- [electronic music]

- [Narrator] Twenty years after it launched, the Joint Tactical Radio System, or JTRS, is still shaping the way the military buys communications gear. JTRS was supposed to make radios more like PCs, a standardized commodity powered by upgradable, changeable software. Unfortunately, after spending tens of billions of dollars on JTRS and the software to find radio programs that built on its legacy, the savings, and flexibility the DOD hoped to get out of software defined radios has never materialized. And the army now fears that the radios that it built for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not up to the challenge of dealing with an enemy who has tech of their own. In February, DOD issued a new update to the software communications architecture, the software standard JTRS created. The new standard, SCA 4.1, finally drops one of JTRS most [mumbling] legacies, a requirement for the radio code to be written in the common object request broker architecture. CORBA, introduced in the 1990's, was supposed to make it easier for developers to wire together disparate systems. SCA required CORBA because DOD wanted to ensure that radio developers could easily hook into DOD's standard waveforms. But CORBA is complex and messy, especially as it was implemented in SCA, and it increased the cost of development. Despite the allegedly common architecture, some of the Army's part of the JTRS program failed outright, while other parts limped forward using the SCA and JTRS waveforms. The soldier radio waveform and the wide-band networking waveform had been requirements for multiple Army radio programs. But they've been called out by researchers and by soldiers alike for their poor performance. While they use a common architecture, the radios would still require hardware swaps to be changed from one waveform to another. And the radios that used them, including the single-channel rifleman radio, remain extremely expensive. Still, the Army recently awarded a four billion dollar contract for a two-channel handheld radio based on the SRW waveform, despite protests that the Army ignored cheaper and more effective options. The Army is also now looking for a replacement for their backbone field network, the Warfighter Information Network tactical communication system, after canceling an upgrade the Army had already spent six billion dollars to develop.