Navy accepting Landing Ship Medium proposals for FY25 contract award

On the same subject

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  November 30, 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Squad X Improves Situational Awareness, Coordination for Dismounted Units

  The first test of DARPA's Squad X Experimentation program successfully demonstrated the ability to extend and enhance the situational awareness of small, dismounted units. In a weeklong test series at Twentynine Palms, California, U.S. Marine squads improved their ability to synchronize maneuvers, employing autonomous air and ground vehicles to detect threats from multiple domains – physical, electromagnetic, and cyber – providing critical intelligence as the squad moved through scenarios. Squad X provides Army and Marine dismounted units with autonomous systems equipped with off-the-shelf technologies and novel sensing tools developed via DARPA's Squad X Core Technologies program. The technologies aim to increase squads' situational awareness and lethality, allowing enemy engagement with greater tempo and from longer ranges. The Squad X program manager in DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, Lt. Col. Phil Root (U.S. Army), said Experiment 1 demonstrated the ability for the squad to communicate and collaborate, even while “dancing on the edge of connectivity.” The squad members involved in the test runs praised the streamlined tools, which allowed them to take advantage of capabilities that previously had been too heavy or cumbersome for individual Soldiers and Marines to use in demanding field conditions. “Each run, they learned a bit more on the systems and how they could support the operation,” said Root, who is also program manager for Squad X Core Technologies. “By the end, they were using the unmanned ground and aerial systems to maximize the squad's combat power and allow a squad to complete a mission that normally would take a platoon to execute.” Two performers, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control and CACI's BIT Systems, each are working on different approaches to provide unique capabilities to enhance ground infantries. Manned-unmanned teaming is critical to both companies' solutions. Marines testing Lockheed Martin's Augmented Spectral Situational Awareness, and Unaided Localization for Transformative Squads (ASSAULTS) system used autonomous robots with sensor systems to detect enemy locations, allowing the Marines to engage and target the enemy with a precision 40mm grenade before the enemy could detect their movement. Small units using CACI's BITS Electronic Attack Module (BEAM) were able to detect, locate, and attack specific threats in the radio frequency and cyber domains. Experiment 2 is currently targeted for early 2019. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-11-30a

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  March 10, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Pentagon Seeks New SatCom Tech For ‘Fully Networked C3’

  "Our fully networked C3 [Command, Control, & Communications] will look completely different" from current satellites and terminals, said OSD's Doug Schroeder. By THERESA HITCHENS SATELLITE 2020: The Pentagon wants industry ideas on how to craft a “fundamentally new architecture” for command, control and communications (C3) that will allow “any user using any terminal to connect to any other user using any other terminal,” says Doug Schroeder, who oversees the effort under the Office of Research and Engineering (R&E). This kind of omnipresent, all-service connectivity across land, sea, air, and space is essential for the Pentagon's rapidly evolving of future war, known as Joint-All Domain Operations. “Our Fully Networked C3 communications will look completely different. We have a new vision. We're crafting it with the help of industry,” he said. “We're relying on very heavily on industry, starting with this Broad Agency Announcement dated March 6,” which asks for companies to submit white papers in short order. According to Schroeder, the Space Development Agency (SDA) will be the funding authority. Vendors whose short, 10 to 15 page white papers are chosen will be invited at the end of April to a Pitch Day. Winners then will be given three months to develop a proposal; contracts for prototypes will be granted 24 months later. Speaking to a relatively sparse audience here at the annual commercial satellite industry conference, Satellite 2020 — which is underway despite the threat of the COVID-19 Coronavirus — Schroeder stressed: “We are going to take our new direction from you.” The new strategy, called Fully Networked C3 (FNC3), is being spearheaded by R&E director Mike Griffin and his assistant director for FNC3, Michael Zatman. According to the BAA, the first issued under the effort, the new strategy is being designed to “enable the DoD to reliably communicate with all its tactical and strategic assets.” C3 is one of Griffin's Top Ten areas of technology innovation for which DoD is developing an agency-wide development strategy. Specifically, DoD now is looking for “Beyond-Line-Of-Site (BLOS) communications systems for airborne, surface, and subsurface systems that is [sic] compatible with both FNC3 enabled systems and legacy systems,” the BAA states. The BAA calls for White Papers to be submitted by March 30 for three different types of BLOS technologies: 1. Protected Radio Frequency (RF) BLOS Communications. 2. Multi-User/Multi-Point High-Data-Rate Laser Communications. 3. Communications with submerged assets. R&E intends to “develop, prototype, and demonstrate each innovative communications capability with the goal of transitioning the technologies into programs of record,” the BAA said. To ensure speedy results, DoD will use Other Transaction Authority (OTA) for prototyping (found under 10 U.S. Code § 2371b.) Much of the detail about the effort is contained in classified annexes. What we do know: Beyond-Line-Of-Sight communications relayed through satellites generally require equipping platforms — such as aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles — with high-throughput voice and data links, capabilities all of the services have expressed interest in. In particular, after years of little progress, Griffin has reinvigorated DoD interest in optical communications via laser links, in large part due to fears about Russian and Chinese RF jamming. Commercial industry has been rushing to develop optical links to enable satellite-to-satellite data transmission, and the Space Development Agency is interested in that capability for its so-called transport layer of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Radio-frequency communications with submarines when underwater are generally limited to terse text messages, transmitted at very low frequencies (three to 30 kilohertz) and extremely low frequencies (three to 300 hertz) and requiring very large antennas to receie them. Research work is ongoing at MIT on how to link traditional underwater sonar to airborne RF receivers, a methodology called Translational Acoustic-RF) communication. Research also is ongoing, including at MIT's Lincoln Lab, on using narrow-beam lasers to allow one underwater vehicle to communicate with another. BLOS communications can also be accomplished without using satellites. Alternative method include tropospheric scatter using microwave radiation, high frequency (HF) wireless, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays, and passive reflector systems. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/pentagon-seeks-new-satcom-tech-for-fully-networked-c3

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  September 26, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  Faulty $5 Parts Cause 18-Month, $1 Billion Delay to Navy, Air Force Nuclear Upgrades

  Defects found in a $5 electrical component will delay the Navy and Air Force nuclear warhead refurbishment program by 18 months and cost more than $1 billion to fix, a National Nuclear Security Administration official said during a congressional hearing Wednesday. The faulty components are small commercially available capacitors that were to be used in upgrades to the Navy's W88 nuclear warheads. These weapons are deployed on the Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missile systems. Similar capacitors are needed to upgrade the Air Force's B61-12 gravity bomb, Charles Verdon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces during the unclassified portion of Wednesday's hearing. When engineers evaluated available parts, they ran tests to determine if the off-the-shelf capacitors were compatible with the systems due for upgrades, Verdon said. Initial results suggested the components would work in the short-term. “Early tests on the capacitors now in question and subsequent tests including component, major assembly and full-up integrated system flight tests demonstrated that these components meet requirement today. Industry best practices were used to stress the components beyond their design planned usage as a way to establish confidence that they will continue to work over the necessary lifetime of the warhead,” Verdon said. “During stress testing, a few of these commercially available capacitors did not meet the reliability requirements.” The problem is, these parts used in the warhead upgrades must survive for decades, up to 30 years after production, Verdon said. However, the quality of each capacitor production lot varied, which led to the stress testing failure. Instead of using the capacitors and risking readiness in the future, Verdon said his agency decided to delay the upgrade work, initially scheduled to begin in December. Replacement capacitors are being produced but will cost about $75 per unit, compared with the $5 per unit cost of the off-the-shelf capacitors that failed stress testing. “The use of commercial-off-the-shelf electric components needs to be improved to reduce future COTS-related risk,” Verdon said. The Navy is working with U.S. Strategic Command to understand how the 18-month delay will affect near-term deployments, Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the director of strategic systems programs for the Navy, told the panel. “Currently, today, based on what we're doing with STRATCOM, we will meet the requirements as we move forward,” Wolfe said. The Navy and STRATCOM are developing a mitigation plan which includes is reevaluating how to turn around the submarine-based nuclear missile stockpile and how to schedule warheads for upgrades in the future, Wolfe said. More details on the Navy's plan to be discussed in a classified hearing. “If you look at the age of these systems and the technology we're using, these are tough, tough issues to solve, and it's critical technology that we're learning as we modernize these,” Wolfe said. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), chair of the strategic forces subcommittee, said he held the hearing because he wanted more information on what NNSA was doing to avoid more delays. He called the recapitalization “both necessary and hugely expensive” in his written opening statement. “Maintaining Congress and the public's confidence in these programs, and their effective execution, is imperative,” he wrote. https://news.usni.org/2019/09/25/faulty-5-parts-cause-18-month-1-billion-delay-to-navy-air-force-nuclear-upgrades