June 18, 2020 | International, Land
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on June 17, 2020 at 2:43 PM
WASHINGTON: “This is a healthy competition,” the head of the Army Stryker program, Col. Bill Venable, reassured reporters. “My No. 1 mandate as the overall program manager was to protect the competition in this first phase.”
Venable was allaying anxieties yesterday about the five-year-old effort to upgun the infantry transport version of the Stryker, an 8×8 armored vehicle that's become an Army workhorse worldwide since its controversial introduction in 2003. The wheeled Stryker was criticized for having lighter armor than the tracked M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley, although it's far better protected than Humvees. It often struggled over Afghan terrain. But its ability to move rapidly by road – with fewer stops for gas and maintenance than heavy armored vehicles – made it a favorite of US commanders from Iraq to Estonia.
So, while overshadowed by high-tech prototypes from hypersonic missiles to high-speed helicopters to robotic tanks, the Army is doubling down on the proven Stryker in several ways:
General Dynamics urgently built 83 upgunned Strykers to reequip a single Europe-based brigade. Now the Army is holding an open competition for an official Program of Record (POR) to upgrade at least three more brigades with a more refined 30mm turret design – but we've heard some anxiety over whether any other vendor can really unseat the incumbent.
Out of six companies awarded $150,000 design contracts last summer, Venable confirmed that at least two have dropped out. At the current — sensitive — stage of the competition, the program manager said after a quick consultation with his staff, he isn't allowed to disclose how many companies remain and how many have quit.
But Venable did tell reporters that one vendor dropped out because it wasn't making adequate progress to meet the technical requirements, while another decided it didn't have a good enough chance of winning to justify the investment. While the Army gave competitors free Strykers and 30mm guns, they must provide their own turrets, electronics and other components to integrate the weapon and the vehicle into a functional fighting system, to be delivered to the Army for testing by August 10.
“We're not funding their development,” Venable said, “[which is] in some cases millions of dollars they're going to invest.” While he won't second-guess any company's cost-benefit calculus, he's been working with all of them to try to keep them in the running, despite disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have adjusted the evaluation strategy in order to maintain the competition as robust as we can,” he said.
“This isn't the first competitive selection effort that I've run, and I will say we have more [viable competitors] than the incumbent, significantly more than the incumbent,” Venable told reporters. “We're going to present a variety of choices to the source selection authority to evaluate starting on 10 August.”
Once the vehicles arrive in August, the Army will live-fire the 30 mm guns, check out the armor, and conduct a host of other tests. By January, Venable expects to have that data ready for the evaluation board, which aims to announce a winner by the end of April, 2021.
After that, the winning company will start mass production, with the first vehicles scheduled for delivery to a Stryker unit in August or September 2022. That meets the Army's previously announced deadline to start fielding by the end of fiscal '22, Venable said. But the brigade will spend months more taking possession of the vehicles and training on them – a “Rubik's Cube” of logistics and scheduling, Venable said — before it's officially declared the “First Unit Equipped,” probably around March 2023.
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/06/army-rebuffs-anxiety-over-stryker-cannon-competition
October 29, 2023 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
At least two key U.S. lawmakers have not committed to greenlighting the Turkey F-16 sale, citing concerns beyond Sweden's NATO accession.
December 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
United States still the leading country in arms spending and sales, followed by China, driven partly by its military modernisation Six American and three Chinese companies dominate the top 10 makers in Swedish think tank's annual ranking Kristin Huang Three Chinese arms companies have been ranked among the world's top 10 for weapons sales in 2019 in a Stockholm security think tank's annual list of the largest arms manufacturers. The United States was the leading nation in terms of both arms spending and sales of weapons, with China in second place in both respects. In the ranking by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), six US companies and three Chinese firms made up the top 10 along with one from Britain. Aviation Industry Corporation of China, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation and China North Industries Group Corporation were ranked sixth, eighth and ninth respectively in the list of companies. A fourth Chinese arms firm, China South Industries Group Corporation, was ranked 24th among the 25 companies examined in SIPRI's report, released on Monday. Data from SIPRI's arms transfer database showed that aircraft, ships, missiles, armoured vehicles and air defence systems were the four Chinese firms' top revenue generators in 2018 and 2019, totalling nearly US$2.5 billion, with the top three buyers of Chinese weapons being Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand. The combined revenue of the four Chinese companies grew by 4.8 per cent overall between 2018 and 2019, to US$56.7 billion. This was the first time SIPRI had included Chinese companies in its annual ranking, having previously cited a lack of reliable data. The report said overall arms sales by the top 25 companies rose by 8.5 per cent in 2019 to US$361 billion, with the leading five all coming from the United States: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics, with combined arms sales of US$166 billion. Another American firm, L3Harris Technologies, was in 10th place, while Britain's BAE Systems was seventh. The US arms industry accounted for 61 per cent of sales by the world's top 25 manufacturers last year, followed by China in second place with 16 per cent, according to the report. Six western European companies collectively accounted for 18 per cent, while the two Russian companies in the list made up 4 per cent. Zhou Chenming, a military expert in Beijing, said relatively cheap prices and good quality made Chinese weapons competitive in the global arms market. “China has invested huge money in developing cutting-edge weapons for years, and now Chinese weapons have improved their performance and are at reasonable prices which can be accepted by many developing countries,” Zhou said. But Zhou did not expect the growth for Chinese companies to continue at the same rate, partly because of international polarisation driven by China's rivalry with the US. “I think most US allies will continue buying arms from the US, and Russia will keep its own market share, and it will be quite difficult for China to increase its arms export revenue,” he said. Nan Tian, a senior researcher from SIPRI, said Chinese arms companies had benefited from the drive to modernise the country's People's Liberation Army since 2015. China was already viewed by the United States as its strongest competitor in cutting-edge military technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, according to a US Congressional Research Service report released in August. “China and the United States are the two biggest states in terms of global arms spending, with companies cut to size,” Lucie Beraud-Sudreau, director of SIPRI's arms and military expenditure programme, was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. The US has dominated the market for decades, but China's growth “corresponds to the implementation of reforms to modernise the People's Liberation Army”, she said. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3112823/pla-reforms-drive-china-second-place-after-us-global-arms
February 16, 2023 | International, C4ISR
Joint All-Domain Command and Control has "become a buzzword," Rear Adm. Susan BryerJoyner said at the West 2023 conference.