By Ann Roosevelt
The Pentagon’s top acquisition official wants to find out when the Army and Air Force can merge their unmanned aerial vehicle programs and then accelerate the process.
“It looks to my team like there are benefits,” to merging the two programs, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Logistics and Technology John Young told reporters April 18. “The issue is going to be on what schedule we can achieve that merge and then…I am going to try and drive that merge as fast as possible.”
A meeting scheduled earlier this month to review the plans was cancelled, Young said. “We are going to have that meeting.”
Earlier this month, Brig. Gen. Stephen Mundt, director of Army Aviation in the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-3/5/7, said, “Any time that you can get the efficiencies out of a program that buys in larger quantities the same kind of thing that’s a good thing for the American taxpayer.”
“It’s not magic,” Mundt said at an Army aviation conference press briefing. “I think we got an agreement between the two acquisition objectives, it’s just when do we do that.”
Paul Bogosian, program executive officer (PEO) for Army Aviation, said he and his Air Force PEO counterpart signed a memorandum of understanding, “which ultimately will lead to a single contract with both services buying the same air vehicle, the MP-1C which is our Sky Warrior.”
Sky Warrior is produced by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI), which in 2005 won a $214 million contract for research, development, test and evaluation of the Army’s Extended Range/Multi Purpose UAS (Defense Daily, Aug. 9, 2005). The MQ-1C Sky Warrior is derived from the MQ-1 Predator, also built by GA-ASI.
“The Air Force up to this point and the Army to some degree had been buying earlier versions within the Predator family of air vehicles,” Bogosian said.
The Air Force is looking at the MQ-9 Reaper, a larger version of what the Army is pursuing, “a platform that is not common and will not be common between services,” he said. “But if there is to be a more capable Predator-class air vehicle, it would be a common platform and it will be the MQ-1C.”
The two services have two different programs of record, moving at different speeds, yet there is a natural point of convergence ahead.
“We are asking collectively, both the Army and the Air Force, that we retain component level management of our individual participation in this common effort, until we had a point of convergence, which will be at the full-rate production point, for the Sky Warrior,” Bogosian said. “When we’re at full-rate production, then a contract will exist that will allow this common air vehicle to be purchased by both services.” There is a still a clearly delineated set of requirements the Army will meet with its common air vehicle and the Air Force, in turn, will meet with theirs. That has to do with integrating within the individual services, integrating within our requirements and capabilities.
“The Air Force is primarily ISR related, while the Army is primarily RSTA and support to the ground maneuver commander,” he said. “So our units are control station employed in theater among Combat Aviation Brigades, our responsiveness is measured for the purposes of tactical responsiveness, and we are within Army command and control, and Army battle command networks.”
The Air Force will use the same common air vehicle and its own processes.
So far, the proposal has been vetted and supported by the staff at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), but Young has yet to weigh in.
An associated effort has to do with an OSD task force, Bogosian said. The task force looks at all unmanned systems through an integrated product team (IPT) structure. It addresses various features of unmanned capabilities and the conclusions are brought to a general officer senior steering group.
Mundt said there is an acquisition representative and a requirements representative on that senior steering group. “We go in and adjudicate as a group, but as a group we come to a decision as to what will be done. It’s a good way to help force interoperability.”
It all starts with the common platform, he said, and every opportunity would be exploited for commonality–for example in sensors or ground control stations.
In fully responding to the objectives of the OSD, two mechanisms set up, one is the task force, the other is the executive steering group, chaired by the PEOs from each service.
However, a great deal of care is in order when two services buy a common air frame for different purposes, since they buy at different rates and each makes make budget trades year in and year out that affect procurement.
“What we want to be very careful of is that we did not go to a single budget line that then has the ability to impact the other service and how fast or how slow they were going to acquire the product,” Mundt said. “That’s not new. We do the same thing with the UH-60s when we buy for the Navy–and then there are two separate [contract line item numbers] CLINs for that. So we keep both programs moving and both services can plan what they do. We still get the synergy out of buying common.”