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April 13, 2021 | International, Aerospace

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  • Vital Signs: Second Annual Study Reveals ‘C’ Average for Defense Industrial Base

    February 2, 2021 | International, Other Defence

    Vital Signs: Second Annual Study Reveals ‘C’ Average for Defense Industrial Base

    2/1/2021 By Wesley Hallman and Nick Jones This is part one of a five-part special report on the health of the U.S. defense industrial base. The National Defense Industrial Association's second annual Vital Signs report on the health of the U.S. defense industrial base will be released Feb. 2. To sign up in advance for a copy, please click HERE. In 2018, the Defense Department released “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States,” a report focused on the production risks to critical defense industrial supply chains. The report starkly framed the health of the U.S. defense industrial base as key to the readiness of the nation to confront near-term threats and compete in an age of great power competition. Despite the report's high-resolution snapshot of the DIB's “unprecedented set of challenges,” the report did not provide a publicly available summary measurement of the health and readiness of the defense industrial base or a simple way of tracking it over time. To fill this gap, the National Defense Industrial Association in 2020 completed “Vital Signs 2020,” which provided an unclassified summary of the health and readiness of the defense industrial base that was accessible to both the public and the defense policy community. “Vital Signs 2021” is the second installment. In order to provide a comprehensive assessment, our procedure involved standardizing and integrating different elements that impact the performance of the defense industrial base and the overall business environment. Like “Vital Signs 2020,” this report's final grade for the health and readiness of the defense industrial base was a “C.” This year's score was 74, slightly lower than last year's 75. While passing, the “C” grade reflects a business environment that is characterized by contrasting areas of concern and confidence. It also reflects the state in which the defense industrial base entered the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically disrupted the daily lives of every American and the flow of U.S. commerce. Continued deterioration in industrial security and the availability of skilled labor and materials emerged from the analysis as areas of clear concern. Favorable conditions for competition in the defense contracting market and a rising demand for defense goods and services reflected growth in the U.S. defense budget and increased overseas sales. NDIA intends Vital Signs 2021 to contribute to the debate about national defense acquisition strategy by offering a common set of indicators — “vital signs” — of the defense industrial base partners that give the men and women in uniform an advantage in all warfare domains. In order to complete this year's Vital Signs, we conducted a months-long study of data related to eight different dimensions that shape the performance capabilities of defense contractors: competition; cost production input; demand for defense goods and services; investment and productivity in the U.S. national innovation system; threats to industrial security; supply chain performance; political and regulatory activity; and industrial surge capacity. We analyzed over 40 publicly available longitudinal statistical indicators, converted each of them into an index score on a scale of 0 to 100, and evaluated three years of scores for each indicator — a running three-year average to control for single-year anomalies. A score of 100 equates to a baseline associated with the Carter-Reagan buildup of 1979-1986 or, if corresponding data is not available, a more recent peak value. With the exception of our Vital Signs 2021 member survey, which was fielded in August 2020, our datasets are lagging indicators collected before the nationwide lockdowns that occurred in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. These lagging indicators provide insights into how the defense industrial base entered the pandemic which may give future policymakers a baseline to evaluate the defense industrial base's ability to cope with disruptions due to a national crisis. Vital Signs 2021 reveals a defense industrial base that entered the COVID-19 pandemic in a weakened state. As noted, with the exception of data from our August 2020 Vital Signs 2021 member survey, most data were published before the disruptions caused by the nationwide COVID-19 lockdowns and the concomitant overseas actions impacting certain supply chains. The final “grades” are based solely on data from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Six conditions earned composite scores lower than 80, and four earned scores lower than 70, which we consider failing grades — the same as last year's report. These scores suggest that the defense industrial base is continuing to face multiple challenges to its ability to thrive. Industrial security scored the lowest among the eight dimensions with a 56 for 2020. Industrial security has gained prominence as massive data breaches and brazen acts of economic espionage by state and nonstate actors plagued defense contractors in recent years. To assess industrial security conditions, we analyzed indicators of threats to information security and to intellectual property rights. The score incorporates MITRE's annual average of the threat severity of the new cyber vulnerabilities, which improved slightly from the 2018 score of 17 to a similarly dismal score of 18, in 2020. In contrast, threats to IP rights scored 100 out of 100 for 2019 as the number of new FBI cases into IP rights violations steadily declined since reaching an all-time high in 2011. Defense industry production inputs also scored poorly in 2020 with a score of 68, a steady score since 2018. Major production inputs include skilled labor, intermediate goods and services, and raw materials used to manufacture or develop end-products and services for defense consumption. Our estimate of the size of the defense industry workforce, currently about 1.1 million people, falls substantially below its mid-1980s peak size of 3.2 million. The indicators for security clearance processing also contributed to the low overall score for production inputs as backlogs have improved but continue to persist. The competitive environment and the state of demand for defense goods and services were areas of confidence. Over the past few years, the Defense Department has averaged about 701,000 prime contracts a year and had over $394 billion in prime contract obligations in 2019, according to an analysis conducted by our research partner Govini. Analysis of the top 100 publicly traded defense contract recipients produced a competition score of 91 for 2020. Several high scoring indicators drove the strength of market competition conditions, including the low level of market concentration of total contract award dollars, the relatively low share of total contract award dollars received by foreign contractors, and the high level of capital expenditures in the defense industrial base. Additionally, the DIB earned a score of 77 for profitability for 2020, based on a new methodology for this edition of the report. Demand for defense goods and services received a score of 93 for 2020, which is a 16-point increase over 2018. The high score for demand is a result of the recent increase in contract obligations issued by the department. Total contract obligations grew from $329 billion in fiscal year 2017, to $394 billion in 2019, a 20 percent increase. Foreign military sales also grew by nearly 20 percent over the same time period. Other takeaways: Innovation conditions within the defense industrial base received a score of 71 for 2020, two points down from its 2018 score. Notably, the U.S. share of global investment in research and development was only 28 percent, down from a peak of 38 percent in 2001. In early 2020, before the pandemic took hold, the percentage of Americans that thought the United States was spending “too little” on national defense was nearly half as many as in 2018, the largest two-year drop since 1983, which may indicate a decrease in the American public's appetite for major increases in military spending. Acquisition reform and budget stability, two of NDIA's strategic priorities, continue to be top of mind for the defense industrial base. In the survey, when asked what the most important thing the government can do to help the defense industrial base, respondents said that streamlining the acquisition process (35 percent) and budget stability (nearly 32 percent) were the most important. When asked what conditions would limit their firm's willingness or ability to devote larger amounts of productive capacity to military production, 48 percent of respondents said uncertain prospects of continuing volumes of business was a moderate deterrent and 41.5 percent of respondents said that the burden of government paperwork was a moderate deterrent. Both findings underscore the continued importance of reforming the acquisition process and the need for budget stability. The capacity of the defense industrial base to grow its output and fulfill a surge in military demand stands as a key test of its health and readiness. Productive capacity and surge readiness earned a score of 66 for 2020, a 15-point decrease from 2019. Declines in output efficiency contributed to the declining trend. Productive capacity is baselined against the defense buildup that began under the Carter administration and accelerated through the Reagan administration. The Carter-Reagan Era buildup involved a 31 percent surge in Defense Department expenditures. The health and readiness of the DIB poses a challenge to the acquisition community. With the growing expectation for the defense industrial base to meet the challenges faced during an era of great power competition, Vital Signs 2021 highlights several hurdles that the base must overcome coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The overall health grade of “C” suggests a satisfactory ability to meet current industrial requirements. Our full report will release to the public at the end of January. We hope that Vital Signs 2021 will drive policy debates in the coming legislative policy cycle and inform the discussions and actions that lead to an improved grade for Vital Signs 2022 and beyond. Wesley Hallman is vice president of strategy and policy, and Nick Jones director of regulatory policy at NDIA. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/2/1/second-annual-study-reveals-c-average-for-defense-industrial-base

  • AI’s dogfight triumph a step toward human-machine teaming

    September 14, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

    AI’s dogfight triumph a step toward human-machine teaming

    By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Human fighter pilots, your jobs are safe for now. Weeks after an artificial intelligence algorithm defeated a human pilot in a simulated dogfight between F-16 jets, the Pentagon's director of research and engineering for modernization said Thursday at the Defense News Conference that it's more likely an AI will team with military pilots than replace them. “I don't see human pilots being phased out, I see them being enhanced, not physically, but I see their work, their effectiveness being enhanced by cooperation with artificial intelligence systems,” said Mark Lewis, who also serves as the acting deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The AlphaDogfight Trials in August marked the finale of the Pentagon research agency's AI air combat competition. The now-notorious algorithm, developed by Heron Systems, easily defeated the fighter pilot in all five rounds that capped off a yearlong competition hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ― which is overseen by Lewis and the Defense Department's research and engineering shop. “The key takeaway from that was the artificial intelligence system did so well because it wasn't so concerned about self-preservation, it was willing to do things that a human pilot wouldn't do. And that's the advantage of artificial intelligence,” Lewis said. “I think the real answer is teaming AI with a human for the best combination of both. So I'm pretty confident we're going to have human pilots into the future.” The AlphaDogfight Trials were a subset of the Air Combat Evolution program, or ACE, which is one of a few DARPA efforts exploring human-machine teaming, agency spokesman Jared Adams said in an email. ACE is using human-machine collaborative dogfighting to increase trust in combat autonomy, and the goal is for it to scale to more complex multi-aircraft scenarios to pave the way for live, campaign-level experimentation. Fiscal 2023 will see the first in a yearlong series of trials using tactical fighter-class aircraft (currently L-39 trainers), with safety pilots on board to assist in case of trouble. Those pilots would be given “higher cognitive level battle management tasks while their aircraft fly dogfights,” all while sensors gauge the pilot's attention, stress and trust in the AI, Adams said. DARPA foresees a single human pilot serving as a mission commander in a manned aircraft, orchestrating multiple autonomous, unmanned platforms that would all be engaged in individual tactics. ACE would ultimately deliver that capability. “ACE, therefore, seeks to create a hierarchical framework for autonomy in which higher-level cognitive functions (e.g., developing an overall engagement strategy, selecting and prioritizing targets, determining best weapon or effect, etc.) may be performed by a human, while lower-level functions (i.e., details of aircraft maneuver and engagement tactics) is left to the autonomous system,” Adams said. “In order for this to be possible, the pilot must be able to trust the autonomy to conduct complex combat behaviors in scenarios such as the within-visual-range dogfight before progressing to beyond-visual-range engagements.” In announcing the future trials using tactical aircraft on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said: “AI's role in our lethality is to support human decision-makers, not replace them.” “We see AI as a tool to free up resources, time and manpower so our people can focus on higher-priority tasks and arrive at the decision point, whether in a lab or on the battlefield, faster and more precise than the competition,” he added. But Esper warned that both Russia and China were pursuing fully autonomous systems, and drew a distinction between them and what he described as the U.S. military's ethically guided approach to AI. “At this moment, Chinese weapons manufacturers are selling autonomous drones they claim can conduct lethal targeted strikes,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Chinese government is advancing the development of next-generation stealth UAVs, which they are preparing to export internationally.” https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/09/10/ais-dogfight-triumph-a-step-toward-human-machine-teaming/

  • U.S. Army Awards Lockheed Martin Contract To Develop Sentinel A4 Radar

    September 30, 2019 | International, C4ISR

    U.S. Army Awards Lockheed Martin Contract To Develop Sentinel A4 Radar

    SYRACUSE, N.Y., Sept. 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) has been awarded a $281 million contract by the United States Army to develop the Sentinel A4 radar system. Sentinel A4 is a high-performance modification of the Sentinel A3 (AN/MPQ-64A3) air and missile defense radar that will provide updates to improve the existing Sentinel capability against cruise missiles, unmanned aerial systems, rotary wing and fixed wing threats. The new Sentinel A4 radar will provide improved surveillance, detection, and classification capabilities against current and emerging aerial threats in order to protect Army maneuver formations and high value static assets to include: command and control nodes, tactical assembly areas and geo-political centers. This needed capability will help protect our warfighters for the next 40 years. "By leveraging our open scalable radar architecture and production efforts, we believe we provide the lowest risk and best value solution for the U.S. Army that will help protect our warfighters for years to come," said Dr. Rob Smith, vice president and general manager for Lockheed Martin's Radar and Sensor Systems. "We have fielded numerous tactical Gallium Nitride (GaN) based radars beginning with the delivery of the TPS-77 Multi Role Radar to Latvia in 2018 and we are under contract with the Army to insert GaN into the Q-53 system." Proven Radar Experience With broad and deep experience developing and delivering ground-based radar solutions to our customers, our high-performing, high-reliability, solid state radar (SSR) systems specialize in counter target acquisition, early warning, situational awareness, and integrated air and missile defense. Our radars are designed with the highest degree of commonality and fully integrated SSR systems. They can operate in all environments, are available in highly mobile configurations and are deployed worldwide. It's why Lockheed Martin's ground-based radars are the choice of more than 45 nations on six continents. About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 105,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. SOURCE Lockheed Martin https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2019-09-27-U-S-Army-Awards-Lockheed-Martin-Contract-to-Develop-Sentinel-A4-Radar

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