Radio Wars: Will Production Halt Force Army To Play Radio Shell Game?

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/10/radio-wars-will-production-stop-force-army-to-play-radio-shell-game/



Army soldiers train with the current PRC-117G radio in Afghanistan. Production of a new, upgraded radio may be in jeopardy.

Radio Wars: Will Production Halt Force Army To Play Radio Shell Game?
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on October 22, 2013 at 12:35 PM

[UPDATED with comments from Army generals] WASHINGTON: In the latest battle over Army radios, defense industry giant General Dynamics is beating the war drums once again. If the Pentagon doesn’t issue a new contract for backpack-sized “Manpack” radios soon, GD warns, they and co-supplier Rockwell Collins will complete the current lot by the year’s end — a press release this morning said they’ve completed 2,300 of the 3,826 on contract — and then have to stop production. Such a halt could jeopardize the delivery of the latest digital communications to combat soldiers, the head of GD’s radio business told me. (Troops currently in Afghanistan are using the somewhat less capable Harris PRC-117G radio).

When I asked Army officers and officials about the potential problem, they insisted the problem was not as urgent. The expedients they offered as backup plans, however, amounted to rationing out new radios and other network technology upgrades, giving more to some units and less to others. That’s not what the service wants to do: It’s what it has to do as budgets tighten.

“The requirement doesn’t change; what we can afford did change,” said Lt. Gen. Kevin Walker, deputy commander at the Army Training and Doctrine Command, in a press conference today at the annual conference of the Association of the US Army. Some units will get the entire “capability set” of communications equipment, but some will only get a subset, he acknowledged, and “that is because of our dollar constraints.”

General Dynamics is definitely pushing hard for its share of a shrinking budget. In what one skeptic called a “desperation move,” the company has mustered 112 of its suppliers from 24 states — all small businesses — and 65 members of Congress to write the Pentagon insisting that production must continue.