said in a report in October 2008 that Defense would not field the new radios because the technologies were not fully developed, the program had unstable requirements and the schedule was too aggressive. As a result, the cost of the program increased from $3.5 billion to $6 billion.

Because of the delays, the Army turned to existing, or legacy, radios to support combat operations, and Congress said in its report that the service has used a "marginally competitive" process to acquire those nonjoint tactical radios.

The Army needs to "reassess its tactical radio requirements, make all needed adjustments based on force structure and programmatic changes, and deliver to Congress as part of its fiscal year 2012 budget submission a new comprehensive tactical radio plan that addresses the numerous concerns expressed by Congress," the report noted.

The Defense Information Systems Agency requested an operations and maintenance budget for the Net-Enabled Command Capability in fiscal 2010 of $9.6 million, down $1.2 million from fiscal 2009, and a fiscal 2010 procurement budget for the command capability of $4 million, down $2.2 million in fiscal 2009.

Congress directed DISA to merge NECC with the existing family of global command-and-control systems that the three services operate because the "NECC program has not managed to overcome significant technical, programmatic and bureaucratic challenges."

Congress fully funded DISA's request for a fiscal 2010 operation and maintenance budget of $1.5 billion and its $408.3 million research-and-development budget for information systems security tools to protect Defense networks.