September 18, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Nathan Strout
Senate appropriators have a message for the Air Force: Make early warning missile satellites a priority.
The Senate Appropriations Committee expressed concern over the Air Force's plan for funding the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared system in a report on their annual defense spending bill. While the Pentagon requested $1.4 billion for the program in fiscal year 2020, the Senate spending committee noted that the request was $630 million short of what the program needs. With such a gap, senators questioned whether OPIR was a priority for the Air Force.
OPIR is the next-generation early warning missile defense satellite system that will ultimately replace the Space Based Infrared System. The Pentagon has contracts with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to build three satellites in geosynchronous orbit and two covering the polar regions, respectively.
In order to close the funding gap, the Air Force has made a number of reprogramming requests. But according to Senate appropriators, that's not a responsible path forward.
“If the program is to have any chance of success, the department cannot continue to rely on reprogramming requests for its funding,” the committee's report read.
Instead, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a far larger budget of $1.9 billion for OPIR. While that is still less than the program need, it represents an increase of $535.5 million. Those funds are in addition to reprogramming requests that could meet the more than $2 billion program need.
Lockheed Martin representatives told reporters at the annual Air Force Association conference Sept. 17 that the requested increase in fiscal year 2020 funding doesn't represent a growth in costs for the program, but is the result of the rapid acquisition approach to the OPIR program.
“This shouldn't be perceived as cost growth,”said Kay Sears, Lockheed Martin's vice president and general manager for military space. “But it is an accelerated schedule, so it comes with an accelerated budget.”
“Next Gen is an absolutely critical capability. We've been asked to deliver that capability in a ‘go fast' environment by 2025 and we are planning to do that. That comes with a funding profile that is a little bit different than a traditional defense program,” she added.
Part of that go fast approach, which Sears says results in higher up front costs, includes a payload competition between a Northrop Grumman/Ball team and a Raytheon team.
“There's a lot of spending that can happen at all of those companies at the same time,” explained Sears. “That is what is driving the funding profile ― it's the payload development and the fact that (...) we have two payload developers and two capabilities that we're going to have to choose from in that critical mission area.”
Senate appropriators noted in their report that OPIR is breaking ground for how to provide rapid prototypes for programs in the future and needs to be fully funded as an example.
“The Committee believes the program will be an exemplar for rapid acquisition of space programs, whether the program succeeds or fails,” read the report. “Failure will have implications for Congress's willingness to fund future programs using the National Defense Authorization Act section 804 rapid prototyping and fielding authorities for similarly large, or even middle tier programs, for years to come.”
OPIR has been a point of contention between the House and Senate as they work through the two annual defense bills. Earlier in the summer the House balked at the massive increase in what the Pentagon wanted for OPIR in fiscal year 2020. While the $1.4 billion Pentagon request is $630 million below what the program needs, it's $459 million above what the Pentagon projected it would need for the program in fiscal year 2020 in the previous years' budget.
The House Armed Services Committee ultimately authorized just $1 billion for the program in their National Defense Authorization Act citing unexplained growth, prompting a letter from the White House arguing that a failure to fund the Pentagon's full budget request now would lead to delays and higher costs over time.
October 2, 2023 | International, Naval
The Ministry of Defence has awarded £3.95 billion of funding to BAE Systems for the next phase of the UK's next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine programme, known as SSN-AUKUS.
November 7, 2018 | International, C4ISR
DARPA program seeks to unleash the performance of modern multi-chip modules by integrating optical signaling at the chip-level OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL 11/1/2018 Parallelism – or the act of several processors simultaneously executing on an application or computation – has been increasingly embraced by the microelectronics industry as a way of sustaining demand for increased system performance. Today, parallel computing architectures have become pervasive across all application domains and system scales – from multicore processing units in consumer devices to high-performance computing in DoD systems. However, the performance gains from parallelism are increasingly constrained not by the computational limits of individual nodes, but rather by the movement of data between them. When residing on modern multi-chip modules (MCMs), these nodes rely on electrical links for short-reach connectivity, but once systems scale to the circuit board level and beyond, the performance of electrical links rapidly degrades, requiring large amounts of energy to move data between integrated circuits. Expanding the use of optical rather than electrical components for data transfer could help significantly reduce energy consumption while increasing data capacity, enabling the advancement of massive parallelism. “Today, microelectronic systems are severely constrained by the high cost of data movement, whether measured in terms of energy, footprint, or latency,” said Dr. Gordon Keeler, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “Efficient photonic signaling offers a path to disruptive system scalability because it eliminates the need to keep data local, and it promises to impact data-intensive applications, including machine learning, large scale emulation, and advanced sensors.” Photonic transceiver modules already enable optical signaling over long distances with high bandwidth and minimal loss using optical fiber. Bottlenecks result, however, when data moves between optical transceivers and advanced integrated circuits in the electrical domain, which significantly limits performance. Integrating photonic solutions into the microelectronics package would remove this limitation and enable new levels of parallel computing. A new DARPA program, the Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, seeks to enable future system scalability by developing high-bandwidth optical signaling technologies for digital microelectronics. Working across three technical areas, PIPES aims to develop and embed integrated optical transceiver capabilities into cutting-edge MCMs and create advanced optical packaging and switching technologies to address the data movement demands of highly parallel systems. The efficient, high-bandwidth, package-level photonic signaling developed through PIPES will be important to a number of emerging applications for both the commercial and defense sectors. The first technical area of the PIPES program is focused on the development of high-performance optical input/output (I/O) technologies packaged with advanced integrated circuits (ICs), including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Beyond technology development, the program seeks to facilitate a domestic ecosystem to support wider deployment of resulting technologies and broaden their impact. Projections of historic scaling trends predict the need for enormous improvements in bandwidth density and energy consumption to accommodate future microelectronics I/O. To help address this challenge, the second technical area will investigate novel component technologies and advanced link concepts for disruptive approaches to highly scalable, in-package optical I/O for unprecedented throughput. The successful development of package-level photonic I/O from PIPES' first two technical areas will create new challenges for systems architects. The development of massively interconnected networks with distributed parallelism will create hundreds to thousands of nodes that will be exceedingly difficult to manage. To help address this complexity, the third technical area of the PIPES program will focus on the creation of low-loss optical packaging approaches to enable high channel density and port counts, as well as reconfigurable, low-power optical switching technologies. A full description of the program is available in the Broad Agency Announcement. For more information, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/HR001119S0004/listing.html https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-11-01
August 28, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Joe Gould and Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON ― Privately held drone maker General Atomics, of San Diego, is laying off approximately 630 of its roughly 10,000 employees. “General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. can confirm a reduction in force involving 6% of its workforce,” a spokesperson wrote in an email to Defense News late Wednesday. “This reduction was made to balance resources with customer requirements.” The layoffs were announced internally Wednesday and confirmed by the company, which did not specify which operations were impacted. General Atomics and Northrop Grumman were two beneficiaries of the Trump administration's recent decision to ease restrictions on overseas sales of unmanned aircraft. In addition, lawmakers are expected to boost Reaper buys in the near term, with House appropriators proposing to give General Atomics $344 million for 16 more MQ-9s in fiscal 2021. But the company was also dealt a blow earlier this year when the Air Force announced it would stop buying the MQ-9 Reaper in fiscal year 2021, at least four years earlier than expected. And now the future of the program remains uncertain, with the Air Force looking at options to replace the MQ-9 Reaper. Over the past two decades, the Reaper has served as one of the Air Force's workhorse drones for surveillance and for striking targets in the Middle East. But service leaders believe it is ill-suited for a war with Russia and China. In addition, they believe it costs too much time and money to keep the aircraft ready for operations in low-threat environments. “The Reaper has been a great platform for us. Four million flight hours, just undeniable overmatch in a low-end uncontested fight, and it is certainly saving lives,” Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper told lawmakers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing this March. “But as we look to the high-end fight, we just can't take them into the battlefield. They are easily shot down.” In June, the Air Force issued a request for information for an MQ-9 successor, underscoring the service's plan to transition from the Reaper to a new surveillance and strike drone. https://www.defensenews.com/2020/08/27/drone-maker-general-atomics-lays-offs-hundreds/