Harris [HRS] is a major player as the Army’s Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) 12.2 communication exercise kicks off today at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., a company official said.
Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division (2/1AD) will operate and evaluate equipment the service may buy for brigade combat teams (BCT).
“Harris is providing the majority of the tactical radios that are participating in (NIE) 12.2, and the reason for that is this exercise is a rehearsal, if you will, for the fieldings that are going to start in Capability Set 13, for the first eight BCT–the architecture put in place for them is being rehearsed in 12.2,” Dennis Moran, vice president, Government Business Development, Harris RF Communications, said in an interview.
While Harris equipment was not high density in previous NIEs, in this evaluation, there will be Harris equipment in every battalion and every company except one.
Harris will be running its proprietary ANW2 waveform and the Soldier Radio Waveform in vehicles and dismounted configurations.
NIE 12.2 rolls into a full field evaluation in May and wraps up in early June.
The installation phase for the equipment ended almost three weeks ago, and the NIE is now in the validation phase where soldiers go from vehicle to vehicle to make sure all the radios are working–no matter what company produced it.
Early last week, the evaluation brigade took control of all the vehicles, which went into the motor pool for final checks before the evaluation begins.
Should something go wrong with equipment, there’s a detailed process orchestrated by the Army’s System of Systems Integration Directorate that notifies and allows the vendor to help soldiers troubleshoot the problem in the field, Moran said.
As an evaluation, it is important that all the data be maintained, Moran said.
The biggest thing to come out of the evaluation will be a decision on which SRW applique radios are going to be procured, a process moving forward in parallel with the evaluation, he said.
The service plans to buy some 5,000 of the single-channel vehicle-mounted SRW Applique (Defense Daily, Feb. 22, April 5). The operational need for the radios was confirmed by an earlier NIE.
A smaller number of radios will be fielded as part of Capability Set 13, the first integrated group of network technologies that will be fielded to brigade combat teams starting in 2013.
Harris, General Dynamics [GD], ITT Exelis [XLS] and, potentially, Thales are all highly interested in the outcome.
Moran thinks the procurement will come quickly.
“When they have emerging results that are defendable with data, they’ll move quickly to acquisition,” he said. If the evaluation ends on June 8, Moran said the program office expects the acquisition process to be well under way with contract negotiations going on by the 4th of July.