By Geoff Fein

Between the ongoing debate over whether to build more DDG-1000s, beyond the two under contract, or build more DDG-51s, and the recent installation of the open architecture configuration onto the guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill (CG-52), Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] Aegis combat system has been drawing quite a bit of attention as of late.

Some of the focus has been good and some of it wrong, company officials said in a recent interview with Defense Daily.

On the plus side, company officials said Aegis is delivering a portable, scalable, and reusable system, moving over the years from military specifications equipment to a weapon system that is now independent of hardware.

“On the reusability and scalability fronts, we’ve actually been able to take those systems and scale them to different track sizes, new sensors, new mission areas. [We’ve] been able to plug in systems built by others,” Norm Malinak, vice president for technical operations, told Defense Daily.

“We’ve been able to take our interfaces and basically give them to non-practitioners and allow them to innovate and bring capability in. It’s permitted us to bring in capabilities from other systems, other weapon systems, and sensors and bring them into our systems.”

For example, Malinak points to the Aegis command and control (C2) system that has been deployed on other non-Aegis assets, such as the Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter (NSC).

“We currently have our C2 systems on LCS-1, it’s on NSC, we’ve actually even put it at the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) to basically handle doing land based testing at White Sands,” Malinak said.

“We have our Aegis fire control system at [WSMR]. One of the reasons it was put out there is because of the SM-6 integration program that we are currently working on,” said Orlando Carvahlo, vice president and general manager for surface and sea based missile defense systems.

One of the missions for Raytheon‘s [RTN] Standard Missile (SM)-6 is going to be naval integrated fire control, Carvahlo said. Putting the Aegis fire control system in support of WMSR was specifically to create a test bed to enable SM-6 integration and support the longer term naval integrated fire control (NIFC) counter air development program, he added.

“In the history of the Aegis program this is the first time we have an Aegis test bed that is a reuse of the actual tactical Aegis software that we are putting on the ships,” Carvahlo noted. “Prior to this test bed, what [WSMR] would use to support Aegis test firings etc., was a representation of Aegis that was accurate at the algorithm level, but it wasn’t the actual tactical software. So we would get all the benefit of a test because of the fact that the algorithms being used were identical to what we were using in Aegis, but it was not the actual tactical software.”

Even though Lockheed Martin has have been doing WSMR testing going back to the very beginning of the Aegis program, it was the move toward OA that has enabled the company to have that kind of fidelity in the test bed at WSMR, Carvahlo said.

“Now you get to OA and the COTS computing and everything else, and it becomes extremely affordable to pick that up and put that out there and install it as a test bed,” Carvahlo said. “Because it is very easy to adapt it for the various different sensors and the things they have at [WSMR], and to create that configuration. Because of that affordability, you are now out here actually doing tests with the real tactical software as opposed to just a representation of it.”

Carvahlo also noted that there has been a certain amount of discussion about Aegis being a proprietary system.

Nothing could be further from the truth, he said.

“For the record, Aegis has never been, is not today and will never be in the future, proprietary. It was important to clarify that,” he said. “People associate open and closed architectures with proprietary and non-proprietary, and in reality, whether something is proprietary or not is separate and apart from whether something is closed or open by the definitions we use today for architectures.”

Carvahlo points to systems used back in the beginnings of the Aegis program–the UYK-7, UYK-43 type of computing environments, point interfaces and those types of things, he said. “All those types of things, by today’s definitions, those systems were closed systems.”

But Carvahlo noted that all that work that was done on Aegis going back to the very beginning of the program was all done with the Navy having full government purpose rights.

“None of that product, that was developed from the beginning of this program throughout this program and into the future of this program, none of this product has ever been developed in a proprietary manner. It’s owned by the government and it’s not proprietary,” he said. “The fact that in the process we have evolved from what was a closed architecture to what is today an open architecture, is separate and apart from this question about proprietary and non-proprietary.”