ITT BEATS RAYTHEON FOR $46.5 MILLION COMMUNICATION SYSTEM.

ITT [IIN] has defeated a bid from Raytheon [RTNA/RTNB] to win a $46.5 million contract award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a prototype situation awareness and communication system for individual soldiers.

The Small Unit Operations/Situation Awareness System (SUO/SAS) is intended to bring together several technologies to provide jamproof communications as well as "assured geolocation information" even when the Global Positioning System is not available, according to the ITT statement.

"What we are building is a soldier system that brings everybody into the tactical internet," said John Kirkwood, an ITT spokesman. Raytheon said it was "disappointed" by the decision.

According to DARPA, the SUO/SAS prototype development program will last until July 2002.

The goal, DARPA said, is to demonstrate the prototype technology and not to develop an actual system for fielding. However, future acquisition systems could benefit from the prototype SUO/SAS work.

"The SUO/SAS is a potential technology that could be used in [other] programs. It will be [a program manager] choice in the future to use whatever technology is applicable to their systems," DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker told Defense Daily. "It would be unusual for a system to transfer directly from DARPA" into an acquisition system.

Kirkwood said a driving force behind the communications capability of the SUO/SAS is the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) architecture.

The JTRS program has recently decided upon an architecture definition proposed by a Raytheon [RTNA-RTNB]-led team (Defense Daily, June 24). According to Kirkwood, SUO/SAS is to be built in conformity with that architecture.

Another program for which SUO/SAS has mission applicability is the Army's Raytheon Land Warrior soldier system.

Kirkwood and Walker said the government and ITT plan to work closely with the Land Warrior project office at Ft. Belvoir, Va., and the JTRS joint program office at Arlington, Va.

The objective for the SUO/SAS is a hand-held multimedia terminal that links individual soldiers into the tactical internet and provides them with key information on their location, the location of friendly forces and the location of enemies.

"We are looking to get to cell phone or palm pilot sized systems," Kirkwood said. "Everything has shrunk...you are doing more now in smaller packages. A lot of that is computer driven" following the advent of digital signal processing (DSP).

DSP allows radios to alternate between communications wave forms, depending upon specific mission needs, without requiring new hardware. With DSP, a radio's wave forms can be changed by adding software alone.