Humm
“Damn Sarge, I can’t raise Fire Control for a fire mission!”
“WTF?!?!?!”
“Ya, the transmitter toasted again, someone left it out where the sun got to it- it’s only rated for 101 F!”
“Well, dig out the spare and get it going!”
“No can do, we used up the last spare when Snuffy splashed his coffee on the enclosure.”
“What else we got?”
“Dunno, can we try the SINCGARS and see of we can get the Air Foce C&C bird”
“No good Spud, they don’t use fox mike”
“[deleted]”
“Let me see if I can the C&C bird on hotel fox”
(sound of small fire increasing
“Any station, any station this is.......”
The operative is “working” MIL-SPEC commo gear is mil-spec for a reason. The better question why not bid for a working system and not an R&D effort.
Because at the pace of tech change in the commo industry, by the time a system gets through the T&E stage and ALL the politicians have had their say ot tweak to the program....
It will already be obsolete.
Also, the funny thing about a lot of COTS gear - quite a bit of it actually exceeds corresponding Mil-Spec gear these days because, surprisingly, some of the customers are actually *harder* on their gear than the military is.
Also, if we had done it your way, we would never have had the GBU-28 deployed in time to save lives in Gulf I.
Time to “go through standard channels” and “standard development for MilSpec” for a new GBU = seven years or so.
Time to improvise and use off the shelf components to get a superpenetrator bomb to the war zone - seventeen days.