Back to news

April 22, 2020 | International, Aerospace

F-35 deliveries could slow down, as COVID-19 jolts Lockheed’s supply chain

By: Valerie Insinna

WASHINGTON — The coronavirus pandemic has rattled Lockheed Martin's aeronautics business, with the F-35 joint strike fighter program facing the prospect of a slowdown in deliveries, company executives said Tuesday.

“The disruptions introduced by the virus have caused us to reduce our 2020 sales expectations as production and supply chain activities have recently slowed in our aeronautics business area,” Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson said during an April 21 earnings call with investors.

The company now projects its total sales for 2020 will amount to anywhere from $62.25 billion to $64 billion dollars — down from the the $62.75 billion to $64.25 billion it had previously estimated in January.

Production of the F-35 has been the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic so far, said Ken Possenriede, the company's chief financial officer.

“There's more analysis that we're going to do over the next couple of weeks working with our supply chain, our Fort Worth production line to determine — if any impact — to what extent it will be, including deliveries,” he said.

Lockheed's acknowledgement of COVID-19 related challenges comes a day after the Pentagon disclosed schedule delays across its major weapons acquisition efforts, with aviation programs hit particularly hard by the effects of the pandemic.

“We believe there will be a three-month impact that we can see right now. So we're looking at schedule delays and inefficiencies and so forth. That isn't a particular program, that's [major defense acquisition programs] in general,” Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's top acquisition official, told reporters Monday.

While Lord did not name specific programs that could be delayed, Possenriede said Tuesday that disruptions to the F-35 program were likely due to pressures faced by domestic and international companies within the jet's global supply chain.

“There are local distancing requirements that are being more stringently applied across the globe. There is workforce disruption,” he said. “We've actually had some issues with shipping constraints.”

Most recently, Lockheed's supply chain team discovered an issue with suppliers' performance-based payment invoices, which get delivered to Lockheed after certain milestones are completed, Possenriede said.

“There are a couple suppliers that are going to be delinquent in April. Some of them are for administrative reasons — we'll work through that. That's just timing. Some of them is due to them not achieving their milestones,” he said. “Most of it is going to be COVID-related. We're looking at that.”

Despite the challenges in keeping F-35 production smooth, there has been little change to other aspects of the program, Possenriede said. Development and follow-on modernization activities have continued with “little to no impact.”

And while Lockheed contractors have faced some barriers reporting to work at certain bases where they help perform repairs or stand up maintenance operations, Possenriede said there has been minimal impact to F-35 sustainment.

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/04/21/f-35-deliveries-could-slow-down-as-covid-19-jolts-lockheeds-supply-chain/

On the same subject

  • How does the Pentagon’s AI center plan to give the military a battlefield advantage?

    September 14, 2020 | International, C4ISR

    How does the Pentagon’s AI center plan to give the military a battlefield advantage?

    Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub is working on tools to help in joint, all-domain operations as department leaders seek to use data to gain an advantage on the battlefield. This year, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center kicked off its joint war-fighting initiative, under which it is developing algorithms to provide armed services and combatant commands with AI tools to accelerate decision-making. Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the JAIC, said the center, for example, is “heavily” involved in the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, the service's primary lever to enable the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept. The system underwent a major test last week. The center is “specifically focused” on working to harness AI to link together systems involved in the intelligence-gathering phase to the operations and effects piece of all-domain operations, Mulchandani added. “It's how do we actually connect these platforms together end to end to build sort of a system that allows a commander to actually have that level of both visibility on the intel side but able to action it on the other side,” Mulchandani said on a call with reporters Thursday. The JAIC is also working on an operations cognitive assistant tool to support commanders and “drive faster and more efficient decision-making through AI-enabled predictive analytics,” Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said Thursday at the DoD AI Symposium. “Our goal is to nest these capabilities under the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept ... to provide a more cohesive and synchronized operational framework for the joint force,” Deasy said. Earlier in the summer, a JAIC official said the war-fighting team was trying to aim a laser on an enemy vehicle to inflict damage. But to enable all these tools, one thing is paramount: data. The DoD CIO's office is set to release its data strategy later this year, with the department's new chief data officer, Dave Spirk, saying at the symposium that the he worked to reorient a draft of the strategy to ensure the use of data to enable joint war fighting is the top priority. “We're in a place now where we want to put joint war fighting at the top of the pile of things we're working on,” Spirk said at the symposium Sept. 9. Deasy also emphasized the importance of data in war fighting during a session at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference that same day. “When we do the exercises, the experiments and things maybe don't go right — I can guarantee you what they're going to write down on the whiteboard at the end of that is ‘data.' Did we have the right data today? Why couldn't we connect those data across our weapons systems, our various assets?” Deasy said. Critical to the development of artificial intelligence are adequate data storage and development platforms. The JAIC recently awarded a contract worth more than $100 million to Deloitte for the development of the Joint Common Foundation platform, an enterprisewide, cloud-based platform that the center will use to develop AI tools. Meanwhile, DoD components such as the JAIC are also awaiting the deployment of the DoD's embattled enterprise cloud, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. Department officials have continuously pointed to the JEDI cloud as a critical piece of the JAIC's ability to develop artificial intelligence, as the new technology it is expected to store 80 percent of DoD systems across classification levels and provide massive amounts of data. Deasy said Sept. 9 that JADC2 will require the services to collect and share data with each other in a way that they have never done before, and that may require changes to how they operate. But in order to enable JADC2, he added, a cultural shift in how the services treat their data is needed; if the services want to link sensors to shooters, interoperability of services' systems and data is imperative. “Historically, each service could gather up their data, send it up their command to focus on. But in this new world ... the services are going to have to come together, which means the data's going to have to come together in a very different way,” Deasy said at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference. The DoD is in the "early days of how we're going to do that,” he added. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/09/10/how-does-the-pentagons-ai-center-plan-to-give-the-military-a-battlefield-advantage/

  • Army issues $17 million in contracts for TITAN development

    January 14, 2021 | International, Land, C4ISR

    Army issues $17 million in contracts for TITAN development

    Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The Army has issued agreements to Palantir Technologies and Raytheon Technologies in support of the design and software maturation of a new next-generation ground station. The Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) is intended to be a key piece in the sensor-to-shooter chain, connecting sensors from all domains to war fighters and systems in the field to enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting. The system will be capable of downlinking data from multiple domains, processing it with artificial intelligence to create targeting data, and then delivering those solutions directly to the Fires networks, which can then determine the best available shooter to respond with. Palantir and Raytheon will each receive an $8.5 million other transaction authority (OTA) agreements for 12 months of work in the project's first phase. That early stage will include a series of design reviews, software demonstrations and soldier touchpoints as the vendors mature the TITAN software and work on system-level design. The Army will eventually move to a single vendor for complete system prototyping for phase 2. The next stage will cover refinement of prototype capabilities, and the fourth and final phase will prepare a prototype that is ready to integrate future sensors and technology advancements. The Army has been practicing with TITAN surrogates, most notably during its Project Convergence learning campaign last year. During that event, the Army was able to take overhead tactical satellite imagery and downlink it to a TITAN surrogate located at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. The TITAN surrogate then used the Prometheus artificial intelligence program to create targeting solutions from that data. Next, those solutions were transported to the main demonstration area at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, where another AI program determined the best shooter to receive that targeting solution. “We found the threat rapidly. We were able to identify it as the real threat. We were able to put hit-grade coordinates on it in very near real time and then digitally send that from the TITAN surrogate unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, down to the firing units that were located down at Yuma via tactical satellite communications. And all of that happened within seconds,” Willie Nelson, director of Army Futures Command's Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Cross-Functional Team, told C4ISRNET following the exercise. Northrop Grumman has been tapped to build two TITAN prototypes. Those are expected to be delivered in 2022. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2021/01/13/army-issues-17-million-in-contracts-for-titan-development/

  • Pourquoi la Finlande a préféré le F-35 américain au Rafale

    December 13, 2021 | International, Aerospace

    Pourquoi la Finlande a préféré le F-35 américain au Rafale

    Helsinki a fait le choix d'acheter 64 appareils F-35 de l'américain Lockheed Martin, pour un montant de 8,4 milliards d'euros. Supériorité...-aero-spatial

All news