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  September 16, 2020 | International, Naval

  Austal Expanding Yard In Alabama as It Eyes New Unmanned, Amphibious Shipbuilding Programs

  Megan Eckstein Austal USA is expanding the capacity and capability of its Alabama shipyard, doubling down on investing in its future in a way reminiscent of 2009, just before it won the block buy of Littoral Combat Ships that secured the yard a spot in the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base. The Mobile yard this month closed on the purchase of a ship repair facility formerly owned by World Marine of Alabama, an indirect subsidiary of Modern American Recycling and Repair Services of Alabama. It includes a 20,000-ton Panamax-class floating dry dock, 100,000 square feet of covered repair facilities and 15 acres of waterfront property along the Mobile River and Gulf of Mexico, according to a company statement. Shipyard President Craig Perciavalle told USNI News this week that the expansion fits in with its desires to continue building aluminum ships and to expand into building steel ships – manned or unmanned – as well as a desire to take on more repair work for the Navy and other customers. “We feel we're putting ourselves, and we've put ourselves, in a very good place to continue to provide very capable but lower-cost ships to the Navy,” he said of the yard that today builds Independence-variant LCSs and Expeditionary Fast Transit (EPF) ships. “I have had some discussions with [Defense Secretary Mark] Esper, we are encouraged by the plan for, the need and the requirement for 355 ships or more maybe. And I think there's plenty of opportunities for us to help the Navy grow the fleet, and we're putting ourselves in a very good position to help the Navy do that long-term.” The yard expansion gives Austal ownership of a dry dock it was leasing to launch its ships into the Mobile River, eliminating any schedule problems the yard had to worry about in the past if its desired timeline didn't match up with the dry dock's availability to be leased. “We'll just have complete control over it, and then we can have the priority for the dry dock be supporting our business, first and foremost,” Perciavalle said. He added that the rest of the facility, on the other side of the river and just south of Austal's property, could be refurbished or upgraded in the future to support ship construction or repair activities as needed, giving Austal some flexibility as its future workload becomes clearer. Many in the Navy and industry have expressed concern about Austal's future, with the company's LCS construction coming to an end in a couple years – four ships are in construction at Austal and four more are in pre-construction – and its future with the EPF program still uncertain, as the Navy and Congress haven't made any firm decisions about continuing the hot production line to build an ambulance ship variant of the hull. Austal competed to build the Navy's FFG(X) frigate program and lost, leaving many wondering what would happen to the yard, its workforce and its suppliers. Perciavalle said he's not worried about the yard's future. “It's no secret that we're focused on the unmanned side of the business, we think there's obviously plenty of opportunities there and we're going to, hopefully – our plan is to be a major player in that side of the market,” he said. Austal is one of six companies selected to conduct industry studies on the Navy's Large Unmanned Surface Vessel, and Austal also participated in the LUSV precursor by converting a vessel to an unmanned ship through the Pentagon's Overlord USV prototype effort. “We are encouraged by discussions around additional EPFs going forward. EPF-15 has been in and out of the budget, and the latest discussions show that there might be some opportunities for that to get back in. I think it's no secret that we've been looking at expeditionary medical ships that have been discussed, and we feel we're in a pretty good place to support those needs to the Navy,” he continued, with the Congress this current fiscal year appropriating money to give EPF-14 a greater medical capability. “And then from a steel shipbuilding perspective, there's certainly opportunities from that medium-sized type vessel: [Light Amphibious Warship] is one that we've been participating in. We have participated in some of the industry studies on [the Coast Guard's Offshore Patrol Cutter]. And without getting into much more detail beyond that, there's opportunities that exist across the board that we're going to continue to look at and to pursue. “ Asked by USNI News if the range of work – from unmanned vessels to amphibious ships to Military Sealift Command support ships to Coast Guard cutters – spurred Austal to take a leap of faith and expand the shipyard now, Perciavalle said, “this is something that Austal's done in the past, so been there done that. We leaned into the facility that we have today, committing much of those funds before (LCS) block buys were even awarded back in the ‘09 and 2010 time period. We have seen where the Navy looks like they're going, and we're leaning into those requirements going forward. There seems to be opportunities both on the steel ship side of things as well as aluminum, and we're going to leverage our strength and what we've been able to do from an aluminum perspective, and take those same strengths and transition adding the steel capabilities.” “So yeah, it's pretty interesting times, it's pretty exciting. We've proven in the past that we're pretty darn good at building lots of ships in a relatively short period of time. I think we've delivered 23 surface ships to the Navy over the last just over seven and a half years,” he continued. “We believe there's value in that for the Navy and trying to expand to 355 in a reasonable timeframe, and I think leveraging the industrial base that we have here in Mobile is going to be important to the Navy's ability to do that.” In addition to the physical expansion of the yard through the recent acquisition, Austal and the Defense Department are spending $100 million to bring a steel shipbuilding capability to the yard that today only builds aluminum ships. DoD offered its half under the Defense Production Act Title III (DPA) Agreement “to maintain, protect, and expand critical domestic shipbuilding and maintenance capacity,” according to a DoD announcement. The money, appropriated as part of the coronavirus pandemic relief bill passed by Congress in the spring, will not only help the Navy industrial base but will “accelerat[e] pandemic recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast region” by supporting the economy. Perciavalle said the yard decided to match the contract with its own $50 million investment in the steel shipbuilding capability. Perciavalle said another growth area for Austal is likely to be ship repair, though the Navy has not made its intentions public yet. Austal is somewhat challenged in that every single LCS it has built is stationed in San Diego, which is a Panama Canal transit away. The San Diego ship repair industrial base is under pressure to keep up with the Navy's growing surface ship maintenance and modernization needs, and although Austal has a support office in San Diego and can contribute to pier-side work at the naval base, it cannot take on maintenance availabilities on its own yet. “The Navy's aware of our interest in expanding our service business, and I think given the fact that they're looking for increased capacity in that regard, I think it's welcome,” he said. “And then we'll just see how things go both here in Mobile, obviously continuing to support efforts on the West Coast, and then in Singapore,” where Austal has an office to support forward-deployed LCSs operating in the Indo-Pacific region. USNI News previously reported that Austal was trying to conduct some LCS work in Mobile after sea trials and ship delivery, but before the ships headed through the canal and onto San Diego. Perciavalle said that has continued, but that the ships are coming out of the yard with very little work waiting to be done during the post-shakedown availability. He said he hopes the Navy and the yard can find a way to bring more repair work to Mobile, to ease the strain in San Diego and to fully leverage the dry dock the yard now owns. Additionally, while his focus is maintaining the ships that Austal built, Perciavalle said “the sky is the limit” in terms of the yard taking on repair and modernization work for Military Sealift Command ships, Coast Guard ships or commercial vessels. “The facility has been in the past supporting various markets and will continue to do that going forward,” he said of the newly purchased property that also includes deep-water berthing space for in-water repairs in addition to the dry dock for out-of-water repairs. He noted that the team operating out of Singapore had contributed to the success of overlapping USS Montgomery (LCS-8) and USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10) deployments there and that Austal planned to maintain or grow its presence in Singapore. “Our game plan is there will be at least two ships there going forward, we are fully prepared to support having two ships in Singapore or more,” as well as sending flyaway teams or setting up offices anywhere else the Navy chooses to hub the LCSs or EPFs around the globe. https://news.usni.org/2020/09/15/austal-expanding-yard-in-alabama-as-it-eyes-new-unmanned-amphibious-shipbuilding-programs

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  July 20, 2020 | International, Land

  OMFV: Army Wants Smaller Crew, More Automation

  The draft RFP for the Bradley replacement, out today, also opens the possibility for a government design team to compete with private industry. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on July 17, 2020 at 1:51 PM WASHINGTON: The Army is giving industry a lot of freedom in their designs for its future armored troop transport, letting them pick the gun, weight, number of passengers and more. But there's one big exception. While the current M2 Bradley has three crew members – commander, gunner, and driver – a draft Request For Proposals released today says that its future replacement, the OMFV, must be able to fight with two. Fewer humans means more automation. It's an ambitious goal, especially for a program the Army already had to reboot and start over once. The other fascinating wrinkle in the RFP is that the Army reserves the right to form its own design team and let it compete against the private-sector contractors. This government design team would be independent of any Army command to avoid conflicts of interest. If the Army does submit its own design, that would be a major departure from longstanding Pentagon practice. But the Army has invested heavily in technologies from 50mm cannon to automated targeting algorithms to engines, so it's not impossible for a government team to put all that government intellectual property together into a complete design. The Army has embraced automation from the beginning of the Bradley replacement program, and that's been consistent before and after January's decision to reboot. OMFV's very name, Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, refers to the service's desire to have the option to operate the vehicle, in some situations, by remote control – eventually. But an unmanned mode remains an aspiration for future upgrades, not a hard-and-fast requirement for the initial version of the vehicle scheduled to enter service in 2028. By contrast, the two-person crew is one of the few hard-and-fast requirements in the draft RFP released this morning. It's all the more remarkable because there few such requirements in the RFP or its extensive technical annexes (which are not public). Instead, in most cases, the Army lays out the broad performance characteristics it desires and gives industry a lot of leeway in how to achieve them. That's a deliberate departure from traditional weapons programs, which lay out a long and detailed list of technical requirements. But the Army tried that prescriptive approach on OMFV and it didn't work. Last year, in its first attempt to build the OMFV, the Army insisted that industry build – at its own expense – a prototype light enough that you could fit two on an Air Force C-17 transport, yet it had to be tough enough to survive a fight with Russian mechanized units in Eastern Europe. Only one company, General Dynamics, even tried to deliver a vehicle built to that specification and the Army decided they didn't succeed. So the Army started over. It decided heavy armor was more important than air transportability, so it dropped the requirement to fit two OMFVs on a single C-17; now it'll be satisfied if a C-17 can carry one. In fact, it decided rigid technical requirements were a bad idea in general because it limited industry's opportunity to offer ingenious new solutions to the Army's problems, so the service replaced them wherever it could with broadly defined goals called characteristics. And yet the new draft RFP does include a strict and technologically ambitious requirement: the two-person crew. Now, since the OMFV is a transport, it'll have more people aboard much of the time, and when an infantry squad is embarked, one of them will have access to the vehicle's sensors and be able to assist the crew. But when the passengers get out to fight on foot, there'll just be two people left to operate the vehicle. A two-person crew isn't just a departure from the Bradley. This is a departure from best practice in armored vehicle design dating back to World War II. In 1940, when Germany invaded France, the French actually had more tanks, including some much better armed and armored than most German machines. But a lot of the French tanks had two-man crews. There was a driver, seated in the hull, and a single harried soldier in the turret who had to spot the enemy, aim the gun, and load the ammunition. By contrast, most German tanks split those tasks among three men – a commander, a gunner, and a loader – which meant they consistently outmaneuvered and outfought the overburdened French tankers. A lot of modern vehicles don't need a loader, because a mechanical feed reloads automatically. But in everything from the Bradley to Soviet tanks, the minimum crew is three: driver, gunner, and commander. That way the driver can focus on the terrain ahead, the gunner can focus on the target currently in his sights, and the commander can watch for danger in all directions. A two-person crew can't split tasks that way, risking cognitive overload – which means a greater risk that no one spots a threat until it's too late. So how do fighter jets and combat helicopters survive, since most of them have one or two crew at most? The answer is extensive training and expensive technology. If the Army wants a two-person crew in its OMFV, the crew compartment may have to look less like a Bradley and more like an Apache gunship, with weapons automatically pointing wherever the operator looks. The Army's even developing a robotic targeting assistant called ATLAS, which spots potential targets on its sensors, decides the biggest threat and automatically brings the gun to bear – but only fires if a human operator gives the order. Now, industry does not have to solve these problems right away. The current document is a draft Request For Proposals, meaning that the Army is seeking feedback from interested companies. If enough potential competitors say the two-man crew is too hard, the Army might drop that requirement. The current schedule gives the Army about nine months, until April 2021, to come out with the final RFP, and only then do companies have to submit their preliminary concepts for the vehicle. The Army will pick several companies to develop “initial digital designs” – detailed computer models of the proposed vehicle – and then refine those designs. Physical prototypes won't enter testing until 2025, with the winning design entering production in 2027 for delivery to combat units the next year. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/omfv-army-wants-smaller-crew-more-automation/

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  June 11, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Le fonds d’investissement DefInvest prêt à entrer au capital de PME stratégiques

  Dans le cadre des mesures du plan de relance annoncées mardi par le gouvernement, la ministre des Armées, Florence Parly, a annoncé un doublement du fonds d'investissement DefInvest de 50 à 100 millions d'euros sur une période de 5 ans. Ce fonds, lancé en 2017 et géré avec Bpifrance, a pour vocation pour soutenir le développement des PME stratégiques pour la défense. «J'ai lancé il y a quelques semaines une task force interministérielle sous le pilotage du ministère des Armées. Soit une centaine de personnes qui ont été chargées de quadriller le territoire, visiter les usines et les bureaux d'études pour identifier avec les entrepreneurs les domaines d'activité qui sont à risque», a précisé la ministre. L'Usine Nouvelle du 10 juin