Re: Silicon Valley techies suit up Army with sleeker gear

[David Gillon <david.gillon@baesystems.com>]

Jim Rogers wrote:
> 
> Ken Garlington wrote:
> 
> >
> > You may want to read the full article:
> >
> > http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2002/02/07/tech-military.htm
> 
> I did. I find some of the conclusions of the article a bit shaky.
> It is clear that the systems built by Raytheon met the contract
> specifications and failed the needs of the soldiers. This appears
> to be a failure of the Army Project Office in charge of the
> Raytheon contract.

Everything I've seen on Land Warrior over the past several years has
said that the power requirements have been a major bugbear, with the
troops loaded down to an unacceptable degree by the battery pack it
required. It's obvious that the system had to expect several major
design iterations, particularly of hardware, to get down to something
useful and it looks like Raytheon (for whatever reason) threw a tantrum
when asked to take on outside help for the next iteration. It also looks
like a lot of the criticism in the article is of the initial prototypes,
not the final Raytheon standard, so is hardly fair. It may well be the
problem is as much in the project office as the contractor, but I
suspect all that talk about software is a distraction from the real
issues, which looks to have been a major 'throw it away and start again'
hardware redesign which got the weight down to something usable.

> It will be interesting to see how well the COTS approach works in
> severe environments. I remember one project using a COTS liquid
> crystal display that completely froze up during a Bosnian Winter.
> The Army did not test for that problem before deploying the
> system. The solution was the addition of a heater system for the
> liquid crystal display. This small addition had a major impact on
> system electrical requirements, system start up time, and overall
> weight.
> 
> It could be that the Project Office had designed requirements with
> such problems in mind. The resulting system was very heavy and
> consumed too much power. Anyone can build a system that works well
> through California Summers and Winters. How well will the same
> system work at 14000 foot (4000 meter) altitudes at -40 degrees?

I'll be interested to find out just how much EM radiation the Silicon
Valley version is leaking compared to Raytheon's version--the last thing
you want is every soldier on the battlefield radiating a 'here-I-am'
signal for the opposition's ELINT guys to triangulate and pass on to
their artillery.... And IIRC correctly, one of the requirements of Land
Warrior is for the soldier to be able to point his rifle at a target and
the system to automatically calculate the target's position based on the
soldier's current GPS-derived coordinates, rifle attitude and the range
to the target derived from it's laser-rangefinder, then to pass that
info on directly to the artillery or air support. That makes Land
Warrior safety critical and they may have bought themselves future V&V
problems by going with the fast-track non-Ada approach. We've seen in
Afghanistan what can happen if GPS guided weapons are given the wrong
coordinates....

-- 

David Gillon