
Military's 15-year quest for perfect radio is a blueprint for failing big (2012) - smacktoward
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-to-blow-6-billion-on-a-tech-project/
======
hydrogen18
I worked on this project. It's a project filled with realizable goals and
impossible mandates. SCA is the most useless thing I've ever encountered. The
requirement to use CORBA is simply impossible, there is no way you can make a
real-time system using CORBA.

The project I worked on recently changed its goal from being the high
bandwidth backbone of the Army to

>"The program will demonstrate the HNW version 3.0 waveform (supports the
JC4ISR radio) and then store the waveform in the DOD Waveform Repository"

From:
[http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2014/pdf/army/2014win-...](http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2014/pdf/army/2014win-t.pdf)

The technology is there, the need is there, the funding has been there, but
the overall management of it by the military is awful. You can't really fault
the contractors either, they are just doing what they are told.

~~~
sdr_corba
The technology is _not_ there, that's the big joke on top of all the
management blunder.

There are multiple radios used in the field for different distances and
bandwidths: VLF, LF/MF/HF, V/UHF, SAT, and ultra high frequency SAT. There is
very little in common between those radios in terms of total equipment mass,
space and cost. The "waveform" is an insignificant part.

The significant mass, space and cost is on band-specific power amplifiers
(PAs), antennas and front-end filters, and those 3 elements are not
interchangeable nor can they be software-defined.

What they have done after >15 years is to ignore all the frequency bands
except V/UHF, and call the result a success.

~~~
rayiner
The technology was supposed to be there. The grand vision was radios that
could operate anywhere in a multi-GHz range, opportunistically use that
spectrum, and be reconfigured via FPGA and pluggable wave-forms. JTRS was
supposed to be the software platform gluing it all together.

The vision was possible.[1] You can have multiple PAs, wide-bandwidth
omnidirectional antennas, replicate front-end filters, etc. As part of the XG
project, the company I used to work for actually developed a very wide-
bandwidth front-end that implemented WiMax in FPGA. The trouble is that analog
doesn't scale like digital. The tuner alone was $5,000, and that doesn't
decrease every 18 months like digital.

[1] In fact, to really take full advantage of opportunistic spectrum usage,
it's _necessary_ to have a radio that can operate over a very wide frequency
range.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _The trouble is that analog doesn 't scale like digital. The tuner alone was
> $5,000, and that doesn't decrease every 18 months like digital._

I don't know much about radio hardware. What is it that makes this so
expensive, and (it sounds like) resistant to economies of scale?

~~~
jacquesm
Analog hardware that is robust enough for military deployment is crazy
expensive because it tends to require parts of very high precision in order to
achieve repeatable results.

It's one thing to build an analog circuit in the lab that performs a certain
function, another to make this as a consumer grade device and a completely
different kettle of fish to build it in such a way that the military will
accept it as a part of their command-and-control infrastructure.

Military comms gear is overdesigned to a degree that is hard to imagine if all
you've seen is consumer stuff.

By comparison, making a digital circuit with very high reproducibility of
features is childs play.

Digital, by its very nature is a lot easier to get right because every state-
transition is 'hard' whereas with analogue parts variability and noise are
much harder to control and will lead to circuitry becoming un-usable
(especially over time, in the presence of vibration or over a large
temperature and humidity range).

------
digikata
Any military project with a 'J' in the acronym increases the likelihood of the
program going over-budget...

~~~
tlrobinson
I was thinking the same thing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program#Cost_overruns)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Tactical_Radio_System#Pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Tactical_Radio_System#Problems_and_restructuring)

Any others?

~~~
digikata
Off hand:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-169_Joint_Common_Missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-169_Joint_Common_Missile)
\- cancelled

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Air-to-
Ground_Missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Air-to-Ground_Missile) \-
follow on to the JCM (not sure about it's status - they may have gotten the
planning right by putting in for a long dev period up front)

Really though it's a tongue-in-cheek observation with a basis in the reality
that a 'Joint' program implies multiple service branches sourcing
requirements. In turn, that increases requirements count and complexity, which
in turn has a non-linear and negative effect of program efficiency.

It also often moves program decisions from technical tradeoffs made by
engineers into political space between branches.

------
rayiner
Flashbacks! My first job involved JTRS. We were working on an unrelated DARPA
project: XG. The purpose of which was to develop the opportunistic spectrum
use capability described in the article. Early on, they saddled us with the
requirement of implementing our technology as an SCA component, even in
simulation. I glued some open source reference implementation together with
our code, but we ended up hiring a consultant to write a whole SCA
implementation in house. Which we then ended up throwing away because it was
pointless to do that in a technology development platform.

That said, I don't think CORBA is the worst thing ever. It was slow as shit
back for the day, but in this age of HTTP based RPC services it seems
lightweight and efficient. Memory management in the C++ binding was broken by
design, however.

------
nickpsecurity
The project might have simply been the result of the "revolving door:"
military people ensuring big profits for defense contractors who pay them high
salaries as "advisors" later. Most of these projects that appear to be
failures are actually successes of theft from taxpayer. Article on this below
with examples:

[http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/11/the-best-
government-m...](http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/11/the-best-government-
money-can-buy/)

On the technology front, I was about to suggest they use Field Programmable RF
to help solve this and then look what I find:

[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/altera-lime-microsystems-
demon...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/altera-lime-microsystems-demonstrate-
completely-120000955.html)

------
jackgavigan
The British Army's Bowman radio system suffered from similar troubles:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_(communications_system)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_\(communications_system\)#Controversy)

I think credit should be given for the standards-based, open architecture
approach. I believe that is the right approach for a procurement project like
this. The problem appears to be with the manner in which the requirements and
delivery were managed.

It's easy to scoff at such failures but three-person startups and MVPs are a
world apart in terms of the scale, time horizons and practical challenges
faced by military hardware.

It's a pity the armed forces don't make better use of commercial talent when
they're undertaking this kind of procurement project. They may be at the
cutting edge when it comes to the technology they're looking to reply but the
management techniques they're using are about 60 years out of date.

~~~
arethuza
It seems to be a fundamental principle of the British military to have world
class personnel and training and then give them some awful equipment.

~~~
jackgavigan
Builds character! ;-)

------
conover
> "The project's SCA architecture allowed software to manipulate field-
> programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the radio hardware to reconfigure how
> its electronics functioned, exposing those FPGAs as CORBA objects."

That sounds like a recipe for slow torture.

~~~
blackguardx
I've never heard of CORBA but this is how some of the demodulation options on
Agilent (Keysight) spectrum analyzers are implemented. Care was taken to
ensure that new measurement schemes could be loaded in tens of milliseconds,
which makes it appear instantaneous to a person.

~~~
jschwartzi
SOAP was created because CORBA was slow and had interoperability problems.
I'll let that sink in.

------
kzhahou
Here's the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) spec. Knock yourself
out.

[http://jpeojtrs.mil/sca/Documents/SCAv4_1_DRAFT/SCA_4.1_DRAF...](http://jpeojtrs.mil/sca/Documents/SCAv4_1_DRAFT/SCA_4.1_DRAFT_ScaSpecification.pdf)

~~~
nostromo
I love how deeply nested the requirements are.

> Could everyone on the call turn to section 3.1.3.4.1.7.5.1.1 titled "Brief
> Rationale"

~~~
JonathonW
Meh. That one's only 139 pages... that's short and straightforward compared to
some of the military specs I've had the pleasure of dealing with.

------
rsync
How precious and naive to refer to this as a "failure".

$6 billion and counting in the hands of government contractors, lobbyists and
freshly minted industry experts retired out of the service.

Sounds like mission accomplished to me.

------
jmnicolas
I'm not an aviation enthusiast but I heard the F35 (Joint Strike Fighter) is
suffering the same problems as this radio project, and that it will probably
never be usable in war conditions.

It seems to me that we are reaching the limits of what can be done in big
technological projects if we don't get rid of greed and internal politics.

At the top you have big corpos that want to milk the government and at the
bottom you have people that will make decisions that will advance their
careers whatever the consequences for the project.

~~~
hydrogen18
It's a plane that still can't fire its gun while in flight. I'd say the F-35
is a failure. For the cost of the program, we could have just given the
Marines full scale aircraft carriers.

------
Aloha
I question why they couldn't buy COTS P25 radios for tactical communication in
a hardened form factor - I'm sure Motorola (or whomever else) would have
gladly whipped up a extra durable version of an XTS3000 or XTS5000 - P25 by
its nature supports pluggable encryption, so you can use just about anything
with it.

For Lower than 30mhz - there are many COTS solutions using well proven
technology, even supporting digital encrypted audio available.

~~~
rayiner
What do you do when the enemy deploys a jammer? One part of the military's
broader cognitive radio strategy is/was radios that could avoid jamming by
hopping to different parts of the spectrum.

~~~
Aloha
Building a simple durable FHSS system isn't hard either, you could then
effectively send a P25 data stream on top of it - the radio access channel and
data stream are reasonably divorced in P25. Even then, its hard to build an
effective broadband jammer - you simple move to another part in a say ~120MHz
band.

------
slr5555
Article does not mention FlexRadio which is a SDR that gets great reviews from
HAM operators. They have been around for a while.

------
AceJohnny2
(2012)

------
god_bless_texas
"Jitters" is just 2 years of bad memories

------
coldcode
Any significantly large government technology project is indistinguishable
from fantasy.

~~~
jfoutz
Eh, it varies. The apollo program was pretty good. There was some stuff with
networking that seemed to take off a few years ago. The human genome project
was pretty spiffy.

The win rate isn't real good though.

~~~
hga
The Human Genome Project wasn't exactly a marvel of _government_ big science:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Craig_Venter#Human_Genome_Pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Craig_Venter#Human_Genome_Project)

On the other hand, the Manhattan Project beats all of these aside from that
obscure networking stuff, Apollo and the HGP were more taking existing working
stuff and doing it on a more ambitious scale. I've been studying the Manhattan
Project as of late, and it's for example amazing how much the plutonium path
was pushed before they understood really important details about it, like fast
neutron cross section, average number of neutrons from fast neutron fission
(needs to be > 1), how to chemically isolate it after transmutation in a
natural uranium reactor, and how to do that with that fantastically
radioactive irradiated stuff.

Or the faith that they'd be able to develop a good enough membrane for the Oak
Ridge gaseous diffusion plant (high pressure + fiercely corrosive UF6). Or how
they got all this in motion before having good bomb designs, and how the Pu240
contamination of reactor brewed vs. cyclotron created plutonium required
getting the most difficult bomb design to work ... and it worked the first
time! Or how they set to making multiple reactors before they really knew
they'd work, and if the size they'd chosen would work in the face of the
neutron poisons it would likely generate.

And in such short time; study of the people and their methods of management
(e.g. Groves and Oppenheimer) is very worthwhile for many HN readers.

~~~
noir_lord
Any good sources to start from?

~~~
bsder
The interesting part about the Manhattan Project wasn't the funding of the
R&D. It was the fact that we created an _entire industrial infrastructure_ to
pull it off.

Almost 84% of the Manhattan Project funding went to the industrial production
at Oak Ridge and Hanford--more than 80% of all funding went _just to producing
fissionable material_.

Almost 1 in every 250 Americans worked on the Manhattan Project.

This wasn't just _big_. It was _unprecedented_. And it almost _didn 't_ work.
If the atomic bomb had been delayed even a few more months, the war would have
been over.

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-
another...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another-
manhattan-project/)

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/05/17/the-price-of-
the-m...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/05/17/the-price-of-the-
manhattan-project/)

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/11/01/many-people-
worked...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/11/01/many-people-worked-
manhattan-project/)

~~~
hga
_If the atomic bomb had been delayed even a few more months, the war would
have been over._

Very possibly not; Operation Olympic, the invasion of the smaller main island
of Kyushu, was in every mind but McCarther's on hold due to massive
reinforcements and an (underestimated) huge number of kamikazes available.
Those who knew about the bomb were planning on using a number of them for that
invasion if the initial 2-3 demonstrations of it failed, those who didn't were
planning on using chemical weapons (I think in general, but maybe for or also
for Olympic). So what would have happened if the war dragged on to it's
scheduled October 1945 date? We can't know.

But the rest that you say, yeah. Bohr didn't think the project was feasible
without turning a nation into a factory, and upon coming here, noted that was
indeed what we did.

------
oldpond
Corba. LOL.

