Airborne tower of Babel

Long article in Aviation Week deploring the lack of a common data link standard between USAF combat aircraft.  Apparently older aircraft like AWACs and F16's were equipped with a datalink system known as Link16.  The newer F22 has a different system called IFDL and the even newer F35 has a system called MADL.  As you might imagine, the various systems cannot talk to each other.  There is a project, hoping for funding, to build a "translator" box that can talk to all three systems and translate between them. 
   Of course, old fogies like myself wonder just why such a datalink is needed.  Is it to allow aircrews to websurf on their way to target? 
   Way back in the day, the F106 fighter had a data link to the SAGE centers.  When it worked, it allowed the ground based SAGE computers to drive the horizontal situation display in the fighter, and set a steering needle to point to point right at the target.  When it was feeling especially clever it could put a bright circle on the fighter's radarscope highlighting the area in which the target was expected to appear. 
   Headquarters ADC loved datalink (dollie they called it) and insisted upon its use on every practice intercept.  When dollie broke, and the aircrew used trusty voice radio to get vector and altitude to target from the ground  controller, HQ would go ballistic and chew out the controller, the aircrew, and avionics maintenance (me) over the "broken dollie sortie". 
   In actual fact, voice radio worked just fine, everyone knew the procedures, and it doesn't take long to say "Vector 034, Angels 18" over the air.
   But HQ ADC was on a dollie kick and we all did a lot of running around  to make them happy.  Only the then new F106 had dollie.  The older F102, F101, and F89 interceptors lacked it, and my controller friends always said the oldest (F89) was the most likely to score a kill.  Dollie didn't make the F106 more effective.