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Continuing Legacy [National Guard](National Guard Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) New technology was supposed to have replaced SINCGARS as the Army's main tactical radio. That hasn't happened yet, and probably won't for many years BY NOW, ARMY NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS were supposed to be equipped with lightweight tactical radios with the ability to transmit voice, photos, maps, videos and other data on the battlefield with Internet-like ease and speed. These "software-defined radios" were supposed to use computer code to do the job that pounds of clunky hardware perform in conventional radios, such as manage frequencies and bandwidth, and ensure security. Each of these new radios was supposed to perform the job of multiple older models. They would communicate with many types of radios simply by switching from one digital "waveform" to another. That was the theory behind the Joint Tactical Radio System when development work began in 1997. JTRS would vanquish line-of-sight limitations by making every radio also a transmitter that would automatically reach out to find other nearby JTRS radios and form a mesh network to connect each soldier to the others on the battlefield. The technology seemed so promising after a decade of research and development that the Army Science Board urged the Army in 2007 to "stop buying SINCGARS immediately" and spend the money instead in "future, not legacy hardware." Seven years have passed since then. JTRS is all but dead and SINCGARS, the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System that traces its origins back to 1974, remains the primary tactical radio for the Army and the Army National Guard. There are a few others. The Guard has some Harris AN/PRC-15ÛS for long-range battlefield communication and some satellite phones, says Lt. Col. Tony Caldwell, chief of policy and governance for the Army Guard's chief information officer. But from backpack to Humvee to heavy truck to helicopter, from Bradley Fighting Vehicle to Ml tank, SINCGARS remains "the baseline radio for the Army" and the Army Guard. And it will be "for quite some time," Caldwell says. What happened? In the 17 years since work on JTRS-pronounced, ironically, "jit- ters"-commenced, the Defense Department spent some $15 billion, yet produced little beyond a relatively small number of radios that have performed so poorly when tested by ordinary troops that the Pentagon pulled the plug in 2012. At the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with JTRS beset by technical troubles and the services short of tactical radios, the Defense Department had little choice but to buy more SINCGARS radios worth about $11 billion. Although JTRS has been formally canceled, a couple of spinouts live on, Caldwell says. They are the Rifleman Radio, a lightweight, hand-held radio, and the larger Manpack, a backpack-size instrument. But so far, test results for those two have not been promising. In January, Michael Gilmore, the Pentagons director of operational test and evaluation, published damning opinions of the pair. The Manpack, he said, "was not operationally effective due to the poor voice quality and limited range" when it was using the SINCGARS waveform. The "legacy SINCGARS radios" did the job much better, Gilmore said. The Manpack performed better when it switched to a different waveform, the soldier radio waveform. But overall, the Manpack "demonstrated poor reliability and poor availability," Gilmore said. The smaller Rifleman Radio also proved substandard. It suffered voice degradation at ranges greater than 500 meters. It failed to support a cavalry troop due to inconsistent communications and insufficient range. It spontaneously rebooted and then took too long to rejoin the radio network. And it was plagued by battery overheating and rapid battery depletion. Gilmore isn't the only critic. In June, then-Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster urged the Army to stop fielding the Manpack. McMaster, who, at the time, commanded the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Ga., said soldiers who tested the Manpack had numerous complaints. The radio weighs 17 pounds, more than twice as much as the backpack version of the SINCGARS it was supposed to replace. It transmits less than half as far as the SINCGARS, and it operates for just six hours on two batteries. The SINCGARS can operate for 33 hours. In addition, McMaster said, the Manpack can overheat, putting soldiers at risk of being burned. JTRS was a good idea, but there was "a huge learning curve" that radio developers failed to master, says Anthony Tabler, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and now a business development manager for Exelis Inc., formerly ITT Communications and the manufacturer of SINCGARS. When the first prototypes came out in 2005, JTRS radios were intended for small units operating in urban environments, Tabler says. The Rifleman Radio, for example, is a "networking radio," meaning that "every radio acts as a relay for every other radio." In cities, buildings can make line-of-sight radio transmissions difficult. A soldier on one side of a building can't necessarily communicate with a soldier on the other side. JTRS radios were supposed to be able to solve that problem by passing transmissions from one radio to the next to the next automatically, creating a network that would find pathways around obstacles. It was great in theory. But when soldiers tried Rifleman Radios in a network-integration evaluation in 2013, the radios "demonstrated numerous suitability issues that contributed to soldiers concluding that this radio was not yet acceptable for combat," Gilmore said in an annual report to Congress. It turns out that "when you bring a lot more radios into the scenario, it creates complexity," Tabler says. There are other problems, too. Caldwell says that radio-makers have not been able to build an encryption package compact enough to fit inside the small, handheld Rifleman. And Tabler notes that design factors that make JTRS radios good for urban areas also make them "not the ideal radio" for other environments, such as forested areas. "That's where SINCGARS shines because of the part of the frequency spectrum it operates in," he says. So the military radio that was conceived 40 years ago, before the invention of personal computers and cell phones several other milestones of the digital revolution, still prevails today. Not Your Father's SINCGARS Work on SINCGARS began in 1974, but it took a decade before SINCGARS radios were produced in significant numbers and fielded by the Army. It took until 1990 before SINCGARS was the Army's primary radio. The Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy adopted it, too. Over the years, the services have bought more than 580,000 SINCGARS radios, many of them long after SINCGARS radios were supposed to have been replaced by JTRS. When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going full throttle, the services bought some 250,000 SINCGARS. SINCGARS purchases increased substantially after the infamous 2003 ambush in Iraq in which Pvt. Jessica Lynch was captured and 11 other soldiers were killed, Tabler says. Lynch was a passenger in a Humvee that lacked a radio. Her vehicle and others got separated from the rest of their convoy and blundered into a hostile Iraqi town and a firefight. Lynch was seriously injured, captured, hospitalized and then dramatically rescued. Afterward, the Army ordered that SINCGARS radios be installed in all tactical wheeled vehicles, Tabler says. SINCGARS were already in all armored vehicles. SINCGARS radios are also standard in helicopters and in some fixed-wing aircraft, including A-10 attack jets. Today, the Army Guard has 97,052 SINCGARS radios and plans to buy 1,739 more as part of an Army modernization plan, according to the National Guard Bureau. And the radios are expected to be around for decades to come. The Army's CommunicationsElectronics Command plans to support SINCGARS through 2042, Tabler says. That's 59 years after the first SINCGARS radios were fielded. But the SINCGARS in use today are not the same as those produced in 1983. The original SINCGARS provided voice communication only. By the late 1990s, they had been upgraded to transmit voice and data, although, by today's standards, their data capability is limited. SINCGARS is supposed to be able to make digital transmissions at a rate of 16,000 bits per second. That was impressive in 1989, perhaps, but that's a lot slower than today's typical cell phone, which operates at 600,000 bits per second and upward. "We can transmit data, but they're not really designed for that," says Col. Kelly Smothers of the Oregon National Guard. Depending on conditions, SINCGARS data transmission rate can slow to 5,000 bits per second, he says. "They're really designed for radio communications." Smothers heads the NGAUS C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) Task Force. The system's data capabilities are "more along the lines of chat and small data messages," Tabler says. "I've never heard of folks trying to do email via SINCGARS because throughput is very limited." Photos, maps, videos? Forget it. But improvements continue. The newest SINCGARS radios can send and receive position location information, which lets users know where other friendly forces are. Over the years, SINCGARS also has been reduced in size and weight. The newest models, the ASIP, or advanced system improvement program, are half the size and weight of the originals, and their power consumption has also been reduced, thus increasing their battery life. Today, the Army Guard uses several versions of SINCGARS, Caldwell says. The newest version is the SINCGARS F, and the Guard is working toward "pure fleeting" so that eventually all its units have F-models. While some Guard units still have older models, no one still has original SINCGARS radios, Caldwell says. And F-models are compatible with earlier models. The Army Guard is "fully included" in the Army's radio modernization strategy, Caldwell says. So as Guard units move toward the front of the Army force-generation cycle, the Army will equip them with new model SINCGARS. When it was introduced, SINCGARS represented a technical breakthrough. It was resistant to jamming and interception. At the time, the jamming threat was from the Soviet Union, and SINCGARS overcame it by frequency hopping. That is, the radio is capable of switching from one frequency to another to avoid jamArmy ming signals that would drown it out. For SINCGARS, frequency hopping means changing frequencies more than 100 times per second. More Updates To make SINCGARS compatible with other radios, including those used by police and other first responders, the Guard has acquired "radio voice cross-banding" equipment. Basically, that's a separate box that serves as a translator between two radios. A SINCGARS is plugged into one side of the box and a different radio is plugged into the other side. Then the two radios and the other radios on their networks can communicate. Cross-banding enables the Guard's SINCGARS to communicate with Iridium satellite phones, the military MUOS (Mobile User Objective System) satellite system and a variety of radios used by first responders, Tabler says. "All of the states have packages that do radio cross-banding," Caldwell says. In a tactical radio modernization strategy he wrote for Exelis, Tabler recommends that the Guard also buy "appliqués" that would enable SINCGARS radios to use the soldier radio waveform. An appliqué is essentially a second radio, either an actual radio or software that emulates a radio that would provide SINCGARS with another channel for voice and data communication. Since the soldier radio waveform is used by JTRS, the appliqués would enable Guard SINCGARS radios to connect to the JTRS network, Tabler says. But with JTRS in disarray, that may be unnecessary. Caldwell is among the skeptics. A lot of appliqués have been developed to do things that the Guard doesn't need done, he says. And even when useful appliqués are offered, the Army must make sure that they work as intended and do not compromise some other functions of the radios, he says. So far, no SINCGARS appliqués have been fielded, Caldwell says. Amid the troubles with tactical radios, the Army Guard has had notable successes with another form of tactical communication, WIN-T, the Warrior Information Network-Tactical. WIN-T uses satellites, aircraft and ground-based towers and antennas to create battlefield communications networks that stretch from command centers to tactical vehicles to troops on the ground. When the New York Army Guard's 101st Signal Battalion deployed to Afghanistan for 10 months in 2012, "we were the phone company, the Internet company and we provided video teleconferencing," says Capt. Frank Quintana, the unit's operations officer. The 101st specializes in WIN-T, which the Army describes as the "high-speed, high-capacity communications backbone" for delivering voice, video, data and imagery throughout the tactical battlefield. But the Guard has begun pushing WIN-T beyond the battlefield, using it to quickly stand up emergency communication capabilities when disaster strikes at home. Sandy, the massive storm that hit the U.S. East Coast in October 2012, provided the first test of WIN-T in disaster response. When the storm roared ashore with 70-mph winds and a 14-foot storm surge, electricity was cut off and communication was impossible even for rescue crews in wide swaths stretching from New Jersey through much of New England. Guard WIN-T units quickly filled the communications gaps, the Army said. "We're very mobile," Quintana says. With truck and trailer-based satellite dishes, truck-mounted radio towers and other mobile network components, WIN-T units can quickly re-establish a highspeed, high-bandwidth communications network. The Army Guard has 79 units equipped with WIN-T, and Caldwell maintains they are the Army's best. He says, "I would put our Army Guard signal units up against Army units any day of the week." | The military radio conceived before the invention of laptop computers and cellphones still prevails today. Communications-Electronics Command plans to support SINCGARS through 2042. WILLIAM MATTHEWS is a Springfield, Va.-basedfreelance writer who specializes in military matters. He may be contacted via magazine@nga us. org. (c) 2014 National Guard Association of the United States |