SAN DIEGO— Industry officials competing for the Navy’s next generation ship-to-ship communication system anticipate service officials to issue a downselect decision to a prime contractor for the program in December.
The downselect decision between Northrop Grumman [NOC] and Lockheed Martin [LMT] for the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) program will also coincide with the system design and development (SDD) milestone also set for December, Dave Wegmann, CANES program manager for Northrop Grumman, said after a June 10 briefing here.
The tactical networks division (PMW160) within the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence at Space and Naval Systems Command (SPAWAR), will oversee both the downselect and SDD milestone.
If successful, the Northrop Grumman team hopes to complete the first installation of their version of CANES aboard a Navy destroyer by fiscal year 2012, Wegmann said. Program officials have already developed and are in the process of testing a prototype version of the system at their San Diego facilities.
Last March, the Navy issued separate development contracts to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to develop CANES for the Navy’s surface fleet. Since then, SPAWAR officials granted the Northrop Grumman-built system critical design review (CDR) approval last month. The Navy has yet to complete its review of the Lockheed Martin variant, Wegmann said.
As both CANES teams work toward that December deadline, a new open system development strategy should give the company an edge during the downselect process, Wegmann said. That strategy, known as the Modular Open Systems Approach–Competitive (MOSA-C) was developed by Northrop Grumman engineers specifically for the CANES competition, according to Wegmann.
While defense industry firms have been heavily integrating commercial off-the-shelf technologies into military systems for decades, “the reality is that the [Pentagon] acquisition community has not reaped the benefits of COTS, from a cost perspective, as much as we think they should be,” he said.
The fact is that once all the modifications needed to make COTS hardware and software battle ready are complete, the additional cost associated with that work nearly negates any cost savings associated with using COTS to begin with, he explained.
“So the combination of those…factors, when the government goes to recompete a contract, it is no longer truly COTS,” he said. “You have now got this proprietary stuff and it gets very difficult to compete.”
By implementing its MOSA-C strategy into the CANES competition, which is COTS –heavy as well as open architecture based, company officials believe it can provide a combat-ready system while retaining cost savings goals.
“We felt CANES was an opportunity to really partner with the government to provide a truly open system, both logically and physically,” he said. “We developed a process to achieve those goals.”
Using the CANES program requirements, developed by the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence within Space and Naval Systems Command (SPAWAR), company officials determined the entire system could be stood up on COTS systems and applications.
That said, Northrop Grumman officials were able to draft “a requirements-based flow down into components and functions…and describe the capabilities that you can trace all the way up [to] the requirements, [and] all way down to a physical component” for CANES hardware and software.
With the specific components identified, company officials can then compete the different pieces of the system among various subcontractors, to drive down cost and provide best value, he said.
Under the MOSA-C approach, Northrop Grumman can then pick the best of breed from those subcontractor offers, and guarantee those components can “plug-and-play” into that overarching, open-source architecture–while ensuring the subcomponents fall in line with Navy specs.