June 11, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
The Pentagon is likely to seek double-digit billions of dollars to reimburse defense contractors that were authorized to seek the money by the CARES Act to preserve their workforce during the COVID-19 crisis, the Pentagon's top procurement officer told lawmakers June 10.
The problem is that while the section of the $2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill allows contractors to seek that reimbursement, the bill did not provide any related funding. For just one prime contractor, the estimated costs to keep its workforce in a steady state throughout the crisis exceeds $1 billion, Ellen Lord, the under secretary of acquisition, logistics and technology, said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing.
Without additional funding, Lord warns that the Pentagon will “eat into readiness and modernization and slow down readiness and modernization on an ongoing basis.”
Aviation and aviation propulsion are two of the hardest-hit areas of the defense industrial base, because of the implosion of the civil aviation industry, she said. Satellite launches also have been hit, given their dependence on the commercial industry, Lord said.
Lawmakers were looking for details about how much would be needed for defense contractors, as they anticipate a new COVID-19 spending bill will move through Congress at the end of July.
According to Lord, there have been 960 closures and 859 reopenings due to COVID-19. The average closure is about 57 days. But contractors will be specifically requesting reimbursement for issues that affected their employees.
So far, contractors are holding back from seeking claims because they are aware that no appropriation exists yet. The Pentagon's internal acquisition group has been tracking data from prime contractors; subcontractors, though, may not be sharing all of their issues to avoid revealing proprietary data, she said, while pledging to provide specific guidance on allowable costs within 30 days.
“The defense industrial base is the nexus of economic and national security and it's vitally important to make sure it stays as healthy as possible,” she said.
February 10, 2024 | International, Land
Officially known as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, the Red Arrows have scheduled performances at four Canadian air shows starting in August.
September 7, 2022 | International, Aerospace
The contract is valued at up to $1.013 billion, spanning five years
November 18, 2019 | International, C4ISR
BY PATRICK TUCKER Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options. The Pentagon's efforts to digitally connect everything on the battlefield is has a big challenge to overcome: getting disparate vehicles and weapons to share data. “The interoperability of various, different systems, that's really where we are struggling. We don't have that machine to machine connection to begin with,” Air Force Brig. Gen. David Kumashiro recently told the audience at last week's Defense One Outlook 2020 conference. Over the past several years, Lockheed Martin officials say they've been working to build those connections, piece by piece and plane by plane. They started by asking, “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” and then working backwards, J.D. Hammond, vice president of C4ISR systems, told reporters at one of the company's offices. The company began by asking “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” They started with an idea of the state they wanted to reach and then worked backward. In 2013, the company launched a project, dubbed Missouri, to link the stealthy F-22 and F-35 combat jets. The Air Force has announced that they are to test a similar link next month, but the Air Force is establishing more complete linkages, including new forms of secure radio linkagages using software defined radio, and also including other assets such as Valkyrie drones. In 2015, they launched Project Iguana, extending the datalinks to the high-flying U-2 spy plane, fourth-generation combat aircraft such as the F-16, and satellites. In February 2018, they conducted an experiment under DARPA's SoSITE program that added other aircraft and a ground station. In April, their RIOT experiment connectngi jets to ground vehicles. Experiment by experiment, Lockheed tried to “systematically work” to build the components of a larger network of networks, said Hammond. There are four experiments projects planned for next year: Mayhem, focusing on links for satellites; Edison, datalinks for the Navy; Brennan, aircraft and Army units; and Project CASTL, satellites and a “space tactical layer”. Ultimately, Lockheed wants all this to add up to a “virtualized cloud-based architecture.” Think of it like the branches of a tree. A handful of ships and planes might form one network. That will, in turn, connect to a larger network that would, in turn, would be connected to the larger JEDI cloud. “You end up with virtual private clouds on the edge with a computing architecture you could have on an aircraft, on a ship, or any of the deployed nodes,” said John Clark, Lockheed's vice president of intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance and unmanned aerial systems. Most of the linked aircraft and ships in these experiments carry an Enterprise Mission Computer 2.0 — dubbed “Einstein box” after its abbreviation, EMC2 — that translates each platform's data into a shared protocol that can go out to the larger wireless network. Lockheed officials hope that bringing all these pieces together will enable a new sort of operating system for warfare. They showed journalists a new experimental battle management display to illustrate the concept. The system presents the operator with a list of effects, from devastating explosions to a quiet disabling of some enemy system; a list of available assets, including planes or drones; a map of targets; and recommendations for the best way to deliver effects to targets. As circumstances change — fuel gets low, ammunition is depleted, targets are destroyed, new enemy forces arrive, etc. — the system can send out alerts that a new plan is needed — or automatically update the plan with new instructions for pilots and drone operators. It all depends on how high the operator wants to set the autonomy. That vision is very different from the way mission tasking works today. Preston Dunlap, the chief architect of the Air Force, said at the Defense One Outlook 2020 conference, “Right now, our commanders are very limited in who they can assign to do certain” things. “More often than not, you have to assign someone because they happen to be in front of a specific place in front of a specific computer,” he said. Of course, realtime data sharing across platforms isn't a simple or clear-cut affair, even after successful experimentation. The years-long problems with Lockheed's Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, for the F-35 show how hard it can be simply to share data between operators and just one platform. The challenges of sharing data between multiple platforms, in the middle of battle in a highly contested airspace, are far larger. But commanders say they must try. “In terms of where our adversaries are,” Kumashiro said, U.S. forces have “a need to have this joint all-domain command-and-control system.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/how-lockheed-martin-trying-link-everything-battlefield/161355