Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - November 15, 2019

On the same subject

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  September 22, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  Pentagon acquisition boss talks industry, mergers and coronavirus

  Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — A longtime industry executive, Ellen Lord was confirmed as the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment in August 2017. In that role, Lord — who is now the longest serving political appointee at the department from the Trump administration — oversees billions of dollars in weapons procurement and sustainment, while also overseeing the health of the defense industrial base, a particularly important role in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Lord was a keynote speaker at this year's Defense News Conference, where she touched on a number of issues affecting the Department of Defense. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. We're about six months after COVID-19 first hit the defense industry. How do you judge the health of the defense industrial base? We use the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Logistics Agency to track about 22,000 key companies that the department works with. And going back over the last six months, we did have hundreds of companies shut down, but now we're down to only about 30. So that's very, very good news. We monitor them on a daily basis; we look at on-time deliveries, deliveries missed and, most importantly, we listen to what the issues are, really leveraging the industry associations to do a lot of listening. What we are looking for is whether or not we're maintaining war-fighter readiness for our production programs, and then relative to modernization, whether we are hitting key milestones relative to development programs. We have seen some slowdowns. We are carefully monitoring, using monthly metrics, where we are. That's something that I'm actually extremely proud of the team over the last few years — we have developed a very data-driven way of doing business. The Pentagon is seeking billions of dollars from Congress to help fund reimbursements for the defense industry's pandemic-related costs. But we've heard criticism of this from a number of sectors, with some saying financial reports last quarter were not so bad. Why is that funding needed, and why now? All the [quarterly] reports that have come out in large part don't reflect the hits that were taken by business. I would contend that most of the effects of COVID-19 haven't yet been seen because most companies gave their employees time off, they stretched out production, paid a lot of people for working 100 percent when perhaps they were only getting 50 percent of the hours in and so forth. So I think the system has absorbed it up to this point in time. Now when we get to the point where we're having payments and incentive fees and award fees earned, and if we haven't done the deliveries, that's where you're going to see the hit. So I believe there's a bit of a delayed response. We want to make sure that we have a one-time accounting for these major COVID hits — very, very well defined in terms of a period of time, March 15-Sept. 15, that we take a very, very data driven approach [saying]: “Send us a proposal showing what the impact was; we will assess them all at once and get back.” However, we can't do that at this point in time because we have an authorization through Section 3610 [of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act] and so forth, but we don't have an appropriation. We believe we need that appropriation to maintain readiness because if we do not get that, what we are going to find is we are not going to get the number of units delivered, we are not going to maintain war-fighter readiness, we're not going to move forward in modernization. We would like to take the one-time hit and then see where we go from there. Assuming you get the appropriation, much money is needed? When will industry see it? We think it's somewhere between $10 billion and $20 billion. We think it would take five to six months because once we got an appropriation, we would go out for a request for proposals, and the larger companies are going to have to flow down those RFPs through their supply chain, gather the data — because again, this has to be a very data-driven drill. So we would get all of that back; we think that would take two to three months. Then we want to look at all of the proposals at once. It isn't going to be a first-in, first-out [situation], and we have to rationalize using the rules we've put in place, what would be reimbursable and what's not. So overall we think five to six months, in terms of a process. We're at about the two-year mark from the executive order 13806 study, which assessed the health of the defense industrial base and included some dire warnings about the supply chain. How has work on fixing those issues gone? We had several areas that we pointed out were problematic, that we were concerned that the U.S. had too great of a dependency on non-friendly nations and that we just didn't have the security and resiliency that we were looking for. In fiscal 2019, we actually had 14 presidential determinations, which is the process you go through to actually say: “Yes, these are areas that are worthy of looking at.” Then we go to get the appropriation to be able to use [the Defense Production Act's Title III authorities]. A number of the areas we looked at were small unmanned aerial systems, rare earth [minerals], that type of thing. When COVID-19 hit, it shone a spotlight on the concern we had with this fragility and helped us tell the story. Because of another executive order coming in declaring a federal emergency, we no longer had to go through the presidential determination route, which is a bit time consuming, to identify areas where we needed to invest. Then [with the pandemic] we had new areas bubble up, probably the most significant of which was aviation propulsion, where we have a number of our key suppliers who are extremely dependent on commercial aviation that was grinding almost to a halt for a while — huge impacts there. So what we did was we were now able to move a little bit more quickly, which is always helpful. And we made a number of awards to aviation companies that literally kept those companies in business, which allowed us to continue to support the war fighter. COVID-19 has helped us accelerate some of those areas. Others are perhaps not getting as much attention as they were pre-COVID-19, looking at our defense industrial base for nuclear modernization for instance, also for hypersonics. But overall, the team is working very hard, and we have put out almost a billion dollars in DPA Title III over the last six months. It sounds like the pandemic may have been beneficial in addressing these long-term issues. What it did was allow us to really put speed in the system, peel away all of what I would call the non-value-added bureaucracy. COVID-19 gave us a burning platform to really demonstrate we could be very responsible in terms of taxpayer dollars, very responsible in terms of security of the war fighter, but move at the speed of relevance to get things done. So I don't want to backslide there. And I want to make sure we really take advantage of all of that. Companies are concerned about being in compliance with the Section 889 rules, which prohibit the government from buying a system that might have Chinese equipment in it from the telecommunications supply chain. Are more waivers for companies possible? We are incredibly supportive of making sure that we don't have Chinese technology in a lot of our telecom systems, which has proven to be a problem in terms of exfiltration of data. So what we did is we got a waiver from [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] for noncritical weapon systems. We continue to discuss an extension beyond September of that with them. We are getting waivers on a case-by-case basis, we will look at those. However, we are encouraging industry and we are very, very pleased at how we see industry still stepping up to really get these systems out of their supply chains. So it will be by exception that we will do waivers, and we are looking to really have a clean path through everything. There have been significant mergers and acquisitions during your tenure at the Pentagon. Are you seeing a downside for the department, given the desire for more competition on programs? I actually put a process in place early on, when we are notified of M&A deals, that we go out very formally to all the services and agencies and ask for objective evidence as to whether or not these mergers or acquisitions will constrain competition in any way. We then work very, very closely with either [the Federal Trade Commission or the Justice Department] on those deals to make sure there are divestitures if needed. Where I'm really focused, and the team is focused, is really getting the small companies going. That's where the predominance of our innovation comes from. That's what bubbles up to these larger companies. So we are holding all kinds of webinars and meetings connecting not only our traditional defense industrial base, small company partners, but nontraditional [firms] with our DoD efforts. We're partnering with the services to get more of that activity. So we want that diverse group coming in, and I'm really excited about what I see coming up through. That doesn't sound like you have many concerns about what you've seen. We watch very carefully. And at this point, we think we've made some smart divestitures on some of those. And we like competition. It's our friend. https://www.defensenews.com/interviews/2020/09/21/pentagon-acquisition-boss-talks-industry-mergers-and-coronavirus/

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  September 30, 2019 | International, Naval

  Navy awards $49.3M for work on six cargo ships

  ByTauren Dyson Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The Navy will exercise the last option on a previously awarded contract to fund operation and maintenance of six maritime vessels. Crowley Government Services will receive $49.3 million to perform work on five USNS 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo-class vessels and the USNS GySgt Fred W. Stockham, the Department of Defense said Wednesday. The vessels support the global prepositioning requirements of the Military Sealift Command, which is responsible for transporting U.S. military assets, as well as handling transportation for other agencies of the government. The Fred W. Stockham is more than 900 feet long and provides roll-on/roll-off sealift ship cargo services. The USNS 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo is the lead ship in the John P. Bobo-class and can carry a 30-day supply of cargo for a Marines Air-Ground Task Force. This modification is the fourth and last option in a previous agreement. Work on the new contract will be performed at sea throughout the world and should be completed by Sept. 30, 2020. https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2019/09/26/Navy-awards-493M-for-work-on-six-cargo-ships

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  March 23, 2020 | International, Land

  The trouble when military robots go underground

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton Picture the scene: A rural compound in northwest Syria. An underground tunnel beneath the compound, where a cornered man with a suicide vest and two children hides from a raid by the U.S. Army's Delta Force. Outside the compound on Oct. 26, waiting and at the ready, was a robot. The vested man was later identified as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant. “We had a robot just in case because we were afraid he had a suicide vest and if you get close to him and he blows it up, you're going to die. You're going to die. He had a very powerful suicide vest,” President Donald Trump said in a press conference about the raid in the following days. “The robot was set, too, but we didn't hook it up because we were too — they were moving too fast. We were moving fast,” the president continued. “We weren't 100 percent sure about the tunnel being dead ended. It's possible that there could have been an escape hatch somewhere along that we didn't know about.” In this case, the robot never went in the tunnels. Picture the scene, four months later, in the damp subterranean levels of the never-finished Satsop nuclear power plant outside Elma, Washington. There, engineers and scientists are testing the machines and algorithms that may guide missions for a time, preparing for a time when the robots won't remain on the sidelines. None of the robots fielded at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Subterranean Challenge urban circuit in Elma in February are particularly battle-ready, though a few could likely work in a pinch. Apart from a single human commander able to take remote control, the robots navigate, mostly autonomously. As captured on hours of video, the robots crawled, floated, rolled and stumbled their way through the course. They mapped their environment and searched for up to 20 special artifacts in the special urban circuit courses, built in the underground levels around a never-used cooling tower. The artifacts included cellphones emitting bluetooth, Wi-Fi and occasionally video. They included red backpacks and thermal manikins warmed to the temperature of humans playing an audio recording, and they included carbon dioxide gas and warm blowing vents. This urban circuit is the second of three underground environments that DARPA is using to test robots. Phones, manikins and backpacks are common across the tunnel, urban and cave settings that constitute the full range of subterranean challenges. The straightforward mission of the contest is to create machines that are better at rescue in environments that are dangerous and difficult for first responders, who are humans. If robots can find people trapped underground, then humans can use their energy getting to those same people, rather than expend that energy searching themselves. A subtext of the Subterranean Challenge is that the same technologies that lead robots to rescue people underground could also lead infantry to find enemies hiding in tunnel complexes. While Delta Force was able to corner al-Baghdadi in Syria, much of the military's modern interest in tunnel warfare can be traced back to Osama bin Laden evading capture for years by escaping through the tunnels at Tora Bora. Underground at Satsop, the future of warfare was far less a concern than simply making sure the robots could navigate the courses before them. That meant, most importantly, maintaining contact with the other robots on the team, and with a human supervisor. Thick concrete walls, feet of dirt, heavy cave walls and the metals embedded in the structure all make underground sites that the military describes as passively denied environments, where the greatest obstacle to communication through the electromagnetic spectrum is the terrain itself. It's a problem military leaders, particularly in the Army, are hoping to solve for future iterations of their networks. Team NUS SEDS, the undergrad roboticists representing the National University of Singapore Students for Exploration and Development of Space, arrived in Washington with one of the smallest budgets of any competitor, spending roughly $12,000 on everything from robot parts to travel and lodging. One of their robots, a larger tracked vehicle, was held up by U.S. Customs, and unable to take part in the competition. Not to be deterred, at the team's preparation area, members showed off a version of the most striking design innovation at the competition: droppable Wi-Fi repeaters. As designed, the robots would release a repeater the moment they lost contact with the human operator. To lighten the data load, the onboard computers would compress the data to one-hundredth of its size, and then send it through the repeater. “It's like dropping bread crumbs,” said Ramu Vairavan, the team's president. Unfortunately for NUS SEDS, the bread crumbs were not enough, and the team only found one artifact in its four runs between the two courses. But the bread-crumb concept was shared across various teams. Besides the physical competition taking place underground at Satsop, the urban circuit held a parallel virtual challenge, where teams selected robots and sensors from a defined budget and then programmed algorithms to tackle a challenge fully autonomously. The repeaters, such a popular innovation in the physical space, will likely be programmed into the next round of the virtual challenge. The first DARPA Grand Challenge, launched in 2004, focused on getting roboticists together to provide a technological answer to a military problem. Convoys, needed for sustaining logistics in occupied countries, are vulnerable to attack, and tasking humans to drive the vehicles and escort the cargo only increasing the fixed costs of resupply. What if, instead, the robots could drive themselves over long stretches of desert? After much attention and even more design, the March 2004 challenge ended with no vehicle having gone even a tenth the distance of the 142-mile track. A second Grand Challenge, held 18 months later, delivered far more successful results, and is largely credited with sparking the modern wave of autonomous driving features in cars. Open desert is a permissive space, and navigation across it is aided by existing maps and the ever-present GPS data. This is the same architecture that undergirds much of autonomous navigation today, where surface robots and flying drones can all plug into communication networks offering useful location data. Underground offers a fundamentally unknowable environment. Robots can explore parts of it, but even the most successful team on its most successful run found fewer than half of the artifacts hidden in the space. That team, CoSTAR (an acronym for “Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient robots) included participants from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech, MIT, KAIST in South Korea and Lulea University of Technology in Sweden. CoSTAR used a mixture of wheeled and legged machines, and in the off-hours would practice everywhere from a local high school to a hotel staircase. Yet, for all the constraints on signal that impeded navigation, it was the human-built environment that provided the greatest hurdle. On a tour of the courses, it was easy to see how an environment intuitive to humans is difficult for machines. Backpacks and cellphones were not just placed on corners of roofs, but on internal ledges, impossible to spot without some aerial navigation. Whereas the tunnel course held relatively flat, the urban circuit features levels upon levels to explore. Stairs and shafts, wide-open rooms with the jangly mess of a mezzanine catwalk, all require teams and robots to explore space in three dimensions. Between runs, the humans running the competition would adjust some features, so that completing the course once does not automatically translate into perfect information for a second attempt. “How do we design equally hard for air and ground?” Viktor Orekhov, a DARPA contractor who designed the course, said. “There's an art to it, not a science. But there's also a lot of science.” Part of that art was building ramps into and out of an early room that would otherwise serve as a run-ending chokepoint. Another component was making sure that the course “leveled up” in difficulty the further teams got, requiring more senses and more tools to find artifacts hidden deeper and deeper in the space. “Using all senses is helpful for humans. It's helpful for robots, too,” said Orekhov. Teams competing in the Subterranean Challenge have six months to incorporate lessons learned into their designs and plans. The cave circuit, the next chapter of the Challenge scheduled for August 2020, will inevitably feature greater strain on communications and navigation, and will not even share the at least familiarity of a human-designed spaces seen in the urban circuit. After that, teams will have a year to prepare for the final circuit, set to incorporate aspects of tunnel, urban and cave circuits, and scheduled for August 2021. DARPA prides itself on spurring technological development, rather than iterating it in a final form. Like the Grand Challenges before it, the goal is at least as much to spark industry interest and collaboration in a useful but unexplored space. Programming a quadcopter or a tracked robot to find a manikin in a safety-yellow vest is a distant task from tracking and capturing armed people in the battlefields of the future, but the tools workshopped in late nights at a high school cafeteria between urban circuit runs may lead to the actual sensors on the robots brought along by Delta Force on future raids. The robots of the underground wars of tomorrow are gestating, in competitions and workshops and github pages. Someday, they won't just be brought along on the raid against a military leader. Wordlessly — with spinning LiDAR, whirring engines, and millimeter-wave radar — the robots might lead the charge themselves. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/03/20/the-trouble-when-military-robots-go-underground/