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  October 1, 2019 | International, Naval

  Kongsberg unveils Vanguard warship design that could ‘rock the market’

  By: Andrew Chuter OSLO, Norway — Are you a navy looking to spend less when buying and operating warships? Norwegian defense company Kongsberg reckons it may have the answer. Kongsberg has taken the wraps off a new multirole warship design that the company says extensively uses commercial systems and can be built in commercial yards for substantially less money and in less time than traditional warships. With warship procurement becoming eye-wateringly expensive, Kongsberg's defense and aerospace arm is pitching its Vanguard design as a way to save money via a 50 percent life-cycle cost reduction. Vanguard will have what is effectively a plug-and-play capability, enabling the multipurpose vessel to pack containers — that meet this International Organization for Standardization's guidelines — with equipment to swap missions as diverse as hydrographic survey to anti-submarine, area-denial and other roles in a matter of hours. Kongsberg doesn't traditionally build or design warships. The Norweigian company is better known in the defense sector for pioneering the use of remote weapons for land vehicles and development of the surface-to-surface Joint Strike Missile for use on the F-35 fighter jet. Design work on the platform was led by Norwegian maritime consultancy Salt Ship Design. It's the company's first major military program, having previously focused on complex commercial ship design work in the offshore energy sector, among other markets. Kongsberg and Salt have been collaborating on the project for more than two years. Salt executives said conceptual work was more or less finished, and they are now engaged in initial design work. Vanguard has been fitted out with Kongsberg equipment like a commercial bridge system overlaid with military specifications. But company officials said the flexibility to install other systems to meet customer requirements is a key element of the program. Baseline ship equipment is predominantly supplied by Kongsberg Defence Systems. Its sister operation, Kongsberg Maritime, is a major player in the commercial maritime sector and earlier this year acquired Britain's Rolls-Royce Commercial Marine. Frank Tveiten , Kongsberg's vice president of naval integrated defense systems, said Vanguard has sparked the interest of potential customers and shipyards. “We have tested it in the market with very positive reactions. The baseline warship fitted with Kongsberg systems and sensors is substantially cheaper than other warships. It's going to rock the market a little bit,“ he said. Tveiten said the economies stretched beyond procurement with manning levels as low as 16-20 people, and a speed requirement that results in very low fuel consumption. Build time for a Vanguard in a commercial yard could be as little as two years, according to the Salt executives. Kongsberg executives said Vanguard would suit emerging navies as well as interest some larger navies looking to increase offshore patrol, corvette and frigate numbers without breaking the bank. Senior Norwegian naval officers at a Kongsberg briefing in Oslo on Sept. 26 said they are interested in the concept but were guarded about whether Vanguard could be a contender to replace the Navy's Helge Ingstad frigate, which was written off after a collision with an oil tanker last year. Chief of the Navy Rear Adm. Nils-Andreas Stensones said there is a gradual move to the use of commercial systems onboard warships, and that Norway's experience with Coast Guard vessels and other ships using similar systems had been positive. “We have had a very good experience when it comes to the Coast Guard over the last 30 years. Also, our new supply ship is built to civilian standards with some military adaptions, and the experience so far is good,” Stensones said. “We see that in many areas we can use civilian technology to great benefit. We see [the use of] commercial equipment sliding gradually to the more high-end applications, but how far [one[ can go with that we don't know yet." “The cost of building military-specified platforms today is becoming prohibitively expensive. If you can reduce the cost of the platform, you can invest more in weapons and sensors. It's finding the best balance,” he added. “Whether we will end up with this concept [Vanguard], I don't know. The hardest part is the training. If you have a mission module onboard, you also need a trained crew — that may be the biggest challenge.” https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2019/09/30/kongsberg-unveils-vanguard-warship-design-that-could-rock-the-market

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  February 4, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  U.S. Air Force Defines Radical Vision For Command And Control

  By Steve Trimble The U.S. Air Force has released the full, sweeping vision for the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a two-year-old concept that proposes to disrupt modern norms for the service's command-and-control doctrine, military acquisition policy and industrial participation. The newly released ABMS architecture defines not a traditional program of record but 28 new “product lines” divided into six major components. The implementation strategy is not focused around traditional acquisition milestones measured in years, but rather development “sprints” fielding morsels of new capabilities every four months. The rights for much of the technology, including a new radar, communication gateway and software-defined radio, are claimed not by an industrial supplier, but by the Air Force itself. USAF adopts lead systems integrator-like model ABMS architecture built on government ownership The release of the strategy on Jan. 21 comes three weeks before the Air Force plans to release a budget plan that would shift $9 billion over the next five years for a “Connect the Joint Force” initiative. The proposed funding would come from retiring certain capabilities, including aircraft fleets, within the next five years, with a clear implication: The Air Force is willing, if Congress approves, to trade some capability now to obtain the ABMS over time. “I think of it as we're finally building the ‘Internet of Things' inside the military, something that is very overdue,” says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, explaining the ABMS to journalists during the unveiling of the architecture in the Pentagon. The scale of the project's ambition has evolved since the ABMS was first proposed in 2018. Air Force leaders unveiled the concept two years ago as a replacement for the airborne Battle Management and Command and Control (BMC2) suite on the Northrop Grumman E-8C Joint Stars fleet. By September 2018, Roper first suggested the same technology could be applied to replace the aging fleet of Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joints and, sometime in the 2030s, the Boeing E-3C Airborne Warning and Control System. Those aims remain intact, but the revealed architecture clarifies that the goals of the ABMS are far broader. If the system is fully realized, the Air Force will create a “combat cloud” on a mobile ad hoc network, transposing the Internet of Things model from civilian technology to the battlefield. As a result, the nearly four-decade-old concept of a centralized command-and-control center—either ground-based or airborne—would be swept away by a future, decentralized digital network. Using computer processors and software algorithms instead of humans, machines would identify targets from sensor data, select the weapons and platforms to prosecute the target automatically, and finally notify the human operator when—or, crucially, whether—to pull the trigger. Roper compares the ABMS' effect on command and control to commercial services on a smartphone, such as the Waze app for drivers navigating traffic. Waze is not driven by a human staff monitoring and reporting traffic hazards, who then review each request for directions and customize a recommended route. Instead, Waze harvests traffic and hazard data from its users, while algorithms mine that information to respond to user requests for services. The Air Force's command-and-control system is constructed around the human staff model, but Roper wants to move the entire enterprise to the Waze approach. “If it didn't exist in the world around us, you'd probably say it was impossible,” Roper says, “but it does [exist].” The challenge for the Air Force is to defend and, if successful, execute that vision for the ABMS. The Air Force needs to secure the support of the other armed services, whose participation is vital to extracting the benefits of such a system. Moreover, the Air Force needs to sell the concept to Congress, despite a system that lacks obvious employment connections to specific legislative districts, such as future factory sites and operational bases. Roper acknowledges the problem of building support for an architecture, rather than a platform, such as a new fighter, bomber or ship. “Those are easy things to sell in this town. You can count them,” he says. “But the internet is not something that's easy to count or quantify, even though we're all very aware of its power.” The Air Force has briefed congressional defense committee staffs on the ABMS concept, but some remain skeptical. A Capitol Hill staffer familiar with the ABMS program doubts that other services will support the Air Force's vision. The ABMS model also appears unlikely to be embraced by industry, the staffer says. A key point of Roper's plan requires companies to cede some intellectual property rights on key elements of the ABMS architecture to the Air Force. But the Air Force is not waiting. Development of the ABMS started last year, even before an analysis of alternatives is completed. In December, the service staged the first demonstration of four new capabilities: transmitting data on a low-probability of intercept link via a gateway between stealthy Air Force and nonstealthy Navy fighters; connecting a C-130 to the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation; demonstrating a cloud-based, command-and-control network up to a “secret” classification level; and setting up an unclassified common operational picture display at a remote command center inside a tent. As the second in the planned series of triannual events, the Air Force plans to stage the next ABMS demonstration in April, this time involving U.S. Space Force, Strategic Command and Northern Command. Roper, an Oxford-trained physicist, has little patience for the military's traditional development process, although he has made exceptions for complex, hardware-driven programs, such as the Northrop Grumman B-21 bomber and the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. For most other programs, Roper wants to trickle out new features at Silicon Valley-speed. A common refrain by military acquisition reformers for decades has been to emphasize delivering an incomplete, “80% solution” sooner than waiting for a system that meets each of sometimes hundreds of detailed requirements. However, for Roper the timeline for delivering even an 80% solution in certain cases is far too long. “[We should] covet the 10-15% solutions that take the next step forward,” Roper said. “Because the learning in that step is so valuable to keep the velocity.” To execute the ABMS vision, Roper appointed Preston Dunlap last year as the lead architect. Unlike a traditional program executive officer (PEO), the architect is a role introduced to the Air Force by Roper, who previously in his career served as the chief architect for the Missile Defense Agency. The six components and 28 production lines for the ABMS are spread across multiple program offices, rather than consolidated under a single PEO. Thus, the role of the architect is to define the vision and then shape acquisition schedules as the various technologies reach maturity. Under Dunlap's architecture, the ABMS is built around six components: new sensors feeding databases in a cloud-based computing environment using software-defined radios, with new apps fusing the data into a common operational picture and integrated effects allowing cruise missiles, for example, to automatically retask sensors on other platforms during flight. Among the 28 product lines, the Air Force proposes to own the rights to the radar, software-defined radio and communications gateway. The Air Force's role resembles the lead systems integrator (LSI) model used for a series of largely failed acquisition programs 15-20 years ago, including the Army's Future Combat System and Coast Guard's Deepwater. In this case, however, the LSI is the Air Force, not an industrial supplier. Such an approach is not unprecedented. The Navy is using a similar model to manage the MQ-25A program, with Boeing selected as a subcontractor to deliver the air vehicle and Naval Air Systems Command providing the ground station and integrating both on an aircraft carrier. The gateway used in the first ABMS demonstration in December offers an example, Roper says. “We took a radio system that was actually built in concert with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to be able to deal with both platforms with the waveforms, and then a Honeywell antenna was able to speak across the frequencies associated with both radio systems,” Roper said. “So we got those three primary vendors working together underneath our government leadership.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/us-air-force-defines-radical-vision-command-control

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  July 31, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Research and Engineering Launches Two New Public Websites

  The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (R&E) launched two new websites to provide information on how two of its directorates support OUSD(R&E)'s mission to foster technological dominance across the Department of Defense and ensure the advantage of the American warfighter. The first web site, https://rt.cto.mil, for the Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering for Research and Technology (DDR&E (R&T)), includes the latest research and technology through science and technology research programs needed to ensure U.S. technological superiority, the DOD laboratories infrastructure, federally funded research institutions, and programs that help cultivate the next generation of science and technology professionals for the department, among others significant areas. The website also spotlights DDR&E (R&T)'s offices and programs: Research Technology and Laboratories, Strategic Technology Protection and Exploitation, Defense Technical Information Center, Reliance 21, DOD STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and its outreach efforts. DDR&E (R&T) leads the DOD's science and technology (S&T) enterprise effort to rapidly develop and mature key technologies to ensure warfighter dominance. DDR&E(R&T) is responsible for the department's research and technology investments, and the science and technology portfolio. It ensures that DOD (S&T) is postured to develop the next generation of game-changing technologies and enable rapid delivery of superior capabilities to the warfighter. The second new website, https://ac.cto.mil/,highlights the work of the Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering for Advanced Capabilities (DDR&E (AC)), the primary technology transition enabler within the DOD that bridges the divide between technology discovery and capability fielding for the warfighter. DDR&E (AC) recognizes, identifies, explores and ensures the development, integration and funding of new technology and capabilities to maintain U.S. technological superiority. The directorate maintains a focus on the innovative application of technology and works with a robust network of transition partners within and external to the DOD to mitigate gaps through accelerated prototyping, demonstration, and fielding – with the ultimate goal of operational sustainment. The website also features its primary offices, including: Developmental Test, Evaluation and Prototyping, Chief Engineer for Advanced Capabilities and Test Resource Management Center. https://dod.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1920518/research-and-engineering-launches-two-new-public-websites/source/GovDelivery/