William M. Brown - Harris Corp.
Management
Yeah Seth, thanks for that question. Look, OSD CAPE commissioned a study that's been led by this firm called IDA, the Institute for Defense Analyses of the Army communications network and it was something that was required in the 2016 NDAA. And they did a lot of work, they came out and talked to a few different companies, not a lot of time with us, but they scoured the commercial landscape a little bit in the defense base. They came up with the report. It was issued in the spring. The chief then out-briefed that to industry and other players. In that out-brief, he expressed in terms of concerned what he really needs to see is a network to your question, he's looking for, as you would expect, assured communication, assured connectivity, so it has to be secure, it has to be simple and intuitive, able to be operated, implemented, maintained by soldiers in the battlefield, resilient, maneuverable and I think an important element he wanted to make sure it's upgradable, so that he is not hardware constrained. And that's where I think there's a great opportunity for us at Harris because through a commercial model, we invest our own money, we develop the radios on our own nickel, we build headroom into our radio platforms which allows those radios because they are software defined to be upgraded over time to do applications, new waveform, new waveform technologies and that's where we see an opportunity here. What they've decided to do is, is split their analysis into three pieces, sort of the upper tactical tier, the lower tactical tier which is the radios, the manpack, the handheld, and an application. And I think because you'll see two things, one is the budget is growing in 2018, which the Army is supportive of and then importantly the delivery order that came out yesterday, which is encouraging them to move forward on manpack testing early next year, I think there are encouraging signs that the Army sees they can separate the upper and lower tactical tier, they have to connect over time, but they could be separated and we can move forward in the lower tactical tier as they evaluate what they want to do with the upper system, which is effectively WIN-T.