Back to news

May 14, 2020 | International, Aerospace

Special Ops Budget Crunch Looms, But New Aircraft Demo Coming

And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform," said SOCOM acquisition czar Jim Smith.

By and on May 13, 2020 at 4:32 PM

WASHINGTON: Like the rest of the Defense Department, Special Operations Command is preparing for flat to declining budgets in the coming years as the national debt spirals to $25 trillion and the economy flattens due to COVID-19 related shutdowns.

At the moment, the command that trains, equips and sustains the nation's elite covert operators boasts a $13 billion budget, $7 billion of which goes directly into buying and repairing new gear, with another $800 million pumped into research and development. And that's the unclassified part of the budget.

The command wants to protect those investments, Jim Smith, SOCOM's top acquisition executive, told reporters this morning. But fiscal realities being what they are, “right now, our planning assumptions are based on a flat budget out through the next seven years or so,” he said. “And then, if you take into account inflation, you might even have a slightly downward pressure on our overall budget.”

Just recently, Defense Secretary Mark Esper suggested that the budget pressure might force his hand in cutting older, legacy systems earlier than planned to pull savings toward priority modernization programs like the $500 billion the DoD plans to spend on the refurbishment of the nuclear triad over the next decade.

Earlier this month Esper declared, “we need to move away from the legacy, and we need to invest those dollars in the future. And we have a lot of legacy programs out there right now — I could pick dozens out from all branches of the services” that could be cut or curtailed.

Asked by Breaking Defense if pressure on SOCOM budgets could lead to the command walking away from bigger and older systems, Smith said “SOF is a little different. There is a propensity for us to accept a near-[commercial] solution and get it into the fight very quickly. And for that reason, we tend not to sustain equipment or the 20-year, 30-year life cycles that you see in the services.”

That's not to say “we don't have the same pressures,” as the services in finding savings, he added. “We're trying to divest in a force that you know likes to hold on to things. And so we have very rich dialogue at the command level, I can assure you, about trying to divest over some of our larger programs going on.”

One area commanders want to grow is close air support and ISR in areas without large, improved landing strips via the Armed Overwatch program. Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, said in February at the Air Force Association's annual meeting that the aircraft would replace AFSOC's U-28s — and focus more on plane's close air support, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.

Smith today explained that effort is standing on the shoulders of the Air Force's defunct Light Attack Aircraft effort.

“We are on the backs of the Air Force's effort. We're using the same program managers and engineers,” Smith said. “Everything that was learned by the Air Force in their light attack experiment is being leveraged into ours.”

The Air Force's long-running light attack aircraft saga — that at one point was expected to involve procurement of up to 300 airplanes — began way back in 2011, when the Air Force initiated a program to procure what it then called “light air-support” aircraft for use in insurgencies.

In 2017, the program morphed into what the service called the Light Attack Experiment, aimed at developing a concept of operations that involved US allies as well as fleshing out an overall acquisition strategy. In 2018, then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service had set aside $2.4 billion in the fiscal year 2019 budget's five-year cycle to acquire agile, armed reconnaissance aircraft — once it had tested out its chosen competitors: Textron's AT-6 and the Sierra Nevada-Embraer team's A-29.

In October 2019, facing a threat from Congress to strip the program from its control, the Air Force issued a request for proposal to Textron and Sierra Nevada to buy “two or three of both” companies' turboprops. Finally, in February this year, the Air Force threw up its collective hands and gave up the quest to buy light attack aircraft in quantity — purchasing only two each of the AT-6 Wolverine and A-29 Tucanos for continued experimentation.

Several of the companies who originally fought it out way back in the day under the Air Force effort, as well as Textron and Sierra Nevada, are now throwing their hats in the SOCOM ring. Spokespeople for Air Tractor (which had formally protested the Air Force's contract award in the light attack competition), Sierra Nevada and Textron confirmed to Breaking Defense today that they are all in for the live-fly demonstration expected in November.

The plan is for SOCOM to buy up to 75 of the aircraft over seven years, beginning with a $106 million request in the 2021 budget to kick things off.

The Special Operations community is as interested in what it can put on one of these planes as it is in the aircraft itself.

“At the end of the day, I'm going to deliver a weapon system,” Smith said. “And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform. I think the Air Force, you know, there was a lot of focus on the actual platforms. I don't think you'll see that from SOCOM. We are far more interested in the integration capability of our eventual industry partners on the platform.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/special-ops-budget-crunch-looms-but-new-aircraft-demo-coming

On the same subject

  • Airbus demos Remote Carrier 'loyal wingman' connectivity with Eurofighters and Tornados

    July 31, 2020 | International, Aerospace

    Airbus demos Remote Carrier 'loyal wingman' connectivity with Eurofighters and Tornados

    by Gareth Jennings Airbus has demonstrated for the first time with real combat aircraft the Remote Carrier (RC) ‘loyal wingman' technology it is developing for the Future Combat Air System (FCAS)/Systeme de Combat Arien du Futur (SCAF) programme. The event during the Luftwaffe's Timber Express exercise over northern Germany and the North Sea, announced by the company on 30 July, saw national Eurofighter and Panavia Tornado aircraft demonstrate interconnectivity with an RC network using the Link 16 datalink. “During the exercise, the Remote Carriers, which currently use the Compact Airborne Networking Data Link (CANDL), were successfully connected to Link 16, the operational tactical datalink of the armed forces. The Remote Carriers were not only visible to all tactical combat aircraft of the [German] Air Force, but could also receive and execute orders without the need for technical modifications to the aircraft,” Airbus said. As noted by the company, this event was followed up with a demonstration of RC interoperability with the NATO concept of Co-operative ESM Operations (CESMO); a reconnaissance network spanning several branches of the armed forces aimed at locating threat systems in the electromagnetic spectrum in real time. https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/airbus-demos-remote-carrier-loyal-wingman-connectivity-with-eurofighters-and-tornados

  • First upgraded F-35s won’t be ready for combat until next year

    April 24, 2024 | International, Aerospace

    First upgraded F-35s won’t be ready for combat until next year

    The F-35 upgrades known as Technology Refresh 3 are now a year overdue and have halted deliveries of the newest fighter jets from Lockheed Martin.

  • DoD seeks industry input on multibillion-dollar cloud collaboration solution

    October 26, 2018 | International, C4ISR

    DoD seeks industry input on multibillion-dollar cloud collaboration solution

    By: Jessie Bur The Pentagon and General Services Administration released a request for information Oct. 25 for a new unified collaborative cloud solution that will unite the entire defense apparatus under one enterprise contract. The Defense Enterprise Office Solution is the first capability set of three that the Department of Defense plans to use to capture its enterprise collaboration and productivity needs. The DEOS capability set needs include a productivity suite, messaging capabilities, content management systems and collaboration tools. “We operate pretty much in a disparate environment right now, and predominantly on-[premises] for these capabilities. So DEOS will give us an opportunity to tear down some of those barriers, posture us for increased interoperability while taking advantage of what the commercial community has to offer,” said Essye Miller, principal deputy to the DoD chief information officer, at a press roundtable. “From a benefit perspective, for us: real-time upgrades, real-time refresh, real-time access to innovation as our industry partners make them available to us.” The contract will be offered through GSA's IT Schedule 70, which Miller said has matured to the level that was needed to support Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router, Secret Internet Protocol Router and tactical environment needs. “In fact, IT Schedule 70 is the vehicle GSA itself used to procure its own cloud-based email, collaboration and productivity solution,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, adding that GSA is committed to working with vendors who would want to propose through the expedited Schedule 70 FASt Lane program. “Using IT Schedule 70 to help DoD procure an enterprisewide solution for email, productivity and collaboration tools could establish a baseline for GSA to scale up this type of solution across the federal government in the future.” In fact, according to Federal CIO Suzette Kent, the DoD solution moves the federal government forward on initiatives to use and procure scalable cloud solutions across agencies. “When we look at where we were with the report to the president across the federal government, and the intent to leverage as many common solutions for purposes of interoperability, cybersecurity ... and the overall efficiency of how we go after those solutions and the ability to keep those current, this is a really positive collaboration, and something that we're incredibly supportive of,” said Kent. Industry has just over two weeks to respond to the RFI, which closes Nov. 9, and the subsequent request for quotes will likely be released in early 2019, according to officials. The DoD and General Services Administration also plan to hold industry days in early December 2018 to facilitate communication between government and industry on the best way to approach the contract. The award for the eventual contract is planned for sometime in the third quarter of 2019, and would likely be set for approximately 10 years and $8 billion, according to Murphy, though that number could change depending on industry input. The appropriate solution would likely have to be certified at FedRAMP Moderate, said Miller. According to Murphy, GSA and DoD have yet to determine whether a single-award or multi-award contract will best suit the DoD's needs — a debate that proved highly contentious for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract that opened for proposals July 26 — and the RFI asks respondents to provide pros and cons for each option. But DoD CIO Dana Deasy said that the DEOS program is part of a Pentagon initiative to bring defense operations into a multi-cloud and multi-vendor environment. “Our intentions are to have a cloud that can serve general purpose computing needs, as well as what I have coined a term as ‘fit-for-purpose' clouds, which could consist of internal clouds or commercial clouds that have a unique fit for purpose,” said Deasy, adding that DEOS would be one such cloud. Because DEOS is one of three collaboration capability sets the agency is looking to fulfill, DoD could end up offering a total of three contracts in that space, according to Miller. https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/10/25/dod-seeks-industry-input-on-multibillion-dollar-cloud-collaboration-solution

All news