Bowman digital radio for £2.4bn said too heavy

While only remotely related to naval aviation, it pretty much caught my attention. Do I read it correctly? £2.4bn (almost $5bn) development cost!?

MoD’s new £2.4bn radio is too heavy for most soldiers
Michael Evans, Defence Editor

A new radio system for the Armed Forces, developed at a cost of £2.4 billion, is too heavy for the average soldier to carry, a report by MPs has revealed.
Soldiers using the Bowman digital radio have also found that they cannot talk to other communication systems deployed with allies on the battle-field in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bowman, which is beginning to replace the 30-year-old Clansman radio, should have been in service ten years ago, the MPs on the Public Accounts Committee said. However, delays had been caused by substantial technical problems, not helped by a Ministry of Defence decision to hand the contract to the Archer consortium, which was “unable to deliver the required product”.
Transferred to General Dynamics, the Bowman system began entering service in March 2004, but with 27 “provisos” and a number of capabilities removed from the specification. One of those was the ability to communicate secure data to the radio systems of allies to help to reduce the danger of “friendly-fire” attacks by coalition partners in a war. This requirement had been delayed until later in the programme, the MPs said. No lives had been lost because of the delays, the MoD had said.
Although the units now using Bowman had found it significantly better than Clansman, military personnel had complained that it was too heavy, and so complicated that it required a substantial amount of training.
The MPs said that the MoD did not take into account the needs of the Armed Forces. Successive directors of army infantry had emphasised that any increase in the size or weight of the Bowman radio would be unacceptable.
However, the project team developing Bowman failed to obtain the director of infantry’s acceptance of the radio’s size and weight, the MPs said. The MoD chose to give priority to performance, rather than having a user-friendly system.
“The radio produced, along with associated equipment including batteries, aerials, carrying equipment, user terminal and display, proved too heavy for the dismounted infantry,” the committee’s report said.
Edward Leigh, chairman of the committee, said: “The Bowman radio packs, despite the repeated concerns of directors of infantry, weigh a ton and so can’t easily be carried by the infantry in combat.”
MPs said that the MoD had paid an extra £121 million to General Dynamics to ensure that the first phase of the Bowman programme was completed on time.
The MoD’s original plan was to install Bowman in 15,700 land vehicles, 141 naval vessels and 60 helicopters, and to train about 75,000 Service personnel on the system.
However, with all the technical challenges that arose from trying to develop a secure radio system that could not be intercepted by an enemy, the number of platforms for Bowman had had to be reduced.
Now there would be 18 per cent fewer land vehicles converted to Bowman, and 74 per cent fewer helicopters.
No RAF aircraft had yet been given Bowman. But a way had had to be found, at a cost of £25 million, “to allow certain troops on the ground to talk to Apache attack helicopters”, which are currently providing crucial close support for units fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan.
The MoD had concluded that it would be “too difficult to install Bowman itself in Apache at present, but they had not dismissed this possibility for the future,” the committee’s report said.
Summing up the Bowman project, Mr Leigh said that MoD officials had “blithely” agreed to unrealistic timetables and then had “wrung their hands” as delays and costs mounted.