July 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
By
The defense industry has made major strides reducing the impact of Covid-19 on operations, decreasing total closings of facilities to six on Monday from a high of 148 in mid-April, according to the Pentagon agency that oversees contracts.
“We're seeing a significantly smaller fraction of the industrial base impacted on a daily basis” as contractors have become “better at restoring operational capability after potential exposures” to the coronavirus, Army Lieutenant General David Bassett, director of the Defense Contract Management Agency, said in an interview. “We've gone from having a substantial fraction of the industrial base impacted to today,” where it's “just a handful.”
In total, 279 defense contracting locations were forced to shut down an average of 20 days since April because of the pandemic.
In addition, 149 locations currently have reduced operations because of the virus, according to the agency, which tracks 10,509 locations of major defense contractors and their subcontractors.
“These closures have generally been short-term in order to clean facilities” or to “reduce the potential exposure of employees,” according to agency spokesman Matthew Montgomery.
Ellen Lord, the Defense Department's acquisitions chief, has warned that pandemic disruptions are expected to result in defense industry claims for reimbursement of more than $10 billion under the Cares Act, which provides economic aid including reimbursing contractors for payments to employees affected by disruptions such as plant closings. She has said a single contractor, which she didn't name, is estimated to have at least $1.5 billion in potential claims.
Bassett said the decline in plant closings reflects that companies “have really got a plan in place so that they know what they have to do when they find people who have been exposed, how they have to handle the plant and then what they can do to get back up quickly and safely.”
Bassett assumed command of the contract agency on June 3 after a career that included positions as the Army's top program manager for command-and-control networks and for ground-combat vehicles.
“As we watch right now and cases are beginning to rise in certain areas of the country, I've asked all of our teams to really think about what we can do right now to make sure if we do end up in a shutdown we can avoid impacts to the industrial base and our deliveries,” he said.
June 30, 2022 | International, C4ISR
'Both the acquisition agreement and the underlying transaction violate federal antitrust law,' said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter.
July 16, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By CHRISTOPHER DENNIS RAF LAKENHEATH, England — A $205 million construction project to prepare RAF Lakenheath for the arrival of two squadrons of U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II fighter jets in 2021 officially got underway Monday. The commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe - U.S. Air Forces Africa, Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, and other dignitaries plunged shovels into dirt at what will become the first permanent site for U.S. F-35s in Europe. U.K. firms Kier and VolkerFitzpatrick will build a flight simulator facility, maintenance unit, hangars and storage units at the site, in time for the arrival of 48 F-35s in November 2021. The Royal Air Force currently has nine F-35s at RAF Marham, about 25 miles north of Lakenheath. “This will be a great opportunity to reinforce together how we will train, execute and operate on a daily basis, and allow us to deepen what is a critically important relationship,” Harrigian said at the groundbreaking. The project is the first in a broad program to support Air Force operations in the U.K. A further $1 billion is expected to be invested in the program over the next seven to 10 years, said the Defense Infrastructure Organization, which last year awarded the contract for the F-35 campus. “The project team is in good shape — we are on schedule for completion in 2021,” Kier's managing director of aviation and defense James Hindes was quoted as saying by The Construction Index, an industry website. The completed campus will host around 1,200 U.S. airmen. Currently, more than 9,100 U.S. servicemembers are based in the U.K, according to Pentagon data. Recent problems with engine delivery of the F-35A are not expected to delay the arrival of America's newest fighter jet at Lakenheath, a 48th Fighter Wing spokeswoman said Monday. Of the 81 engines that were delivered in 2018, 86% were late, according to a Government Accountability Office report in April. That was up from 48% that were not delivered on time the previous year, when fewer engines were delivered. The delays were due in part to an increase in the “average number of quality issues per engine”— 941 in 2018 against 777 a year earlier, the GAO report said. United Technologies' Pratt and Whitney unit, the only company to make the engines, is under a corrective action request from the Defense Contract Management Agency for “poor delivery performance,” according to a July report by Bloomberg News. https://www.stripes.com/news/construction-of-first-permanent-us-f-35-campus-in-europe-begins-at-lakenheath-1.590422
June 9, 2024 | International, Aerospace
Could air-launched effects also be a long-range precision munition? The Army is looking into it.