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March 31, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

Small defense businesses see cash issues during coronavirus outbreak

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.

https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/03/27/small-defense-businesses-seeing-cash-issues-during-coronavirus-outbreak-survey/

On the same subject

  • The drive to advance missile defense is there, but there must be funding

    February 3, 2020 | International, Aerospace

    The drive to advance missile defense is there, but there must be funding

    By: Richard Matlock Over the past five years, missile threats have evolved far more rapidly than conventional wisdom had predicted. Best known is North Korea's accelerated development and testing of sophisticated, road-mobile ballistic missiles. But the U.S. National Defense Strategy requires renewed focus on greater powers. China has adopted an anti-access strategy consisting of new offensive missiles, operational tactics and fortifications in the South China Sea. Russia, too, has developed highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles specifically designed to defeat today's defenses. Grappling with these sobering realities demands change. The 2019 Missile Defense Review called for a comprehensive approach to countering regional missiles of all kinds and from whatever source, as well as the increasingly complex intercontinental ballistic missiles from rogue states. But programs and budgets have not yet aligned with the policy. The upcoming defense budget submission presents an important opportunity to address these new and complex challenges. The Missile Defense Agency's current top three goals are sustaining the existing force, increasing capacity and capability, and addressing more advanced threats. The first two are necessary but insufficient. The third goal must be elevated to adapt U.S. missile defense efforts to the geopolitical and technological realities of our time. For the last decade, less than 2 percent of MDA's annual funding has been dedicated to developing advanced technology, during which time our adversaries have begun outpacing us. As President Donald Trump said last January, we “cannot simply build more of the same, or make incremental improvements.” Adapting our missile defense architecture will require rebalance, discipline and difficult choices. Realigning resources to develop advanced technologies and operational concepts means investing less in single-purpose systems incapable against the broader threat. It also requires we accept and manage new kinds of risk. Indeed, meeting the advanced threat may, in the short term, require accepting some strategic risk with North Korea. The beginning of this rebalance requires more distributed, elevated and survivable sensors capable of tracking advanced threats. The most important component here is a proliferated, globally persistent space layer in low-Earth orbit consisting of both passive and active sensors. MDA may be the missile defense-centric organization best suited to developing and integrating this capability into the architecture, but there is considerable opportunity for partnering with others to move out smartly, as recently urged by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten. Partnerships with the Space Development Agency and the Air Force can be supplemented by collaborative efforts with commercial space companies. We need not do this all at once. Space assets could be fielded in phases, with numbers, capability (sensors, interceptors, lasers), missions, and orbits evolving over time. MDA demonstrated a similar paradigm with the Delta experiments, Miniature Sensor Technology Integration series and the Near Field Infrared Experiment in the past. Meanwhile, other sensors could alleviate the cost of building new, billion-dollar radar on islands in the Pacific Ocean — efforts which continue to suffer delay. Adding infrared tracking sensors to high-altitude drones, for instance, has already been demonstrated experimentally in the Indo-Pacific theater with modified Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles. These need not be dedicated assets. Sensor pod kits could be stored in theater to be deployed aboard Reapers or other platforms during heightened tensions. We must revisit boost-phase defenses and directed energy. In 2010, the Airborne Laser program demonstrated that lasers could destroy missiles in the boost phase, but deploying toxic chemical lasers aboard large commercial aircraft was fiscally and operationally untenable. Fortunately, considerable operational promise exists with recently developed solid-state lasers (the cost of which is around $2 of electricity per shot). We must move these systems out of the laboratory and build and test operational prototypes. Near-term actions to better manage risk against the rogue-state ballistic missile threat must not overtake the pursuit of these larger goals. Although the Pentagon is currently considering a 10-year, $12 billion program for a next-generation interceptor, nearer-term, cheaper options are available. Replacing each existing kill vehicle on the Ground-Based Interceptors with several smaller kill vehicles would multiply each interceptor's effectiveness dramatically. The U.S. has been developing this technology since 2006, including a “hover” flight test in 2009. Affordable solutions like this must be found. Missile defense cannot do it all. Denying, degrading and destroying enemy missile systems prior to launch must be part of the mix. But left-of-launch activities can be expensive and difficult, and reliance on a cyber magic wand carries risk, too. We need to broaden our approach to attack all parts of our adversary's kill chain. The National Defense Strategy urges that we contend with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be — or as it previously was. To meet the threats of today and tomorrow, we must radically transform our U.S. missile defenses. It falls to the 2021 budget to do so. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/01/31/the-drive-to-advance-missile-defense-is-there-but-there-must-be-funding/

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    February 1, 2023 | International, Aerospace

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  • Space-based interceptors and drones with lasers: the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Review wish-list revealed

    January 17, 2019 | International, Aerospace

    Space-based interceptors and drones with lasers: the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Review wish-list revealed

    By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — The long-delayed Missile Defense Review, which will be formally introduced by President Donald Trump at the Pentagon Thursday, will call for research and investments to ensure America's security for the next several decades: laser technology, the F-35 as an ICBM killer, and potentially putting interceptors in space. Trump will roll out the report at 11 a.m. Thursday as part of his third visit to the Pentagon since taking office. Expected to attend the rollout is a who's who of national security officials, including vice president Mike Pence, national security adviser John Bolton; Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan; Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson; Army Secretary Mark Esper; Pentagon policy head John Rood; Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord; Pentagon technology head Mike Griffin; and Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, a leading advocate for missile defense. A senior administration official, speaking to reporters ahead of the report's release, confirmed a number of new technologies that Defense News has learned are highlighted in the report. The official told reporters that overall, the review looks at “the comprehensive environment the United States faces, and our allies and partners face. It does posture forces to be prepared for capabilities that currently exist and that we anticipate in the future.” It's been a long road for the MDR to finally emerge. Pentagon officials originally said the document would be released in late 2017 — then February, then mid-May and then late in the summer. In September, Rood, who as undersecretary of defense for policy is the point man for the MDR, indicated the report could come out in a matter of weeks. And in October, Shanahan, then the deputy secretary of defense, said the document had been done “for some time.” There is also widespread speculation in the missile defense community that the review has been delayed, at least in part, because of the warmed relations between the Trump administration and North Korea. Notably, the mid-May time frame for release, which was floated by Shanahan in April, lined up President Donald Trump's planned meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. While that meeting was canceled and then eventually happened in June, there was a sense the Pentagon did not want to do anything that could jeopardize those talks, such as releasing a report discussing how the U.S. could counter North Korean capabilities. Ironically, Trump will be rolling the report out just hours before a high-level North Korean delegation is expected to arrive in Washington for talks with the administration. However, Sung-Yoon Lee, a Korean expert with Tufts University‘s Fletcher School, doesn't expect that to impact any negotiations. “North Korea has the upper hand and is playing hard to get,” Lee said, and so won't make a big deal out of the MDR's statements on North Korea. “Their propaganda machinery at home may issue a statement a couple of days later, but [lead North Korean official Kim Yong Chol] would be foolish to address it while he's in D.C," he added. Technological changes Much of the technology discussed in the MDR will require many years of development, and in some cases will never come to fruition. But the following points give a good sense of the let's-try-everything approach the Pentagon is putting forth with the report: Turn the SM-3 and F-35 into ICBM killers: The SM-3 Block IIA ship-launched interceptor is designed for dealing with regional threats. But the Pentagon intends to test the weapon as a counter-ICBM system in 2020, as part of a goal of creating an extra layer of protection for the homeland. In essence, the department wants to offer as many options as possible, scattered around the globe, for making sure nothing gets through the safety net. The department has previously said the F-35 could be used in some capacity for missile defense, but the MDR calls for the testing and development of a new or modified interceptor which could shoot down a ballistic missile in the boost phase; expect early R&D funding for such a weapon to be in the FY20 budget request. There is also the possibility of using the F-35, equipped with its array of sensors, to hunt and track mobile missile units, which is a key part of North Korea's doctrine. Lasers on drones: The idea of using directed energy weapons, more commonly known as lasers, to take out a missile in the boost phase is not new, but it has received a boost in the past year in comments from technological leaders inside the building. In theory, putting a drone equipped with a laser high in the air at around 60,000 feet would keep it safe from any missile defense systems, while providing overwatch on potential launch sites. However, this idea feels more far-flung than others, in part because both the scaled up laser that would be needed for such capabilities has yet to be invented, let alone paired with a system that would be able to stay that high for long periods of time. In the meantime, DoD is developing a low-power laser demonstrator to evaluate and test what technologies would be needed to make such a system a reality, despite the fact that airborne laser weapons are perhaps the hardest directed energy system to develop. Space-based sensors: In the FY19 defense authorization bill, Congress required the missile defense agency to fully study and prototype ways to increase the space-based sensor layer. It's been another focus area for Griffin during his time in the Pentagon. “A space-based layer of sensors is something we are looking at to help give early warning, tracking and discrimination of missiles when they are launched,” the administration official said. “We see space as an area that's very important as far as advanced, next-level capabilities that will help us stay ahead of the threat.” Just what that layer looks like, however, remains to be seen. Expect some form of disaggregated architecture, relying on many smaller systems rather than the expensive, highly-capable systems that the U.S. has traditionally relied upon. Hosting sensor payloads on commercial satellites could also be in play. The hope is to demo some form of space-based sensor layer by early in the 2020s. Space-based interceptors: Perhaps the most controversial of the ideas being considered in the document comes from the idea of having interceptors placed in orbit to take out ballistic missiles. Picture a satellite equipped with 10 rockets that, when triggered by the sensor net, can target and launch against an incoming missile. The MDR does not call for investment in space-based interceptors at this point. Instead, the department will launch a study, lasting perhaps six months, to look into the most promising technologies and come up with estimates for cost and time; after the study is done, the department will look to move forward if it makes sense. But don't expect lasers in space anytime soon, with the administration official saying nothing has been determined, only that “we're going to study it and we'll see whether or not it's feasible.” Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2019/01/17/space-based-interceptors-and-drones-with-lasers-the-pentagons-missile-defense-review-wish-list-revealed

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