The Navy yesterday said the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) program recently achieved a significant engineering milestone with the completion of Critical Design Reviews (CDR) for the two competing CANES systems being developed by Lockheed Martin [LMT] Mission Systems and Sensors and Northrop Grumman [NOC].
“CDR is a key point in the CANES program as it establishes the design baseline and provides assurances that CANES will meet stated performance requirements within cost and schedule parameters,” said Capt. D.J. LeGoff, program manager for the Tactical Networks Program Office. “We are confidently proceeding into system fabrication, demonstration and test.”
The next step in the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase of the program is completion of a Test Readiness Review, the service said in a statement. This review will ensure that the CANES design is ready to proceed into formal Contractor System Integration Test prior to downselect to a single CANES design, which the Navy said would likely come by December (Defense Daily, June 24).
The review will also assess test objectives, test methods and procedures, and scope of testing while verifying the traceability of testing to program requirements.
The CANES program has recently re-phased its programmatic schedule as a result of the fiscal year 2011 continuing resolution and congressional marks (Defense Daily, June 29). The continuing resolution resulted in an approximate five-month schedule delay in the completion of the EMD phase of the contract.
All major acquisition milestones are still achievable within the approved parameters established by the milestone decision authority in January 2011 and the first CANES installation on a fleet destroyer is planned for late in fiscal year 2012.
CANES is one of several Acquisition Category I programs in the Program Executive Office, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (PEO C4I) portfolio. CANES represents the consolidation and enhancement of five shipboard legacy network programs to provide the common computing environment infrastructure for command, control, intelligence and logistics applications.
Consolidation through CANES will eliminate many legacy, stand-alone networks while providing an adaptable and responsive information technology platform to rapidly meet changing warfighter requirements, the service said. This strategy strengthens the network’s infrastructure, improves security, reduces the existing hardware footprint and decreases total ownership costs. In addition to providing greater capability, CANES is expected to allow sailors to benefit from reduced operations and sustainment workloads as a result of common equipment, training and logistics.