I'm not surprised that Thales have touted a replacement - they were one of the losing teams when GDUK won the re-let contract in 2001.
...and ORAC, if you think that BOWMAN will carry any air/int related data beyond "contact, wait out", you are, sadly, v mistaken. It has tiny bandwidth, (512kbps shared between a brigade of users on so-called High Capacity Data Radio anyone?)
the bog standard VHF radios have less than 9kbps to spare, the HF radios naturally a lot less.
Environmental factors have added in most of the weight too. For example, the Personal User Data Terminal (PUDT), made so robust that it would survive a drop from 1.2m and temps from -40degC (approx) to +50 meant that it was so heavy and bulky that no one would bother carrying it in the first place - common sense on this point injected by the users was overruled by the IPT - as usual, so what you have is a long way from the palm-top devices everyone was supposed to be pulling from their top pockets...