March 31, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
By: Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — More than 60 percent of small companies in the defense supply chain are seeing disrupted cash flow, according to a new survey put forth from the National Defense Industrial Association.
“This survey shows how the defense lifeline runs through small business,” Hawk Carlisle, NDIA's president and CEO, said in a statement. “These companies must survive if the defense industrial base is to remain the best in the world on other side of COVID-19.”
COVID-19 is a newly discovered coronavirus — a family of viruses, some of which cause disease in people and animals, named for crownlike spikes on their surfaces.
As of Friday, 458 small businesses had responded to the survey, which will remain open through April 10. Fifty-five percent of respondents have less than $5 million in annual revenue, and 70 percent have less than 50 employees.
Sixty-two percent of the respondents have seen disrupted cash flow as a result of the economic downturn. Primarily, those have come as cuts to billable hours or delayed payments from prime contractors because of shutdowns or telework. A lack of telework options is also an issue for contractors.
Notably, 54 percent of respondents say they cannot work on a contract because they are currently under a shelter-in-place order.
And optimistically, 69 percent do not expect cost overruns on fixed-price contracts as a result of the coronavirus-related disruptions. Those that do expect such overruns predict them to be in the 10-20 percent range.
The results of the survey were delivered Friday to Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Lord said she is closely watching the lower tier of the supply chain for weak spots that may appear.
Last week, the Defense Department announced new measures to increase progress payments out to both small and large companies to ensure they are able to keep work moving on schedule.
June 7, 2023 | International, Land
The contract was signed on 31 May 2023 in Oslo by Gro Jeare, director of the Norwegian Defence Materiel Agency, and Michael Wittlinger, chairman of the board of management of...
January 4, 2019 | International, Land, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau Europe's increasingly contested environments have required increasingly complex electronic warfare planning tools. Vehicles, however, can't house the power of command posts, so the Army is adapting an existing system for the tactical edge. The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, or EWPMT, is a command-and-control planning capability that allows commanders and soldiers to visualize on a screen the effects of electronic warfare in the field. As part of efforts to provide soldiers additional capabilities for EWPMT ahead of the program's scheduled add-ons — an effort dubbed Raven Claw — the Army received feedback that troops at the vehicle or platform level don't need the full application required at command posts. This feedback coincided with other observations from the Raven Claw deployment, which officials said were mixed. “It does what it's supposed to do, but it requires a lot of computing capacity and also it requires a lot of inputs from the [electronic warfare officers] right now,” Col. Mark Dotson, the Army's capability manager for electronic warfare, told C4ISRNET in a November interview. In response, a new effort called Raven Feather “will address both processing consumption and critical EW tasks required at the vehicle/platform level,” Lt. Col. Jason Marshall, product manager for electronic warfare integration at Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told C4ISRNET in response to written questions. “Raven Feather will provide a more tactically focused Graphical User Interface as part of the EWPMT Raven Claw system mounted in the vehicle or loaded into the Mounted Family of Computer Systems (MFoCS).” Dotson added that the Army is eyeing lighter versions of the capability that could be available for lower echelons that may not need as much modeling and simulation. “We're looking at ways to tailor it specifically to the echelon, and then that will help us with the platform we need to put it on,” he said. The modeling and simulation might be important at the staff officer level, he added, but he questioned whether that computing power is needed at the micro-tactical level. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2019/01/03/heres-the-armys-latest-electronic-warfare-project
April 24, 2023 | International, Land
The new order brings Germany's envisioned inventory to almost 370 BvS10 vehicles, which are optimized for operations in harsh conditions.