on my radio

June 28, 2009 in stupid procurement

OK, so there’s the magic army vehicle project that spent more on powerpoint presentations than Drayson managed to spend buying several hundred actual vehicles. FRES, as it is known, started off as the British half of a US project that ended up being the Future Combat System, a pharaonic lashup of vehicles, radios, computers, and individual equipment that was meant to “network enable” everything.

The US end has now been cancelled, which will have nontrivial consequences for the various BAE-owned companies involved, who were probably hoping to use the work there for our job. This would be a great moment to rethink; after all, why would you try to design a large motor vehicle from the radio outwards? The whole point about “network enablement” everywhere else it has been tried is that it doesn’t matter what you attach the mobile phones/PCs/RFID chips/whatever to, so you have great technical flexibility.

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