Col. Steven MacLaird managed the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) Joint Program Office (JPO) from 2000 until his retirement from the U.S. Air Force in 2005. JTRS is one of the DoD’s largest programs, which I include with the “big three” of the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 and Future Combat Systems. Last year, I estimated that over the program’s life, somewhere between $12-$15 billion would be spent on JTRS radios and infrastructure (download available at http://meecc.com/presentations/CIUFO.pdf).

Steven successfully navigated a challenging program, rife with technical, financial, and programmatic obstacles. Today, the JTRS clusters have been renamed and shuffled around, and the program is realigning its timetable for initial deployment over the next 12 months. He has been selected to sit on the board of directors of PrismTech, a COTS supplier of the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) that’s essential to JTRS. I had the privilege of speaking with him last April. Edited excerpts from that conversation follow. – Chris Ciufo