Capitol Hill Week Ahead. The House and Senate return with a vengeance for a load of defense budget hearings. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford and Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord will all testify on the 2017 defense budget during a House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing. Top leaders from the Navy, Army and the service’s S&T community will also be making the rounds for various authorization and appropriations committee hearings on the budget.
Pulzze Award. The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate has made its first award under a new effort to draw innovative startup companies into the homeland security market, awarding Silicon Valley-based Pulzze Systems $200,000 to demonstrate a prototype in six months of a system that is can detect devices on a network and is scalable. The company responded to S&T’s call in December for solutions than can detect, authenticate and do secure updates of devices on the Internet of Things (IoT). Pulzze will be adapting technology it has developed for commercial applications to try and meet needs of the Department of Homeland Security and critical infrastructure providers. By detecting and authenticating devices on a network, administrators can know whether a device belongs there, Melissa Ho, managing director of S&T’s Silicon Valley Office, tells Defense Daily.
…Next Call. Ho thinks that the next call for offers could be this summer and won’t necessarily be for a specific technical area like the IoT-related call in December. She says that S&T is working with DHS operational components on solutions to meet their mission needs. The startup community has told the SVO that “’we don’t know what DHS does so we don’t know what you need.’ And so this is us trying to say, ‘hey look, this is what we do. This is what we need.’” S&T is working to attract start-up companies and non-traditional contractors by using a more flexible contracting mechanism that streamlines approaches to meet department needs.
…UAS Detection Success. CACI International, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security say that initial testing of the company’s unmanned aircraft system (UAS) detection system showed that SkyTracker “performed as designed” and “successfully identified, detected, and tracked UAS in flight, and precisely located drone ground operators, all without interfering with airport and ground operations.” The primary goal of the ongoing project, which organized under a Pathfinder agreement with the FAA, is to “safely explore procedures and processes for deploying and operating detection technologies in and around commercial airports,” the FAA says.
Ship Maintenance Contracts. The Navy awards BAE Systems, Marine Hydraulics International and General Dynamics NASSCO contracts for maintenance availabilities on surface and amphibious ships. While the initial contract value was not specified, the cumulative value of the contracts amounts to $2.6 billion if all options are exercised. Each contractor will receive one surface ship maintenance contract for a destroyer or cruiser, as well as an amphibious ship maintenance contract for LSD, LPD, LHA and LHD class ships. Work will be performed in Norfolk and is expected to be complete by February 2021.
MV-22 Engines. Rolls-Royce picks up a $118 million contract modification to exercise an option to procure 50 AE1107C engines and associated spares for Marine Corps and Japanese MV-22 Ospreys. The Nay will pay $90 million for 38 engines, and the government of Japan will pay $28 million for 12 engines procured under a Foreign Military Sales contract.
Submarine Control System. Progeny systems gets a $55 million contract for the design, development, testing and delivery of the Payload Control System portion of the AN/BYG-1 Submarine Combat Control System, which will be integrated on Navy new construction and in-service submarines and Royal Australian Navy’s Collins-class submarines. AN/BYG-1 allows submarines to track other boomers and surface ships and target torpedoes and missiles. The contract includes $500,000 from the Royal Australian Navy.
Belgium Cyber Visit. The Chief of Defense of Belgium, General Gérard Van Caelenberge, visits the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Tallinn, Estonia during a visit to the country. Van Caelenberge notes the expertise at the center offers the opportunity to address new cyber challenges more efficiently. This is the first visit by the Belgium defense minister since Belgium announces in late 2015 that the country intends to join the CCDCOE.
Life After JLTV. Lockheed Martin has now thoroughly lost its bid to build the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which brings into question the fate of its 300,000-square-foot plant in Camden, Ark., where it planned to build the trucks. The company has other manufacturing business at the complex and plans to continue operation, a spokesman says. “Lockheed Martin’s Camden Operations continues to be a production center of excellence for the Corporation,” Lockheed Martin tells Defense Daily. “We have recently received new orders extending THAAD and PAC-3 production, and our family of Tactical Missiles products, including HIMARS, TACMS and Guided MLRS, continues to evolve in both domestic and international markets. We have a growing need for manufacturing/production space in Camden.”
Death Spiral. Retired Gen. Gordon Sullivan, former Army chief of staff and current president of the Association of the U.S. Army, released an alarming assessment of the service in a Feb. 16 message published on the association’s website. He worries more about the service than he ever has since donning the uniform, Sullivan says. “ I am more concerned about America’s Army today than any time since I became a soldier in 1955. Our Army has a flat budget and continues to make force structure reductions while facing expanding global operations, a combination that makes the goal of improving combat readiness dangerously out of reach. Instead, the Army faces a death spiral in which it consumes readiness faster than it can be restored, a situation that needs immediate attention from our nation’s political leaders.”
ISIS In Libya. U.S. manned and unmanned war planes struck an Islamic State (ISIL) training camp in Libya, where the group is thought to be setting up a satellite foothold from its main base of operations in Iraq and Syria. The targets were a training camp and a specific militant implicated in the fatal March 18, 2015, attack on a museum in Tunis, Tunisia. Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook says the militant named Noureddine Chouchane, a.k.a. “Sabir,” was a Tunisian national who was an ISIL senior facilitator in Libya associated with the training camp.
… Unnamed Aircraft. Cook would not specify which U.S. aircraft were involved in the strike under a policy of not disclosing platforms types to protect pilots and other personnel. The policy is generally followed with strikes in Iraq and Syria, but details of aircraft involved in that main anti-ISIL air campaign have emerged. Both campaigns are being conducted under the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) approved in 2001 to make way for strikes against al Qaeda.