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The Pentagon announced on Friday that it plans to spend $6.1 billion more than the cost of a new Virginia-class attack submarine to modernize the Army command and control radios.
In a contract announcement, the Department of Defense announced that two defense contractors, Thales Defense and Security Inc. of Clarksburg, Maryland. and L3Harris Technologies Inc., of Rochester, New York, said they would compete for the radio modernization program.
The announcement states that the upgrade program for the Army’s Single-Channel Ground and Air Radio System – or SINCGARS – radios is based on the National Security Agency crypto security modernization requirement.
Radio modernization will be completed by 2032.
The military uses more than 570,000 SINCGARS radios mounted on vehicles or carried by troops, providing security for command and control for forces and communication with air and naval forces.
The radios are hardened against the electromagnetic pulse and electronic jamming capabilities produced by a nuclear explosion.
The military’s request for information on SINCGARS said the upgrade would “use, as far as possible, existing radio aids for upgraded platforms.”
The request stated that the upgraded radios would be used to combat “fires and missile defense”.
A congressional Government Accountability Office report last year said the Pentagon had not implemented three different strategies to ensure its communications survived in a conflict involving anticipated Chinese or Russian electronic warfare attacks.
“Disruption of U.S. forces access to the spectrum could put at a military disadvantage, preventing U.S. forces from operating as planned and intended,” the report said.
An earlier GAO report from 2008 said the Pentagon had spent nearly $12 billion on tactical radios over the previous five years, “as much as money spent on producing the Virginia Class submarines ($10.8 billion) in the same period.”
The current cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.5 billion.
“Survival and lethality in combat depend increasingly on superior information and communication capabilities,” the second GAO report said.
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