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  • What To Expect From Biden’s Pentagon

    November 24, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

    What To Expect From Biden’s Pentagon

    Jen DiMascio Michael Bruno Lee Hudson Tony Osborne November 20, 2020 One of Joe Biden's last speeches as U.S. vice president focused on nuclear security, touting passage of the New Start Treaty with Russia in 2010 and subsequent reductions in the U.S. stockpile of warheads. Four years later, nuclear modernization and arms control will be among the first major tests he faces when he assumes the presidency in January. Under President Donald Trump, the Pentagon made notable strides in speeding up its cumbersome acquisition system, enabling the military to take better advantage of commercial technologies. The Defense Department also established what it calls “irreversible momentum” toward new space capabilities. But it will fall to the Biden administration to shepherd many experiments in new technologies into actual programs. It will be Biden's task to sell Congress on the idea of Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The new Democratic president could be dealing with a Senate controlled by Republicans, and he faces allies that see the U.S. as a less reliable partner than it was four years ago. He also will have to balance the modernization and readiness of the force within a budget that probably peaked in 2020. Shortly after he is inaugurated, Biden will face the Feb. 5 expiration of the New Start arms control treaty with Russia. His options are to extend the treaty for up to five years, for a shorter time frame or not at all. The Trump administration has been reluctant to agree to a full extension, given Russia's aggressive modernization of nuclear systems not covered by the treaty. Biden's advisors are likely to opt for extending the treaty to allow for more time for negotiations, predicts Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to be more focused on the threat of advanced weaponry in Russia and China, in particular the growth of strategic nuclear arsenals. Retiring Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, says he is “particularly concerned about where the Chinese are headed with the size and capability of their nuclear program.” He adds: “Like a lot of things related to the Chinese, we have probably been too complacent.” Such tensions, and a Congress split along partisan lines, could help maintain support for nuclear modernization programs such as development of the next-generation ICBM, the Northrop Grumman Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), a program some analysts have thought a Biden administration might consider slowing or canceling. “Any serious push to retire the ICBM force and do away with the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent program would not be supported by the Senate,” Cowen analysts say. A Biden administration likely means more of the same for the U.S. industrial base, for better or worse. The U.S. defense budget is expected to remain flat, putting pressure on the Pentagon to find ways to get more bang for its buck and better technologies against peer rivals—at the expense of traditional force structure. “Technology investment is likely to be most important, including network integration, hypersonics, artificial intelligence, long-range strike and missile defense,” Bernstein analyst Doug Harned and his team say. “We expect a lot of activity around integration, but exactly what this means is still ill-defined. Force structure may well come under more pressure. This means lower numbers of troops, aircraft, vehicles, ships, etc.” Downward pressure on force structure would be bad for Lockheed Martin, given its high exposure with the F-35, as well as for General Dynamics' warships and ground vehicles, says the Bernstein team. Northrop Grumman appears well-positioned long-term, based on its lean toward new technologies, but there are some risks around the GBSD. Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed have the highest Middle East exposure among the primes, and military sales there may have some added risk. “Democrats in both the House and Senate want restrictions on [Foreign Military Sales] in the wake of reports that the United Arab Emirates will be allowed to purchase 50 Lockheed Martin F-35s,” the Cowen Washington Research Group observed Nov. 4. “We do not believe a [Republican] Senate will support restrictions. If the sale is going to happen, it will need to be jammed through . . . before Biden takes office.” Like the Obama administration, the Trump team provided growing support for new space technologies. “I believe space will continue to be very, very important,” says Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. “I just had a briefing on a lot of [National Reconnaissance Office] projects we work on. And I'll tell you, it is absolutely eye-watering the capability that is being launched here in the next couple of months. . . . I think we have irreversible momentum.” During the Trump administration's final weeks in office, Lord is working to create a trusted capital marketplace, strengthen the defense industrial base and work with Capitol Hill on new ways of purchasing software. The Defense Department is working closely with the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment to block adversaries such as China or Russia from purchasing companies that are critical to U.S. national technology initiatives, she told the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Ascend conference on Nov. 18. Another focus for Lord's team is rare earth minerals and microelectronics. The bulk of rare earth mineral processing occurs in China, and most microelectronics are manufactured outside the U.S. Chris Brose, who served as policy director for the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is advocating more radical change to scale up defense innovation, a priority of U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. “The question for the new administration is going to be: ‘How do you support that vision, and how do you kind of reshape the Air Force, reshape the Space Force and really realign the [national] defense program?'” asks Brose, who is now chief strategy officer for the defense industry startup Anduril. Brose believes that to compete more effectively against advanced military challenges, the Pentagon must rethink how it harnesses new technologies, from the requirements process all the way through the acquisition process. Today's military, he notes, is organized to purchase a platform it has seen in a presentation or read in a white paper. The goal should not be to spend a long time defining requirements and then pay a single vendor to build things such as small satellites, software-defined programs or unmanned systems. One of the Air Force's top modernization priorities is the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS). The challenge with an effort such as the ABMS is that the requirements and concepts of operation are unclear, Brose says, and ABMS demonstrations study different problems each year, making progress tough to discern. Though the Trump administration has experienced extensive turnover among its civilian leadership, it made considerable progress in restoring aircraft fleet readiness. In 2018, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis—the first of five men in the military's top civilian job in four years—mandated that all tactical aircraft fleets needed to be 80% ready for missions. The Navy drew on techniques from the commercial airline industry to meet that goal within about one year for its Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet. The service has since applied the same techniques to improve the readiness of Boeing EA-18G Growlers, and it is beginning to expand the process to its Northrop Grumman E-2D Hawkeyes, with an eye toward the rest of its tactical aircraft, Rear Adm. Shane Gahagan, the Navy's program executive officer for tactical aviation, said at Aviation Week's Military Aviation Logistics and Maintenance Symposium on Nov. 17. While Biden's team will seek to build on that progress, his administration likely will take a markedly less confrontational approach with U.S. allies than Trump, who believes the U.S. has borne too much of the burden to defend Europe. As the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany earlier this year, repositioning them around Europe, Trump placed the blame squarely on Germany, describing the nation as “delinquent” in failing to pay its fair share. NATO members breathed a collective sigh of relief after Biden's election, believing it will pave the way for a relaunch of transatlantic defense relations. But Biden is likely to maintain pressure on European countries to keep defense spending up in light of Russian and Chinese threats and to align with NATO's call for members to spend 2% of their GDP on defense. “Trump seized on the 2% and banged the table. . . . It is broadly true he got the Europeans to take seriously the demand that more should be spent on defense,” says Jonathan Eyal, an associate director at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. The cost of Trump's approach, however, has been “very heavy,” he says, leading to a virtual collapse in the relationship between the U.S. and Germany. Less certain is how a Biden administration will deal with countries that appear to be undermining NATO values. Turkey's oil and gas exploration in waters disputed by neighbor and fellow NATO member Greece have prompted regional tension, not to mention Ankara's actions in Libya, Syria and, more recently, its support of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict (AW&ST Oct. 12-25, p. 62). Turkey's decision to recently test its S-400 ground-based air defense system purchased from Russia also remains a source of irritation for Washington. The purchase of the S-400 prompted Washington to kick Turkey out of the F-35 program, but Trump opted not to invoke the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan despite pressure in the Senate. “One can assume that the Biden administration would take the tougher line on Turkey,” Eyal says. “Erdogan is now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/what-expect-bidens-pentagon

  • L3Harris to build prototype satellite capable of tracking hypersonic weapons

    January 15, 2021 | International, Aerospace

    L3Harris to build prototype satellite capable of tracking hypersonic weapons

    Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The Missile Defense Agency awarded L3Harris Technologies a $121 million contract to build a prototype satellite capable of tracking hypersonic weapons, the agency announced Jan. 14. Under the contract, L3Harris is tasked with building an on-orbit prototype demonstration for the agency's Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, a proliferated constellation in low Earth orbit that is capable of detecting and tracking hypersonic weapons. The constellation is designed to fill the gap in the country's missile defense architecture created by hypersonic weapons, which are dimmer than traditional ballistic missiles, making them harder to see with the nation's infrared sensors based in geosynchronous orbit. In addition, they are able to maneuver around terrestrial sensors. With China and Russia developing these weapons, the Department of Defense is eager to develop a new constellation that can detect and track the threats anywhere in the world. And so is Congress — in December lawmakers set aside $130 million to fund the project. The HBTSS design solves the hypersonic weapon problem by placing the sensor much closer to the Earth's surface in the lower orbit, making it easier to see the threat. But because the sensors are closer to the Earth, they have a far more limited field of view than the sensors in geosynchronous orbit. In order to achieve global coverage, the Missile Defense Agency wants a proliferated constellation made up of dozens of satellites on orbit. L3Harris was one of four companies awarded $20 million contracts in 2019 to develop a prototype payload design and risk reduction demonstration for HBTSS, along with Northrop Grumman, Leidos and Raytheon Technologies. According to the initial contract announcements, work on those designs was due Oct. 31, 2020. With this most recent award, L3Harris has won the subsequent competition between the four companies to build the actual prototype. The company has also been selected to build satellites for the Space Development Agency that will track hypersonic threats and feed data to HBTSS. In October, L3Harris won a $193 million contract to build four of the agency's eight wide field of view (WFOV) satellites, with SpaceX building four more. According to Space Development Agency leaders, their satellites will work in conjunction with HBTSS satellites to track hypersonic threats. The WFOV satellites will provide initial detection and tracing of the weapons, passing custody from satellite to satellite as the threats traverse the globe. Then, the WFOV satellites will pass custody to the medium field of view HBTSS satellites, which can provide targeting solutions with their more accurate sensors. The WFOV satellites are scheduled for launch as early as September 2022. Work on the HBTSS prototype contract will be complete in July 2023. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2021/01/14/l3harris-to-build-prototype-satellite-capable-of-tracking-hypersonic-weapons

  • Air Force Awards $95M For Cyber Intelligence

    February 9, 2021 | International, C4ISR, Security

    Air Force Awards $95M For Cyber Intelligence

    The investment is a sign of the Air Force's commitment to fighting war effectively across all domains, including cyber and its electronic warfare cousin. By KELSEY ATHERTONon February 08, 2021 at 5:08 PM ALBUQUERQUE: The 16th Air Force, designed to constantly contest the electromagnetic spectrum, has awarded a $95 million contract to support both command and control and service cryptologic element roles. The contract — Full Spectrum Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Operational Non-Appropriated Funds Support, or FUSIONS — was awarded to Scientific Research Corp of Atlanta. It will run through February 2026. In a sign that Scientific may have developed a promising approach, this is not the first award to the company for this sort of work. The Navy awarded the company a contract similar in scale and scope in 2018. The 16th Air Force first started soliciting this contract in November 2019, one month after the command was created. The original solicitation emphasized the importance of “delivering timely and relevant intelligence data/products to the war fighter.” The 16th was created by merging an Air Force cyber mission with an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance component. Combining intelligence collection in the same component as one that can launch attacks on computers is a way for the Air Force to show how closely connected cyber attacks are to online espionage. Cyber, like surveillance and activity in the electromagnetic spectrum, can happen below the threshold of a shooting war but can also be used for targeting and to inflict physical damage. The scale of the investment is a sign of the Air Force's commitment to fighting war effectively across all its domains, including cyber. At a Dec. 11 symposium, Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mark D. Kelly said he'd told 16AF commander Lt. Gen. Timothy D. Haugh to “Take all of us, whether we go willingly, or kicking and screaming, into the non-kinetic competition.” Much of the work of delivering data products to the Air Force will involve harnessing information it already has in its databases, and making them useful on a command level. Some of that work, as outlined in the solicitation, involves targeting products. “The contractor shall provide targeting SME support regarding the Joint and Air Force Targeting Enterprise (JTE/AFTE), and kinetic, Electronic Warfare (EW), Information Operations (IO), Space and Cyber targeting,” reads the solicitation. The contract is designed to support the 16th in its role as a “service cryptologic element,” or the formal mechanism by which signals intelligence components of the service work directly with the NSA. Another component of the FUSIONS contract is identifying and recommending “new or unexploited information systems,” as well as “unique friendly, enemy, or neutral information sources,” with the goal of turning that information into relevant and useful intelligence. This means, broadly, looking at new Internet-connected devices, tools, and networks, and making that information something troops at the tactical level can use. Vital to that intelligence collection and sharing is ensuring the data itself can be transmitted over existing DoD networks. https://breakingdefense.com/2021/02/air-force-awards-95-million-for-cyber-intelligence/

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