The Department of Defense’s Joint Tactical Networking Center has begun working with other DOD agencies and service branches to come up with a framework for assessing future and current communications products.
The framework seeks to establish a forum that would enable vendors to demonstrate their products that meet electronic warfare and resiliency requirements and provide government leaders, service users and program managers with readily available, searchable and trusted data on programs of record and commercial products, the U.S. Army’s acquisition support center said Monday.
JTNC created the resiliency sub working group to help come up with common processes and terminology to design, test and deploy tactical radio systems that can mitigate interception, detection, jamming and geolocation threats in compliance with the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act.
In 2017, the center established a framework to characterize tactical communication platforms and came up with 22 capability areas across five major product categories. Since the adoption of the framework, JTNC has identified more than 200 evaluation goals to help characterize product performance and features.
To date, JTNC has carried out 10 characterization events on tactical satellite communication routers, single-channel handheld commercial radios and other products.