Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - July 1, 2019

On the same subject

• 

  January 4, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  Pakistan to buy Chinese FC-31 fighter jets, says air chief

  Pakistan is set to acquire the Chinese FC-31 Gyrfalcon fifth-generation fighter, according to head of the Pakistan Air Force.

• 

  April 23, 2020 | International, Land

  Do Soldiers Dream Of Electric Trucks?

  While Tesla won't be building heavy tanks, the Army Futures & Concepts Center says moving lighter, wheeled vehicles from fossil fuel to electric drive could streamline supply lines – and save lives. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: In wartime, the cost of gas is often partly paid in blood. Hundreds of US troops have died and thousands have been wounded fighting to move supplies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Against an adversary with long-range missiles like Russia, the carnage among convoys would be worse. The bulkiest cargo and often the most needed (along with bullets and bombs): fuel. If you could dramatically reduce the amount of gas the US military consumes, you could reduce the logistics burden a great deal. Fewer fuel convoys on the road would save money in peacetime and lives in wartime. But how do you get there? With electric vehicles, answers Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, head of the Futures & Concepts Center at Army Futures Command. “Tesla is building large [semitrailer] trucks,” he told reporters in a wide-ranging roundtable yesterday. “Battery costs have gone down precipitously over the last 10 years,” he said, recharge times have dropped, and ranges has grown longer. What's more, electric motors have many fewer moving parts than internal combustion ones, making them potentially easier to maintain and repair. “The entire automotive industry is migrating towards this idea of electrification,” he said. “We're already, I would argue, late to the need.” Not only do electric motors not need gas, Wesley said. They also can generate power for high-tech combat systems – sensors, command networks, even laser weapons and robots – that currently require dedicated auxiliary power units or diesel generators that burn even more fuel. Imagine a squad of soldiers recharging their jamming-resistant radios and IVAS targeting goggles in their vehicle between missions, or a mobile command post running its servers off the same truck that carried them. The Hard Part Electric motors can even help frontline forces sneak up on the enemy, he said. They run much quieter and cooler than internal combustion engines, making it much harder to hear electric vehicles approaching or spot them on infrared. The Army's cancelled Future Combat System would have included a family of hybrid-electric vehicles. Even the ambitious FCS program didn't try to build all-electric tanks. Now, Wesley isn't talking about electric tanks, just trucks. “Right now, we don't see the technology, on the near-term horizon, being able to power heavy vehicles,” he said. That's because even the latest batteries still provide less power per pound than fossil fuel. (Engineers call this “energy density”). So, for example, the replacement for the Reagan-era M2 Bradley troop carrier – likely to weigh about 50 tons — is going to need an internal combustion engine or at least a hybrid diesel-electric one. But the vast majority of Army vehicles are wheeled, from supply trucks to the JLTV, an armored 4×4 replacing many Humvees: That weight class, up to 10 or even 15 tons, can move on electrical power alone. Wesley had planned to kick off his electrification drive with a panel discussion at last month's AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Ala. (I would've been the moderator). But that conference got canceled due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, so he's rolling it out to the press instead. His staff is working on an in-depth internal study for his boss, the four-star chief of Army Futures Command, Gen. John “Mike” Murray. There are a lot of thorny problems to work out, Wesley acknowledges. The big one: Where do you generate the electricity in the first place? In a war zone, you can't just pull into your garage and plug into a charger overnight. “We can't just go buy an electric vehicle. We have to look at the supply chains,” he said. One option the Army's considering, he said, is miniaturized, mobile nuclear power plants – something the Pentagon is now researching and says should be safe even after a direct hit. While Wesley didn't discuss other alternatives, the fallback option is presumably burning some fossil fuel to run a generator, which then charges batteries or capacitators. “We're writing a draft white paper proposal for Gen. Murray and the Army to look at this holistically,” Wesley said, “[and] we are building up a proposal that we will publish here in early summer that is going to describe a recommendation for how the Army transitions toward the future.” “My expectation is that it's about a 10-year horizon right now to do something like that which I just described,” he said. “If that's true, then we have to have a transition plan for the Army to move in this direction.” Extended excerpts from Lt. Gen. Wesley's roundtable with reporters, edited for length & clarity, follow below. He also discussed how Army units have to evolve for future multi-domain operations: more on that later this week. Q: The Army's been interested in electric vehicles and alternative fuel for some time. What's new here? A: We were going to have a panel on this to kick off [at AUSA Global Force]: a broader look at electrification and alternative fuel sources for the Army. We're writing a draft white paper proposal for Gen. Murray and the Army to look at this holistically. And we are building up a proposal that we will publish here in early summer that is going to describe a recommendation for how the Army transitions toward the future. Tesla is building large [semitrailer] trucks. UPS and FedEx are starting to buy these vehicles to learn how they move into that area. The entire automotive industry is migrating towards this idea of electrification, and there's a lot of good reasons for it. And as the entire industry goes to electrification, the supply of internal combustion engine parts is going to go down and therefore prices are going to go up. Battery costs have gone down precipitously over the last 10 years. Recharge times and range [have improved]. The trajectory that all of that is on, in the next two years, it'll be far more efficient to have an electric vehicle than internal combustion, so we're already, I would argue, late to the need. Q: What's slowed the Army down? A: The problem is bigger for the Army than it is for any corporation, industry, or family, because you have to have a means to move the energy and generate the energy at the right time and place. It's not that the Army is slow to move on this, we just have a bigger problem to solve, and I would argue that's what we have to do now. The issue is not whether we can build hybrid vehicles. That's easy. In fact, any one of us could go out and — as long as there's not a waiting list — buy a Tesla tomorrow and sell our Chevy Suburban. You plug it in at home, we've got the infrastructure. You don't have to change your supply chain or your way of life when you buy a Tesla. The Army, we can't just go buy an electric vehicle, we have to look at the supply chains. How are you going to have [electricity] sources for charging? If technology tells us that safe, mobile nuclear power plants, for example, something that goes on the back of a truck, are realistic, and if you add capacitor technology [to store the electricity], you can distribute that forward in varying ways. Q: Are we talking about electric-drive tanks here? Or just trucks? A: The Army hasn't said, we're going all-electric. Right now, we don't see the technology, on the near-term horizon, being able to power heavy vehicles, it's just too much of a drain on the battery. The Next Generation Combat Vehicle, it's still going to require you to have an internal combustion engine. But if we could reduce the fossil fuel consumption by transitioning our wheeled vehicles [to electric motors], you can reduce the volume of travel on your supply route to only [move] fossil fuels for the much heavier vehicles. Q: Could you make an electric version of something like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle? A: The technology to power a vehicle of that weight exists today. We're talking [up to] about 10-15 tons; that technology exists now. If it exists now, you can anticipate that we're going to have to transition some of this in the next 10 years. And if that's true, then we have to have a transition plan for the Army to move in this direction. It should require a very detailed strategy and step by step pathways. It should include starting to build in hooks into our requirements [for new designs]. And then there are other experimentation efforts where we can learn about enterprise-level supply chain decisions. (Eds. note: We ask all fans of Phillip K. Dick to forgive us for the headline). https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/do-soldiers-dream-of-electric-trucks

• 

  March 18, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  FVL: Bell, Sikorsky-Boeing Split $181M To Finalize FLRAA Designs

  After two years of intensive digital engineering, in 2020 the Army will pick either a Bell tiltrotor or a Sikorsky-Boeing compound helicopter to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: A Sikorsky-Boeing team won a $97 million award to refine their SB>1 Defiant high-speed helicopter over the next two years, the Army announced today, while Bell Textron won $84 million for its V-280 Valor tiltrotor. The two designs are vying to replace the Reagan-era UH-60 Black Hawk, the Army's workhorse air assault and medevac transport. The difference in amounts purely reflects the different approaches the two teams proposed for what's called Competitive Demonstration & Risk Reduction, Army officials told reporters. It doesn't imply either team has an advantage going into 2022, when the service will choose one design as its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), with the first operational units flying in 2030. FLRAA is just part of the flying “ecosystem” of manned and unmanned aircraft that the Army is developing under its Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team, which in turn is just one of eight CFTs working on 31 high-priority projects. But FLRAA has been unusually visible, literally, because – as part of a program called the Joint Multi-Role Tech Demonstration – both companies have prototype aircraft actually flying. As we've reported previously, the SB>1 Defiant started flight tests a year later than the V-280 Valor, but Army officials reasserted today they'll have enough test data on both aircraft. “The flight envelope continues to expand for Sikorsky-Boeing, so they're flying a bit more aggressively now than the V-280,” said Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, head of the FVL CFT. “Towards the end of this fiscal year, maybe August, we're going to see very comparable data on both.” “Flight time is only one of the inputs that goes into a multivariable non-linear calculation,” added the Army's aviation acquisition chief, Program Executive Officer Pat Mason. Not all flight hours are equally valuable, he told reporters, and flight hours alone are not enough. “[It's] what you did in flight, what you've done in modeling and simulation, how you're administering model design, how you [set up] your digital engineering development environment, what you've done in your component test, lab test, SIL [System Integration Lab] test. Taking the totality of those elements into consideration, what we see is a good competition between two vendors.” So while the two aircraft will continue flying to provide more performance data, the lion's share of the work over the next two years will be digital, explained the Army's program manager for FLRAA. “The preponderance of this effort is associated with digital engineering and model-based systems engineering,” Col. David Philips said. That means taking the real-world data from physical tests and rigorously refining every aspect of the design to meet the Army's needs from flight performance, combat survivability, affordability, sustainability, safety and more. The program's reached the phase of design refinement that's traditionally handled by engineers with slide rules on “reams of paper,” Mason explained, but which will now be accomplished in painstakingly precise virtual models and simulations of every aspect of the aircraft. “That is the future of design,” Mason said. “The key is that digital environment.... digital engineering and model-based engineering.” The flight tests of physical aircraft are proving out their novel configurations – designed to achieve high speed and long range that are aerodynamically unattainable for conventional helicopters. But the digital design phase is especially suited for working out the software that's essential to everything from flight controls to navigation to evading incoming anti-aircraft missiles. Rather than have each vendor fit the electronic jigsaw together in their own unique, proprietary way, the Army insists that FLRAA, its sister design the FARA scout, and a whole family of drones all use the same Modular Open Systems Architecture. MOSA is meant to ensure that all the aircraft can easily share data on everything from maintenance diagnostics to enemy targets, and that the Army can easily replace specific components (hence “modular”) using whatever vendor offers the best technology (hence “open”). To ensure different vendors' products plug and play together, Mason said, “we specify what we need in those interfaces, and we flow those out in models.” Those models will include simulations of the aircrafts' physical characteristics, but, since they're software themselves, they can contain the actual prototype code for the Modular Open Systems Architecture. In other words — let's get digital. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/fvl-bell-sikorsky-boeing-split-181m-to-finalize-flraa-designs