HENSOLDT provides US Coast Guard with naval radars

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  March 20, 2020 | International, Land

  Raytheon: Robotized Factory Speeds Up Army LTAMDS Radar

  The company is using extensive automation and a new generation of high-efficiency gallium nitride materials to accelerate development of the Lower-Tier Air & Missile Defense Sensor, LTAMDS. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on March 19, 2020 at 7:01 AM WASHINGTON: Last October, the Army gave Raytheon a new kind of contract for a new kind of radar. Originally envisioned as simply an upgrade for the iconic but aging Patriot missile defense system, the Lower-Tier Air & Missile Defense Sensor has evolved into a multi-purpose radar that can share data with multiple kinds of command posts and launchers, not just Patriot, over the Army's new IBCS network. Its components use gallium nitride (GaN), instead of the traditional gallium arsenide (GaS), which means less electrical energy wasted as heat and more pouring out of the radar to detect incoming threats at greater distances. The program also takes a new approach to acquisition, using both the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) and Section 804 Mid-Tier Acquisition processes to shortcut around the cumbersome conventional process known as DoD 5000. Even the manufacturing process uses new forms of automation to speed up the process, helping to meet the Army's ambitious timeline. In this interview, sponsored by Raytheon, the company's Integrated Air & Missile Defense director, Bob Kelley, talks to Breaking Defense about what makes LTAMDS different. Q: What's special about the way the Army and Raytheon are developing LTAMDS? A: I think this is a great example of an Other Transaction Authority and Section 804 type of rapid prototyping program. It's very ambitious to go from a sense-off in the spring/early summer timeframe at White Sands Missile Range in 2019, to fielding radars to US Army soldiers in 2022. It is an ambitious schedule, but thus far we are on or ahead of schedule. I think a lot of that has to do just with the level of collaboration and transparency that you get from these types of acquisition programs. The OTA is a rapid prototyping program. This is not a [standard] 5000-series DOD acquisition program. The Army is looking for an urgent material release in fiscal year '22. And so, you back that up, you've got to deliver radars for testing in '21, and you had contract award in October of '19. Within 4 months of contract award, we had the first main array antenna, the one that goes on the front – there are two smaller ones to the rear. The first large front array is complete. Call it a prototype zero. That will be ready to start running contractor tests on this year. Q: What's your manufacturing process like to build these systems? A: We have our own nationally certified GaN Foundry on our site of our manufacturing facility in Andover, Massachusetts. So we're literally manufacturing the GaN chips about a couple hundred yards away from where we turn those into circuit cards, so that we can make GaN radio frequency elements to go onto the front of a radar antenna. So once those GaN chips are made, they come over to the circuit card assembly line, and from that point on there is very little touch labor. What you have is you have people that are supervising machines that are making these chips. It's not that people can't make great circuit cards, but you're going to be far more efficient and you're going to make a lot more. The machines are calibrated that every single card will be identical. Now, you need the humans there to make sure that it's identically right, not identically wrong, because if the first one's wrong they're all going to be wrong. But we take a lot of steps with a lot of quality control and testing to make sure that those are all done properly. Something else that's new this time around is adding some larger robots to our factory. We literally have a robot taking those circuit cards — that were assembled on a circuit card assembly line by machines — and delivering those circuit cards to another robot, and that robot will put them in place and install them on onto the radar. It allows us to have more identicality throughout the entire manufacturing process, but also to manufacturer these products much faster. A Patriot radar is still a very viable radar on the battlefield today, and we have partners that are purchasing them, but there's a lot of human touch labor on there, because some of the designs are a few decades old. This makes it so that we can create and manufacturer a radar in a much shorter period of time — and that's one of the things that is what's allowing us to go quickly here and meet the Army's ambitious timeline. Q: You mentioned Gallium Nitride – why is your ability to make that for LTAMDS so important? A: From our perspective, it's the power efficiency. So our radar takes power in and then it needs some of that power to power all the internal systems inside the radar: There's a whole bunch of signal processors, there's a cooling system — just like your car, there's all these auxiliary things that have to be operating to make the radar work. Then you're left with an amount of power that you are going to try to turn into radio frequency power, to push out and do things that radars do – detect, identify, classify, discriminate. The ranges and altitudes that you can do that at is a function of the efficiency of your RF transmitters and how much power you're putting in. What you'll see with gallium nitride is the efficiency, the output, the power output efficiency is unparalleled by any technology that's out there today. With the same amount of input power, you can see much further, see much higher and see much clearer. That's important when you want to build a ground-based air defense radar that has to be able to be driven around, that you want to be able to deploy on, say, a C-17 aircraft from the United States to some hotspot in the world. Well, that will limit you on the size that your radar can be. What you want to have is the most efficient radar that you can make, so with that size you can get the most performance and capability out of your radar. And we believe that's what we've done. This is not our first gallium nitride radar we've made. But with the improvements we've made to our gallium nitride over the past five to 10 years, we're calling this next-gen GaN technology. The efficiency on this radar far exceeds the efficiency on any other GaN radars that we produce. The main LTAMDS array is roughly the same size as the array on a Patriot, but provides more than twice the performance of the Patriot that's out there today on the battlefield. Q: What's the importance of the side arrays? Patriot didn't have them. A: The battlefield used to be linear – the good guys were on one side, the bad guys were on the other side – so bad things were going to come at you from generally the way you were facing. Well, the battlefield is nonlinear today. Now I can maneuver these missiles to attack from any direction I want. I know what your capability for sensing is; if I want to stay out of that, go all the way around you and come in from the rear, I can do that to you. You can be attacked by tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, electronic attack in the form of jamming, UAVs, fifth gen fighters. And they can bring them all in the same time and space to overwhelm your sensor capability. It's gotten to the point now, with the evolution of the threat and where the threat is going, that there is a requirement to have 360 degree protection. That's why we ended up with three fixed and staring arrays, so that we are always looking in all directions. Q: It's not just about LTAMDS itself – you also have to make this work with Northrop Grumman's Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System network, IBCS. A: There's a lot of intersections with IBCS as it gets ready to go into its limited user test, coming up in the next couple of months. This is the first US Army radar that is being designed and manufactured to be a native to the IBCS network. With Patriot and Sentinel, there are these adaptation kits that will adapt those radars and those shooters to the IBCS integrated fire control network. Those kits are not required with this radar: It is being designed and optimized specifically to operate in that network. It was actually part of the requirement: You had to demonstrate that you understood how to do that and make it happen. We get the interface document from the United States government and they say, “This is what you have to interface with.” It's that simple. [Editor's note: IBCS is a Northrop Grumman product, not one of Raytheon's, but the US government owns the necessary data rights and can share the interface control documents with other contractors whose products need to plug in. That's actually a novel approach to contracting and central to the military's pursuit of interoperable open architecture.] This interview transcript was edited for clarity and brevity. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/raytheon-robotized-factory-speeds-up-army-ltamds-radar

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  June 13, 2018 | International, Naval

  US Navy awards Lockheed Martin MK48 maintenance contract

  The US Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) awarded Lockheed Martin a five-year follow-on contract option on 12 June worth about USD65 million to support the Navy's intermediate-level maintenance activities for MK48 torpedoes at the Pearl Harbor Heavyweight Torpedo Intermediate Maintenance Activity (IMA). The initial contract was awarded in March 2018. The Lockheed Martin MK48 Torpedo IMA Program focuses on ensuring availability and reliability of the torpedoes, Richard Dunn, programme manager for Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems, said in a statement, while reducing total programme life cycle costs for the US Navy's torpedo programme. Lockheed Martin has provided specialised maintenance for the MK48 torpedoes since 2007. http://www.janes.com/article/80934/us-navy-awards-lockheed-martin-mk48-maintenance-contract

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  June 26, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

  ‘Lightning in her veins’: How Katie Arrington is convincing defense contractors to love cybersecurity

  Andrew Eversden Katie Arrington's job is to win the room. She's at San Francisco's Moscone Center on Feb. 26 at the RSA Conference, one of the largest cybersecurity events. In the last year, she's spoken at more than 100 events, which may explain why today, she's sick. Her voice, typically loud and energetic, is raspy and shaky. Arrington's title is clunky: chief information security officer for acquisition in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. Translated, she's leading the Pentagon's effort to add new cybersecurity requirements for the 300,000 companies that do business with the Pentagon. Her challenge, almost every day, is to convince industry it should embrace the Defense Department's new auditing standards, which are aimed at improving cybersecurity. In this room, she sits next to a top American executive from the Chinese technology company Huawei to discuss — rather, argue about — supply chain security, alongside a Harvard lecturer and think tank fellow. In the months leading up to the panel, the U.S. government and Huawei fought in court over a provision in the fiscal 2019 defense policy bill that bans federal agencies from buying the company's equipment. The audience is shoulder to shoulder, no seat spared. “This session promises to be one of the most interesting, colorful and perhaps debate[d] topic,” the moderator begins. Arrington, however, doesn't understand what all the “hoopla” is about. “Really, honestly, it's not that big of a deal,” she told C4ISRNET hours before the session. The Department of Defense has made the RSA Conference a greater priority in recent years as it tries to heal a strained relationship with Silicon Valley. Outside the Capital Beltway, the cybersecurity community often views the department's mission with skepticism or that of an overly strict parent. In contrast, defense leaders see themselves as offering lucrative contracts with reasonable sets of security requirements for winning the work, which can range from the acquisition of military weapons systems and basic IT tools to mowing grass at military bases. But after years of suppliers with weak cybersecurity tormenting the department, it's now Arrington's job to find a solution. The conventional wisdom among defense officials is that cybersecurity problems can't be solved — they can only be mitigated. “Supply chain security is an insurmountably hard problem,” said fellow panelist Bruce Schneier, the Harvard lecturer and well-known technology guru. So Arrington flies all over the country, speaking to room after room of defense contractors and trying to convince them, somehow, that they must impose tighter cybersecurity controls. And if they don't? The Pentagon could lose out on state-of-the-art technology to protect national security secrets. And if industry doesn't care about that? Then businesses will lose out on profitable DoD contracts. The underdog Arrington has spent much of the last two and a half years shuffling in and out of rooms, working to persuade audiences she can solve pressing community problems. In 2018, it was a different cause: politics. Her problem then was Rep. Mark Sanford. Sanford, she said, spent too much time on cable news fighting with President Donald Trump and not enough time on local issues. So Arrington challenged him in a Republican primary. Sanford, the former South Carolina governor of “hiking the Appalachian Trail” fame, had never lost an election. But Arrington, endorsed by the president, pulled off the unexpected, knocking off the political powerhouse by about 2,500 votes and adding her name to South Carolina political folklore. “If somebody tells her she can't do something, she ignores that,” said Andrew Boucher, a consultant for Arrington's congressional campaign. “She ignores the naysayers. Now, Arrington, 49, is leading a robust overhaul of the Pentagon's cybersecurity requirements for contractors, known as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, or CMMC. The department is pushing the reform at a breakneck pace, at least as far as Defense Department reforms go. Her team has issued several drafts and the final standards in the past year. “She's got lightning in her veins,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO and a member of the board of directors for PreVeil, an email encryption company. “She's smart, and she's smart enough to know she doesn't know everything.” That lightning kept CMMC on pace for its final standards rollout in January, an aggressive timeline that one trade association representative characterized as a “herculean effort.” This summer, CMMC is scheduled to be included in requests for information for upcoming Pentagon contracts. If all goes according to plan, CMMC would mitigate several cybersecurity issues that plague the DoD supply chain, and the government would have a mechanism to verify contractors' cybersecurity claims. The guidance recognizes that security differs from business to business while allowing the government insight into companies' cyber posture before awarding contracts. The problem now is a system where companies can self-assess their cyber defenses. Arrington describes it this way: “Everybody thinks when they walk out of the room in the morning, when they walk away from the mirror, they look great, [but] when you put the mirror up and you say, ‘Yeah, nope' — you didn't draw your eyebrows on right today.” Through these changes, the department has to retain a fair and competitive acquisition process. It's a massive overhaul that needs a charismatic and competent leader to succeed, said David Berteau, president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, a trade organization that represents more than 400 government contractors. “Very little important change gets done without a vocal, capable champion present all the way through,” he said. That's Arrington. Experts estimate that China steals hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property annually, including military technology. The federal government's concern with Huawei is that its presence could allow the Chinese government to access the feds' data. Chinese actors have continuously breached Navy contractors, as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018. In addition, China accounts for 90 percent of the U.S. Justice Department's economic espionage cases as well as two-thirds of its trade secrets cases, according to a 2019 Congressional Research Service report. Pentagon officials see the success of CMMC as critical “because of the ongoing and escalating threat of cybersecurity challenges,” said Berteau, who also worked for six defense secretaries. “It has real consequences for America, above and beyond the consequences for a particular contract or a particular program.” But leaders in the defense industry still have questions. Company executives wonder what level of certification they will need, a centerpiece of CMMC that will affect competitiveness. Business leaders also don't know when they need to get the certifications. Others still have questions about reimbursement for “allowable costs” for compliance, or don't understand how subcontractors can recover compliance costs, if at all. Though some industry members have criticized the Pentagon for the rapid speed at which CMMC has proceeded, others acknowledge it is years overdue. For each day CMMC isn't part of solicitations, the Defense Department is losing out on implementing tighter cybersecurity controls until contracts expire, the argument goes. And Arrington is quick to mention the standards need to be in RFPs this fall. “Our adversaries ... their whole job is to have us not exist. The easiest way to do that has been through our supply chain,” she said on a January podcast. “It's the easiest way to get access to us.” ‘Everybody has a superpower' Tensions rise on the RSA Conference panel after Arrington explains why the Defense Department must stay away from risky technology that may allow access into DoD networks through backdoors. Why, she questions, would the federal government use hardware made by a company with close ties to the Chinese government — the same government that's plotting economic domination, trampling over human rights and looking to spread communism? But isn't it true there are several other countries that can install backdoors and launch virtual attacks, responds Huawei's Andy Purdy, implying the United States has that capability as well? “That's ridiculous!” Arrington says, with her arms outstretched to her sides. “The bottom line is we're a democracy, we're different!” In the last 18 months, Arrington's earned a reputation for her candor with the defense-industrial base, a community of vendors accustomed to dry presentations on programs from other senior DoD officials. She responds to criticism on LinkedIn. She's direct with contractors, once telling them to chant: “We all are going to get breached.” Then there's the origin story of the acronym that became shorthand for her program. “It was a glass of wine on a Friday night, and that's how you got ‘C-M-M-C,' ” Arrington jokingly said Jan. 28 at the law firm Holland and Knight. “Really, unique, huh? Yeah, I went cray-cray on the acronym.” But joking aside, Arrington knows the government contracting process can be cumbersome. She reminds audiences that she came up in industry and understands. “Ladies and gentlemen, we're a ‘we,' ” Arrington said in June last year, as if it were an applause line on the campaign trail. Her approach, she said, is part of a paradigm shift that defense contractors must adopt. Accepting there's a risk of a breach will lead to stronger cyber defenses. To get this done will require a web of industry relationships. Arrington knows this. “Everybody has a superpower,” she said in an interview, and hers is collaboration. Sources in industry agreed, telling C4ISRNET that Arrington and her team's success thus far is due to their engagement with small businesses, prime contractors and trade associations. “It's collaboration! That's what the human condition is about. What we can do together is far more impactful than what we'll ever do on our own,” Arrington said. Driven to serve Twenty-eight minutes into the RSA session, the prickly nature of the panel prompts the moderator to quip: “I'm glad we're at least expressing how we feel here.” Huawei's Purdy is passionately arguing that all bad technology should be removed from the supply chain, when Arrington cuts him off. He shuts his eyes momentarily and takes a deep breath. She continues until Harvard's Schneier says that “5G's lost, and our only hope now is to try to secure 6G.” He then adds: “I'm rooting for you, but I'm not optimistic.” Arrington — again finding herself on the defensive — interrupts the moderator to pointedly ask Schneier who he's really rooting for. He responds by saying he hopes Arrington can build a Huawei-free 5G network. “Why would I have to build a 5G network? When did the Department of Defense ever build a network?” Arrington asks, snapping her head back to look at the packed audience, her eyebrow furrowed on a face of sarcastic confusion. The quip earns laughter from the crowd, a sign her humor and wit are working to her advantage. Arrington “fell in love” with cybersecurity when she worked at the defense giant Booz Allen Hamilton. She's fascinated by the power and interconnectedness of technology. Cyber, she said, is like fire: It can provide benefits such as warmth or help with cooking. But handled improperly, it will burn you. Similarly, poor cyber hygiene can destroy everything a victim is connected to, including national security secrets. Or, as she said on a January podcast, “When Al Gore created the internet, he did not realize what he was doing.” She's also long been attracted to solving problems in public life; even President Jimmy Carter encouraged her at five years old to find solutions to problems. And there are plenty of problems to solve in local politics. So in 2016 she turned politician, winning a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives. That was a “great training ground” that prepared her to wrestle with contractors' concerns. “Your job is to listen to all the disparate pieces and work on the best solution set for all,” she said. Her foray into the South Carolina political scene was brief — just two years — before she launched her bid for Congress. Ten days after she beat Sanford in the Republican primary, however, Arrington and a friend were hit head on by a drunk driver. They were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. She was bleeding to death. Her back was fractured. Several ribs were broken. A main artery in her legs partially collapsed. Doctors had to remove part of her colon and small intestine. She spent two weeks in the hospital. When Boucher visited, she wrote a note — unable to speak due to the tubes down her throat — telling him: “Two weeks and I will be right back at it.” He joked to her that finally he could tell her what to do without her talking back. With the hand that wasn't strapped down, she flipped him off. After a few weeks of recovery, she was in “tremendous” pain that limited how much time she could spend campaigning, Boucher said. Arrington spent weeks in a wheelchair, then used a cane. But toward the end of that summer, she helped pack and deliver sandbags as the area prepared for a hurricane. For Arrington, the wreck gave her a new perspective. “Even when you think you are at your worst, the sun will rise and you can make it better the following day,” Arrington said in an interview. “I mean, you don't go through what I went through with my car accident and getting that awareness of ‘tomorrow will be OK, like, I'm alive.' ” She went on to lose the election. But the week after the congressional race concluded, both candidates left for Washington, D.C., on the same day, with Arrington cryptically telling the Post and Courier she was “going to see some groups of people.” Later, she joined the Defense Department. “I teared up walking into the Pentagon the first day like, ‘OK, I'm really going to make a change now. I'm really going to be part of the solution,' ” she said. Unfinished business On stage at RSA, Chinese IP theft is a primary point of discussion. Arrington's CMMC effort is designed to defend against that, but the panelists continue to poke at the government's decision to ban Huawei. At one point the moderator asks Arrington: What if Huawei were to go through the CMMC process and earn certification? Then could its hardware be used in DoD networks? “It's against the law. Why are you asking a silly question?” Arrington quips, staring unflinchingly back at the laughing moderator, the crowd cheering in the background. “This is a moot point. The law is done.” But now Schneier wants to deal in hypotheticals: If it was legal, would it be reasonable to allow Huawei into the process? Before answering no, she says: “Even Huawei can admit [that] their programmers are where Microsoft was 25 years ago, right?” Purdy looks forward, tongue literally in cheek, tugging awkwardly at his black dress shirt. As CMMC becomes part of every acquisition, Arrington wants to move ahead with tools that highlight cybersecurity gaps in the supply chain, and she expects international allies to adopt some standards. Her goal for CMMC isn't for it to serve as checklist, but rather as a living document that can evolve to address new threats. Eighteen months into the job, Arrington is struggling with at least two other problems. The first is there aren't sinks to rinse out coffee mugs in the Pentagon. “We have to wash our coffee cups in the bathroom, it's not a big deal,” she said. “But if I could figure something out like a little kitchenette, that would be nice.” The second is her work-life balance, she said. When she says she'll meet with industry, she means it. For more than a year Arrington's been the public face of CMMC. That leaves a third problem lingering as a presidential election approaches: What happens to Arrington, and CMMC, if there's a new administration next year? For now, her trip to San Francisco is just another packed bag, another flight and another opportunity to evangelize to an audience of cybersecurity professionals. By now, the panelists have targeted her on several occasions, and at the end, the moderator says: “Katie, looks like they're, like, beating up on you here.” “We don't mean to, though,” Schneier interjects. “You're, like, on the good side.” “I am on the good side,” Arrington replies. The audience applauds. She wants to add another comment, but the clapping cuts her off. She waits. Even Purdy gives her a few claps. “I came here today because sometimes you just gotta say the truth and you just gotta hold the line.” She's won over this room, and she did it while making the case for more stringent requirements that put additional burdens on companies. Her voice was nearly gone, but another room, another meeting of industry leaders awaits. For Arrington, another set of problems is always waiting. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2020/06/25/lightning-in-her-veins-how-katie-arrington-is-convincing-defense-contractors-to-love-cybersecurity/