May 25, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

The US needs to rethink its overseas supply chain

By: Thomas Ayres

As Americans respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become acutely aware of the outsized impact of our dependence on China in the supply chain.

Pharmaceutical companies learned key chemicals and minerals are exclusively made or mined in China. For instance, reports show China produces 97 percent of the antibiotics, 95 percent of ibuprofen and 91 percent of hydrocortisone consumed in the U.S. market. Hospitals also learned that while China produces 50 percent of the world's face masks, they are of dubious reliability. There is cause for concern with the quantity or quality of ventilators.

In sum, we learned as citizens what we in the Department of Defense have known for some time: Our national security supply chain must be free from dependence on China.

The DoD's concern for its supply chain is not new. Congress spurred activity over a decade ago by questioning the DoD's supply chain risk management, or SCRM, policies. The National Defense Strategy‘s recognition of a new era of strategic, great power competition further sharpened the DoD's focus, propelling recent efforts to enhance regulations and procedures in addressing supply chain threats.

We are transitioning from analog to digital, with the goal of planes, ships, tanks and satellites all seamlessly sharing data — a lethal version of the ride-sharing app on your smartphone. Yet, even as the DoD builds this future, the threat of supply chain disruption and concerns about component quality within the electronic backbone are real. Counterfeit or planted microelectronic parts can be vectors for cybersecurity intrusions.

Recently, for instance, the DoD voiced concerns that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei's 5G solution provided back doors, purposefully or negligently, for data corruption, data extraction, system failure or worse. Similarly, SCRM policies have increasingly addressed the concern of intellectual property theft enabled by subcomponents designed to allow information to flow back to larger architectures. The COVID-19 pandemic is giving new meaning to that threat, and the risk of disruption to both raw and manufactured materials from abroad has become apparent.

Our SCRM focus must broaden in response to COVID-19 to better address national production capacity and sustainability. Being able to assure access to the minerals, chemicals, subcomponents and components required to build weapon systems is essential. China supplies 80 percent of the rare earth minerals imported to the U.S., many of which are essential to electronic parts. Since 1933, the Buy American Act has required federal agencies, including the DoD, to purchase items manufactured in the U.S. Additionally, these items must be made from supplies mined or made in the U.S.

The act is implemented by regulations requiring analysis of the components — where they are mined or made, and where they are assembled. Companies that falsify “Made in America” designations can be debarred from the federal marketplace. In July 2019, months before the pandemic emerged, President Donald Trump issued an executive order seeking to increase the minimum domestic manufacture thresholds above the current 50 percent floors. The pandemic now shows even more needs to be done. We must increase to President Trump's mandated percentages, and we must also analyze where each of the subcomponents are manufactured.

This doesn't mean we need to back away from allied contributions or alliance-based weapon systems like the F-35 fighter jet, which benefits from the industrial cooperation of nine partner nations. But in light of COVID-19, it does mean that when we make risk-based and measured decisions to produce an alliance system, we program in several months' worth of component backlogs to allow continued production during future quarantines.

The majority of our weapon systems are made in the U.S. by American companies with greater than 50 percent of component production and assembly done domestically. Yet, what is less clear are the composition of the subcomponents in the components themselves. Not recognizing the risks of the subcomponents equally jeopardizes the new reality of disruptions to our supply chain and risks of data extraction, degradation and spying, about which we have increasingly been concerned.

Recently, I sought to buy a grapefruit spoon on the internet and found it exceedingly difficult to learn where the offered spoons were made. The harder it was to find, the more I suspected it was made in China. Perhaps Congress should pass a law making it easier to learn the source of manufacturing. Ensuring my access to an American-made grapefruit spoon is not nearly as vital as assuring our access to critical weapon systems, rare earth materials, and pharmaceuticals and medical supplies. A vital step is knowing the source countries of components and subcomponents. We must have deeper knowledge of the full supply chains of subcomponents, and how and where they are produced.

Trust can only come once we know all that is required to understand our supply chains and we seek even greater focus in our new normal. Our security depends on it.

Thomas Ayres is general counsel for the U.S. Air Force.

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/05/22/the-us-needs-to-rethink-its-overseas-supply-chain/

On the same subject

October 1, 2019 | International, Aerospace

Air Force paints a digital future where data from satellites play central role
by Sandra Erwin In a few months the Air Force will start a series of experiments to try to connect fighter aircraft and other weapon systems into a single network so they can all share critical data and intelligence, much of which is collected by satellites in space. Will Roper, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, described the venture as the “first demonstration of what you could call ‘step 1' of ABMS.” ABMS is short for Advanced Battle Management System, and it is a hard concept to explain because it is not like a traditional piece of hardware or software. It can be best described as a network where data is piped in from sensors located in space, at sea, in the air or on the ground. That information would be instantly analyzed with artificial intelligence tools and shared across the network. This is the type of technology that will “allow us to be more collaborative,” Roper told reporters at the recent 2019 Air Space & Cyber symposium. Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein is “driving this idea across the Air Force,” said Roper. Goldfein has been a champion of ABMS and wants to make it a “large dollar item in our 2021 budget,” said Roper. The thinking is that the Air Force will spend less money on shiny new platforms and more on exploiting data and advanced networks. It would be like the “Internet of Things, but applied to military systems,” said Roper. Air Force leaders initially pitched the ABMS idea to Congress two years ago as a vision of the future where access to timely data is key to success in the battlefield. They suggested that the Air Force should invest in ABMS rather than spend billions on new command-and-control airplanes. Congress gave the plan a skeptical reception but the Air Force will continue to press its case. In a keynote speech at Air Force Association's Air Space & Cyber conference last week, Goldfein described the future as one of “multi-domain operations” where all weapons and military forces receive up-to-the-minute intelligence and are able to share that data, something that ABMS would make possible. “What I'm talking about is a fully networked force where Air Force paints a digital future where data from satellites play central role each platform's sensors and operators are connected,” said Goldfein. While the concept seems straightforward, putting it into practice is not. One of the challenges is how to handle the vast amounts of data available from satellites and the infrastructure required to bring this data to the ground, analyze the data and then transport it to where it's needed. Some of the crucial technologies that will enable ABMS or any similar efforts will come from the world of commercial space and cloud computing. The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center has recognized this as it pursues a project called CASINO, short for Commercially Augmented Space Inter Networked Operations. CASINO is a spinoff of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Blackjack program that is attempting to demonstrate the military utility of small satellites in low Earth orbit. SMC has made CASINO one of its signature efforts to show how commercial technology could be used to process and distribute data from large LEO constellations. The Pentagon's Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit on Sept. 10 awarded a contract of undisclosed value to Ball Aerospace and Microsoft to demonstrate cloud processing capabilities in support of the CASINO project. The companies will have to show how simultaneous, worldwide data streams from large, distributed constellations of small satellites can be processed quickly using Microsoft's Azure cloud and Ball Aerospace algorithms. This is about making satellite data more actionable more quickly, Azure Global vice president Tom Keane said. One of the questions this project seeks to answer is “what would it take to completely transform what a ground station looks like, and downlink that data directly to the cloud?” Keane said. Perhaps one option is to place electronically steered flat panel antennas on the roof of a data center to connect multiple LEO satellites. Ball Aerospace algorithms in this project will process data streams from up to 20 satellites. With the data in the cloud, customers can direct it to where it's needed. Clearly, there is a long way to go to achieve what Goldfein calls the “Air Force That We Need” — one where all U.S. and allied forces are connected and get relevant information quickly. But you have to start somewhere. https://spacenews.com/air-force-paints-a-digital-future-where-data-from-satellites-play-central-role/
May 5, 2020 | International, Aerospace

Northrop, Raytheon team on next-gen interceptor bid
By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Technologies are teaming up to fight for the right to build America's next missile interceptor, the companies announced Monday. The two companies hope to be one of two teams to be downselected by the Missile Defense Agency later this year, as the Pentagon seeks a replacement for the Redesigned Kill Vehicle program, which was cancelled last August after department officials decided the program was too technically challenged to continue. On April 24, the Pentagon formally issued a request for proposals for the new competition, known as the Next Generation Interceptor. The MDA requested $664.1 million in fiscal year 2021 for the NGI program, as part of a $4.9 billion five-year budget plan. “We have the right team, technology and expertise in place to meet our customer's needs for enhanced capabilities, from the identification of a ballistic missile launched by an adversary, all the way to its elimination,” Blake Larson, corporate vice president and president Northrop Grumman Space Systems, said in a statement. “The joining of true experts — with mastery from threat detection to interception — creates a team capable of developing a revolutionary solution that is designed to defeat emerging threats,” added Wes Kremer, president of Raytheon Missiles & Defense. The two companies have a depth of knowledge of the current missile defense architecture, with the press release claiming one or the other company currently provides “the interceptor booster, kill vehicle, ground systems, fire control and engagement coordination” systems for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. In addition, while the RKV program was led by Boeing, Raytheon was the company actually building the kill vehicle as a sub-contractor. Raytheon Technologies, formed via a merger of Raytheon and United Technologies, began trading on the stock market at the start of April. https://www.defensenews.com/space/2020/05/04/northrop-raytheon-team-on-next-gen-interceptor-bid
January 17, 2019 | International, Naval

Facing a sealift capacity collapse, the Navy seeks strategy for new auxiliary ships
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It could be a smaller ship but needed more berthing capability.” The Navy released a request for information this week for industry studies that they hope to award in March that will validate the approach, Searles said. “We believe it's going to be two hulls, but that's still a great savings over designing five hulls,” he said. Congress wants the Navy to start ordering hulls by 2023 to deliver by 2026, something the Navy told Congress in a report last year could be done if it ponies up the cash. The most urgent need in the surge sealift fleet is the ready reserve force, a fleet of ships run by the Maritime Administration that are in reduced operating status and spend most of their time in port on standby waiting to be activated in case of a national emergency. 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Collapse In February, the Army sent a letter to Congress saying that the country's organic sealift capacity would fall below the level required to move the Army's equipment by 2024 if the Navy did not act fast. “Without proactive recapitalization of the Organic Surge Sealift Fleet, the Army will face unacceptable risk in force projection capability beginning in 2024,” the document said, adding that the advanced age of the current fleet adds further risk to the equation. “By 2034, 70% of the organic fleet will be over 60 years old — well past its economic useful life; further degrading the Army's ability to deploy forces,” the document reads. The Army's G-4 also alluded to then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' readiness push, adding that even the most prepared forces wouldn't matter if they can't reach the front line. “Shortfalls in sealift capacity undermine the effectiveness of US conventional deterrence as even a fully-resourced and trained force has limited deterrent value if an adversary believes they can achieve their strategic objective in the window of opportunity before American land forces arrive,” the paper reads. “The Army's ability to project military power influences adversaries' risk calculations.” The document reflects the Army's growing impatience with the Navy's efforts to recapitalize its surge sealift ships, which are composed of a series of roll-on/roll-off ships and other special-purpose vessels operated by Military Sealift Command and the Maritime Administration. And Capitol Hill shares the Army's view, according to two HASC staffers, who spoke to Defense News last year on condition of anonymity. The Navy, which is responsible for recapitalizing the surge sealift force, put forward a budget in 2019 that called for about $242 million over the next five years, the bulk of which would go toward designing and developing a new platform that will replace the current vessels. HASC lawmakers considered that amount of funding not enough to make any serious inroads on recapitalization, and certainly not enough to forestall the critical shortfall identified in the information paper, the staffers said. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/01/16/facing-a-sealift-capacity-collapse-the-navy-hones-in-on-a-strategy-for-new-auxiliary-ships

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