By Geoff Fein
Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] are completing their prototypes after having spent the past three years working to be one of the two selectees to develop the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise System (CANES) program.
Last week the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego awarded Lockheed Martin a $14.9 million contract and Northrop Grumman a $17.4 million contracts for CANES (Defense Daily, March 5). The two companies will now spend the next 12 to 14 month system, design and development phase on CANES for the Navy to field in DDG-51-class ships, Karen Conti, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for the CANES program, told reporters during a teleconference last week.
The first systems will be delivered in mid to late 2011 followed by initial operational capability in late 2011 or 2012, she added.
“We have a very quick accelerated schedule. We go to PDR and CDR with the Navy, then once approved, finish building the system and go into a system integration test,” Conti said. “Those are probably the key events over the next year.”
Lockheed Martin has a prototype that’s very mature, Conti added. “We will be finishing the last 10 percent of that and converting it into the engineering design model.
“Then we will be putting it through testing and then turn it over to the Navy for operational assessment,” she said. “It’s a very quick schedule. Normally you don’t get through PDR in a few months.”
The Navy had offered time lines to the bidders, but the companies were allowed to deviate from that, Conti noted. “The constraints were to get a finished prototype system and qualify through environmental [qualifications] and then submit all documentation within 14 months.”
While Lockheed Martin has partnered up with a number of other large defense firms–notably General Dynamics [GD], Harris Corp. [HRS], and ViaSat [VSAT]–Conti pointed out the large number of small companies that brought niche capabilities to the team.
“We believe we are bringing focused innovation through small business and through a rapid COTS insertion approach much like ARCI, where we can bring the best technology to the warfighters irrespective of the developer,” she said. “We are going to be the honest broker, bring the best technology in and get it to the warfighter much more quickly through the SPAWAR technology insertion program.”
Northrop Grumman started preparing for this program working on prototyping and piloting with advanced commercial networking and computing technologies and associated software infrastructure to get an understanding of how these systems can be built, Michael Twyman, vice president of Integrated Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Systems, told Defense Daily in an interview last week.
“We partnered with our shipbuilding sector to tie it together so we could understand and bring the best of our expertise together to ensure what it meant to design a new system onboard a ship,” he said. “That’s allowed us to get to the position we are in.”
Not only has Northrop Grumman also built its own prototype, but the company has developed a new business process called Modular Open Systems Approach-Competitive (MOSA-C). Twyman said it allows Northrop Grumman to rapidly integrate commercial technologies and ensure continual competition throughout the lifecycle of the program. The effort will also lead to minimizing total ownership cost for the Navy, he added.
“CANES is really the perfect program for Northrop Grumman to be the prime contractor for,” Twyman said. “It integrates our shipbuilding expertise, our lead, in particularly with the Navy C4ISR expertise, our cyber security expertise and out logistics expertise. That’s why we are so well positioned and that’s why we don’t have such a large team because our corporation can bring all this capability to bear.”
Another key element of Northrop Grumman’s strategy was partnering with IBM [IBM] Global Services, he added.
“We feel like what the customer is looking for is not only the expertise in the DoD domain, like C4ISR, shipbuilding, cyber defense, but also they want to take advantage of best commercial practices and the best commercial techs,” Twyman said. “We partnered with IBM to bring that blend together, and I think that really [set us apart] from the other three teams in that we really had that high commercial content coupled with leading DoD expertise.”