The Latest Word On Trends And Developments In Aerospace And Defense
HASC Honcho. HASC Republicans should know by day’s end tomorrow whom their next ranking member will be. Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calf.), and Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) are vying for the spot. Bartlett has the most seniority of the trio, yet sources say each of his competitors may have a better shot at the coveted spot. A House Republican steering committee is expected to pick the HASC’s top Republican tomorrow. Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.) resigned as the committee’s ranking member last Wednesday, the day after President Obama announced he will nominate McHugh to be the Army secretary.
Number Crunching. The fiscal year 2010 budget hearings aren’t over yet. The SAC-D will host Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen for a session on the Pentagon budget tomorrow morning, and the SASC Airland subcommittee has scheduled a separate hearing later in the day on varied services’ tactical aviation plans. The HASC subcommittees will mark up their versions of the FY ’10 authorization bill this Thursday and Friday, before next week’s full committee markup. The HAC Homeland Security subcommittee scheduled a mark up for the Department of Homeland Security’s appropriations bill today, which will be followed by a full committee markup on Friday.
Man Needed. The Air Force will likely never “end up being a completely unmanned force,” service Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz says. “There are some missions, in my view, that require a man in the cockpit or a woman in the cockpit,” he tells the HAC-D last Wednesday. “For example, a nuclear bomber like the B-2, I’m not sure that I would be comfortable making that an unmanned platform.” Still, he says, the Air Force is expanding the population of unmanned aircraft to 50 orbits by 2011, adding: “That’s our current target, and we’ll see what the demand signal looks like out of (Quadrennial Defense Review) QDR and so on.”
Osprey Readiness. The readiness rates for the Afghanistan-bound MV-22 Osprey are “where we expected they would be at this point in the aircraft’s lifecycle,” Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway tells reporters after a HAC-D hearing last Wednesday. He says the current–and undisclosed–rate is less than the 90 percent level he expects in the future. “It is not what we eventually want it to be,” he says. “We’re working, making every effort to enhance readiness availability, for obvious reasons….If you check the history of virtually every new aircraft, the readiness and availability rates show a steady increase, up to about the 90th percentile or so.” The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been trying to gather data from the Pentagon on the readiness condition of the tiltrotor aircraft.
Rescue and Recovery. The Air Force has begun negotiating termination fees with Boeing for the Combat Search-and-Rescue (CSAR-X) helicopter replacement program. Boeing won the initial contract, estimated to be worth $15 billion, in 2006. But the competition was reopened after losing bidders Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky twice filed protests that were sustained by the GAO. “Boeing is in the process of contract termination with the Air Force for the Combat Search and Rescue contract awarded in 2006 and terminated on May 2, 2009,” a company spokesman confirms last week. “While we do not yet have an estimate of what our anticipated recovery might be, we have commenced the process of assessing our termination costs and have one year to submit a claim.”
First International F-35s. The Defense Department has awarded Lockheed Martin a $2.1 billion contract modification to produce 17 F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters in the third lot of low-rate initial production (LRIP), the company announced last week. The buy also includes the first international orders–two F-35 operational test aircraft for the United Kingdom and one for the Netherlands. The contract adds to a May 2008 award of $197 million to fund LRIP 3 long-lead materials, and to a March 2009 contract modification award of $320 million for tooling and test equipment, also beginning in LRIP 3. Assembly of 14 aircraft in the first two LRIP lots is already under way, with initial F-35 deliveries to the U.S. Air Force scheduled to begin in 2010. Eight development aircraft have entered testing, and the remaining 11 are planned to roll out by year’s end.
3D Radar. The Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin a fixed-price contract for nearly $25 million to develop a prototype for the next-generation 3-Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar (3DELRR). Lockheed Martin was one of two industry teams placed under contract for the technical development of this new land-based radar. The Air Force plans to replace its entire TPS-75 long-range radar inventory with the 3DELRR, which will detect, identify, track and report aircraft and missiles. Following a 20-month Technical Development Phase, the Air Force has said it intends to competitively award one contract for system development in the 2011 timeframe.
Open Up. Because many defense programs take a very long time to develop and technology moves at such a rapid pace, if the services fielded what they originally designed, it would be obsolete by the time it is fielded, says Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) during a teleconference call about VH-71 with reporters last week. “So you have two options: One is to keep adding new technologies, which run [costs] up and extends the life of the program and that’s what happens in just about every one of our programs,” he adds. “The other is to design [VH-71] with a really totally open architecture so that you can introduce new technologies when they are available…where you can rush it into service with technologies that are adequate and then add new technologies when they become available.” Bartlett adds the government is not doing a very good job of defining that interface for totally open architectures, so that personnel can have plug and play for any new technologies that come along. “The result of that is wasting billions and billions of dollars across our military and all of the platforms that are scrapped when the basic frame of the platform is perfectly okay. But what is not okay is some of the high tech electronics…if we could swap those things out, we could save a lot of money and keep everything up to date. That’s a huge challenge, and we are trying to get our arms around that.”
…Good Enough For Now. “We have to say this is good enough to get it out into the field and we’ll make it better when new technologies come around,” Bartlett adds. It will be just a matter of swapping out the old systems and plugging in the new ones, he says. “New technologies are getting lighter rather than heavier so actually the weight of the whole platform [VH-71] ought to go down when you swap out old technology for new technology…because not only are the new technologies not only better, but they are smaller.”
Cyber Security. Jake Olcott, director of the House Homeland Security Committee subcommittee on emerging threats, cybersecurity, and science and technology, tells attendees at last week’s Defense Daily cyber security summit that there has been a lot of discussion on the cyber legislation written by Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), specifically the idea that there could be a “red button” that could be pushed to turn the Internet off. “How do we stop attacks that occur in milliseconds? How do we build the capability to do that?” Olcott believes that was the intent behind the Rockefeller-Snowe bill. “How do we stop these nation-state level attacks from killing our critical infrastructure in a matter of seconds,” he adds. “We have to sell a lot of these ideas to the American people…these issues are very difficult for a lot of policy makers to get their arms around. Imagine doing that for the general public,” Olcott says. “It’s really important for the private sector, the policy makers, to help us craft a better way of [discussing] some of these big picture ideas.”
Come Together. Today, there is no coordinated capability in the United States that is a joint integrated 24/7 operational capability that deals with detection, prevention, mitigation, and response as it relates to cyber events and incidents that may be nationally consequential, Robert Dix, vice president, Government Affairs Critical Infrastructure Protection Juniper Networks, Inc., tells Defense Daily in a recent interview. “Some of us have been calling for such a capability for a period of time. And when the president talked about Conficker today and the need to move away from the ad hoc approaches to dealing with some of these challenges that could be significant and present a threat to national and economic security, then it takes me back to the notion of creating and establishing that joint integrated 24/7 public-private operational capability,” he says.
…Where To Begin? Dix says the nation doesn’t have to start from scratch. “We have had a model…the national coordinating center (NCC) for telecommunications…for quite some period of time,” he adds. The center has both government and private sector subject matter experts embedded, Dix notes. There is also US-CERT, but that is government only, Dix adds. “Part of the recommendation some of us have made, let’s create an integrated watch capability with the NCC and US-CERT, and include appropriate subject matter experts along side our government colleagues to enhance our grip on situational awareness patterns and trends to develop a common operating picture that would allow us to be better at alerts and warnings, intel and analysis and being able to have collective collaboration around any events that may have a national consequence.” Dix believes such a capability could be implemented, at least the first phase of it, fairly quickly. “I believe there is a strong appetite both in the government and private sector to do so.”
Good, Open Shot. NSWC Port Hueneme successfully conducted ESSM engineering tests aboard the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) near San Nicholas Island in the Pacific Ocean May 27, the Navy reports. The tests, which included two single missile scenarios, featured the first fleet firings of the new production configuration of ESSM from the new Open Architecture variant of SSDS on Nimitz. “ESSM is a kinematic upgrade to the RIM-7P Sea Sparrow Missile and provides self-defense fire power against faster, lower, smaller, more maneuverable anti-ship cruise missiles,” says Mike Ryan, NSWC Port Hueneme missile test director. The tests demonstrated that the SSDS and the newly-configured ESSM are properly integrated to engage anti-ship missile threat-representative targets. The tests also validated the new guidance improvement configuration of ESSM, which will increase guidance performance against air and surface threats, increasing the probability of target kill and depth of defense, the Navy adds.
Wanna Own A Ship? The Navy is re-advertising the availability of the ex-Sea Shadow and Hughes Mining Barge (HMB 1) for donation, revising the original requirement to display both ex-Sea Shadow and the HMB 1 as a static museum/memorial, the Navy says. As detailed in a June 2 Federal Register notice, potential receivers can now either display the two vessels as currently configured as a single unit, or display only ex-Sea Shadow as a public museum and reactivate the HMB 1 for commercial use. “We believe that this change in display requirements will make it easier for the Navy to donate the ex-Sea Shadow to an eligible community or non-profit organization,” says Glen Clark, deputy program manager for the Navy’s Inactive Ships Program. Ex-Sea Shadow (IX-529) was built in 1985 to examine the application of stealth technology to naval vessels. The vessel was developed at Lockheed Martin’s Redwood City, Calif., facility inside HMB 1, which functioned as a covered floating garage during construction and testing. HMB 1 was originally developed as part of the CIA’s Project Jennifer, the top-secret effort mounted by Navy to salvage the remains of the Soviet submarine K-129 from the ocean floor. Upon conclusion of Project Jennifer, HMB 1 was mothballed until 1982. Ex-Sea Shadow and HMB 1 were removed from service in 2006. Both vessels are currently located at the Maritime Administration’s National Defense Reserve Fleet in Suisun Bay, Calif., the Navy adds.
…Contact. Interested organizations should submit a letter of intent and executive summary by Aug. 1, 2009. Eligible recipients include: Any State, Commonwealth, or possession of the United States or any municipal corporation or political subdivision thereof; the District of Columbia; or any organization incorporated as a non-profit entity. If more than one acceptable application is received, the Navy will award donation to the best qualified applicant based on a comparative evaluation, the Navy says.
Moving On. Bob Ainsworth is the new U.K. Secretary of State for Defence, appointed Friday, the same day John Hutton resigned. Ainsworth was Minister for the Armed Forces since June 2007. Hutton, appointed in October 2008, did not specify reasons for leaving “front line politics,” though his official statement says he’s: “always had the deepest admiration for our armed forces, and everything they do.” A strong supporter of U.K. involvement in Afghanistan and in preserving the defense budget from large cuts, Hutton was the latest to leave the U.K. labor government, which has seen a flurry of resignations due to the misuse of expenses.
Fix’Em Up. Oshkosh receives $17 million in contract modifications from the Army to continue refurbishing heavy and line haul vehicles at its Kuwaiti facility. The Oshkosh Defense Theater-Provided Equipment Refurbishment (TPER) program will do the work. The TPER program is the result of an urgent requirement to repair tactical vehicles worn from extreme conditions and return them to full mission operability. Vehicles covered by these two contracts include the Palletized Load System (PLS), Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT), and Heavy Equipment Transporter (HET), which are all produced by Oshkosh as part of the Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles (FHTV). Additionally, HET trailers and M915 Line Haul family of vehicles are included in the contract, which were not originally produced by the Oshkosh.
New Chief Scientist. The National Interest Security Company, LLC, (NISC), announces that Les Dreiling, former technical adviser to the CIA National Clandestine Service (NCS), has joined NISC as Chief Scientist of NISC Advanced Information Solutions. Dreiling, who recently retired after 29 years at the CIA, will mainly focus on advanced, next- generation media forensics, cybersecurity, and large-scale analytical visualization initiatives. He will work to create and promulgate a set of software development and software engineering best practices reflecting his experience running successful projects at the CIA.
Milestone Howitzer. The 500th M777A2 Lightweight 155mm howitzer, produced by BAE Systems, is now in the hands of the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Germany. “A significant number of M777A2’s have now been fielded to both the Army and (the Marine Corps), providing significantly greater combat capability to our troops,” Jim Shields, joint program manager for the howitzer, says. The M777A2 uses an advanced digital fire control system to precisely and accurately locate and aim the weapon, and can deliver long-range 155mm artillery fire to support ground troops who are engaging the enemy, Shields says. In Afghanistan, both the United States and Canada are using the guns.
Safety Check. Visitors to Army FCS Technical Field Tests all receive a safety briefing before leaving the BCT Moderrnization building and heading to the test area on White Sands Missile Range, N.M. A briefing for visiting reporters at the end of last month was immediatley put to the test as they left the building’s front door. A bobcat was sighted strolling by the building. Everyone was told to stay away from that side of the building and leave the wild cat alone. A big question was whether the FCS Class 1 UAV being tested would fly over and search the cat out with its advanced sensors? Alas, no. Such a search was not part of the planned test, and would not be done because tests need to be repeatable to build databases.