I'm not sure I buy the argument about not making money. Sure there's not a monetary incentive to make the whole system work well together, but that doesn't mean that the military should ignore how failures in their communication infrastructure limit their ability to rapidly respond to threats and coordinate between different forces. Combined arms is a thing a after all, and it sucks when people have to spend time coordinating because targets or enemies show up in some units but not their attached units (or worse show up in different locations on each).
Sure, legacy systems are an issue and compatibility is necessary (especially for systems we need to talk with allies who spends less money upgrading equipment than we do). But that doesn't justify the new things not working together. Is there a reason that we got MADL with the F-35 and IFDL for the F-22 and needed a special program (with unmanned airborne relays) to allow the two to talk? Those are both new systems, there just doesn't seem to be any overall coordination. Heck, to some degree it seems like this inability to interoperate is intentional, as one of the F-35 requirements was that it could receive but not transmit on the existing legacy waveform, Link-16.
I don't mean to be so negative about it. The technology behind modern military radios is incredible and the radios effectively meet the requirements that the military specifies. This allows them to do amazing things. I just think that, particularly for communications, they need to look past the new hotness for something less exciting that both ages better and works well with existing systems.
Sure, legacy systems are an issue and compatibility is necessary (especially for systems we need to talk with allies who spends less money upgrading equipment than we do). But that doesn't justify the new things not working together. Is there a reason that we got MADL with the F-35 and IFDL for the F-22 and needed a special program (with unmanned airborne relays) to allow the two to talk? Those are both new systems, there just doesn't seem to be any overall coordination. Heck, to some degree it seems like this inability to interoperate is intentional, as one of the F-35 requirements was that it could receive but not transmit on the existing legacy waveform, Link-16.
I don't mean to be so negative about it. The technology behind modern military radios is incredible and the radios effectively meet the requirements that the military specifies. This allows them to do amazing things. I just think that, particularly for communications, they need to look past the new hotness for something less exciting that both ages better and works well with existing systems.