ITT's radios — SINCGARS and the tactical-communications works

1970s – 2015

The Army's combat net radio, made here: The Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System — SINCGARS — was the standard combat radio of the U.S. Army and allied forces for a generation, and Fort Wayne was its home plant. ITT's Fort Wayne division worked on the program's engineering from the 1970s: Army technical reports of 1978–79 show ITT Aerospace/Optical Division on East Pontiac Street designing a vehicular intercommunication system expressly to interface with the SINCGARS-V radio then under development. In production, the federal contract record names ITT Industries of Fort Wayne as the program's primary contractor, with Fort Wayne as the primary place of performance. In 2007 the Senate approved $148 million for SINCGARS radios "manufactured primarily at ITT Corporation's Fort Wayne facility" in the fiscal 2008 defense appropriation, and Lou Dollive, president and general manager of ITT Aerospace/Communications Division, put the Fort Wayne claim on the record: its radio was "the only SINCGARS radio that exceeds the military's stated operational requirements."

The division around the radio: By the Exelis years the Fort Wayne communications business — Night Vision and Communications Solutions, shared with Roanoke, Virginia — covered secure voice and data communications, battlefield situational awareness and night-vision systems beyond the SINCGARS line itself. The lineage of the works is the lineage of the company: ITT's defense business was spun off as Exelis in October 2011, and Harris Corporation acquired Exelis for $4.75 billion in May 2015, the transaction that carried both the Fort Wayne radio works and the weather-instrument works of the next entry into Harris, and in 2019 into L3Harris. Fort Wayne's radio production itself wound down as the Army's radio modernisation moved to newer systems and other plants; the site's centre of gravity shifted to the space instruments that had shared its roof for forty years.

Sources:

1. Federal Procurement Data System record for the SINCGARS program (GovTribe compilation) — ITT Industries, Inc., Fort Wayne, Indiana, the primary contractor; Fort Wayne the primary place of performance.
2. Senator Evan Bayh, announcement of the fiscal 2008 defense appropriation (2007) — $148 million for SINCGARS radio systems manufactured primarily at ITT's Fort Wayne facility; Lou Dollive's statement for ITT Aerospace/Communications Division.
3. U.S. Army CORADCOM technical reports, 1978–79 (DTIC) — ITT Aerospace/Optical Division, Fort Wayne, designing the vehicular intercommunication system for the SINCGARS-V project manager.
4. Exelis Inc., company record — the October 2011 ITT spin-off; the Night Vision and Communications Solutions business at Fort Wayne and Roanoke; Harris Corporation's $4.75 billion acquisition, completed 29 May 2015.