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  October 25, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  Battle over Air Force’s $1,300 coffee cups heats up

  By: Stephen Losey The Air Force, under fire for throwing down $1,280 apiece to replace in-flight reheating cups after their handles break, is pledging to use 3-D printing to get that replacement cost down to 50 cents. But Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is still wondering why these pricey water heaters are necessary in the first place, and plans to keep pushing the Air Force to find cheaper waysto warm up their coffee. The cups, which plug into outlets on cargo planes to reheat liquids such as water or coffee, have a faulty plastic handle that easily breaks when the cups are dropped. And because replacement parts for the cup are no longer made, the Air Force has had to order a whole new cup when the handle breaks. In an Oct. 2 letter to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, Grassley said that 25 replacement cups, each costing roughly $1,280 each, have been bought this year alone, for a total of roughly $32,000. The 60th Aerial Port Squadron at Travis Air Force Base in California spent nearly $56,000 to replace broken cups over the past three years. And the price is rising. Grassley noted that Travis said each cup cost taxpayers $693 in 2016. “Paying nearly $700 for a single cup is bad enough, but it's simply beyond reason to continue to pay ever-increasing prices for something as simple as a coffee cup that is so fragile that it needs to be constantly replaced,” Grassley said. “This latest example of reckless spending of taxpayer dollars gives me no confidence that the Air Force is taking real steps to reduce wasteful spending practices.” In an Oct. 17 letter to Grassley, Wilson said that “it is simply irresponsible to spend thousands of dollars on manufactured parts when we have the technology available to produce them ourselves,” once a supplier either stops producing those parts or goes out of business. Wilson said that in July, she ordered a new Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office to be created to find ways to develop and deliver parts at a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing methods. This office has recently shown it can 3-D print replacement handles for the reheating cup for about 50 cents each. Wilson told Grassley that this cup is specially manufactured to plug into aircraft systems, and because it connects to the aircraft, the replacements need to be certified as airworthy by the FAA. This has driven up the cost of buying 391 of these cups since 2016 to $326,785, Wilson said, or about $836 apiece. The water heaters are used on 59 KC-10s, 52 C-5s, and 222 C-17s, Wilson said. But with planes aging, and the average KC-10 at 34 years old, it's harder and harder to find replacement parts for those aircraft, she said. And the price tag for raw materials for those parts is also increasing, Wilson said, with copper and chrome plating costs have increased 180 percent since 2016. Wilson told Grassley that she and Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein have ordered the new sustainment office to look for items in the procurement process that it can self-produce, or other overpriced items that it can stop buying without hurting the Air Force's mission. Grassley was dissatisfied with Wilson's response, and said he will keep digging. “It leaves me with more questions,” Grassley said. “While I appreciate that the Air Force is working to find innovations that would help save taxpayer dollars, it remains unclear why it cannot find a cheaper alternative to a $1,280 cup. Government officials have the responsibility to use taxpayer dollars efficiently. Too often, that's not the case.” The Air Force also said that Air Mobility Command is no longer buying the heaters for large transport aircraft as they try to find more cost-effective solutions. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22/battle-over-air-forces-1300-coffee-cups-heats-up

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  May 6, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  The Key To All-Domain Warfare Is ‘Predictive Analysis:’ Gen. O’Shaughnessy

  By THERESA HITCHENS on May 05, 2020 at 3:23 PM WASHINGTON: Northern Command head Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy says the key to winning tomorrow's all-domain wars is predicting an adversary's actions — as well as the impacts of US military responses — hours and even days in advance. The capability to perform such “predictive analysis” will be enabled by the US military's Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative for managing high-speed battle across the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains,” he told the Mitchell Institute yesterday evening in a webinar. “We see JADC2 is absolutely core to the way we're gonna defend the homeland,” O'Shaughnessy enthused. “And the part that I think is going to be so incredibly game-changing is the ability for us to really use predictive analysis and inform our decisions going into the future.” “That's, to me, what JADC2 is going to do: it's going to inform our decision-makers, it's going to help them make decisions that, like playing chess, are thinking about two or three moves downstream,” he added. “It's going to give the decision-makers, at the speed of relevance, the ability to make really complex decisions.” NORTHCOM was a key player in the Air Force's first “On Ramp” demonstration in December of technologies being developed under its Advanced Battle Management System effort, which the service sees as a foundation for JADC2. O'Shaughnessy said he is excited that NORTHCOM will be expanding its participation in the next demonstration, now slated for late August or early September having been pushed back from its original April data due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. O'Shaughnessy said JADC2 also will be critical for providing much-needed improvements to domain awareness in the Arctic. The US military has to “put together a bigger ecosystem for sensing” rather than relying on “traditional stovepiped systems” in the High North, he explained. That ecosystem needs to fuse information from as many systems as possible — from submarines patrolling beneath the icy waters to ground-based radar to long-endurance unmanned drones to future sensors based on large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites — which is exactly the goal of JADC2. “We have to continue to work on our ability to see the approaches to our homeland and understand what what is there and be able to react to it,” said O'Shaughnessy, who also is the commander of NORAD. As Breaking D readers know, the US military is turning an increasingly worried eye toward the Arctic where Russia and China both have begun to covet as a future zone of economic wealth as the Earth's climate opens shipping routes and expands access to undersea oil. O'Shaughnessy said he sees three areas where more investment is required to up the US military's game in the Arctic: communications, training, and infrastructure. Communications at northern latitudes is a particular struggle due to the difficulties of laying fiber optic cable in the harsh terrain, and the paucity of satellite coverage in the region. This, he said, is why NORTHCOM is extremely interested in the potential for so-called proliferated LEO satellite constellations. — both those currently being built by commercial firms and any future military networks. As Breaking D readers are well aware, DoD's Space Development Agency is planning a multi-tiered network of satellites in LEO that includes “data transport” satellites to allow faster communications between satellites and air-, land- and sea-based receivers that Director Derek Tournear sees as integral to JADC2. DARPA also is experimenting with proliferated LEO architectures under its Blackjack program, which plans 20 satellites using various buses and payloads to test their capabilities by the end of third-quarter 2022. DARPA late last month selected Lockheed Martin to undertake Phase 1 satellite integration of satellite buses with payloads and the central Pit Boss C2 system under a $5.8 million contract. SEAKR Engineering announced on April 28 that it had been granted a sole source Phase I, Option 2 contract (under a three-phased program plan) to develop a Pit Boss demonstrator, beating out two other teams led, respectively, by BAE and Scientific Systems. “One of the things we find is after you get above about 65 degrees or so north, some of our traditional means of communications really start breaking down,” he said, “and once you get closer to 70, almost all except for our most exquisite communications capability really starts to break down. And so we see a need to relook our ability to communicate in the Arctic” — with proliferated LEO “one of the best approaches.” “If you look at some of the companies out there doing incredible things, we see that as a solution set to allow us to communicate in the Arctic in the relatively near future, and that will be critical,” he added. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/the-key-to-all-domain-warfare-is-predictive-analysis-gen-oshaughnessy

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  January 7, 2019 | International, Naval

  Pentagon Approves Two-Carrier Buy As Fixes Continue to Navy’s Most Expensive Ship

  By PAUL MCLEARY Congress is evaluating the proposal to issue a $24 billion contract for the Navy's next two carriers, as the service looks at months of work to fix ongoing problems with the Ford-class's first ship. WASHINGTON: The Navy's coming request for the 2020 fiscal year is still under wraps, but one important piece of the Navy's future plans appears increasingly certain: the service will commit billions to buy two new Ford-class aircraft carriers under the same contract. While most of that money won't be spent in '20, it's still a tremendous long-term commitment that, advocates say, should save 5 to 10 percentover buying each carrier separately. The Navy says that the long-troubled Ford program has turned a corner, and it is pushing ahead with remaining fixes while planning to save up to $4 billion by buying the next two flattops on a single massive contract. That mega-deal would remove uncertainty for the builder, HII's Newport News Shipbuilding, and help keep production lines humming with no expensive stop-and-start in construction or ramping up and down of supply chains, which spreads across dozens of states. Congress first has to review the plan over the next 30 days before Navy can award the contract. News of the potential buy — which was expected by the end of the year — camefrom Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who put out a statement on New Year's Eve saying he was “thrilled the Navy has decided to pursue a block buy for aircraft carriers, something I've been advocating to save billions in taxpayer dollars and offer more certainty to the Hampton Roads defense community.” Kaine, a longtime proponent of the block buy, also represents the state where the work will be done. “This smart move will save taxpayer dollars and help ensure the shipyards can maintain a skilled workforce to get the job done,” he said. Virginia Congressman Rob Wittman, outgoing chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, said he's “thrilled” about the notification which will allow the Navy “to build to a fleet of 12 aircraft carriers and 355 ships.” Wittman attached an amendment to the FY 2019 DoD appropriations bill calling for the dual buy, which he says “will not only save the taxpayers $4 billion, it provides important certainty to our defense industrial base that build and maintain these ships.” Wittman was the author of the “Securing the Homeland by Increasing our Power on the Seas Act,” which transformed the Navy's goal of 355 ships into official government policy. President Trump signed the bill into law in 2017. Both senators said the contract will keep the ships at or under the construction cap set by Congress of $12.9 billion each. Last May, however, the first ship of the class, USS Gerald R. Ford, blew past that cap by $120 million thanks to a litany of fixes identified by shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries., including replacing propulsion components damaged in a previous failure, extending the repair schedule to 12 months from the original eight, and correcting problems with the ship's eleven Advanced Weapons Elevators. The elevators, used to bring munitions from below deck up top for installation on aircraft, are powered by magnets as opposed to cables, and were supposed to be installed by the ship's delivery date in May 2017, but issues have delayed their completion. Navy spokesman Capt. Danny Hernandez told me that the eleven elevators remain “in varying levels of construction, testing and operations,” and the first one was turned over to the crew in December. The plan is to complete installation and testing of the elevators before the ship's scheduled “sail away date” in July. Hernandez added that “there will be some remaining certification documentation that will be performed for 5 of the 11 elevators after” July, and “a dedicated team is engaged on these efforts and will accelerate this certification work and schedule where feasible.” James Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, promised a Congressional panel in November that the Ford would leave HII's Newport News shipyard with all systems in working order. “I would say of all of the technologies on the CVN 78, of which there were many we proved out on this lead ship, the weapons elevator is the last one that we need to get tied up and work our way through,” Geurts said. “We are making progress,” he said. The second ship of the class, CVN 79, USS John F. Kennedy, is currently under construction. Huntington spokesperson Beci Brenton said in a statement the company is “pleased to have come to an agreement with the Navy regarding a two-ship acquisition approach for CVN 80 and 81, a significant step toward building these ships more affordably. Although there is more work to be done it is important to note that the multi-ship purchase of aircraft carriers helps stabilize the Newport News Shipbuilding workforce, enables the purchase of material in quantity, and permits a fragile supplier base of more than 2,000 in 46 states to phase work more efficiently.” After decades of dominance however, the Ford-class carriers might be the last of the line for US nuclear-powered supercarriers, given the increasing threat being presented by land-based “ship-killer” standoff weapons being fielded by China and Russia. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event last month, Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that optimistically, a carrier strike group could likely knock down 450 incoming missiles, but “that is not enough. You are looking at a threat that is at least 600, and maybe more weapons” that the Chinese can launch from their coast on short notice. Jerry Hendrix, vice president of the Telemus Group, added that the threat could be somewhat mitigated by keeping ships father from shore and putting more drones in the air both as scouts and attack aircraft. The “carrier air wing must increase its range by investing in an unmanned, air combat strike platform,” Hendrix said. Any moves to increase range must first fight for primacy with the navy's other massive investment in hulls, from new aircraft carriers to Columbia-class submarinesto a new frigate. When the 2020 budget comes out next month, we'll likely have a better idea of what the Navy is planning. https://breakingdefense.com/2019/01/navy-going-for-two-carrier-buy-as-value-of-flattops-debated