Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - October 28, 2019

On the same subject

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  October 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  Democrats face internal ‘fight’ on defense spending, says Smith

  Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― The Democratic split over the size of future defense budgets will come to a head in the new Congress, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., predicted Tuesday. The outcome of the long-simmering dispute would take on higher stakes if some pre-election polling becomes a reality and Democrats retake Congress and the White House. Though President Donald Trump and his supporters claim the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the far left, Smith's remarks suggest the party's future direction, at least on defense spending, is not yet settled. Instead of slashing next year's $740 billion defense budget, as some progressives want, Smith is pushing, “a rational Democratic, progressive national security strategy,” as he called it. That stance seems to align Smith with his party's pragmatic standard-bearer, Joe Biden, who's said he doesn't foresee major defense cuts, if elected. “I don't think that rational policy involves 20 percent defense cut, but that fight is going to be had,” Smith said at an event hosted by George Mason University. “There are extremists on the right and extremists on the left, and what I'm trying to do is say, ‘Let's go for pragmatic problem solving.' I don't see extremism solving problems.” If Democrats are swept into power Nov. 3, it will be by voters opposed to President Donald Trump from across the political spectrum, Smith said. To hold on that mandate, Democrats would need to govern with a broad coalition and not overreach from the left on issues like defense. “Okay, we can win an election because people are appalled by Donald Trump,” Smith said, “but that doesn't mean that they're endorsing us in any sort of huge, dramatic way.” After the House passed an early version of last year's defense policy bill without Republicans aboard, negotiations to reconcile it with theWhite House and GOP-held Senate dragged for months before a compromise bill passed Congress with progressive priorities stripped from it, leaving them dissatisfied. This year, many of the progressives' priorities were deflected from the House's version of the bill, and it passed the chamber with support from more than half of Republicans and more than two-thirds of Democrats. Military spending remains popular with most Republicans, and they largely opposed progressive amendments in the House and Senate this summer to slash the authorization bill by 10 percent. HASC member Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., called the House amendment, “a deeply irresponsible stunt.” Biden and congressional Democrats are already under pressure from progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who have been part of a campaign to direct spending away from the military in favor of healthcare, education and jobs. Massive spending on national security, they say, didn't protect the country from COVID-19. “You have a progressive movement in the party now that is really motivated and mobilized around foreign policy and national security issues, and that's not going away,” Matt Duss, a Sanders foreign policy aide, told Defense News last month. “That is something a President Biden will have to work with, and I think his team understands that.” As both Biden, Trump and lawmakers of both parties have called for the U.S. to extricate itself from the Mideast and end the “endless wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Smith said it's important to educate a war-weary American people about why it's unwise to retreat from the world stage ― marked by hotspots in Libya, Syria and West Africa. “We've got to make the case to them: ‘Here's why the defense budget is what it is, here's why we're trying to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish, and here's why it's in your best interest,'” Smith said. “And we're going to be very aggressive about having public hearings and public discussions to listen to people, to listen to those concerns and try to address them.” The Pentagon's five-year defense plan indicates it will request flat defense spending after 2021, and ― amid pandemic-related expenses and historic deficits ― the budget is widely expected to stay flat regardless of who is president. Smith pretty much echoed that view Tuesday. “I think the reasonable assumption is yeah, the defense budget is going to be flat for a while ― and there is no reason on Earth in my view that we cannot defend the United States of America for $700 to $740 billion,” Smith said. “So I think the better question, the question to focus on, is how do we get more out of it?” On that one, Smith echoed some ideas from his committee's bipartisan Future of Defense Task Force. Its report emphasized the need, in order to compete with a surging China, to divest from some legacy programs and heavily invest in artificial intelligence, among other potentially game-changing technologies. Citing a spate of acquisition failures, Smith said Washington has to work with its defense contractors “about how we spend our money and the results we get for that money.” He also acknowledged the need to protect key contractors stressed by the pandemic's economic impacts and strengthen the industrial base overall. Smith defended the Pentagon's allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic relief funding for items like jet and submarine parts instead of increasing the country's supply of medical equipment. The remarks seemed to set him at odds with liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who have asked the Defense inspector general to look into the department's “reported misuse” of funds. The Democrat-led House Oversight and Reform Committee, Financial Services Committee, and select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis are conducting a joint investigation. “Three committees in Congress are now investigating this, and I'm not one of them because there's nothing to investigate here, in my view,” Smith said. “This was part of the CARES Act: We gave a billion dollars to DoD to deal with COVID-related expenses. Very specifically, it said one of the COVID related expenses you could deal with was the defense industrial base, which they did. And now we're chewing on them for doing that.” Smith said the Pentagon did “nothing illegal,” but he suggested it's reasonable to explore whether DoD balanced the money it received appropriately and whether its payments to large contractors are flowing to smaller, more vulnerable firms, as they should. “I think it is important to make sure we keep the industrial base going,” Smith said, “but there's going to be pressure on that [decision].” https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/10/07/democrats-face-internal-fight-on-defense-spending-says-smith/

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  January 6, 2023 | International, Naval

  Shipbuilders near and far line up for Latin American naval upgrades

  As governments pick foreign ship designs for modernizing their naval fleets, local industries hope to grow from the deals.

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  November 30, 2018 | International, C4ISR

  What will forces need in complex EW environment?

  By: Mark Pomerleau Sophisticated adversaries have been leveraging the electromagnetic spectrum to create significant dilemmas for U.S. and allied forces, say officials, and transformative efforts are needed to deal with an increasing complicated threat. “China is outspending us probably 10 to 1 on trying to figure out how to use and manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum. Russia showed us what they're going to do with it in their incursion into Ukraine ... Electromagnetic warfare, electronic warfare at the maneuver level,” Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the annual Association of Old Crows symposium held Nov. 28 in Washington, D.C. “We haven't designed ourselves to fight that fight. They have demonstrated that they are not only willing, but they're [also] capable of deploying and employing electronic countermeasures at the ground and maneuver level. It is a reality that we are going to have to adjust to.” The capabilities forces need For the Army, it's not going to be one thing, Col. Mark Dotson, the capabilities manager for electronic warfare at the Cyber Center of Excellence, said at the symposium Nov. 27. There have to be layered capabilities and effects, each increasing range and sensing capability. “We're still sorting through that,” Dotson said, noting the need to develop from the current tactical focus all the way to the strategic level. “We're trying to expand our scope and get into what are those other things we need. Do we need artillery delivered capability? Do we need loitering munitions? Is it going to manned or is it an unmanned aircraft?” In addition, Dotson said, the Army needs systems integrating EW, cyber and signals intelligence, and the service has started generating requirements working with the Intelligence Center of Excellence and the Cyber Center of Excellence. “I think SIGINT and EW go hand in hand, so us not sharing going forward and working like a team like we do now makes no sense,” Col. Jennifer McAfee, Dotson's counterpart for Terrestrial and Identity at the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, told C4ISRNET in a November interview. McAfee added that the team is also joining up with the other centers of excellence to ensure that when they are pursuing requirements for airborne or ground systems, the Intelligence and Cyber centers are plugged in to leverage EW expertise and not create duplicative efforts. Geolocating solutions Others across the joint force have expressed the desire for more decoys, physical or non-physical, to confuse or confound enemy systems. “It's network electronic warfare from air, sea and land; it's smart warfare combined with advanced decoys, whether they're physical decoys or cyber decoys out there; drones, swarms and jamming drones,” Col. John Edwards, commander of the 28th Bomb Wing, said at the symposium. “Things that go out there to where an air defense operator cannot distinguish between what is cyber and what is real out there.” Such aerial systems can be used to either overwhelm or distract air defenses, allowing strike aircraft to penetrate, or take the point jamming the air defenses and thus assuming all the risk leaving the more expensive and manned systems in the rear. On the ground side, officials have also discussed the need for more investments in decoys. Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, commander of Army Cyber Command, told reporters in August that big investments needed to be made in this area. He envisioned forces being able to drop a decoy emitting strong signals off a truck at a fork in the road, thus drawing enemy attention to it. “Now we're presenting multiple dilemmas to the adversary,” he said. One of the difficulties of modern warfare is all jammers and sensors emit some kind of a signal in the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning they can be geolocated and targeted. This means if an enemy wants to use it, they have to take into account a risk calculus in revealing their position. “Jammers are emitters, emitters are targets. I think that's something we really ought to be thinking about,” Selva said. “If you're going to operate in an electronically dense environment ... the tools actually reveal their position." Similarly, decoys can be used to throw adversaries off the trail of friendly forces or distract from other items forces might want to protect. ”If I have something like a counterfire radar, that's really important to me. Maybe what I want to do, again, is push an alternate threat to the adversary," Fogarty said. In these complex environments, Selva said forces need to be able to identify, localize and characterize the jammer. If that's possible, then forces can decide what to do with it. If the answer is they want to kill it, they have to have a tool to kill it. “If you can't do all three of those things, the jamming is very effective,” he said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2018/11/29/what-will-forces-need-in-complex-ew-environment