Operators of NATO’s surveillance plane reveal what they want in its replacement

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  July 24, 2024 | International, Land

  Dassault says Rafale jet production ramp-up hit by supply chain snags

  “We have signed contracts for the Rafale, so we have to deliver on time,” CEO Eric Trappier said.

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  September 22, 2020 | International, Naval

  Is the US Navy winning the war on maintenance delays?

  David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy, beset by maintenance delays, is making progress on getting its ships out of the shipyards on time, fleet officials say. Over the past three years, the Navy is on track to more than double the percentage of ships getting out of maintenance on time, key to the service's efforts to make deployments more sustainable for its ships and sailors, Capt. Dave Wroe, U.S. Fleet Forces Command's deputy fleet readiness officer told Defense News in an email. “On-time ship maintenance availability completion rates in private shipyards improved from 24% in FY18 to 37% in FY19,” Wroe said. “Current performance trends in FY20 are projected to be 65%.” The improvement is a sign that the Navy may be turning the corner on a fight to restore readiness from its nadir in the early part of the last decade, when the Navy was running ragged filling unsustainable requirements for forces around the globe. Getting ships through their maintenance cycles on time is the linchpin of what the Navy calls its “optimized fleet response plan,” which is the system through which the Navy generates deployable ships that are maintained, manned and trained. Late last year and again in January, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told audiences that repeated delays in the shipyards was undermining the Navy's Optimized Fleet Response Plan, and turning that around was vital. “We are getting 35 to 40 percent of our ships out of maintenance on time: that's unacceptable,” Gilday said at the USNI Defense Forum in December. “I can't sustain the fleet I have with that kind of track record.” A recent Government Accountability Office report found that between 2015 and 2019, only 25 percent of the Navy's maintenance periods for ships and submarines. Improvements Getting out of that hole has been difficult for a number of reasons: High operational demand for Navy forces makes planning maintenance difficult, and inevitably when the ships go into maintenance after years of hard use, workers discover more work that needs to be done, creating delays. And those delays make executing OFRP difficult, Wroe said. “OFRP provides the construct to best assess and optimize readiness production — down to a unit level — taking into account all the various competing factors to produced Navy readiness,” Wroe said. “Bottom line: OFRP helps mitigate fundamental points of friction, such as shipyard capacity and manning gaps at sea — but in itself doesn't solve key degraders like depot level maintenance delays and extensions.” But some key factors in the delays have been identified and the Navy is working to mitigate them, Fleet Forces Commander Adm. Chris Grady said this week at this week's Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium. One area that has a tendency to drive delays is when workers discover things that need to be fixed, the fix may not cost much but the adjustment must go through an approval process that slows everything down. Those kinds of changes add up to about 70 percent of the so-called “growth work.” Part of it is anticipating and building in ways to deal with growth work into every maintenance period, and the other part is making it easier to address small changes to the scope of the work, Grady said. “When we began this initiative, cycle time for the small value changes averaged about 30 days,” he said “We're now at six and aim to bring it down further to only two days.” Other things that have helped the problem has been bundling maintenance periods for ships, meaning that contractors bid on multiple ships to fix, and can plan hiring further out, Grady said. Additionally, improving base access for contractors has helped, as well. “Last year, we averaged 110 days delayed per ship in private avails,” Grady said, using the short-hand term for “maintenance availability.” “Things much better this year — even with COVID-19,” he continued. “We go from about one-third avails finishing on-time to two-thirds. That is great. But, again, each delay has real impact on our readiness, and we need to keep working together to do better.” What happened? Because the U.S. Navy is set up to meet standing presence requirements and missions around the world, it must cycle its ships through a system of tiered readiness. That means ships go on deployment fully manned, trained and equipped. Then the ships come home, and after a period of sustained readiness where the ship can be redeployed, it goes into a reduced readiness status while undergoing maintenance. Following maintenance, the ship and crew goes into a training cycle for another deployment as an individual unit, then as a group, then returns to deployment. The whole cycle takes 36 months: Rinse and repeat. OFRP was designed in the 2013-2014 time-frame when the Navy was deploying well beyond its means, with carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups going out for nine-to-10 months at a time. The excess use wore hard on the ships and sailors who manned them and put more wear on the hulls than they were designed to sustain. That meant that when ships went in for maintenance they were more broken than they were supposed to be, and funding to fix them was hampered by spending cuts. For nuclear ships — submarines and aircraft carriers — the funding cuts were a double whammy of work stoppages and furloughs that contributed to a wave of retirements in the yards, meaning the public yards were understaffed and had to hire and train new workers. Work took longer, throwing a wrench into an already complicated system of generating readiness. All that added up to significant delays in getting ships through their maintenance cycles and contributed to astonishing delays in attack submarine maintenance especially. What OFRP was meant to do was create a system whereby the Navy could meet combatant commander demands but not break the system. That meant that the Navy would generate as much readiness as it possibly could but that the demand would have to be limited to what the Navy could reasonably maintain, man, train and equip. But getting to that system has been immensely difficult because of the deep hole the Navy dug meeting requirements that well outstripped funding and supply. For example, there was a two year period when the service was forced to supply two carrier strike groups to the Arabian Gulf at all times, a requirement only canceled when automatic across-the-board spending cuts in 2013 made it impossible for the Navy to fund the two-carrier requirement. Adding to the difficulty: some of OFRP's founding requirements were nigh impossible to pull off. One was that the all the ships in group would go into and come out of their maintenance availabilities on time and together. Another was that a group would go into the first phase of their training, the so-called basic phase right after coming out of maintenance, fully manned. Both have been immensely difficult to pull off. But Fleet Forces, headed then by OFRP architect Adm. Phil Davidson, was given ample warning that those assumptions would be difficult to achieve. Then-NAVSEA head Vice Adm. William Hilarides told USNI News in January 2015 that getting ships to come out of the yards simultaneously would be hard. “The challenge to me is, let's say you want four destroyers in a battle group, all to come out at the same time in one port? That's a real challenge,” Hilarides told USNI News. The current head of NAVSEA, who at the time was in charge of the Regional Maintenance Center enterprise, backed up his boss to USNI News, saying it would be particularly challenging in places with less infrastructure. “Your big rub there is, the challenge of OFRP is ... all those ships [in a carrier strike group], they go through maintenance together, they go through training together and they deploy together,” said then-Rear Adm. William Galinis. "So, what our challenge is, is to be able to take all that work from all those ships and try to schedule it for roughly about the same time, and to get all that work done on time. So that's our challenge. “Now, in a port like Norfolk or San Diego, we have big shipyards, a lot of people, a lot of ships. You can kind of absorb that type of workload. When you go to Mayport, they've got like 10 ships down there [and typically cannot work on more than one or two destroyers at a time.],” he told USNI. Galinis said that Fleet Forces would have to be responsive to the shipyards because at least that way they could plan for delays. “They know if they give us all this work at one time, it's going to go long anyway,” he told USNI. “So they'd rather be able to plan that and at least know when they're getting the ship back, as opposed to, ‘nope, we're not going to talk to you, you've got to go do it,' and then the ships go long because we don't have enough people to do the work.” Fleet Forces Command has been reviewing its assumptions this year and is preparing to release a revised OFRP instruction, but the core is likely to remain the same. In any case, Wroe said in the email, it was always going to take a long time to dig out of the hole the Navy found itself in when OFRP was implemented fully in 2015. “It was clear at the inception of OFRP, and remains clear today, that it will take the entire 2015-2025 period to recover readiness and establish stable readiness production,” Wroe said. “That makes sense when readiness production is planned over 9-years and large blocks of time have already been scheduled for depot maintenance periods.” Ultimately, if the process of OFRP is funded correctly and ships can get out of maintenance on time, it's a sound way of moving forward, Fleet Forces Commander Grady told the audience this week. “My bottom line here is that, as a process, OFRP works,” he said. “If we are looking where to improve upon it, each of these studies came to the same conclusion: the biggest inhibitor to fleet readiness is maintenance and modernization performance in the shipyards. We simply must get better, and I know you share my concern.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/09/19/is-the-us-navy-winning-the-war-on-maintenance/

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  July 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  With a new setup, the Air Force hopes to improve information warfare operations

  Mark Pomerleau The Air Force is realigning the cyber mission force teams it provides to U.S. Cyber Command as a way to have intelligence personnel work more closely with cyber operators. In the past, Air Forces Cyber was made up of cyber and intelligence personnel from 24th Air Force and 25th Air Force, respectively. However, the arrangement created difficulties with command relationships and oversight of teams since the intelligence operators served beneath a separate Air Force command with a separate commander. But in October, the Air Force decided to merge 24th and 25th Air Force into 16th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, placing cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare and weather capabilities under one commander, and creating the Air Force's first information warfare entity. The new organization also serves as the Air Force's component to Cyber Command. The new organization of teams moves intelligence forces from the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing to the 67th Cyber Operations Wing. “We looked at the intelligence squadron and focused on the position descriptions that really were supporting the cyber mission force ... so that we can merge those intelligence professionals into the cyber operations squadron in order to build the mission elements that supported the combatant command requirements,” Col. Lauren Courchaine, commander of the 67th Cyberspace Operations Group, told C4ISRNET in an interview. Specifically, these teams are combat mission teams – the teams that conduct cyber operations on behalf of combatant commands mostly in the offensive sphere – and cyber support teams, which provide intelligence, mission planning and other necessary support work for combat mission team. Officials at the creation of 16th Air Force said the integration would allow the service to provide more robust teams to Cyber Command. This new structure - with cyber operators, developers and intelligence forces in the same room and read in on the same missions - provides a tighter mission thread, Courchaine said. In the past, she said, when cyber operators needed intelligence support, they'd have to ask their intelligence teammates who weren't always privy to the mission or technical context, which created gaps. “Now when you have those conversations with intelligence airmen, operators and developers all in the same forum, sometimes in the same room with the same whiteboard, you come to integrated solutions up front in early vice having to work through a process where that one piece of information, potentially out of context, is levied on the intelligence requirement to somebody that you don't know in another place ... to try to understand truly what the intelligence piece that you're looking for,” Courchaine, said. “When you fuse all of them together, I think the output is significantly better and drives that operationally speed, the agility and flexibility that [16th Air Force commander] Gen. [Timothy] Haugh is looking after.” The final realignment package is still at the Air Staff awaiting final approval with details regarding new units still to be determined, to include a new group activated under the 67th Cyberspace Wing and three new squadrons. Gaining insights from joint operations The team realignment also extends to Air Force cyber teams that serve under commanders of other services under different Joint Force Headquarters-Cybers. The way cyber operations are structured within DoD is individual services do not have their own offensive teams. Instead, these teams work through several organizations, each formally known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber that exist beneath Cyber Command, which in turn provide planning, targeting, intelligence and cyber capabilities to the combatant commands to which they're assigned. The heads of the four service cyber components also lead their respective JFHQ-C. These organizations oversee combat mission teams and combat support teams. Courchaine said the Air Force teams, those that conduct operations in Central Command under Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber and operations focused on China under Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber Fleet Cyber, can bring a global perspective a back to the service. These teams conduct operations on behalf of European Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command and Space Command. In some theaters, with the high tempo of operations, such as Central Command, the approach allows the teams conducting operations to bring back lessons learned to their respective services. “You can see how these three areas will really converge and enable Gen. Haugh from a 16th Air Force perspective to not just be successful in aligning the forces appropriately but driving that return on investment where we're able to converge target sets globally ... to drive operations so that we can influence our adversaries in support of national security objectives,” she said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2020/07/19/with-a-new-setup-the-air-force-hopes-to-improve-information-warfare-operations/