The military wants weapons and equipment with modular, open-systems architectures (MOSA) that allow rapid, regular upgrades but need assurance from industry that each incremental upgrade will not come with its own massive bill.
General and flag officers from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force agree that open architectures are critical to the rapid integration of future technologies but the advantage is lessened if industry isn’t on board with making incremental, evolutionary improvements affordable.
“Every time a standard changes in some modest way, it would very helpful if you would support our goal of evolving systems quickly, to not put an enormous bill on the table every time we ask you to make a modest standards change,” Maj. Gen. David Bassett, ground combat systems program chief, said during Defense Daily’s 2016 Open Architecture Summit in Washington, D.C.
“Most of the time, when one of our large vendors comes back to us, they treat it as if we have changed the very foundation of all our efforts. It is not millions of dollars’ worth of non-recurring engineering to make this moderate standards change. It’s like sliding two pizza boxes underneath the door of a couple engineers and maybe a 12-pack of beer.”
Rear Adm. David Lewis, chief of Space and Naval Warfare Systems (SPAWAR), simply said that if industry is “using an arc welder and cutting steel to make a C4I upgrade, you have failed.” The services are willing to pay a premium for platforms that significantly improve capability over current systems, but not for incremental upgrades to those and legacy systems, he said.
Once the military purchases a base system like a tank or aircraft, it must be able to purchase upgrades at a discounted rate or solicit new bids from companies other than the original manufacturer, said Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force’s chief uniformed weapon buyer.
When the Air Force issues requirements, “We don’t cast it in stone, etch it in stone and it never, ever changes,” Bunch said. “I realize that has contract implications but it’s where we are.”
Bunch told Defense Daily that the F-35 Joint Program office will seek to pry the program’s software architecture loose from Lockheed Martin’s talons in soliciting bids for the aircraft’s Block 4 upgrades. The Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy are at the mercy of Lockheed Martin in development and fielding of the proprietary F-35 software suite, which continues to suffer from malfunctions, delays and cost overruns.
Bunch said the Air Force in the future needs to own the technical baseline of its platforms, if not the intellectual property of how those platforms are built.
“I need to own the technical baseline,” Lewis said. “I don’t need to have all the technology. But I need the technical baseline. I have to know what I need. I need to know where I’m going and I need to be able to evaluate the potential offers, who offers the product that best fits my needs.”
Architecture standards make sense for new platforms but do not always complement efforts to rapidly upgrade legacy vehicles, Bassett said. All new Army ground vehicles soon must adhere to VICTORY – anagram of the laborious Vehicular Integration for Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (C4ISR) / Electronic Warfare (EW) Interoperability standards – but requiring adherence would stifle ongoing rapid modernization programs, he said.
“In some cases we are being pushed so hard for rapid acquisition that if I were to go out and put an RFP (request for proposals) on the street today that said I want you to use this emerging standard, there would be no things available in a short period of time that complied with that standard,” Bassett said.
He gave the example of the effort to rapidly prototype and field a retrofit for the Stryker wheeled vehicle that improves its automotive performance and survivability while mounting a new turret and 30mm cannon atop the hull. General Dynamics [GD] is set to deliver the first such Stryker lethality upgrade variant to the Army within days.
“If I had tried to say I want to use all VICTORY standards everywhere on that system, I would not have been able to go as fast,” Bassett said. “There wasn’t time to pull it apart, put in a bunch of open standards and put it back together again, given the desire for rapid acquisition. You have to go slow, sometimes, up front to be able to go fast later. We have to know when we want to do that and other times when we just want to go fast.”