WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0A group of 178 House lawmakers signed a letter last month sent to U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to encourage fielding the service’s key tactical communications capability faster.
Congress provided an extra $114 million in the recently passed fiscal 2017 spending bill to fund two additional brigade combat teams with WIN-T Inc. 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The original request asked for funding to field WIN-T to two division headquarters. The total budget for WIN-T in 2017 is now around $406 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To date, the Army has fielded WIN-T Inc. 2 to 13 BCTs and seven division headquarters. The Army plans to field a total of 18 division headquarters and 56 BCTs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Army\u2019s original plan was to furnish well north of 100 units with WIN-T Inc. 2, but budget reductions drove the total fielding number down to 74 units total.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lawmakers note in the letter that the system has been deployed with the 101st Airborne Division, the 10th Mountain Division and in West Africa as part of the response to the Ebola crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And through continued development, WIN-T Inc. 2 has become “smaller, lighter, more capable, and less expensive technology,” they wrote, adding that the system is also now more “resilient” to cyber and electronic warfare attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Complaints of WIN-T’s weight and bulkiness have plagued the program in the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But according to Bill Weiss, General Dynamics\u2019 vice president and general manager of ground systems, WIN-T is moving off the 5-ton trucks on which it used to be and moving onto Humvees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
General Dynamics manufactures WIN-T and has been working with the Army for several years to reconfigure its tactical nodes into a smaller package to fit on Humvees called the Tactical Communications Node-Lite, or TCN-L, which gives the system a much more agile on-the-move capability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
“We have significantly reduced the size, weight and power, and cost by the way, of that critical piece of gear for the system,” Weiss told Defense News in an interview at the C4ISRNET Conference in Arlington, Virginia, on May 3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And for WIN-T systems that need to be embedded in combat vehicles like Stryker platforms, “we\u2019ve generally got about 40 percent of volume as well as cost out of the kit,” which also means two seats in the vehicle have been restored, Weiss said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The TCN-L capability has been fielded to units at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and those assets will undergo an operational test at the Network Integration Evaluation at Fort Bliss, Texas, in July.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We expect that most, if not all, future tactical communications nodes that are put on order will be light versions,” Weiss said. “In fact, the order that we currently have is for the light versions.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A group of 178 House lawmakers signed a letter last month sent to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to encourage fielding the service\u2019s key tactical communications capability faster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":55077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"10":{"categories":["land"],"primary_category":"land"}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3286],"class_list":["post-17740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"BCX54ERWCZFC7A7PLVETYHUSMQ","arc_canonical_url":"\/2017\/05\/11\/congress-proposes-faster-fielding-of-army-s-tactical-comms\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n