By Geoff Fein

Although the system design and development contract (SDD) for the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system (UAS) was three years late, the award earlier this week to Northrop Grumman [NOC] represents the service gaining real traction in the UAS world, a Navy official said.

The Navy awarded the $1.16 billion cost plus award fee SDD contract Monday, a little less than a year after the three teams–Northrop Grumman, Boeing [BA] and Lockheed Martin [LMT]–submitted their proposals to develop a persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance UAS capability for maritime security.

Northrop Grumman’s proposal is a variant of their RQ-4B Global Hawk UAS.

Although Northrop Grumman has an existing contract to build Global Hawk for the Air Force, the Navy’s effort (the RQ-4N) will be a separate effort because of the unique maritime requirements, William Balderson, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy (research, development and acquisition) for air programs, told reporters during a briefing Monday.

“We have different sensor requirements which drive a different approach to the program,” he said “So we will maintain a separate program office.”

Both the Air Force and Navy Global Hawks, however, will be built at the company’s Moss Point, Miss., facility, he added.

Balderson noted that both the Air Force and Navy will leverage many areas of the Global hawk program as the Navy moves forward.

The RQ-4N incorporates a maritime radar that has full 360-degree coverage around the air vehicle which was an objective requirement and an emphasis area for the Navy going into source selection, Capt. Robert Dishman, program manager for persistent maritime UAS program office, told reporters.

Additionally, the Navy Global Hawk will have an electronically scanned array and an Electro Optical Infrared (EOIR) ball turret in its nose. “That does not exist on the Air Force Global Hawk, so you have a full 360-degree turreted EOIR ball that provides streaming video…a large requirement today,” Dishman said.

The RQ-4N also has electronics support measure (ESM) capability to detect incoming electronic signals from weapons systems, and the Navy is modifying the communications suite that exists on the current Air Force vehicle. That system relies on commercial satellite communications, he added.

“There are some gaps in commercial satellite coverage in the maritime domain, so there are modifications that allow us to leverage off of military satellite communications which has the coverage…of all the oceans,” Dishman explained.

The Navy plans to buy 68 air vehicles at a cost of $55 million per vehicle, (in FY ’07 dollars), Balderson said. “That’s with the sensors and communication suite…the full-up vehicle.”

The figure, however, does not include lifecycle cost, logistics or the ground stations, he added.

Under the SDD contract, the Navy will initially buy three air vehicles. Three more will be purchased for Low Rate Initial Production I. Three of those first six vehicles will remain in the test environment, Dishman said.

“The others will be used for OPEVAL (operational evaluation), and then be rolled into the fleet to support IOC (initial operational capability),” he said.

BAMS will IOC in 2015 and is planned to achieve full operational capability (FOC) in 2019, Balderson said.

Those aircraft will have an service life of 20 years, which will take them out to the 2039 time frame, he added.

The Navy does not yet have a procurement plan for the entire buy of 68 RQ-4N Global Hawks, Balderson noted.

“We are building POM (program objective memorandum) ’10 today which only goes through 2015, which is when we IOC. So we are a couple of POMs away from laying in procurement,” Balderson said. “I don’t think there is a notional procurement profile at this point because it is too early.”

The last year of the POM only gets the Navy into IOC, which is in POM 12, he added. “We will have to begin to lay in a procurement profile and it will probably be POM 14 before we have the full 68 laid into the budget.”

Full operational capability is five persistent orbits worldwide, Dishman said.

“You’d have four air vehicles per site, so there would be about 20 air vehicles distributed equally among five sites worldwide to provide persistent maritime ISR capability,” he said.

Notionally, each numbered fleet commander would get one system, Dishman added. “The intention is that you would achieve that [in] FOC.”

The Navy has not yet determined which five locations will get BAMS, Dishman said. “The basing decision will be made later.”

“The intention is to leverage off the investments the DoD (Department of Defense) has already made in the maritime patrol community,” he said. “We would co-locate the sites with the tactical support centers that exist worldwide today to support maritime patrol operations today and will support MMA (Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft) operations.”

The Navy is looking to debrief Boeing and Lockheed Martin as soon as the service can, Balderson noted.

“That debrief will include not only information with respect to their cost and their technical proposal, and the pros and cons of their proposed offering, but it will also deal with the process, the transparency and the rigor that we followed,” Balderson said.

All three teams were evaluated under four criteria, Balderson said.

  • Technical approach;
  • Experience…relevant experience in this kind of development of air vehicles;
  • Past performance; and
  • Cost…development cost, procurement cost and lifecycle cost.

“We took each proposal under thorough evaluation and assessed each proposal against the criteria and sub-criteria and the next level down criteria for those four main factors,” Balderson said. “Once you’ve done that and come up with…the pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, then you do an evaluation where you go to make your trade-offs and determine, based on that relative importance, what’s in the overall best value for the government.”

All three contractors submitted good proposals and responsive proposals, Balderson noted. “But clearly to us, in the best value evaluation, Northrop Grumman had the best value proposal.”