Army to cancel contract for Ground Mobile Radio - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Army to cancel contract for Ground Mobile Radio

The Army plans to cancel its contract with prime contractor Boeing for the Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radio and instead seek a two-channel radio replacement, according to industry and Army officials.

Notification of the decision, in a letter signed by acting Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall, is expected to be sent to Congress any day, an Army source said.

According to a congressional source, Congress has not yet received notification.

Without commenting on the current GMR contract, Col. John Wendel, military deputy to the Army’s new director of system of systems integration, said the service plans to release a sources sought notice for a two-channel radio versus the four-channel GMR.

The GMR was first conceived as part of the network backbone for the Future Combat Systems program. Since the ambitious FCS program was canceled and its remaining pieces terminated, the GMR has received poor feedback from troops.

The ambitious four-channel requirement is no longer what’s most important for troops trying to communicate on the battlefield, Wendel said. Army officials want to see improvements in how long it takes to start up the radio as well as the soldier interface.

Boeing did not respond to calls for comment on Thursday.

A July 27 memo from the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command gave GMR low marks following the first Network Integration Exercise held at Fort Bliss, Texas.

“The GMR is neither simple nor easy to operate,” the memo says. The system’s display screen was “not intuitive for the soldiers to use.”

Capt. Phillip McCoy, a battle captain for the exercise, called the GMR nothing more than a “heavy paperweight,” explaining how it overheated and left soldiers often times disconnected. Other soldiers said the GMR had made some steps from the last time they used it, albeit small ones.

Brig. Gen. Michael Williamson, the Joint Program Executive Officer for JTRS, said GMR struggled since the radio was designed to operate in the advanced FCS vehicles and architecture that never materialized. He acknowledged the radio consistently overheated during the exercise, but described the problem as correctable.

“The size, weight, and power requirements combined with significant heat output, complexity and mechanical unreliability of the GMR preclude it from being a valid material solution,” the memo said.

Williamson said he was less worried about radios and end-user systems and more worried about the waveform the Army is developing. Tests continue on the Soldier Radio Waveform and the Wideband Networking Waveform.

Last spring, the Army drastically scaled backs its GMR buy, from 86,209 to 10,293, causing unit costs to soar. This triggered what’s known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach.

Nunn-McCurdy legislation dictates the Army must go back to Congress and prove the program is essential to national security and no acceptable alternatives exist.

Wendel said there were many possible solutions for the Army’s revised radio requirements, several of which were on display at companies’ booths at the Association of the U.S. Army annual convention this week.

While Boeing is the prime contractor for the GMR program, subcontractors include BAE Systems, Rockwell Collins and Northrop Grumman, with support from Harris Corp.