Abstract: To meet its objectives of winning the information ware and digitizing the battlefield, the U.S. Army must leverage advances in commercial technology. The Department of Defense has adopted a new approach to acquiring and fielding systems in response to economic realities and the need to incorporate rapidly advancing commercial technology into Army systems. This approach calls for the evaluation of commercial breakthroughs in a laboratory environment followed by evaluation by the user in a warfighting experiment. The most promising products are then transitioned to a program executive officer/project manager for accelerated acquisition and fielding. The U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) Research, Development and Engineering Center Space & Terrestrial Communications Directorate is working with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to study the applicability of personal communications systems and related technologies for Army applications. The results of this cooperative effort were demonstrated in 1995 through the use of the trunked Land Mobile Radio (LMR) during field exercises. This paper will describe the joint CECOM/ARPA programs that sponsor the evaluation of commercial technologies, characteristics of the LMR and the details of its interface with the legacy systems, and current plans for further experimentation/evaluation.!0
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