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.

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."

The seabed wreck of the USS Macon airship, which crashed 75 years ago today off of Point Sur, Calif., 140 miles south of San Francisco, has been added to the National Register of Historical Places, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced.

The wreck of the 785 foot long Macon lies in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which NOAA administers. Paul Michel, the sanctuary's superintendent, said the National Register listing "highlights the importance of protecting the wreck site and its artifacts for further understanding our past."

The Macon represented truly advanced technology for the Navy in 1935. The mammoth dirigible was a flying aircraft carrier, toting around five Sparrowhawk scout biplanes housed in an internal hangar.

The Macon released and released and retrieved the scout planes from a trapeze-like device that hung from its belly.

The planes provided the <em>Macon</em> with what is known in today's parlance as over-the-horizon surveillance. So it's quite synchronistic that yesterday the Army kicked off a procurement for an advanced airship that will use all kind of high-tech gadgets and gizmos to perform the same kind of surveillance.

A truly back to the future moment.

View image of the Macon, courtesy of the Moffet Field Historical Society

The Navy plans to stand up its new cyber outfit, Navy Cyber Forces, at the Joint Expeditionary Base in Little Creek - Fort Story in Virginia on jan. 26. It will ultimately have some 40,000 cyber warriors under its command, I'm told.

The service also plans to launch formally its Fleet Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Md., home of the National Security Agency, three days later.

Navy Cyber Forces will include information warfare and intelligence officers, enlisted intelligence, information technology personnel, cryptology technicians and for some odd reason, meteorologists and oceanographers, as I reportedin October 2009.

Vice Admiral H. Denby Starling II, commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command, will run both NETWARCOM and Cyber Forces until new two-star commanders are tapped to run the organizations.

Vice Admiral Bernard J. "Barry" McCullough will run the Fleet Cyber Command, which is supposed to work with the new Defense Department Cyber Command, also slated to be based at Fort Meade.

That command however has run into a congressional roadblock, which I think resulted from whining by the Homeland Security Department.

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.

A lot of troops will be coming home for the holidays, and the Transportation Security Administration wants them and their families to know it has special airport meet and greet procedures.

Families waiting for service members at the airport don't have to go outside the security area like everyone else, TSA spokesman Greg Soule said. They can get a gate pass from an airline to pass through security so they can meet their uniformed loved one at the gate. The same procedure applies when troops return to duty: obtain an airline pass and then proceed through security to the departure gate.

This is a real gift because it provides troops and their families extra time at the gate if they honor the two-hour check in requirement for international flights.

Every time I fly in and out of the Albuquerque, N.M., airport, I see families of troops waiting patiently outside the security area with signs and balloons. So, because this is a little known twist on standard TSA procedures, it might be a good idea to print the Accommodations for U.S. Military Personnel rules off the TSA Web site before you go to the airport.

TSA, meanwhile, has tried to remove its security manual leaked onto the Web, but many copies still float around, including this one from ABC News.

But, I don't really want to focus on the security manual snafu here, as TSA does deserve kudos for helping out the troops and their families.

I like heartwarming stories at this time of year. It brings out the Jimmy Stewart in me.

I reported last month that the Military Health System plans to evaluate two competing applications for its dental electronic health record to make sure it fields the right system, including one it already sunk $100 million into, my sources close to the MHS Skyline HQ in Falls Church, Va., told me.

The $100 million system, AHLTA Dental, looked real dandy until the Army abruptly halted the roll out in November.

MHS told me that it wanted to evaluate AHLTA Dental, developed by Northrop Grumman Corp. and maintained by SAIC, against the Army's Corporate Dental Application, developed by Harris Corp. MHS Chief Information Office Chuck Campbell said it made sense to examine all options before fielding a dental health record for all three services.

OK, this has a certain logic to it. But with two wars going on and an economy that supposedly is just now climbing out of the pit, does MHS really have the luxury to deep six a system it has sunk $100 million into, only to run around and spend another $100 million on another?

This makes my teeth hurt.

Navy field corpsmen who serve with Marine units probably are the best on-the-scene trauma care specialists in the world, but there's only so much one corpsman can do on the battlefield or during a medevac.

To help out, the Office of Naval Research wants to see if some smart folks can develop a man-packed Automated Critical Care System, which can automatically maintain a critically injured soldier for up to three hours without human intervention.

The system should provide the kind of life support found in a hospital emergency room -- automatically dispensing oxygen and drugs. If a corpsman needs expert guidance in treating casualties, the research office wants the critical care system to be equipped with "decision assist" software to help in providing care to a patient. And the system should have the capability to consult remotely with specialists and retrieve electronic medical records.

Anyone with a good idea for the combat robo-doc needs to submit a proposal to the research office by Jan. 30, 2010.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, so I'm going to doff my grump hat and thank the folks who make this column possible, starting with some really fine military public affairs officers.

These PAOs have a tough job. They need to feed news hungry hordes of ink-stained (or in my case, digit-stained) wretches with accurate facts on a Web-driven deadline schedule -- and in doing so with probably more grace and style than I could muster if the roles were reversed.

In my experience, military PAOs also could teach their colleagues in civilian agencies a lesson or two and are way ahead of most of their counterparts in the private sector.

So, many warm thanks to these folks:

• Jon Anderson, Defense Information Systems Agency
• Terry Jones, Military Health System
• Charlene Reynolds, Military Health System
• Air Force Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, Pentagon press desk
• Army Lt. Col. Marty Downie, Army Pentagon press shop and Iraq
• Steve Davis, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command
• Julie Calohan, Madigan Army Medical Center
• John Donaldson, Naval Network Warfare Command
• Dave Hampton, Fort Bliss, Texas
• Ray Steen, Army Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care
• Vicki Stein, Pentagon Air Force press desk
• Michael Kleiman, Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.
• Lindy Kyzer, Army Online and Social Media Division

And finally, two true friends and superb PAOs who serve as living reminders of what is important: George Wright, in the Army Pentagon public affairs ship, and Navy Capt. Dave Wray, commander of the Joint Public Affairs Support Element of the U.S. Joint Forces Command.

Last, but not least, my thanks go to Katie Roberts, the press secretary at the Veterans Affairs Department, who puts up with me despite the slings and arrows I send her way in this column.

Navy meteorologists and oceanographers might not consider themselves cyber warriors, but they are going to be lumped into a new Navy Information Dominance Corps established by Adm. Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, on Oct. 6.

The new corps, according to a Roughead memo, which a kind soul sent me, will pull most of its personnel from traditional information and intelligence disciplines, including information warfare and intelligence officers, and enlisted intelligence, information technology personnel as well as cryptology technicians. The dominance outfit also will include civilian personnel who work in these fields, Roughhead said.

The corps was created, Roughead said, "to more effectively and collaboratively lead and manage a cadre of officers, enlisted and civilian professionals who possess extensive skills in information-intensive fields.

"This corps of professionals will receive extensive training, education and work experience in information, intelligence, counterintelligence, human-derived information, networks, space and oceanographic disciplines. This corps will develop and deliver dominant information capabilities in support of U.S. Navy, Joint and national warfighting requirements."

In a speech last week, Roughead estimated that the new corps will eventually have 45,000 military and civilian personnel under its command.

That's not all folks. I also have learned the Navy is setting up a Cyber Force which will train and equip all of the above folks, who will ultimately work for the Fleet Cyber Command and the U.S. Cyber Command at Ft. Meade, Md.

Neither the corps nor the Navy Cyber Forces Command have a logo or badge yet, but a Navy source told me the service is working on it.