Joint Telecommunications Engineer: Consolidating a Common Service Activity in U.S. Central Command
Abstract
Imagine an office building housing four companies (one on each floor), all leasing space from the building's owner. Because the leasers are separate organizations, the owner decides that each company must install their own electrical power grid that cannot be shared with the other tenants. They all comply and install multiple power cables, generators, and switches without collaborating on a single master plan. In the end, each floor has electricity. Nevertheless, the individual projects took much longer and expended four times the resources compared to collaborating on a single plan and generating all the building's power from one source. As far-fetched as this analogy seems, the Department of Defense (DoD) operates in a similar manner in the telecommunications realm. Although intuition would dictate the development of a single infrastructure that meets all tenants' needs, this is not occurring at Joint-use bases in the Central Command's (CENTCOM's) area of responsibility (AOR). Without a single engineering organization transcending Service priorities and integrating requirements for the base's multiple tenants, each branch creates its own telecommunications infrastructure, negating any of their neighbors' plans or resources. As CENTCOM consolidates its bases into fewer, but larger, Joint installations, the current paradigm of creating single-Service infrastructure grows more inefficient and expensive. A centralized DoD-level engineer is needed to coordinate and develop telecommunications infrastructure at CENTCOM's Joint-use fixed-bases to reduce costs, streamline planning, and facilitate standardization.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 20, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA508057
Entities
People
- T. M. Spink
Organizations
- Marine Corps University