Surface force lays out tech development timeline for industry

On the same subject

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  February 21, 2020 | International, Naval

  Main contractor Damen and more than a hundred companies contribute to combat support ship

  February 19, 2020 - With the contract signing for construction for the new supply ship HNLMS Den Helder, more than a hundred, mainly Dutch companies receive work. The contract was signed today in Den Helder by the Director of Defence Material Organization (DMO), Vice Admiral Arie Jan de Waard and Arnout Damen, the new CEO of the family business Damen Shipyards Group. Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding (DSNS) will supervise the project, together with DMO, as the main contractor. Damen will not do this alone; more than a hundred companies from the Dutch naval construction sector are involved in this ship. This means that a large part of the sector will be deployed to participate in this innovative new ship. With HNLMS Den Helder, the maritime supply capacity of the Royal Netherlands Navy will be restored. The ship will operate alongside the Joint Support Ship HNLMS Karel Doorman. This vessel also forms the basis for the design of this Combat Support Ship. The new ship can be used worldwide and can operate under high threat, protected by frigates. In addition, she can be used in the fight against drug trafficking, controlling refugee flows and providing emergency aid. The supply ship, which is almost 200 metres long, will receive a 75-person crew and can also take 75 extra people on board. There is room for several helicopters and around 20 containers. The design explicitly looked at fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. The combination of diesel engines, hull shape and propeller design reduces fuel consumption by around 6 % compared to HNLMS Karel Doorman. The building contract is not contracted out elsewhere in Europe. DMO wishes to keep the knowledge and skills of designing and building naval ships in the Netherlands. The armed forces thus invoked Article 346 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It states that Member States may protect essential security interests. This also relates to the production of defence equipment. Completion is scheduled for the second quarter of 2024. A year later, in the second quarter of 2025, the Combat Support Ship must be operable. The size of the total project budget is 375 million euros. View source version on Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding (DSNS) : https://www.damen.com/en/news/2020/02/main_contractor_damen_and_more_than_a_hundred_companies_contribute_to_css

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  August 9, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  Hypersonics by the dozens: US industry faces manufacturing challenge

  By: Jen Judson HUNTSVILLE, Ala. —The U.S. military is a few years from launching offensive hypersonic weapons that are currently under development. But building those initial missiles is one thing — manufacturing the weapons in multitude is another issue entirely. “I would say we really need to understand, again, how can we produce precision hardware at scale,” Michael Griffin, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a group of reporters Aug. 7 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “If we talk about ballistic missile defense or hypersonic offense and we talk about proliferating architectures, we need any dozens, many hundreds, maybe thousands of assets,” he added. “This takes us back to the Cold War where at one point we had 30,000 nuclear warheads and missiles to launch them. We haven't produced at that kind of scale since the wall came down.” As hypersonic missiles become a reality, industry is going to have to relearn how to effectively, efficiently and economically produce them, Griffin said. While industry has developed warheads, glide bodies and other components, there is no industrial base equipped to manufacture hypersonic weapons. Things are moving in the right direction when it comes to bringing industry up to speed and preparing for larger-scale manufacturing of missiles, Griffin said. But building these systems is challenging because, for example, hypersonics require a greater degree of thermal protection than what has been required of other weapons in the past, he noted. Building hypersonics is no longer a technical issue or a matter of understanding physics, but rather an issue of understanding the industrial engineering required to produce a larger number. “I'm not sure how much help the government can be there,” he said. “Mass production is not what we do. ... That is going to be an industry problem.” The Army is just weeks away from awarding a contract to a company that will work with the federally funded laboratory that developed a hypersonic glide body to develop manufacturing plans and strategies. Other companies will have a turn as well. The effort is spearheaded by the service's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office. Griffin stressed that the weapons manufacturing process needs to be affordable. “Our adversaries have clearly found ways to make them affordable. China has these things now by the thousands. What do we do to learn, once again, how to produce sophisticated things at scale and affordably?” he said. China is able to field new systems every few years, Griffin noted, while the U.S. takes a decade or more to get through a cumbersome acquisition process. “It don't believe that the issues facing the United States aerospace and defense establishment are issues of specific technologies,” he said. “I believe that over the last 30 years ... we've become lost in our processes.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2019/08/08/hypersonics-by-the-dozens-us-industry-faces-manufacturing-challenge/

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  May 22, 2020 | International, Security, Other Defence

  Announcement of an SBIR/STTR Opportunity

  Announcement of an SBIR/STTR Opportunity Under Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) HR001120S0019 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) May 13, 2020 The DARPA Small Business Programs Office (SBPO) has pre-released the following SBIR/STTR Opportunities (SBOs): "Compact Modular Detector for Water and Food Contaminants", Announcement Number HR001120S0019-07, published at https://beta.sam.gov/search?keywords=HR001120S0019-07 "Near-Term Forecasting of Nonstationary Dynamic Processes", Announcement Number HR001120S0019-08, published at https://beta.sam.gov/search?keywords=HR001120S0019-08 "Organizational Modeling", Announcement Number HR001120S0019-09, published at https://beta.sam.gov/search?keywords=HR001120S0019-09 “Flexible Manufacturing of Fine Chemical Reagents", Announcement Number HR001120S0019-10, published at https://beta.sam.gov/search?keywords=HR001120S0019-10 These SBOs will open for proposals on May 28, 2020 and close on June 29, 2020 at 2:00pm ET