David Axe stories from The Center for Public Integrity

Obama order protects intelligence community whistleblowers

2012-10-15T10:26:23-04:00

President Barack Obama signed an executive order last week creating new protections for national security and intelligence community whistleblowers, effectively sidestepping a congressional impasse provoked by the reservations of congressional Republicans.

The order — formally known as "Presidential Policy Directive 19" and signed by Obama out of public view on Oct. 10 and without a White House announcement — directs intelligence agencies to establish procedures for the protection of employees reporting waste, fraud and abuse.

The order is meant to address longstanding concerns that whistleblowers in the intelligence agencies lacked legal protections like those available to employees of the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

The new order bans retaliation against whistleblowers in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other intelligence organizations. Until now, these agencies were not specifically prohibited from retaliating against whistleblowers.

A House bill aimed at improving protections for most federal employees, known as the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act and passed by that chamber in September, lacked the safeguards ordered by Obama. Angela Canterbury, from the Washington, D.C. watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said House Republicans had narrowed the bill’s focus due to worries that its provisions might encourage Wikileaks-type disclosures of sensitive information.

She called this a "red herring," explaining that by protecting those with security clearances who want to blow the whistle on wrongdoing at intelligence agencies, a new law could have encouraged them to “use safe internal channels.” The Senate has yet to take up its own version of the bill.

In the meantime, Obama’s order "fills a vacuum," according to Tom Devine, a legal adviser to the Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that provides legal support for government whistleblowers, including many working on national security matters. The order could function as a "beachhead" for further reforms in future legislation, he says.

The executive order, which Devine said was devised by the White House over the past year, protects certain disclosures of classified information to Congress and agency inspector generals; creates an appeal channel for whistleblowers facing punishment; and promises that those who prove improper retaliation can be reinstated and given financial compensation. The Director of National Intelligence is responsible for ensuring that each agency puts new review procedures in place. (A spokesman for the DNI did not immediately respond to questions about this story.)

But one advocate said the order is "toothless" because the role it gives the DNI, who is an intelligence official. Stephen M. Kohn, the Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Whistleblower Center, another group that counsels whistleblowers, calls the directive a "smokescreen" that masks real reform. Kohn also highlighted a disclaimer in the presidential directive that he says cancels the order's other provisions. "This directive is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law," the order reads.

"We are concerned that national security employees may think that this directive gives them some much-needed protections when it does not," Kohn says. But Canterbury says the order's disclaimer is boilerplate for presidential directives and should not be read as undermining its real, and positive, changes.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz says the directive provides new recourse for those facing retaliation. Besides giving the Director of National Intelligence authority to oversee intelligence agencies handling of whistleblower cases, the order requires agencies for the first time to provide “whole” relief for employees whose right to free speech is violated, he noted.

"We'll be pressing very hard to get permanent statutory fix,” Devine said.

Will the $55 billion bomber program fly?

2013-03-29T13:41:19-04:00

When the Obama administration dispatched three B-2 bombers from a Missouri air base on March 19 last year to cross the ocean and reach Libya, it put roughly $9 billion worth of America’s most prized military assets into the air. The bat-shaped black bombers, finely machined to elude radar and equipped with bombs weighing a ton apiece, easily demolished dozens of concrete aircraft shelters near Libya’s northern coast.

The Air Force points to that successful mission, and thousands of others against insurgents in Afghanistan conducted by older B-1 bombers, while arguing that long-distance, pinpoint expressions of U.S. military power are best carried out by strategic bombers. As a result, the Air Force says, the country needs more and newer versions of them, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Its claims over the last year have impressed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who called the idea “critical” to national security in February budget testimony. They also charmed Congress, which in December slipped an extra hundred million dollars into the defense budget to speed the creation of a top-secret new “Long-Range Strike Bomber.” Only that bomber — among the dozens of major new weapons systems now in development — was honored with a specific endorsement in the Pentagon’s new strategic review, released on Jan. 5.

But the new bomber’s future is not assured. While Libyan and Afghan gunners may be no match, the new planes seem likely to encounter major turbulence at home, as a climate of financial austerity begins to afflict the Pentagon for the first time in a decade and other weapons compete to serve its military role.

Critics have expressed concerns that the Air Force will not fit the bombers into its budget; that their preliminary design is too technically ambitious; and that a key potential mission — conducting bombing raids over China — is implausible. They also have asked why new planes are needed when old ones are undergoing multi-billion-dollar upgrades.

By all accounts, the Air Force’s track record of making bombers the country can afford is dismal. The B-1 program was cancelled mid-stream by the Carter administration after its cost doubled, then revived under President Reagan. The B-2 grew so costly in the early 1990s that the Pentagon ended up buying just a fifth of the aircraft originally planned. The B-2s are actually not used much now, partly because few targets justify risking aircraft that cost $3 billion apiece in today’s dollars, and partly because their flights by some estimates cost $135,000 per hour — almost double that of any other military airplane.

The Air Force says the new bomber is slated to cost roughly $55 billion, or about $550 million a plane — less than a quarter of the price of the B-2. If costs rise, “we don't get a program,” Air Force chief of staff Gen. Norton Schwartz recently told reporters, citing a 2009 warning by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, an airpower skeptic, as Gates cancelled an earlier attempt to build a new bomber.

One of the skeptics is Tom Christie, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester from 2001 until his retirement in 2005. He says that if $550 million per copy is the target, “you're talking $2 billion by the time they build the damn thing …. How many times [have] we been through this with bombers? And look where we end up.”

“Besides, what do we need it for?” adds Christie, a sardonic scientist who in his three decades working for the military contributed to the design of many of today’s most successful warplanes. A jowly man with snow-white hair, Christie has devoted his retirement to highlighting and criticizing what he sees as wasteful Pentagon practices.

The new bomber program has been accelerated at a particularly risky moment, when its design — by the accounts of several top officials — remains up for grabs. The Air Force has said, for example, that it may or may not be given a nuclear mission at some point in the future, a feature that would add to its price tag. The Air Force has also said it is to be “optionally manned,” meaning it conceivably could be flown from a ground station, without a pilot in the cockpit. Nothing similar, involving unmanned, armed aircraft that must survive in a hostile environment, has ever been attempted.

That kind of technological ambition has doomed many weapons program — a reality the Air Force says it recognizes. In 2009, for example, the Obama administration ordered cancellation of an advanced fighter called the F-22 after its costs ballooned and it began to suffer technological and maintenance problems.

Besides Gates, no critic has been more vocal and posed more of an obstacle to the Air Force's bomber efforts than Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, a former fighter pilot who served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 until retiring in August 2011. The charismatic Cartwright was instrumental in persuading Gates to kill off the Air Force's earlier effort to develop a new bomber. It wasn't until Cartwright’s influence waned that the Air Force succeeded in advancing its revived bomber scheme through the Pentagon bureaucracy and Congress.

Cartwright says the nation does need several hundred new “trucks” or inexpensive bomb haulers, without fancy sensors, capable of penetrating advanced air defenses to drop guided bombs. Such weapons can cost around $20,000 apiece, or about a fifth what modern cruise missiles cost.

But Cartwright says he doubts that the Air Force can develop an effective bomber cheap enough to be bought in adequate numbers. He predicts cost increases will result in the Air Force again buying less than two dozen new bombers — around a quarter of what the service says it needs. Cartwright adds that he is not sure why the Air Force feels a new bomber is needed now and, equally importantly, why the service believes it can afford it. “Those are the right questions,” Cartwright says.

A record of cost overruns and shifting timetables

The Air Force's bomber troubles stretch a long way back. The last bomber to be developed and purchased without huge cost overruns was the B-52, which began development in the late 1940s. Twice in subsequent decades the Air Force launched a new bomber program in order to replace the now-classic B-52, only to see costs rise and production terminated early. Seventy years after its design was conceived, the B-52 remains America's most numerous strategic bomber.

The Air Force now says it wants between 80 and 100 Long-Range Strike Bombers, the number planners say is required to carry out a sustained bombing campaign against a well-armed foe such as China or Iran. It has said repeatedly that the new planes, which it claims will use "off-the-shelf" technologies, will be ready for flying in the mid-2020’s — when America’s list of friends and foes might be different.

Between now and then, the Air Force intends to hide the plane’s design, missions, operating costs, and basing plans in an enveloping shroud of secrecy, much as it did with the B-2. “There’s a competition. The program is underway. The requirements, the cost parameters have been set by the secretary of defense and we’re executing in that direction,” Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said at a conference in February. “That's about all we're saying.” Northrop, Boeing and Lockheed Martin all said they would compete for the contract, but likewise declined comment about it.

The program’s current timetable represents a shift. A decade ago, the Air Force believed it could wait until 2037 for a new bomber. But in 2001, a Defense Department strategy review warned that another world power could launch a surprise attack on a U.S. ally that U.S. ground and naval forces could not prevent — an obvious reference to a sudden amphibious assault by China on Taiwan. It called for a robust capability to strike and maneuver “within denied areas.”

“What is this but a new stealth bomber?” says David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former deputy chief of staff for intelligence who helped plan bomber operations over Afghanistan and the Pacific and now teaches at the Air Force Academy in Colorado and is CEO of a defense and aerospace contractor, Mav6.

In 2006, under then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon blessed the Air Force’s plan to produce a new bomber by 2018 — and began channeling money into design efforts. The new plane was supposed to include cutting-edge sensors, communications and weapons, potentially including the world's first operational air-to-air laser cannon — all of which added to its pricetag.

But after Gates replaced Rumsfeld in late 2006 and Cartwright joined the Joint Chiefs of Staff the following year, Gates canceled the new bomber initiative, citing the same out-of-control technological ambitions that caused the B-2 to cost $3 billion per copy. “It makes little sense to pursue a future bomber … in a way that repeats this history,” Gates said.

“Gates was listening to Cartwright at this point in time,” says Barry Watts, a bookish former Air Force and Northrop Grumman program evaluator now working for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

To lower the cost, Gates proposed the Air Force return to the drawing board and look at an unmanned design, echoing Cartwright's own preference. A strictly pilotless bomber could dispense with the cockpit, ejection seats and onboard oxygen systems, thereby reducing cost, Cartwright claims. “Today’s weapons and platform technologies allow an aircraft to stay airborne far longer than a human can maintain peak mental and physical performance.”

The White House Office of Management and Budget, which vets all federal spending, endorsed Gates’ decision at the time. “Current aircraft will be able to meet the threats expected in the foreseeable future,” OMB said of the bomber fleet in 2009.

“The OMB statement was actually something of an anomaly,” counters Deptula, a former fighter pilot and air power champion. “OMB has no military competence and should not be attributed any.”

Last spring, the House Armed Services Committee promised to give the Air Force $100 million more than the $197 million it requested for new bomber work for the 2012 fiscal year. The committee is chaired by Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Cal.), who district includes a secretive Air Force research and testing facility in Palmdale, outside Los Angeles, where the B-1s and B-2s were built and where the new bomber will most likely be assembled, regardless of which company wins the contract.

Paul Meyer, a Northrop Grumman vice president, says the extra funding was not a surprise when it was officially appropriated last fall. “I’m proud of how both the Air Force and my committee are approaching the [bomber] development,” McKeon said in a May 5 speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

McKeon’s staff did not respond to multiple requests for interviews. But his plan attracted bipartisan House support: George Behan, a staffer for Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the House Armed Services Committee's ranking member and a longstanding supporter of Boeing — a potential bomber contractor — says the unrequested, extra funding “was needed to keep it on schedule.”

In May last year, Ashton Carter, the deputy secretary of defense, met with executives from Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin to discuss the bomber and its technologies in Palmdale. “His intent was to understand what was resident in various contractors' capabilities,” a source at the meeting said of Carter. Details of the meeting have not been disclosed, but when Panetta left as head of the CIA to replace Gates and Carter became the deputy defense secretary, both embraced the bomber enthusiastically.

“Rebalancing our global posture and presence to emphasize the Asia-Pacific and Middle East areas … requires an Air Force that is able to penetrate sophisticated enemy defenses and strike over long distances,” Panetta said in a February press briefing. “So we will be funding the next-generation bomber.”

At the same time, Panetta required that senior Defense Department officials jointly oversee its development. He also opted to defer efforts to certify it for carrying nuclear weapons — a task that requires special communications and costly hardening against radiation effects and other consequences of nearby nuclear explosions.

That decision reverses the development course of the B-1 and B-2, which were designed to be nuclear-capable from the outset and then re-engineered to carry largely nonnuclear weaponry. That change cost around $4.5 billion for the B-1 fleet alone, in 2001. The Air Force has declined to say what the cost will be of “certifying” the planes later as nuclear-capable.

A cockpit without a pilot

While meant to be at least as stealthy as the B-2, the new bomber is not meant to fly mostly alone into battle, using its own sensors to spot targets and its own electronic defenses to defeat enemy radar. It “won't be a Swiss Army knife” like the B-2, explains Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, “Instead, it will rely on its integration with other systems” — such as satellites, spy drones and radar-jamming planes.

But one challenging requirement has already crept into the design: It is supposed to be flown as a pilotless drone with only minor tweaks. “It could be manned; it could be unmanned,” Meyer says. On some missions, in short, it might look like a ghost-plane, flying perfectly with no crewmembers in the installed seats.

The Air Force is no stranger to drones — even large ones. The Northrop Grumman-built Global Hawk, with a wingspan greater than the ubiquitous Boeing 737 passenger jet, can stay aloft for 35 hours. Even the Air Force's standard Predator and Reaper, each around the size of a Cessna, routinely fly for 14 hours or more over Afghanistan.

But the Global Hawk is unarmed, and the propeller-driven Predators and Reapers are loud, slow and intended only for patrols in undefended airspace. The Air Force has never fielded a large, high-performance, armed drone warplane — much less one that can switch between manned and unmanned modes with minimal changes.

From the mid-1990s until 2006, the Pentagon started to develop such a drone under a contract with Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Flying prototypes, known as the X-47 and X-45, were built under the $1-billion effort, called the Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems initiative. But the program has not produced a combat-ready copy.

Cartwright and Gates said they favored a purely drone bomber — a sort of pilotless B-52 priced to buy in large numbers. But the Air Force, with a senior leadership dominated by traditional pilots, pushed back; it insisted that a drone would not save money.

“By the time you look at a payload of 40,000 pounds, onboard fuel and the airframe itself, adding a crew and cockpit module aren’t that big a deal,” Rebecca Grant, a consultant to major aerospace firms, told Aviation Week, a trade magazine. “We want the value of a manned crew compartment” — principally, a diminished need to ensure good communications back to a control center.” Even highly autonomous drones such as the Global Hawk require a steady satellite link to operators on the ground, which enemies might try to degrade.

In January, the Pentagon canceled one variant of the Global Hawk, admitting that the spy drone was actually more expensive to operate than the 60-year old, manned U-2 it was meant to replace. “Cost savings have not materialized,” the Defense Department reported. A pilotless bomber could incur the same unexpected expense.

The Air Force also refuses to accept the notion of a pilotless bomber with a possible nuclear mission. “Could you be comfortable with a nuclear-laden RPA? I wouldn't,” Air Force chief of staff Schwartz said in a recent speech, using the acronym for “Remotely Piloted Aircraft.” As a drone advocate, Cartwright wanted to change that policy. “I don’t remember the last time I manned an ICBM,” he told a group of Washington, D.C., defense reporters last July.

But with Cartwright out of the picture, the Air Force is not about to shift positions. That means that the new bomber will retain all the risks incumbent in drone design, without the benefit of the potential cost savings that attracted Gates and Cartwright.

A mission to bomb China?

In late 2011, Capt. James Perkins, a U.S. Army infantry commander in the eastern province of Paktika, saw bombs dropping from an unseen B-1 through thick cloud cover, striking Taliban fighters with precision. “It was pretty amazing,” he told the Center for Public Integrity. But that type of mission — against an undefended foe — is not what the Air Force has in mind for the new bomber.

Deptula explains that since 2004, the United States has been stationing B-52s at its air base in Guam, just outside the range of most Chinese weapons. In November of that year, he organized tests to see if the planes could find and sink a Chinese invasion fleet steaming towards Taiwan. Two B-52s flew from Louisiana to the Pacific and hunted for the decommissioned U.S. Navy landing ship Schenectady, which had been deliberately abandoned off the Hawaiian coast.

Spotting the Schenectady with their sensors, the bombers dropped four tons of explosives on the 522-foot vessel, pulverizing it.

The continuing presence of B-52s and B-2s on the tarmac in Guam deters China, according to Bob Elder, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who commanded the 8th Air Force, the main bomber unit. “When we want them to be seen — when we're trying to send a signal — they're capable of doing that,” Elder says of bombers.

This signal is less and less credible, Air Force officials say, because China hasn't been standing still. Their military budget tripled between 2000 and 2010, and the military acquired new jet fighters, radars and long-range HQ-10 surface-to-air missiles, representing what Schwartz calls “one of the world’s best air defense environments.” And the Obama administration — which announced a “strategic pivot” towards Asia in recent months — has expressed concern that a failure to provide a U.S. military riposte might loosen America’s political ties to its closest allies in the region.

Lately Iran, too, has been investing in air defenses that could challenge U.S. forces, Schwartz added. Technologies meant to keep out U.S. military planes “are proliferating very rapidly,” Jamie Morin, an Air Force assistant secretary and comptroller, told the nonprofit Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., this month. “The technology is widely available and comparatively inexpensive.”

Against the best defenses, the Air Force can use only the radar-evading B-2s, and only half of these are ready for combat on short notice, analysts say. The non-stealthy B-1s and B-52s are too vulnerable, and fighters including the F-22 lack the range to hit Chinese targets from secure U.S. bases.

But some experts have said that using any American plane to conduct bombing raids over China is a remote possibility, given that Beijing has a stockpile of missiles tipped with nuclear warheads that can reach major cities in the United States. The idea is both unnecessary and dangerous, said Wayne Hughes, a retired Navy captain now teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

“We should not adopt an air-sea strike plan against the [Chinese] mainland, because that is a sure way to start World War IV,” Hughes told an informal gathering of naval strategists in Washington in February 2011. “We need only enough access to threaten a war at sea that destroys Chinese trade and curtails energy imports.” That more limited deterrent capability does not necessarily require a new stealth bomber, he said, because inexpensive ships and planes firing guided missiles could pose enough threat to Chinese trade to prevent any conflict.

If Hughes is correct, bomber upgrades already in the works could render the new bomber redundant. The B-52, B-1 and B-2 are all being fitted with a new cruise missile with some of the same stealth qualities as the B-2, and can hit targets up to 600 miles away. For the cost of the new bomber fleet, the Air Force could buy 50,000 of these missiles. It has fired just 2,000 cruise missiles since it began using the long-range weapons in combat in 1991.

All three existing bombers are also getting new sensors, new radios and structural enhancements. The Air Force has acknowledged the B-1 and B-52 will be structurally sound for at least another 29 years — and the B-2 potentially for another 50 or more. The bill for the B-2 upgrades alone is projected to be $2 billion. Even the B-52 has vast potential, Boeing officials say. “Every aspect of the aircraft — structurally, the capability to hold weapons and avionics, the power — has large margins in it,” explains Scot Oathout, Boeing’s B-52 program manager.

Air Force spokesman Sholtis responds that “continued modernization of existing aircraft at the expense of any larger leap in technology comes with serious risk. To the extent that we may be required to put our existing, upgraded forces up against more fundamentally advanced air-to-air or surface-to-air threats, we’re looking at more airmen potentially dying and more battlefield targets not being hit.”

But Christie, a veteran observer of the military services’ budgetary stratagems, speculates that other factors are at play besides military need. “You have new [Asia-centered] strategy which, on the surface, would seem indicate some rationale for something like this [bomber],” Christie says. But he says it’s really an effort to “take advantage of things and jump in there while we can.”

Christie says the service might be acting now to prop up its budget and thus protect itself from financial ruin in the early 2020s, when two other major Air Force programs — a new tanker and the stealthy Joint Strike Fighter — will also begin full-rate production, potentially under a flat or falling overall defense budget.

By starting a major program now — any major program — the service can keep its spending high enough to fend off Pentagon planners seeking funds for the Army, Navy and Marine Corps “You strike while the iron is hot and look at where you are five to 10 years from now,” Christie says. Officials think that “hopefully nirvana will come and we’ll have double the budgets we had. We’ll have a new war which will cause budgets to increase or we’ll have allies on [Capitol] Hill to cause them to take money away from the other services.”

A battlefield internet?

2012-01-10T00:18:01-05:00

An Army strategist, John Arquilla, who in the early ’90s worked at the California think tank RAND, was one of the first to imagine a “cyberwar” force that would feature widely-spread, small groups of soldiers equipped with the latest sensors and communications technology.

This “highly networked” army would be capable of instantly reacting to an enemy and hitting him where he’s weakest. “What distinguishes the victors is their grasp of information,” Arquilla and a colleague wrote in 1993.

Arquilla’s vision proved irresistible to Army planners. Observing the rapid spread of personal computers and the growing popularity of Internet use, the Army in the late 1990’s decided to create a digital revolution of its own.

By transforming every soldier into a communications node, capable of transmitting and receiving large volumes of data from many sources, Army leaders imagined they could chart the path to an era of high-tech wars in which information was as important as bullets and shells.

But in doing so, the planners went the wrong way, according to independent analysts. Instead of repairing their communications problems with lighter, easier-to-use radios, and a simpler network, they chose heavier, more complex devices.

That solution, says Col. Gian Gentile, an Iraq war veteran now teaching at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, “took [the challenges of] close fighting out of the equation.” It ignored, in effect, the risk of trying to spread high-tech electronics everywhere amid the rough and tumble of brutal combat.

Problems with battlefield smartphones

2012-01-10T00:18:01-05:00

In mid-November, when the Army asked soldiers to test and appraise the high-tech communications devices that came from what’s left of the JTRS program, the answers they got were not exactly reassuring.

After gathering in a dusty valley ringed by low mountains in New Mexico, a part of the White Sands Missile Range, the soldiers jumped from armored vehicles in a “village” composed of cheap plywood-and-concrete structures, including one with the word “mosque” sprayed on the side.

Guided by robotic aircraft droning overhead, they advanced towards a cluster of buildings, rifles raised, eyes scanning, radios softly chirping. Inside the buildings, heavily-armed “insurgent” fighters prepared a deadly ambush. Some were equipped with new JTRS-compatible Rifleman radios, which the Army had just agreed to buy from General Dynamics for $56 million, or around $8,750 a copy.

They also had prototype handheld devices meant to provide them Internet-like connectivity even in the middle of a desert; the devices are similar in appearance to an iPhone, and allow even the most inexperienced private to take and transmit photos and videos and track other soldiers via GPS.

But, instead of being thrilled by all that connectivity, some of the soldiers complained not only about the radios they used, but about the Army’s strategic vision of a battlefield Internet. “It’s a distraction,” Staff Sgt. Cody Moose told visiting media and industry officials at the White Sands mock village. “I don’t believe a private needs one.”

What a private needs, Moose said, is to pay attention to the ground around him, be ready with his rifle and listen to his squad leader. The smartphone-like devices are a classic example of “too much information.” “You get sucked into it when you could just look around,” says 2nd Lt. Adam Martin, standing nearby at a makeshift display for the new radios and smartphones.

The smartphones tested were also unreliable. Soldiers complained about their weight and the inaccuracy of their built-in GPS. The Army nonetheless plans to buy 215,000 of the devices — one for every front-line soldier.

John Lynn, a professor of military history at Northwestern University, said he understands the reasons for such skepticism. “Militaries develop sets of assumptions and expectations and then they want to fight wars the way they think they should be fought according to those expectations. This notion of trying to create equipment that will allow you to have a cyber battlespace — that’s a cultural conception trying to impose itself on the real world.”

“That in the ’90s we were so taken up with ‘netcentric’ war makes a certain kind of sense,” Lynn added. “That we continue to be, is somewhat strange.”

Failure to communicate: Inside the army's doomed quest for the 'perfect' radio

THE BOEING COMPANY — 2012-01-23T20:35:46-05:00

As several dozen soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Task Force Rock drove into Afghanistan’s Chowkay Valley one morning in March 2010, Taliban fighters immediately began moving into ambush positions along a higher ridge. The Force’s mission was to protect a U.S. reconstruction team as it met with local village leaders, but it was stuck in place as the Taliban reached their fighting posts.

What tied them down was their radios: a forest of plastic and metal cubes sprouting antennae of different lengths and sizes. They had short-range models for talking with the reconstruction team; longer-range versions for reaching headquarters 25 miles away; and a backup satellite radio in case the mountains blocked the transmission. An Air Force controller carried his own radio for talking to jet fighters overhead and a separate radio for downloading streaming video from the aircraft.

Some of these radios worked only while the troopers were stationary; others were simply too cumbersome to operate on the move. “Not good,” said Spec. Geoff Pearman, as he watched farmers scurry indoors from their wheat fields — a sure sign that fighting was imminent.

Task Force Rock’s vulnerability that morning is routine for U.S. forces in Afghanistan today. But it was never supposed to occur at all.

Almost fifteen years ago, the Army launched an ambitious program, the Joint Tactical Radio System, aimed at developing several highly-compatible “universal” radios. Together, the JTRS radios would replace nearly all older radios in the American arsenal, greatly simplifying communications and freeing up combat units “to tap into the network on the move,” according to Paul Mehney, an Army spokesman.

But JTRS, pronounced “jitters,” failed to live up to its promise. Overly ambitious, poorly managed and saddled by incompatible goals, the program burned through $6 billion dollars while producing little working hardware. Delays forced the Army to spend $11 billion more on old-style radios to meet the urgent demands of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The Army eventually reduced the planned purchase of JTRS radios and cut the types of radios in development. In October, it canceled the vehicle-mounted version of JTRS, the most important of the new radios, which by then had grown to the size of a dormitory-sized refrigerator. For all practical purposes, JTRS is dead — at least in its original guise.

But the need for simpler battlefield communications remains. After an investment of 15 years and $17 billion, today the Army is still struggling to build better radios and estimates it may need to spend another $12 billion to get what it needs. The U.S. taxpayer has paid the bill, but frontline soldiers like those from Task Force Rock bear the true cost.

JTRS’ history is one of grand but naive technological ambition colliding with the unbending laws of physics and the unforgiving exigencies of modern warfare. After years of work, the Army discovered for itself what experts had been warning all along: It’s impossible for a single radio design to handle all the military’s different communications tasks.

The more capabilities that the Army and prime contractor Boeing packed into JTRS, the bigger, more complex and more expensive it became — until it was too bulky and unreliable for combat. In its relentless drive for conceptual simplicity, the Army found itself mired in mechanical complexity.

The Army wasn’t alone in its doomed pursuit of a technological pipe dream. The past decade has by many accounts been an era of grand ambition, flawed management and wasted treasure for all the military branches. A lengthy Harvard Business School study for the Pentagon concluded in April that despite many attempts at reform, “major defense programs still require more than 15 years to deliver less capability than planned, often at two to three times the planned cost.”

But the Army has arguably had more failures than other services. An internal report in 2010 noted that every year since 1996, the Army has spent more than a billion dollars annually “on programs that were ultimately cancelled” – including 15 cancelled since 2001. More than a third of its weapons development funds over the past seven years were spent on weapons systems deemed unusable in the end.

“I feel sorry for the Army,” said Thomas Christie, the Pentagon’s top weapons tester from 2001 to 2005. “Everything they’ve touched has turned to crap.”

Now the Pentagon faces a round of budget-cutting. So if the Army is to acquire new radios to keep its forces moving, it must do so on the cheap. That means reforming the vast, slow-moving bureaucracy entrusted to developing, testing and buying new military gear — a goal the Army is finally taking steps to reach. But it also means separating the good ideas from the bad ones at the outset, an ability that independent experts say continues to elude the world’s most powerful ground fighting force.

A Program Born in Frustration

The Army’s latest plan for overhauling its battlefield communication system was forged after the ground war to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi Army in February 1991. While preparing for the lightning Left Hook drive north and east in southern Iraq, Pentagon planners were frustrated by their need to decide everything in advance because of the Army’s inability to communicate well on the move.

They developed a plan to create a “cyberwar” force on the battlefield, upending a tradition that only leaders carry radios, and information flows not between individuals, but between squads, platoons, companies, and other units. Instead of merely pointing their rifles and scanning with their eyes, every soldier in the networked force would be an information node with his own cameras, GPS tracker and radio, all communicating perfectly with others.

The Army formally started the program in 1997, calling it the “Joint Tactical Radio.” The JTR — the “S” for “System” was soon added — was to be compatible with all previous Army radio models plus almost every radio used by the Marines, Air Force, Navy and even civilian organizations such as local police departments.

The architecture was meant to be flexible, matching the communications needs of every imaginable user, from an individual private soldier lugging a rifle across the battlefield to top generals in their high-tech headquarters deep inside friendly territory. JTRS would even work in space.

The new radio, moreover, was a key component of an even more ambitious program — a collection of new lightweight armored vehicles and weapons-carrying robots collectively known as the Future Combat Systems. They would be fast-moving, widely-spread and plugged into a vast information network. Each would carry its own JTRS radio, as would every soldier riding inside.

After a series of war games to refine the cyberwar concept, in June 2000 the Defense Department awarded Chicago-based Boeing, America’s number-two defense contractor after Lockheed Martin, a $2-million contract to begin preparing JTRS blueprints. By Pentagon standards, it was a tiny contract. The overall JTRS program, including design and production, was expected to cost at least $6 billion over the first 10 years — and up to $40 billion by the time every last JTRS radio was bought, many years later.

For Boeing, that first contract was a foot in the door for both JTRS and Future Combat Systems, which by itself was expected to cost at least $120 billion over a period of decades. Boeing was not an experienced radio maker, nor did it manufacture armored vehicles. But the company sold itself to the Army on the strength of its intellectual prowess and management skills, stressing in a press release its “proven experience in large-scale system design, development and deployment.”

A little over a year later, 9/11 opened the floodgates for defense spending. After a series of high-level Pentagon meetings in 2002, the Army got a green light to give Boeing the major contracts for both JTRS and Future Combat Systems. Under the latter contract, Boeing was to receive 10 to 15 percent profit margins, regardless of the program’s success or eventual cost.

During the review, Christie, the Pentagon’s top weapons tester, warned top officials that the Army’s plans were unrealistic. “I said there’s no way this is going to happen,” he recalls. “But they got the go-ahead anyway, by claiming there was little technical risk.”

One Size Does Not Fit All

The Army figured it would need 230,000 copies of the main JTRS radios to replace 750,000 of its older radios and lighten unit commanders’ loads. The other military branches together would buy another 90,000 or so radios, and they would all connect with a quarter-million related devices. The new radios had to be phased in gradually due to manufacturing constraints, which meant each JTRS radio had to be compatible not only with other JTRS radios and the radios belonging to the other armed services, but also with all the Army’s old-style radios.

Achieving such broad compatibility posed a daunting challenge. Traditionally, the size and shape of military radios is determined by their task. A vehicle-mounted radio piping in data from some distant headquarters is large enough to accommodate a larger antenna, more processing power and more sophisticated encryption. A radio for an infantry squad is small enough for one man to carry; it has less range, power and encryption.

In addition, radios must be equipped to interpret particular radio “languages” known as a “waveforms,” tailored for specific types of transmissions. Some are better for moving data; others are better for voice or a mix of data and voice. The Army wanted JTRS to be compatible with the 30 or so most important military waveforms, including several ideally suited for the new radios. But it gradually grasped that it was impossible for a single radio design to handle all tasks and all waveforms.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all,” admits Brig. Gen. Michael Williamson, who since March has overseen the rapidly fading JTRS program. So JTRS split into several sub-programs between 2000 and 2004, each developing a different version. Boeing handled the bulk of the work in California and Missouri, but other defense contractors – including BAE Sytems in New Jersey and Rockwell Collins in Iowa -- got slices, as well. There were sea-, air- and space-based versions.

The ground-combat branch settled on one major JTRS radio, the so-called “Ground Mobile Radio” meant for vehicles, plus a smaller version for small units marching on foot, and the handheld version for individual soldiers. The ground radio was the main focus, a key to getting Army units talking on the move to each other, to aircraft overhead, to the Navy offshore and to senior commanders far away.

“JTRS would largely lift the fog of war,” Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute in Virginia, crowed on his blog in December 2010. The Lexington Institute receives funding from Boeing and other military contractors, and Thompson now describes JTRS as “a mixed bag.”

JTRS’ collapse began when reality intervened, after unit commanders in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq struggled to stay in contact while on the move. Just as the Army’s war needs expanded the demand for innovation, software problems with the new radios slowed testing. So the Army had no choice but to buy non-JTRS radios from other manufacturers -- 300,000 radios in all, worth nearly $11 billion through 2006.

Frustrated by the delays and freshly equipped with new copies of old-style radios, the Army began losing its appetite for JTRS. Between 2006 and 2008, the Army scaled back its JTRS purchasing plans by 20 percent and decided the new radio would understand just eight waveforms instead of 33.

The reductions shaved billions of dollars off the cost of developing JTRS, but also increased the overall pricetag for each one, including research and development expenses. The Army suddenly expected to pay up to $300,000 for each JTRS ground radio — roughly double its estimate in 2002. By comparison, a factory-fresh, vehicle-mounted, non-JTRS radio from another major military supplier, the Harris Corp., costs just $57,000.

Technical Problems Worsen

The technical challenges of transmitting huge amounts of data over complex new waveforms became so acute that in 2005, the Army briefly ordered Boeing to stop work on JTRS. But the Pentagon has a hard time cancelling any program – often because the contracts it signs impose steep penalties on the government for any major change of heart -- and so the Army decided to reorganize the management office while allowing Boeing to proceed.

The program did not improve. Col. Dan Hughes, who oversaw ground radio development between 2006 and 2009, watched the radio grow in complexity and cost, while continually missing design deadlines. “We tried to make it better and better and better,” he says. But in the first two years after full-scale development was approved, the number of pages in the blueprint for the ground radio design tripled, according to a Government Accountability Office report in 2005. The radio also tipped the scales at 207 pounds — several times the weight of existing radios.

Plans to hand over prototypes to the troops for realistic testing got bumped back one year, then two, then three. With each delay, the Army was forced to buy more old-style radios for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manufacturers took the opportunity to upgrade their existing radio designs with enhanced processors, software and encryption and new waveforms, bringing them closer to the ground radio’s specs.

The Harris firm tweaked one of its popular radios to accommodate the main JTRS waveforms, and quickly sold 16,000 of the new radios, mostly to the Army.

Then, in 2010, the Army assembled 1,000 battlefield veterans at a desert training range at Fort Bliss, just outside of El Paso, to try out the key bits of JTRS technology. They criticized its size, its weight, its short range and its tendency to break down. Michael Gilmore, the Army’s top weapons tester, cited the soldiers’ complaints in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. He said the ground radio “demonstrated little military utility.”

Meanwhile, the federal government’s ballooning deficits prompted several rounds of defense cuts that shaved billions from the Army’s research and development accounts. Future Combat Systems was killed first, around the same time the evaluation troops were testing JTRS.

In October, the Army also canceled the ground radio. “The technical challenges of mobile, ad hoc networks and scalability were not well understood due to the immaturity of technology at that time,” Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall explained in letters to the chairmen of the congressional armed services committees, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Howard McKeon (R-Cal.)..

Aspects of the overall JTRS program survive. The two main JTRS waveforms are still in development. So are the air-, sea- and space-based versions of the radio, plus some of the smaller Army models — in particular, the soldiers’ hand-held version. “We don’t want more monolithic programs,” says Col. John Morrison, who oversees the Army’s network-based battle-command efforts. Under the best of circumstances, the GAO estimates, the radios will cost another $12 billion to complete.

Although the Pentagon sometimes tries to recoup money invested in failed weapons, in the case of the ground radio, the Army said it would simply allow the Boeing contract, which was good through 2012, to lapse. Boeing would not be paid to continue ground-radio work — nor would the company be penalized.

A spokesman for Boeing, Matthew Billingsley, declined to say if the nonpublic contract allowed for the company to be penalized. He said that Boeing was disappointed at the program’s cancellation, and that the company looked forward to “applying our experience and knowledge in future competitions.”

Task Force Rock, anchored to the floor of Afghanistan’s Chowkay Valley by its radios in March 2010, was lucky. It escaped an attack by fleeing the valley under the cover of U.S. helicopters firing white phosphorus rockets. Burdened with radios the Army has spent more than 20 years trying to replace, other American combat units might not be so lucky.