The US Military’s DTCS “Netted Iridium” Program

Early Iridium poster(click to view full) In June 2009, Iridium Government Services in Tempe, AZ received a contract to begin providing Netted Iridium satellite communication system to front line Marines. The program was developed to enable Marines deployed inland to communicate back to their ships, and moved on to Phase 2 as the Distributed Tactical Communications System (DTCS). A number of important improvements are underway, and the program is now in Phase 3. Iridium is still most famous as Motorola’s spectacular global venture failure, but it was bought for pennies on the dollar and has become a thriving low-bandwidth communications provider. Commenting on the problem that the Netted Iridium program was designed to solve, Brigadier General Mark Bowman, of US Central Command J6, said: Iridium satellite(click to view full) “Since Desert Storm, we’ve had an unsatisfied requirement for C2 OTM (command and control on-the-move) and no material solution to date has had such great potential in filling that requirement across such a broad spectrum as Netted Iridium does…In my opinion, Netted Iridium will be the most significant tactical communications improvement developed and fielded during the Global War on Terror.” The Distributed Tactical Communications System (DTCS) is an extension of “Netted […]