Over the past 15 years the Army has spent $17 billion on a doomed attempt to build a "universal" radio – that is, a single radio model capable of replacing the many different radio types in everyday use by front-line troops. After struggling for years with escalating size, weight and complexity, in October the Army finally canceled the Ground Mobile Radio, the main version of this so-called Joint Tactical Radio System.

The ill-fated JTRS – or "Jitters," as it's known – isn't the military's most expensive gear-buying faceplant. Not by a long shot. But it is a uniquely damaging one. For while the Army tried and failed to replace many radios with one, combat units have had to make do with outdated systems that have left them vulnerable on the battlefield. Today, as in years past, soldiers have to slow down or even stop in order to deploy their vast, complex arsenal of old-fashioned radios.

Jitters' troubled history, and its implications for the present day, are the subjects of my first feature for the Center for Public Integrity, published in partnership with McClatchy newspapers. I also spoke to NPR's All Things Considered about the program.

Jitters became a formal military requirement in 1997, when the Army announced its intention to develop a "software-programmable and hardware-configurable digital radio system ... to provide increased interoperability, flexibility and adaptability." That requirement spawned a planned decade-long initiative, led by Boeing but including several other big defense contractors. Jitters was projected to cost $30 billion for a quarter-million radios, each replacing no fewer than three old-style radios.

The idea of simpler and therefore more mobile comms was a sound one. It was the extremely high degree of simplification the Army sought that proved to be Jitters' fatal flaw.

Each of the three radios a single Jitters device was meant to replace is tailored for a different purpose, meaning a different combination of antenna, waveform, power, processing and encryption. Blending all those radios into a single system is essentially impossible.

Ace reporter Greg Grant, before he became a speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, parsed this problem in a piece for Defense News that is sadly no longer on-line, but is quoted here. "The desire to use a single antenna for many different wavelengths bumps up against laws of physics, which make it difficult to pull in strong signals across the spectrum," Grant wrote. He also pointed out that an amplifier that works across a wide spectrum "will use much more electrical power than one tuned for a specific frequency band."

In short, the more different capabilities that the Army and Boeing packed into the universal Jitters ground radio, the bigger, more complex and more expensive it became – until it was too bulky and unreliable for combat.

In its relentless drive for conceptual simplicity for its new radio, the Army found itself mired in mechanical complexity. By the time the Army canceled it, the ground radio had tripled in complexity and bulked up to the size of a small refrigerator. "JTRS really bit off more than it could chew," says Lewis Johnston, a vice president at Thales, a major radio-maker.

Jitters began in the overly-optimistic dot-com 1990s, but its roots go much deeper. The universal radio's long history reflects the shifting technological fads, and follies, of several eras.

In 1976, Thomas Rona, an engineer for Boeing who later became a technology adviser to the Reagan administration, penned a study entitled, "Weapons Systems and Information War." It was the first widely-read (in Pentagon circles) publication to conceptualize information and communication as weapons, something now accepted as truth inside the Pentagon.

Rona's concept had implications at every level of warfare, from the lowliest individual soldier to the highest strategic planners. It could have led to a revolution in battlefield communications. Instead, it got monopolized by the strategists, according to John Arquilla, currently an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. "Defense researchers, still steeped in Cold War military doctrine, became deeply attracted to the idea of mounting crippling attacks on adversaries without first having to engage and defeat their sea, air and land forces," Arquilla wrote in a recent article. To them, "information warfare" should focus not on soldier-level comms, but on shutting down entire armies or even countries using computer viruses.

It took a major ground campaign to shift the military's attention to soldiers and radios.

In February 1991, U.S.-led coalition launched its 100-hour ground war to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi army. The coalition strategy hinged on a daring move. The U.S. Army's 18th Airborne Corps, with thousands of vehicles and tens of thousands of soldiers, would drive 100 miles into southern Iraq, then pivot eastward like a boxer swinging with his left arm. The so-called "Left Hook" would trap the Iraqi army between separate coalition forces.

It was a risky strategy. The tank and infantry companies comprising the Left Hook's "fist" would have to be in motion the entire time, with no opportunity to stop and set up all their radios. "It had to all be pre-planned, because we didn't have communications on the move," recalls Mike Nott, a former soldier now overseeing Army radio tests.

The Army got lucky and the Left Hook went off as planned. But Pentagon insiders knew what a disaster it could have been. They realized the Army needed simpler, better radios that would allow units to talk on the move. That was the second point at which the military had the momentum to pursue an improved, more nimble communications system.

But Arquilla, who in the early '90s worked at the California think tank RAND, took the mobile-communications concept a step farther. Revisiting Rona's information-warfare theory, he proposed an entirely new way of thinking about ground warfare that only started with the radios.

Instead of massive, densely-packed armies following carefully-laid, inflexible plans, Arquilla's "cyberwar" force would feature widely-spread, small groups of soldiers equipped with the latest sensors and communications technology. This highly networked army would be capable of instantly reacting to an enemy and hitting him where he's weakest.

Arquilla's vision of a networked military proved irresistible to Army planners. Instead of simply developing improved, slightly simpler, more mobile radios to address the Left Hook problem, they aspired to something far grander: a top-to-bottom transformation of the U.S. Army into Arquilla's cyberwar force. Jitters lay at the heart of this new concept.

To an Army caught up in the excitement of the dot-com era, the vision's technical aspects posed no problem. Planners took it on faith that new technology would overcome any and all real-world obstacles. That faith in cutting-edge technology was just one of several naive assumptions that guided, or misguided, Army investments in the '90s and resulted in a force profoundly ill-prepared for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only now is the military finally giving up on the cyberwar force, just as it earlier abandoned the idea of strategic information warfare. With Jitters mostly in the grave where it belongs, the Army can focus on building a modestly improved radios, ones that might finally get the ground troops talking and moving at the same time.

"Militaries develop sets of assumptions and expectations and then they want to fight wars the way they think they should be fought according to those expectations," explains Dr. John Lynn, a professor of military history at Northwestern University. But as Jitters has proved, reality isn't always compatible with the assumptions.

Photo: Army