October 27, 2020 | International, Naval
David Pugliese,
Two reports by the parliamentary budget officer looking into the costs of major Canadian naval equipment projects have been delayed.
The Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates had unanimously passed a motion in June to request the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer undertake a costing analysis of the Royal Canadian Navy's new joint support ships as well as the leasing of the Asterix supply ship from a private firm. The PBO study was to also look at the cost of building the joint support ships in Canada at Seaspan shipyard in Vancouver. The committee asked that the PBO report be provided by Oct. 15.
Another motion from the committee, passed later in June, asked the PBO to examine the $60 billion price tag of Canada's proposed new fleet of warships – the Canadian Surface Combatant or CSC. Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux was tasked to investigate the cost of the CSC as well as examine the cost of two other types of warships: the FREMM and the Type 31. That study was supposed to be presented to the committee by Oct. 22.
But those original motions from the committee expired when Parliament was prorogued. So new motions have to be provided to the PBO.
The Commons committee passed a new motion on Oct. 19 on the Asterix and Joint Support Ship analysis. That analysis is to be delivered by Nov. 30, PBO spokeswoman Sloane Mask told this newspaper. A date for the analysis to be made public has not yet been determined.
“Currently, we are also in the process of confirming the revised timelines for the CSC report,” she added.There is particular interest in the defence community about what the PBO determines is the current price-tag of the Canadian Surface Combatant project.
Last year the Liberal government signed an initial deal on CSC that is expected to lead to the eventual construction of 15 warships in the largest single government purchase in Canadian history. Lockheed Martin offered Canada the Type 26 warship designed by BAE in the United Kingdom. Irving is the prime contractor and the vessels will be built at its east coast shipyard.
Construction of the first ship isn't expected to begin until the early 2020s.
But the Canadian Surface Combatant program has already faced rising costs. In 2008, the then-Conservative government estimated the project would cost roughly $26 billion. But in 2015, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, then commander of the navy, voiced concern that taxpayers may not have been given all the information about the program, publicly predicting the cost for the warships alone would approach $30 billion.
The overall project is currently estimated to cost around $60 billion. “Approximately one-half of the CSC build cost is comprised of labour in the (Irving) Halifax yard and materials,” according to federal government documents obtained by this newspaper through the Access to Information law.
But some members of parliament and industry representatives have privately questioned whether the CSC price-tag is too high. There have been suggestions that Canada could dump the Type 26 design and go for a cheaper alternative since the CSC project is still in early stages and costs to withdraw could be covered by savings from a less expensive ship.
Canada had already been pitched on alternatives. In December 2017, the French and Italian governments proposed a plan in which Canada could build the FREMM frigate at Irving. Those governments offered to guarantee the cost of the 15 ships at a fixed $30 billion, but that was rejected by the Canadian government.
The other type of warship the PBO will look at is the Type 31, which is to be built for the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Those ships are to cost less than $500 million each.
In 2017, then Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette estimated the CSC program would cost $61.82 billion.
The entry of the BAE Type 26 warship in the Canadian competition was controversial from the start and sparked complaints that the procurement process was skewed to favour that vessel. Previously the Liberal government had said only mature existing designs or designs of ships already in service with other navies would be accepted on the grounds they could be built faster and would be less risky. Unproven designs can face challenges if problems are found once the vessel is in the water and operating.
But the criteria was changed and the government and Irving accepted the BAE design, though at the time it existed only on the drawing board. Construction began on the first Type 26 frigate in the summer of 2017 for Britain's Royal Navy.
July 5, 2023 | International, Aerospace
Germany will buy 60 Chinook helicopters from Boeing in a package that will cost up to 8 billion euros ($8.7 billion), including necessary infrastructure for the aircraft, two members of the parliamentary budget committee told Reuters on Wednesday.
August 28, 2020 | International, Naval
Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — A new request for information from the U.S. Navy outlines the service's interest in launching a “hardware factory and hardware pipeline” to keep its fleet computing platforms up-to-date. According to an Aug. 25 request posted by the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the sea service wants the factory as part of a broader effort to “architect, implement, and migrate” to a universally managed, infrastructure as a service environment for the sea service's surface fleet. NAVSEA wants the pipeline and factory ready for use no later than fiscal 2023. The Navy wants to use the hardware factory and hardware pipeline concept to use agile development to accelerate the development of its computing infrastructure. The new model is part of the Navy's effort to transition away from technology insertions and move toward continuous hardware refreshes aboard its current and future surface fleet. The request is for a program called Future Integrated Combat System Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Computing Infrastructure (FICS-CI), managed by NAVSEA's Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems. “The Navy envisions a transition to a HW Factory and HW Pipeline Process continuously delivering IaaS to pace technology, eliminate obsolescence, and enable continuous design and development of [computing infrastructure] solutions that meet ship needs with minimal deviation from commercial standards and practices,” the RFI states. The program is part of an effort by the NAVSEA's PEO IWS to migrate systems to a “common, scalable intermittently connected edge cloud architecture” using IaaS to enable platform as a service. NAVSEA wants to deploy the computing architecture to large and small combatants, aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, and “other related programs including U.S. Coast Guard, AEGIS Foreign Military Sales, and proposed future ship classes.” The RFI lists several interest areas for the Navy: systems engineering; IaaS design and integration; technical data packages; production; diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages, hardware, and software version release tracking; and integrated logistics support, maintenance and operations training. “The HW Factory and HW Pipeline will streamline component selection, qualification, integration, life cycle support and training for the Fleet, leading to accelerated infrastructure development and fielding,” the RFI states. “The Navy envisions a continuous CI refresh cycle rapidly delivering improved Lethality, Combat Capability and Capacity to the Surface Navy Fleet to confront an increasing array of Strategic, Operational, and Tactical Challenges.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/08/27/us-navy-wants-to-create-a-hardware-factory/
March 10, 2020 | International, C4ISR
"Our fully networked C3 [Command, Control, & Communications] will look completely different" from current satellites and terminals, said OSD's Doug Schroeder. By THERESA HITCHENS SATELLITE 2020: The Pentagon wants industry ideas on how to craft a “fundamentally new architecture” for command, control and communications (C3) that will allow “any user using any terminal to connect to any other user using any other terminal,” says Doug Schroeder, who oversees the effort under the Office of Research and Engineering (R&E). This kind of omnipresent, all-service connectivity across land, sea, air, and space is essential for the Pentagon's rapidly evolving of future war, known as Joint-All Domain Operations. “Our Fully Networked C3 communications will look completely different. We have a new vision. We're crafting it with the help of industry,” he said. “We're relying on very heavily on industry, starting with this Broad Agency Announcement dated March 6,” which asks for companies to submit white papers in short order. According to Schroeder, the Space Development Agency (SDA) will be the funding authority. Vendors whose short, 10 to 15 page white papers are chosen will be invited at the end of April to a Pitch Day. Winners then will be given three months to develop a proposal; contracts for prototypes will be granted 24 months later. Speaking to a relatively sparse audience here at the annual commercial satellite industry conference, Satellite 2020 — which is underway despite the threat of the COVID-19 Coronavirus — Schroeder stressed: “We are going to take our new direction from you.” The new strategy, called Fully Networked C3 (FNC3), is being spearheaded by R&E director Mike Griffin and his assistant director for FNC3, Michael Zatman. According to the BAA, the first issued under the effort, the new strategy is being designed to “enable the DoD to reliably communicate with all its tactical and strategic assets.” C3 is one of Griffin's Top Ten areas of technology innovation for which DoD is developing an agency-wide development strategy. Specifically, DoD now is looking for “Beyond-Line-Of-Site (BLOS) communications systems for airborne, surface, and subsurface systems that is [sic] compatible with both FNC3 enabled systems and legacy systems,” the BAA states. The BAA calls for White Papers to be submitted by March 30 for three different types of BLOS technologies: 1. Protected Radio Frequency (RF) BLOS Communications. 2. Multi-User/Multi-Point High-Data-Rate Laser Communications. 3. Communications with submerged assets. R&E intends to “develop, prototype, and demonstrate each innovative communications capability with the goal of transitioning the technologies into programs of record,” the BAA said. To ensure speedy results, DoD will use Other Transaction Authority (OTA) for prototyping (found under 10 U.S. Code § 2371b.) Much of the detail about the effort is contained in classified annexes. What we do know: Beyond-Line-Of-Sight communications relayed through satellites generally require equipping platforms — such as aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles — with high-throughput voice and data links, capabilities all of the services have expressed interest in. In particular, after years of little progress, Griffin has reinvigorated DoD interest in optical communications via laser links, in large part due to fears about Russian and Chinese RF jamming. Commercial industry has been rushing to develop optical links to enable satellite-to-satellite data transmission, and the Space Development Agency is interested in that capability for its so-called transport layer of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Radio-frequency communications with submarines when underwater are generally limited to terse text messages, transmitted at very low frequencies (three to 30 kilohertz) and extremely low frequencies (three to 300 hertz) and requiring very large antennas to receie them. Research work is ongoing at MIT on how to link traditional underwater sonar to airborne RF receivers, a methodology called Translational Acoustic-RF) communication. Research also is ongoing, including at MIT's Lincoln Lab, on using narrow-beam lasers to allow one underwater vehicle to communicate with another. BLOS communications can also be accomplished without using satellites. Alternative method include tropospheric scatter using microwave radiation, high frequency (HF) wireless, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays, and passive reflector systems. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/pentagon-seeks-new-satcom-tech-for-fully-networked-c3