KBR Fortifies Cybersecurity of U.S. Air Force Weapons Systems

On the same subject

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  January 23, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  Think the Sentinel nuclear program is pricey? Try living without it.

  Opinion: Budgets are tight, which means every defense dollar counts, but the program should not be thought of as “unaffordable,” given the stakes.

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  March 26, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Lockheed and Bell will compete head-to-head to build US Army’s future attack recon aircraft

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin-owned company, and Bell have been selected to build and fly Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) prototypes for the U.S. Army in a head-to-head competition, according to a March 25 Army statement. The Army is planning to procure both a FARA and Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) that will slowly replace the current fleet of Sikorsky-manufactured UH-60 Black Hawks utility helicopters and Boeing-made AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. The service plans to initially field both in the 2030s. FARA will fill a critical capability gap currently being filled by AH-64E Apache attack helicopters teamed with Shadow unmanned aircraft following the retirement of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters. The service has tried and failed three times to fill the gap with an aircraft. The Army had selected five teams to provide FARA designs last spring: AVX Aircraft Co. partnered with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems, Bell, Boeing, Karem Aircraft and Sikorsky. The Army laid out a handful of mandatory requirements that the vendors had to meet and also a list of desired requirements for initial designs, Col. Craig Alia, the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team chief of staff, told reporters last year. The service also looked at the vendors' execution plans and evaluated timing as well as funding profile requirements. “The ones that were selected were clearly meeting the mandatory requirements and were in the acceptable risk level of the execution plan and the desired requirements," Dan Bailey, who is the FARA competitive prototype program manager, added. The prototype program falls under the purview of the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center's Aviation Development Directorate. Lockheed unveiled its design — Raider X — at the Association of the U.S. Army's annual conference in October 2019. The company's design uses its Raider X2 coaxial technology with a focus on how it will perform “at the X.” “One thing that always comes out is the importance of this aircraft at the X,” Tim Malia, Sikorsky's director of future vertical lift light, told Defense News in an interview last fall. “The ‘X' is defined by the Army as the terminal area where they actually have to go do the work, do the reconnaissance, do the attack mission. The operation at the X is really critical for this program and for this platform.” That's where Raider X comes in. It's a slightly larger version of the Raider coaxial helicopter that Lockheed has been flying for several years at its West Palm Beach, Florida, flight test center. “Through our mature S-97 RAIDER technology demonstrator, we continue to optimize our FARA solution, which will provide the Army with an integrated weapon system that combines speed, range, maneuverability, survivability and operational flexibility," Andy Adams, Sikorsky's vice president of future vertical lift, said in a March 25 statement. This approach is driving down risk and will result in an aircraft solution that is capable of executing the Army's joint all-domain operations." Bell revealed its design — the Bell 360 Invictus — which is based on 525 technology. But its design features several key differences, including its size in order to adhere to the Army requirement of 40-foot in diameter rotor blades. The design includes a single main rotor helicopter in a four-blade configuration, a low-drag tandem cockpit fuselage and transportability in a C-17. “Bell is proud to continue work on the Bell 360 Invictus as part of the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft Competitive Prototype competition,” Keith Flail, Bell's vice president of advanced vertical lift systems, told Defense News on March 25. “We have made significant investment and begun manufacturing in order to preserve the Army's schedule for FARA CP and we are thrilled to continue our work on the Invictus,” he said. “Bell's approach from the beginning has been tailored to deliver the advanced performance required without excessive complexity in order to get critical capability in the hands of the warfighter quickly and affordably.” The AVX and L3 team was the earliest to unveil its design for the FARA competition at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual summit in Nashville, Tennessee, in April 2019. The design uses AVX's compound coaxial and ducted fans technology. The companies said its single-engine design meets 100 percent of the Army's mandatory requirements and 70 percent of its desired attributes. Karem announced it would team with Northrop and Raytheon and came out with its design at AUSA — its AR-40 — with a single main rotor, tilting compound wings and a rotating tail rotor. Boeing was the last to reveal its design, coming out with it March 3. The company's clean-sheet design featured a hingeless, six-bladed, high-solidity main rotor; a four-bladed conventional tail rotor; and a propeller on the back. The prototype aircraft are expected to start flying in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, and the flight test is expected to run through 2023. The engineering and manufacturing development phase is expect to begin in FY24. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/army-modernization/2020/03/25/lockheed-and-bell-will-compete-head-to-head-to-build-us-armys-future-attack-recon-aircraft

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  November 2, 2020 | International, Naval

  American shipbuilding: An anchor for economic and national security

  By: Peter Navarro “Don't give up the ship!” These were Capt. James Lawrence's dying words defending the USS Chesapeake during the War of 1812. Over 200 years later, the United States Navy and America's critical shipbuilding industry are issuing the same cry from shipyards across our nation. Here is a simple truth: A true renaissance of America's shipbuilding industry will require a large-scale overhaul and new strategy before it can churn out the ships we urgently need to maintain our status as the greatest maritime power in world history. In the first year of his “Peace through Strength” administration, President Donald Trump made a 355-ship Navy the official national policy by signing the 2018 Defense Authorization Act. Currently, however, we are asking too few ships to do too much while many vessels are decades old and severely backlogged for critical repairs. This egregiously long queue is an open invitation to foreign adversaries, who are displaying increasingly aggressive postures and rapidly expanding their own naval capabilities. Today, only seven shipyards across the country are capable of constructing large or deep-draft Navy vessels. More subtly, each yard has become specialized to build a specific warship, whether it be a nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarine or an Independence-class littoral combat ship. This specialization, while optimal for workforce training and infrastructure investments at specific yards, makes them remarkably vulnerable when there is a downturn in government contracts or the private market contracts. Foreign competitors such as China anchor their shipyards in tens of billions of mercantilist and predatory government subsidies every year. Unable to compete with such foreign subsidization, the American shipbuilding industry has lost 75,000 jobs — a decline of over 40 percent. For every shipbuilding job in America, three indirect jobs are supported. We have therefore allowed predatory foreign markets to steal approximately 300,000 good-paying American jobs — the population of St. Louis, Missouri. Our strategic and economic adversaries know the importance of shipbuilding. To understand the dangers, consider this: From 2010 to 2018, the Chinese Communist Party has provided over $130 billion in shipping and shipbuilding subsidies. Now, it controls the world's second-largest commercial fleet by gross tons, and constructs one-third of the world's ships. If Pax Americana is to continue, we must live up to the maxim of former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and 26th President Teddy Roosevelt: “A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guarantee of peace.” Restoring investment in shipbuilding will leave a wake of prosperity for our economic security and send waves of strength for our national security. Expansion in capacity and capabilities of our shipyards will again incentivize commercial shipbuilding, increasing industry efficiency and creating competition, eventually lowering the overall cost of production. This must be our policy goal. If we commit to a revitalization of our shipyards, in just a few years, scores of vessels could again make maiden voyages from American yards built at the hands of thousands of American steelworkers, pipefitters, welders and electricians — a renaissance of one of our nation's most integral industries. This would mean thousands of new jobs in Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and throughout the Gulf Coast. This means secure waters around Greenland, the Bering Strait and the South China Sea as well as the straits of Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca and Hormuz. While the 296-ship fleet of the U.S. Navy is still the most powerful in the world, Communist China's People's Liberation Army Navy is now sailing approximately 350 warships and counting. Some estimates say Communist China's Navy could be as large as 450 ships by 2030 — and it's not just China that is a cause for concern. While the Chinese Communist Party militarizes the South China Sea, Russia — which will assume chairmanship of the Arctic Council in May 2021 — has been quietly rebuilding its Arctic fleet. This is a region that will be of critical importance in the years to come as northern shipping lanes open and natural resources make themselves available. As it stands now, the U.S. Navy can't effectively access these waters, as it lacks the ice-hardened warships to do so. Our shipbuilding industry was once a bulwark of American manufacturing, but decades of neglect, ambivalence to predatory foreign markets and sequestration have caused it to take on water. If we don't begin patching the holes now, it won't be just an industry that sinks. It may well be our economic and national security, as we will be unable to protect the world's sea lanes — the arteries of commerce and veins of national defense. While our enemies argue American manufacturing and might is on the decline, we repeat the battle cry of Capt. John Paul Jones: “I have not yet begun to fight!” Peter Navarro is the assistant to the president and director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy within the White House. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/10/30/american-shipbuilding-an-anchor-for-economic-and-national-security/