TECHNOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT

The Joint Tactical Radio System, in development since 1999 when I only had a few gray hairs, failed another series of tests last year at Fort Bliss, Texas.

Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, the Defense Department's director of operational test and evaluation, told a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that an April 2009 test of the Rifleman Radio, planned for use by grunts, highlighted deficiencies in reliability, battery life and range.

The JTRS Ground Mobile Radio, planned for use in vehicles, had yet another slip in development testing because of hardware and software problems, Gilmore said.

A test of the wideband version of the Ground Mobile Radio showed it had low throughput and the National Security Agency also identified security issues with it, he said.

Since the Army plans to use these radios in its future highly networked force, maybe it's finally time to give up on the grand JTRS vision to develop a family of software-defined radios for all the services and just buy a pile of plain vanilla radios.

Last year, I hiked in the Bataan Memorial Death March and considered it one of the top 10 events of my life, a day where those old fashioned words comradeship and camaraderie rang true.

This year's march takes place Sunday, March 21, at the Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and individuals can still register for $65 and teams for $275 until Match 14.

After that, the price of entry goes up to $130 for individuals and $550 for teams until March 17, when registration closes.

I'm doing the march again this year with my Marine buddy from The Original Las Vegas in New Mexico, Vince Howell, along with Paul McCloskey, editor of Government Health IT, who is flying in for the event from his home in Chicago.

Please join us.

Apple's iPhone and smart phones built around Google's Android operating system make for yummy application development platforms, but their use in the federal government -- especially the Defense Department -- has been restricted because neither the iPhone nor Android phones have received security accreditation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

But Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army chief information officer, indicated at a press briefing on Wednesday that that situation may soon change. He said Apple and Google are making progress in getting their gizmos certified to the Federal Information Processing (FIPS) 140-2 cryptology standard needed for use on federal networks.

Where does that leave applications under development for the Apps for the Army competition the service kicked off this week, which has both iPhone and Android categories?

Sorenson said those apps can be tested and used outside standard federal networks until they receive a blessing from NIST.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said on Monday it wants individuals and industry to develop military iPhone and Android applications "that can be used today with little or no additional research and development expenses."

The request, posted on FedBizOpps on Tuesday, dovetails with plans that Maj. Gen Keith Walker, director of the Army's Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss, Texas, detailed on Monday, which included testing smart phone apps with 200 soldiers in the Army Evaluation Task Force.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army's chief information officer, also kicked off on Monday his Apps for the Army contest, which seeks some good ideas for mobile and Web apps.

You can't beat this synchronicity. And hopefully Mari Maeda, who runs the DARPA program, will have a confab with Sorenson and Walker.

DARPA said it is looking for mobile apps that can be used on the battlefield, for humanitarian assistance and in disaster recovery efforts.

The Defense agency said it views the use of mobile phone apps as a way to transform the fielding of battlefield systems and software that could result in the rapid development of applications and system enhancements that keep up with the changing demands of warfighters on the battlefield.

If this works, maybe the Defense Department could kill off the decade-old Joint Tactical Radio System project, the primary purpose of which seems to be the consumption of billions of dollars in finding without delivering many working radios.

The Army launched its "Apps for the Army" contest on Monday, which is open to active-duty, Reserve and National Guard personnel, and civilian employees. The service seeks some good Web and mobile software applications that can be used throughout the Army.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army chief information officer, said the purpose of the contest is "to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs."

Anyone interested in competing should apply quickly at Army Knowledge Online because participation is limited to just 100 folks.

The Army will distribute a total of $30,000 in prizes to winners of the contest, which, when you get down to it, is probably less than it would pay a contractor to write a thousand lines of code, let alone an entire application.

I woke up today with what can only be described as a bombardment of e-mails from PR folks who had clients panting to give me their views on the U.S. Strategic Command lifting its ban on thumb drives and other flash media, a notion they picked up from stories in Inside Defense, Wired and Government Computer News, which based its story on the Wired and Inside Defense reports.

But, as it turned out, STRATCOM did not repeal its November 2008 ban. Instead, it decided to permit use of flash media only as a "last resort for operational mission requirements," according to Vice Adm. Carl Mauney, STRATCOM deputy commander.

Navy Cmdr. Steve Curry and Air Force Master Sgt. Kevin Allen at the STRATCOM public affairs shop both deserve kudos for turning around a query I submitted on Thursday and providing me with a factual statement overnight that debunked many assumptions about flash media that flooded my inbox this morning.

As Joe Friday, the famed Los Angeles Police Department detective, said in the 1950s, "Just the facts, ma'am."

Like many of my generation (I turned 66 on Monday), I grew up with the works of J.D. Salinger, not only The Catcher in the Rye, but his short stories in The New Yorker, which I subscribed to for years, including when I was in the Marine Corps.

When Salinger died last month, I tended to agree with the numerous obituaries that portrayed him as an enigmatic figure who frittered away his talent by abandoning the literary life of Manhattan for a reclusive and unproductive existence in Cornish, N.H.

A letter from a Marine, Paul Kane, who serves in the Marine Corps headquarters' public affairs shop, to the Financial Times on Feb. 6 nudged me to a deeper understanding of Salinger - and his service to the nation. In his letter, Kane took sharp exception to the newspaper's obituary on Salinger, which began, "Seldom has a man who wrote so few words attracted so many as J.D. Salinger . . . ." The article pointed out he had not written anything since 1965. (Hapworth 16, 1924, which The New Yorker published in June, 1965, just before I returned home from Vietnam.)

Kane told the FT that "Salinger's writing was informed by his exposure to very real world experiences," such as his Army service, which included a landing on Utah Beach in France on D-Day.

Salinger, Kane wrote, then "fought across Europe in four other campaigns and saw continuous combat action in the Battle of the Bulge. He was among the first soldiers to liberate a German death camp and witness its inhumanity.

"After the war, he stayed in Europe and applied his fluency in German and French doing counter-intelligence work, interrogating prisoners and hunting war criminals."

Taking aim at the FT's core audience, Kane also pointed out, "In a world today where bankers, chief executives and fund managers wince when they hear the term 'personal adversity,' and think of how they once lost 20 percent of their portfolio, Salinger's generation was made of tougher stuff, investing in themselves and taking risks to defend and repair a broken world."

Based on Kane's online biographical information, he's made of tougher stuff, too, and has taken the kind of risks avoided by many of his generation and education, which includes an undergrad degree from the University of Maryland and a fellowship in the International Security Program at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.

Kane joined the Marine Reserves after graduating from Maryland, did a tour in Iraq in 2003 as an enlisted man and returned to active duty at HQMC in 2008.

Semper Fidelis.

The United States has operated in Afghanistan for nine years and based on a FedBizOpps notice last week, at least one part of the Army plans for another five years.

The Rock Island Contracting Center of the Army Contracting Command said it plans to issue next week a request for proposals for Army mail services. The contract will have one base year and five option years, which shows at least one part of the Army has long-range plans in Afghanistan.

I don't know if the folks who deliver mail for the Army have any special insight into top-level strategic thinking or are just good planners. But the notice sure does confirm that careful reading of FedBizOpps is a good way to discern long-range plans at a very low level -- i.e. pretty good open source intelligence.

The Defense and the Veterans Affairs departments offer a wide range of tools to help soldiers and veterans on the brink of suicide, including counseling centers and 800 number help lines.

But people with problems don't fit into tidy boxes, as I found out the day before Christmas when I talked with a friend in the Army's Pentagon press shop. He had just received an e-mail from an Army National Guard Iraq veteran who had found my friend's name in a news article about suicides. The veteran told him she was suicidal. He asked her to call him every day until he found her the help she needed, and last Friday she entered a 90-day treatment program at a VA hospital.

What's the lesson here as we confront increasingly dismal suicide statistics by veterans and active duty troops? Simple, maybe we all have a role to play in helping those we have sent into harms way. That means asking them about combat stress, what they are doing about it, and whether they need help -- and then guiding them to find help.

It also means having a warm and sympathetic heart, which my Army PA friend has, and a realization that suicide prevention is something handled not by a bureaucracy, but people helping each other.

I know they're real busy on the Hill right now, adding verbiage to an already incomprehensible 2,000 page-plus health care bill, but I'm appalled at the sloppy work done on the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill signed by President Obama on Monday.

The final version of the bill was printed in the Congressional Record, which includes the bill's text and what looks like report language that omitted numerous tables on exactly how Congress sliced and diced a $637 billion budget.

Instead of tables that specify the exact budget for, say, a left-handed cyber gimble, the report in the Congressional Record is replete with notations on page after page that say, "Insert graphic folio."

Someone forgot to insert all the graphic folios.

That means the Senate approved expenditure of billions of dollars without any real idea of exactly what was in the Defense bill. And the president compounded the problem by signing it.