By Emelie Rutherford
The Navy is expected to award a contract for a system of persistent unmanned maritime surveillance aircraft in the coming weeks, and the program manager predicted a pre-award Pentagon meeting won’t be pushed off again, after recent delays.
On April 8, the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Unmanned Aerial System (BAMS UAS) effort is slated to go before the Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) for approval to enter into the system development and demonstration (SDD) phase, BAMS program manager Capt. Robert Dishman said in an interview last Friday.
“We do have a DAB scheduled for the 8th of April, and we expect a contract award within two weeks of that,” Dishman, program manager for the Navy’s Persistent Maritime Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office, told Defense Daily. “So we’re very excited for the Navy finally getting to the point of being able to award a contract for BAMs after several years of development.”
While the Navy program office does not have the sole say on matter, Dishman said “there are no foreseen obstacles to that DAB happening on the 8th.
“I feel fairly confident that that will happen on the 8th,” he said. The DAB is headed by Pentagon acquisition executive John Young.
The DAB meeting for allowing BAMS to enter into SDD–or milestone B–previously had been scheduled for last October, and has been rescheduled multiple times since then.
The meetings were delayed because the Navy wanted the bidders to make improvements to their proposals, service and industry officials have said.
Northrop Grumman [NOC], Boeing [BA] and a Lockheed Martin [LMT]-General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA ASI) team are competing for the contract, all proposing variants of existing aircraft, the companies have said.
The Navy released the request for proposals for BAMS in February 2007, and proposals were submitted in May 2007.
We “have been doing the due diligence on this part to make sure that we have strict adherence to the source-selection criteria and to make sure that we make the best value determination for the Navy in making the decision,” Dishman said.
The Navy’s BAMS network of unmanned aircraft will be used for long-dwell, all-weather, day-night surveillance of littoral and open-ocean areas to detect, track and identify maritime surface targets.
“What it brings to the warfighter is the idea of persistence in the form of ISR,” Dishman said. “And in order to do that efficiently and effectively it’s going to be integrated within the maritime patrol community.”
Thus, BAMS, the P-8 Poseidon Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft and the future EPX–a planned next-generation spy plane that will replace the EP-3 Aries aircraft–will work together, he said.
“Obviously persistent ISR is in high demand, more demand than we can provide to the COCOMs right now, and BAMS will help to fill that gap and meet that requirement when it’s fielded,” he said.
The BAMS contract will be for one prime contractor to execute system development and demonstration, with a low-rate initial production option.
Australia has been working with the U.S. Navy on BAMS, and Australia in the solicitation has a separately priced option that the offerors were asked to address. The Navy is working with Australian officials to establish a memorandum of understanding to allow Australia to fully participate in a cooperative development program, Dishman said.
Once the U.S. Navy makes a source-selection decision, Australia will decide if it wants to join the SDD effort, he said.
“We fully expect that that will happen, but they will make a decision based on the source-selection decision,” he said.
He added that other international partners may step forward to take part in BAMS.
“Once we make a decision and the Navy starts pursuing a particular platform, I think a lot of the international partners are waiting in the wings to see which direction the U.S. Navy is going to go with the persistent ISR platform, and I think, depending on the results of source selection, will determine which international partners come forward with the most amount of interest,” he said.
Aside from Australia, there also has been interest from Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea, Dishman said.
Whether the countries potentially take part in BAMS as cooperative-development efforts or through Foreign Military Sales arrangements is still to be determined, he said.