By Geoff Fein
Last month’s award of the Navy’s Small Tactical Unmanned Aerial System (STUAS) Tier II contract to Insitu took the company from being a provider of service contracts and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology supplier into the realm of prime contractor, according to the company’s CEO.
“This is a relatively new stage for Insitu. In the past, we have been doing service contracts and we’ve been a COTS supplier of new technologies and now we are going to be a prime where we will need to work with the government to deliver a proven system that goes through all the standards that NAVAIR wants us to achieve for these systems,” Steve Sliwa, CEO and president, told reporters during a briefing last week.
Insitu, which is now part of Boeing [BA], beat out several bidders for STUAS, including the team of General Dynamics [GD] and Israel’s Elbit Systems [ESLT], and Raytheon [RTN].
Insitu has been providing its ScanEagle UAS to the Navy and Marine Corps for both ship and land based use. For STUAS, the company will provide its Integrator platform.
“We will be leveraging our many years of experience delivering ISR to warfighters for the U.S. and allies,” Sliwa said. “We will take all the lessons we have learned from ScanEagle, and systems we have delivered, to make sure Integrator sets a new standard going forward.”
One prime benefit of Integrator over Instiu’s previous systems is with the demand to keep pace with the rate that new technologies change Integrator has been designed to be modular, he added.
“We made it so that it should be relatively plug-and-play to integrate new capabilities into the platform and keep the system current as technologies evolve,” Sliwa added.
For the Integrator STUAS effort, Insitu has teamed with Black Ram Engineering Services and Corsair Engineering, which will provide systems engineering capabilities, and Harris [HRS], which will support communications programs and evolution, he said. Unlike ScanEagle, which has limitations on its payload capacity, Integrator will be able to carry both an electro-optical and infrared (IR) camera as well as an IR marker and laser range finder. The UAS will also have a communications link for the Marines, and room to grow.
“We have a fairly large payload bay which is about 40-inches long, 8-inches wide and 7-inches deep, which is totally vacant and available to the end user,” Pete Kunz, chief engineer, Insitu STUAS Program, told reporters.
As the Integrator team comes together to begin working on engineering development models (EDM), the Navy is also looking to conduct an operational assessment in the next six months to determine if the UAS can be deployed to Marines right away.
The potential for early deployment was part of the original request for proposals, Capt. J.R. Brown, STUAS program manager, told Defense Daily last month.
“In the RFP, we did ask [bidders] to propose an early operational capability…that is our goal for the Marine Corps,” he said.
What makes an early deployment possible is that the whole RFP was written so that companies did not develop new platforms, but bid using pre-existing systems, Brown noted.
“The whole idea was for them to take what they have right now,” he said.
In this case, the Navy will take Insitu’s Integrator and see if it can be handed off to Marines quickly, Brown added.
“We are going to do an operational assessment in less than six months and make a decision on whether to procure up to five systems and take them forward for the Marine Corps,” he said.
Brown said the number of systems the Navy would buy was advertised at 57, not including systems for the EDM phase, the operational assessment (planned for FY ’11) or Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) planned for FY ’12.
For LRIP, the option is for two systems, one the Navy will take to a L-class ship to integrate and test and the other for the Marine Corps and Navy Special Warfare,” he said.
“It’s important to note, a system can go land based or ship based and, obviously, I would need a small kit to adapt it for the ship. For the Marine Corps, that is a very important point because they are coming from the sea,” he said.
Both the Navy and Marine Corps’ ScanEagle and Integrator will carry the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for identifying ships. That system will only be on the shipboard variant, Brown noted.
“The communication relay is very important to the Marine Corps and Navy Special Warfare. It’s something ScanEagle, when it has one of those sensors on, doesn’t have the payload capability to carry.”
Heavy fuel was also a desired item, and Brown said Insitu proposed coming out with a heavy fuel engine in its contract.