JTRS acquisition team applies ‘gold standard’

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AFB, Mass. --  In an era when seemingly every high-profile, big-dollar defense contract award is followed almost immediately by protests from the losing bidders, one recent decision stands out.

When a joint team led by the Electronic Systems Center awarded the system development and demonstration (SDD) contract for the Airborne and Maritime/Fixed Station Joint Tactical Radio System this spring, the move triggered not a single protest.

"It's one way we can tell we listened, learned, understood and applied the gold standards to make for a successful source selection," said Air Force Col. Joe Wercinski of ESC's 653rd Electronic Systems Wing, the outgoing program manager. "We put together a very thorough, solid, clean acquisition process and team that produced the right result for the war fighter. The evidence of that was pretty clear to everyone who reviewed it."

The five-year contract is worth $766 million with options that could increase the total value to $1.3 billion.

The JTRS program began about a decade ago when the Defense Department decided to unify its communications infrastructure by creating what are known as software-defined radios. These would allow troops, vehicles, ships and aircraft to easily receive and pass the same information, eliminating disconnects that have often hampered warfighting operations in the past, the colonel said.

"JTRS puts broadband-like wireless capability right into the cockpit - and into submarines and surface ships," Colonel Wercinski said. And while it falls beyond the immediate scope of the airborne and maritime/fixed, or AMF, portion of the massive program, JTRS will also tie in combat vehicles and individual soldiers and Marines on the ground.

Even airborne munitions and small mines can be equipped with JTRS, allowing the weapons to pass information to warfighters, he said.

But bringing such an ambitious joint program together proved very challenging. About five years ago, DoD decided to break it into more manageable chunks, or as they were called, clusters. The AMF cluster, jointly managed out of Hanscom and led primarily by an ESC team, set an acquisition strategy that carefully reduced risk by using pre-SDD awards that helped design the overall effort and examine the challenges to come.

While this effort resulted in two awards, the larger SDD competition was full and open to any company or industry team wishing to participate, Colonel Wercinski said.

"We took a very deliberate, thoughtful approach to the acquisition," he said. "We paused when we needed to in order to make sure things were okay, that we were on the right track. We wanted to be sure that, in the end, we could feel really good and really confident in the decision we made and about the program's likelihood of success; and we definitely do."

The team had to consider a bevy of technical challenges and proposed solutions, he said. "Over the years, DoD and its various contractors have built so many stove-piped radios, each designed to do its specific thing with unique waveforms, that getting down to a reasonable number of waveforms was very important."

JTRS program managers had to reduce an initial 32 waveforms down to about six, he said, picking those considered "transformational."

"Those with the widest spectrum and throughput capability are the ones we want," he said. "The data rates are incredible."

They also had to carefully consider the big three concerns of most engineering designs: size, weight and power, especially for smaller applications like unmanned aerial vehicles. Because of this the AMF team is working toward two separate designs, a larger fixed and maritime unit and a small unit for UAVs and rotary wing aircraft that's about the size of a shoebox and which will weigh no more than 15 pounds.

"Every ounce is critical where size constraints are in place," the colonel said.

On board aircraft, there are also power limitations, and heat is a real concern, too. "Power when burned turns to heat, so you have to think about cooling and venting," he said.

The team took all of this and far more into consideration during a rigorous source selection process that involved a large, multi-faceted and "truly joint" team which also included participation from the National Security Agency.

"Now we're on contract, we're fully funded, and we have commitments from each of the services for our products. That means we're well positioned for success. And that success can be directly attributed to the incredible ESC support this program received," Colonel Wercinski said.

"We had great support from MITRE, in terms of engineering support, from our contracting folks, our Acquisition Center of Excellence, Legal and many others," he said. "We couldn't have accomplished all of this any other way."