COTS Electronics

A wide-ranging commercial hardware and software upgrade initiative for the Defense Logistics Agency offers the promise of greater efficiencies, lower cost and new capabilities that may actually help predict and act on customer needs. The upgrade program is replacing several disparate systems with a single requisition and delivery system using commercial hardware and software with established performance records and familiarity among many agency users.

With the help of commercial technology, 3.1 million of the U.S. Defense Department's most valuable assets, its people, will soon experience transformation from a personal-and personnel-perspective. Work has begun on a departmentwide system that will integrate personnel and pay systems and track each warfighter's career from recruitment to retirement. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines will be able to access their individual records and, in some cases, update information from anywhere, including from the battlefield. In addition, combatant commanders will have personnel data literally at their fingertips.

Industry, academia and government organizations are collaborating to build a new information superhighway and put commercial homeland security technologies on the fast track. The goal is to accelerate processes and possibly circumvent some of the roadblocks; these roadblocks are slowing down the delivery of viable security solutions to the government agencies that need them. This approach aims at making innovative technologies commercially available two to three times faster than if they had gone the traditional U.S. Defense Department commercialization route.

A third-party testing and verification regimen allows program managers and directors to save time and money by efficiently integrating commercial systems into mission-critical environments. When it is initiated at the beginning of a program, the practice offers an additional means of detecting faults in systems before they are deployed.

The very situations that call for rapidly deployable military communications gear also mandate commercial equipment for long-term theater operations. A fast, agile, mobile military requires communications equipment that can be quick to move and quick to set up. However, in exchange for this tactical mobility, these equipment components are more vulnerable to the elements. This makes any stay for extended periods hard on the equipment.