August 5, 2022 | International, Aerospace
Fighter pilots will don AR helmets to train with imaginary enemies
Roughly a year from now, Air Force pilots will start wearing augmented reality helmets that let them fight imaginary enemies in the air.
May 6, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Land
The Army’s future vertical lift plan may have a supplier problem
By: Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — Army rotorcraft programs could net industry an average of $8 billion to 10 billion per year over the next decade — but defense companies can expect major challenges for its lower-tier suppliers, some of whom might choose not to come along for the ride.
Those are the findings of a new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, released Wednesday. It follows a November report outlining cost concerns about the service's Future Vertical Lift (FVL) plan.
The Army plans to field a future attack reconnaissance aircraft, or FARA, by 2028 and a future long-range assault aircraft, or FLRAA, by 2030. The modernization program is one of the top priorities for the Army.
First, the good news for industry. The study found an annual market of $8 billion to 10 billion for Army rotorcraft programs over the next decade, with a potential dip occurring only in 2026, when the two new programs are spinning up. That's a strong figure that should keep the major defense companies happy.
However, lower-tier companies may find themselves unprepared to actually manufacture FLRAA and FARA parts, given the newer production techniques the Army plans to use — things like additive manufacturing, robotics, artificial intelligence, digital twins, and data analytics. And if that happens, the service could face a supplier problem that could provide a major speed bump for its plans of having the systems ready to go at the end of the decade.
Convincing those suppliers, many of whom lack cash on hand for major internal investments at the best of times, to put money down in the near term to redevelop their facilities and retrain people is going to be an “expensive issue,” said Andrew Hunter, who co-authored the study for CSIS along with Rhys McCormick. “They need a really compelling reason to invest.”
“For a company that is devoted to the defense aviation market, they don't necessarily have a choice to not make the transition,” Hunter told reporters in a Tuesday call. “However, there is a dollars and cents issue, which is you have to be able to access the capital. If you can't, the primes will quickly go somewhere else.”
And some companies with a broader market share in the commercial world may decide investing in modernization isn't worth the effort and simply leave the defense rotorcraft market, leaving the primes to scramble to find replacements. In that case, Hunter said, the primes could potentially look to bring that work in-house.
Companies “are looking at the equation” of the commercial versus defense markets when making these decisions, said Patrick Mason, the Army's top aviation acquisition official. But he noted that the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which his hitting commercial aviation firms particularly hard, may cause some companies to consider the benefits of defense, which is historically smaller but more stable than the commercial aviation world.
Mason also emphasized the importance of keeping suppliers with experience in the unique heat requirements or material aspects as part of the service's rotorcraft supply chain, saying “Those are the ones we remain focused on because those are the ones who could end up as a failure.”
On the same subject
-
-
October 1, 2018 | International, Aerospace
Boeing’s big month capped off with hat trick of new contracts
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Boeing is the biggest aircraft manufacturer in the world, but the losses of the joint strike fighter program and Air Force's long range strike bomber still weigh heavily on the company's defense unit, and had prompted some in industry to wonder if the company's days of making cutting edge combat aircraft were numbered. Conventional wisdom held that Boeing needed to win either the Navy's unmanned tanker drone or the Air Force's next-generation trainer aircraft contract to keep its St. Louis, Mo.-based facility building tactical aircraft into the 2030s. a contract for the Air Force's Huey replacement helicopter was seen as out of reach as the service had formerly expressed a preference for sole-sourcing Black Hawks. But in a matter of weeks, Boeing racked up all three contracts, shocking the defense establishment. First came the MQ-25 Stingray award for the Navy's unmanned tanker drone on Aug. 30. An initial $805 million contract covers the design, development, fabrication, test and delivery of four Stingray drones, but Navy acquisition boss James Geurts said the entire program could be worth up to $13 billion for 72 aircraft. “It is a big win on a high-visibility competition/program and gives Boeing a franchise unmanned program,” wrote Roman Schweizer of Cowen Washington Research Group on Sept. 4. Boeing defeated Lockheed Martin and General Atomics to win the program — and that victory allows Boeing to cement its own status as the Navy's premier manufacturer of fixed-wing aircraft. “A Lockheed Martin win would have cemented its position as the builder of ‘next-gen' naval aviation platforms while Boeing would have been relegated to manufacturing fleet workhorses,” Schweizer said in his assessment of the award. “General Atomics would have a been a one-off, but we thought they would been a favorite for a low-cost, low-risk design.” Then on Monday, Boeing won another big competition — this time worth up to $2.38 billion — for the Air Force's UH-1N replacement helicopter. Boeing and Leonardo were immediately obligated $375 million for the initial four MH-139 helicopters, which will be built at Leonardo's commercial AW-139 production plant in Philadelphia. It was huge news for Leonardo, a large Italian defense contractor that had been attempting to break into the U.S. market with a major program for about a decade. But for Boeing, it was still a relatively small aircraft procurement program, with Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, writing that there were probably few opportunities for Boeing-Leonardo to sell the MH-139 to other users in the U.S. military. However, Boeing on Thursday won the major opportunity it had been seeking: the Air Force's T-X program. Boeing's clean sheet design beat out Lockheed and Leonardo to win a contract worth up to $9.2 billion. It's likely the actual program will be worth considerably less — Boeing would be obligated a total of $9.2 billion over time if the Air Force decides to execute all options on the contract for 475 training jets, and the services' program of record sits at 350 jets. But its importance to Boeing extends past the award's total contract value. Winning T-X was “possibly critical” for Boeing's St. Louis plant and for its defense business to remain a competitive player in tactical aircraft design, said Callan. “The MQ-25 win helps sustain production at that facility, which now builds F/A-18s and F-15s,” he wrote after the Sept. 27 announcement. “However, the F/A-18 and F-15 lines may end by the mid-2020s. T-X enables Boeing to keep that facility humming and therefore in the hunt for Penetrating Counter Air and other new military aircraft programs.” Analysts like Callan and Schweizer had speculated that Boeing would bid very aggressively to try to win the contract, but the question was whether the company could possibly offer a new purpose-built design at a significantly lower price point than competitors Lockheed Martin and Leonardo, which both proposed aircraft designs already in production and use by foreign militaries. It appears Boeing may have been able to do just that. Richard Aboulafia told Defense News in 2017 that the Lockheed and Leonardo trainers came with a price tag of about $25 million, although both companies were expected to bid lower than that to be competitive. Meanwhile, Jim McAleese of McAleese & Associates pegged the unit cost of Boeing's T-X at an “eye-watering” $19 million, far below the Air Force's $45 million per plane expectation. That low price “establishes an extremely high burden for disappointed offerors of Lockheed or Leonardo” to launch a successful protest with the Government Accountability Office, he stated in a Sept. 28 email, although Lockheed and Leonardo could potentially argue that the Air Force's cost and schedule risk assessments are too optimistic, given that Boeing offered a new airframe. Callan also pointed out that the MQ-25 and T-X wins could be advantageous to Boeing's commercial business. In the past, the defense sector has developed new materials that have later been adapted for use by the airline industry. With Boeing acquiring autonomy-focused businesses like Liquid Robotics and Aurora while investing in startups through its HorizonX organization, it is possible advances in military unmanned tech could give way to autonomous commercial cargo planes or other future concepts. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2018/09/28/boeings-big-month-capped-off-with-hat-trick-of-new-contracts
-
July 8, 2019 | International, Other Defence
How the Pentagon can improve AI adoption
By: Graham Gilmer The excitement of artificial intelligence today is like the space race of the 1960s, when nations were in fierce competition. Now, the United States is in first place. But continued leadership is not a given, especially as competitors, namely China and Russia, are making significant investments in AI for defense. To maintain our technological advantage, safeguard national security, and lead on the world stage, we have an imperative to invest strategically in AI. The successful and widespread adoption of AI requires the United States take a human-centric and technologically innovative approach to using AI to help maintain the peace and prosperity of our nation. As the Department of Defense and Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) continue their efforts to accelerate AI adoption, they must address three key components of successful adoption: building trust in AI technology, operationalizing AI technologies to reach enterprise scale, and establishing ethical governance standards and procedures to reduce exposure to undue risk. Build trust in AI technology Fear and distrust hold technology adoption back. This was true during the first three industrial revolutions as mechanization, factories, and computers transformed the world, and it is the case in today's fourth industrial revolution of AI. The confusion surrounding AI has led to teams abandoning applications due to a lack of trust. To build that trust, we must prioritize training, explainability, and transparency. Trust in technology is built when leaders have accurate expectations around what it is going to deliver, mission owners can identify use cases connected to the core mission, and managers understand the true impact on mission performance. Building trust requires that all users, from executives and managers to analysts and operators, receive training on AI-enabled technologies. Training involves not only providing access to learning resources, but also creating opportunities for them to put their new skills to use. In its formal AI strategy, Pentagon leaders outlined extensive plans for implementing AI training programs across the department to build a digitally savvy workforce that will be key to maintaining the United States' leading position in the AI race. “Explainable AI” also curbs distrust by showing users how machines reach decisions. Consider computer vision. Users may wonder: How can such a tool sift through millions of images to identify a mobile missile launcher? A computer vision tool equipped with explainable AI could highlight aspects of the image that it uses in identification—in this case, elements that look like wheels, tracks, or launch tubes. Explainable AI gives users a “look under the hood,” tailored to their level of technical literacy. AI technologies must be more than understandable; they must also be transparent. This starts at the granular system level, including providing training data provenance and an audit trail showing what data, weights, and other inputs helped a machine reach its decision. Building AI systems that are explainable, transparent, and auditable will also link to governance standards and reduce risk. Operationalize AI at the enterprise scale AI will only be a successful tool if agencies can use AI at the enterprise level. At its core, this means moving AI beyond the pilot phase to real-world production across the enterprise or deployed out in the field on edge devices. Successfully operationalizing AI starts early. AI is an exciting new technology, but agencies too enamored with the hype run the risk of missing out on the real benefits. Too many organizations have developed AI pilot capabilities that work in the lab but cannot support the added noise of real-world environments. Such short-term thinking results in wasted resources. Agencies must think strategically about how the AI opportunities they choose to pursue align with their real-world mission and operations. Leaders must think through the processes and infrastructure needed to seamlessly extend AI to the enterprise at-scale. This involves building scalable infrastructure, data stores and standards, a library of reusable tools and frameworks, and security safeguards to protect against adversarial AI. It is equally important to prioritize investment in the infrastructure to organize, store, and access data, the computational needs for AI (cloud, GPU chips, etc.), as well as open, extensible software tools for ease of upgrade and maintenance. Establish governance to reduce risk Governance standards, controls, and ethical guidelines are critical to ensuring how AI systems are built, managed, and used in a manner that reduces exposure to undue risk. While our allies have engaged in conversations about how to ensure ethical AI, China and Russia have thus far shown little concern for the ethical risks associated with AI. Given this tension, it is imperative that the United States maintain its technological advantage and ethical leadership by establishing governance standards and proactive risk mitigation tactics. To this end, in May, three Senators introduced the bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act, which includes provisions for establishing a National AI Coordination Office and national standards for testing AI algorithm effectiveness. Building auditability and validation functions into AI not only ensures trust and adoption, but also reduces risk. By establishing proactive risk management procedures and processes for continuous testing and validation for compliance purposes, organizations can ensure that their AI systems are performing at optimal levels. Governance controls and system auditability also ensure that AI systems and tools are robust against hacking and adversarial AI threats. AI could be the most transformative technological development of our lifetime—and it's a necessity for maintaining America's competitive edge. To ensure that we develop AI that users trust and can scale to the enterprise with reduced risk, organizations must take a calm, methodical approach to its development and adoption. Focus on these three areas is crucial to protecting our national security, maintaining our competitive advantage and leading on the world stage. Graham Gilmer is a principal at Booz Allen who helps manage artificial intelligence initiatives across the Department of Defense. https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/2019/07/08/how-the-pentagon-can-improve-ai-adoption/