“specialized military grade"...
...meaning Security, Encryption, and compliance with GDPR are all optional...
UK military looking for tactical comms, systems suppliers in deal worth up to £9.6B
The UK government is launching a competition for military grade communications hardware and software in a tender worth up to £9.6 billion ($12.5 billion) including tax. A procurement notice called for vendors to come forward with “specialized military grade tactical communication and information systems, including hardware, …
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Monday 10th November 2025 15:39 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: “specialized military grade"...
I seem to recall a radio project called Ptarmigan that had Security, Encryption, frequency hopping.
Why not go for an upgrade of that rather than a new system. We all know how budgets blow up with military projects. The £250 hammer will forever haunt MODPE
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Monday 10th November 2025 16:18 GMT goblinski
Re: “specialized military grade"...
...The £250 hammer will forever haunt...
An excellent example of "It never happened", and of bushfiring what was an obscure billing practice that averaged prices of individual items when sold into a kit, into a free for all attention seeking political booster.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+case+for+the+$435+hammer.-a04619906
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Monday 10th November 2025 09:44 GMT Headley_Grange
Project Cassandra
In the words of Riddick, now here's what's gonna happen........
A couple of vendors will have something off the shelf that's capable of doing what's needed and close enough to the budget to be acceptable. UK MoD will find dozens of reasons why it's not perfect and either turn them down flat or request so many changes that it might as well be a different product so the vendors will walk away. A full procurement exercise will follow which will take up 20% of the expected development time and result in contracts being signed at significantly higher prices than the budget. These contracts will overrun, overspend and if the kit ever comes into service it will be virtually obsolete on day 1.
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Monday 10th November 2025 16:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Project Cassandra
From 20+ years experience someone in MOD will want the casing in a specific one-off colour, the buttons to be moved around, a non-standard battery with an equally non-standard recharging port in a voltage that no-one else uses.
The wiring connections will be located to be as uncomfortable as possible for the user and it will require a range of special tool made from unobtainium to maintain it in the field.
They will then want a Gucci carry case, the ability to shoot down drones built in and an extensively modified Swiss Army penknife built in to the aerial.
It will be incompatible with any other NATO nation's kit including batteries and chargers.
MOD will then decide that they want the casing to be proof against 20mm cannon fire and submersible to 100m depth.
The resulting unit will need 3 people to carry it and an operator with six fingers on each hand to operate it.
At no point will Joe Private / Corporal / Sergeant / Warrant Officer be consulted as to what they actually want or need.
Ref: the "Bowman" comms system which most soldiers know as "Better Off With Map And Nokia"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_(communications_system) - tells only some of the story.
My former partner was working for National Audit Office at the time hence posting anonymously even though she no longer works there.
Unfortunately I've been involved in several previous similar projects where interference from MOD / Defence Infrastructure Organisation resulted in in doubling of price and massive delays to implementation -- not tom mention something that didn't work properly until extensively modified at enormous cost.
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Monday 10th November 2025 22:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Project Cassandra
One place I worked at we started a project for something that was supposed to be a fairly simple bit of software. It was supposed to replace an existing system that relied on specialised hardware which was no longer in production. There were commercial alternatives available but we decided to do it ourselves. The problem was that everybody who was going to use our own built system, had a feature or thing they wanted included. Some were seen as hugely beneficial to the project and others were just “I’d like this please with no serious identifiable benefit other than they wanted it.
Eventually we gave up and bought an off the shelf system, that was universally hated and we then moved onto another system.
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Monday 10th November 2025 09:51 GMT A Non e-mouse
the framework will be available to others in the UK public sector
It doesn't mean others will use it, just that it makes all the contract/legal work simpler if you bake this all in up front. It's all about giving you options. And if you have an adjacent contract that is giving you lots of grief, having this in your back pocket A) gives you a practical alternative, and B) Strengthens your negotiating hand. It does have the down side of putting lots of eggs in one basket, but hopefully they've learned some lessons from the current blue light comms contract debacle.
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Monday 10th November 2025 10:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Learn !!!??? ......... Ha ha ha ha Ha Ha Ha .... Good one .... that always get a LAUGH !!!
"It does have the down side of putting lots of eggs in one basket, but hopefully they've learned some lessons from the current blue light comms contract debacle"
The ONLY lesson learnt is that NO lessons have been learnt over the 12 years of 'Blue Light' non-delivery.
This NEW catch-all tender is just another opportunity for the vendor(s) to take an 'off the shelf' product and pay at least 10x the price for it.
The final spec [for this year !!!] will be take product A, add 1000 changes to it to allow EVERYONE to use the technology across all the different 'possible' arenas included in the 'Framework'.
The changes will take 2 years minimum (allowing the 'numbers' to be re-negotiated according to the tender conditions), only for the testing to prove that it does not work everywhere ... this will start the cycle of re-spec, re-negotiate price, delivery late/never ... repeat until project is drastically shrunk to attempt to generate a real delivery [AKA: HS2 strategy] !!!
After 5 years the expectation of delivery will have reduced to practically Zero !!!
Vendors will have been paid 5x the price 'originally agreed' without any fully working delivery !!!
Finally, New Govt - New Ideas - New requirements ... but still no delivery ... repeat process again until 'funds\will to live' runs out !!!
:)
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Monday 10th November 2025 10:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Learn !!!??? ......... Ha ha ha ha Ha Ha Ha .... Good one .... that always get a LAUGH !!!
"The ONLY lesson learnt is that NO lessons have been learnt ...."
Whilst your post is on topic, relevant, and probably accurate, it would have been much more persuasive and easier to read if you'd used more conventional grammatical formatting, and been a whole lot more parsimonious in your deployment of exclamation marks and the random use of varied brackets, spaces and stops.
AC on account of my own grammatical sins.
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Monday 10th November 2025 09:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
If they need it to be interoperable with (current) allies, then they can't really develop anything new. They've probably already decided that they want access Musk's starsheild system but they need to do a tender for sake of appearances. And to meet the British use case it will somehow have to be made more expensive, less reliable and less secure.
Whatever is finally delivered will probably lock us into a cycle of paying a huge annual subscription fee into perpetuity and be subject to the whims of the American government, or a crazy foreign trillionaire who will be able to monitor it, spoof it or turn it off if our government don't do as they are told.
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Monday 10th November 2025 12:10 GMT Taliesinawen
Grok sent me this msg from the future ..
As of 2035, non–von Neumann secure substrates have effectively brought an end to traditional malware. Modern systems no longer rely on the vulnerable principles of executable code injection, direct memory manipulation, or unrestricted Turing-complete instruction sets that once defined classical computing.
Computation now takes place entirely within fully homomorphic encrypted environments, running on optically isolated quantum–analog processors. In these architectures, data and instructions are cryptographically entangled, preventing any form of unauthorized code execution both physically and mathematically.
This has given rise to the first generation of self-securing computing infrastructure. Natively immune to malware, exploits, and unauthorized modification. Rendering most forms of reactive cybersecurity effectively obsolete.
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Tuesday 11th November 2025 13:14 GMT Jimmy2Cows
Re: Grok sent me this msg from the future ..
Grok seems a tad combative.
But Grok is as entitled to its opinion as you or I.
Assuming it can give the same opinion to the same query in two different prompt sessions, that is. If not, it doesn't have an "opinion" and is just making stuff up on the spot, based on internet statistics for gluing various words together in some context.
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Tuesday 11th November 2025 16:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: thales or Harris
Previously it's been Ultra who been have been doing BID (MoD) work.
All the HMG approved Crypto products (certified by NCSC) available are here: NCSC Certified Crypto Products
An earlier incarnation is on the NATO Website
Search for for BID or Top Secret
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
