House boosts budget for broadband satellites, kills DISA lease plans
By
Bob Brewin
The House Appropriations Committee, in its version of the $538.9 billion Defense Department budget approved Tuesday,sharply boosted funding for the department broadband communications satellites and chopped most of the requested budget for a Defense Information Systems Agency program to lease commercial satellites to serve the Middle East.
The House increased funding for Wideband Global System satellites by $335 million above the $473.7 million request for a total of $808.7 million and slashed $416 million from DISA's requested budget of $500.9 million to lease commercial satellites to provide service to the Middle East, according to the 349-page report.
Each Wideband Global System satellite has a throughput of 6.2 gigabits per second.The department has three satellites in service out of a planned constellation of eight, with the cost of one funded by Australia.
Despite this existing and planned capacity, 80 percent of the traffic to Afghanistan, Iraq and other areas in the Middle East is handled by commercial satellites. DISA had planned a 15-year lease of a commercial satellite with roughly the same capacity as a Wideband Global satellite to serve the region, a project effectively killed in the House budget.
The House almost doubled the 2012 budget request for tactical communications equipment for the Special Operations Command from $76.5 million to $148.5 million. The panel fully funded the requested $298 million budget for the Army's Warfighter Information Network-Tactical communications system,but sliced the requested budget for the Joint Tactical Radio System by $53 million, from $688.1 million to $635.1 million. In May, Defense said it wanted to find commercial alternatives to the ground mobile radio that Boeing Co. developed.
The committee expressed concern about the growing cost of the cellular communications throughout Defense due to multiple contracts with carriers and the proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones. It directed department officials to study the use of third-party cellular management systems that can cut costs by as much as 30 percent.
DISA asked industry for help last month to centrally manage the 1 million cellphones and other mobile devices Defense personnel use, but that request did not include a cost management component.