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October 14, 2020 | International, Land, C4ISR

US Army pegs 2023 as tipping point for ending old weapons

WASHINGTON — The Army will see a significant shift in funding from its current fleet to new and modern capability designed to fight in multidomain operations in fiscal 2023, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told Defense News in an Oct. 8 interview.

The service has conducted several rounds of “night court” reviews already, a deep dive across the Army's portfolios to determine whether money is in the right place to ensure modernization priorities are getting what they need to progress.

In FY18 and FY19, the Army focused on the science and technology portfolio, but in FY20 ramped up the process finding north of $25 billion to apply to modernization priorities across the next five years.

The FY21 and FY22 process was similar and still resulted in a substantial amount of funding that was redirected, according to McCarthy.

“We're basically lining ourselves up for the '23 program where you will see a much more aggressive effort like you saw in FY20,” McCarthy said. “The choices are going to get bigger and tougher, but that's necessary” as modernized programs begin to be fielded, he said. “That will force us to make harder calls with legacy systems that will have to be forced to end their service life.”

The FY22 night court review has wrapped up, and the number of canceled, reduced or delayed programs is less than in previous years.

The Army still had to make some hard decisions, Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army G-8, told Defense News in a separate Oct. 8 interview, but there were fewer. “It did still result in dozens of reductions and eliminations, but smaller, much smaller than in the past.”

In FY20, for example, the Army canceled, delayed or reduced 186 programs. In FY21 that number was roughly 80.

“I feel better now than I did on the front end of this thing a year ago,” Pasquarette said, “and how we were going to make ends meet.”

Pasquarette, who manages the night court process, said a year ago that after two deep dives he was concerned there wouldn't be enough low-hanging fruit to move over to fund modernization at the levels needed in the coming years.

But since the Army has already found $37 billion total from the previous night courts and no major changes have been made to the strategy or what is being prioritized, less needs to move around because everything is in the right place, according to Pasquarette.

Yet in FY23 some big programs will begin to go out to units such as the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense System (M-SHORAD), next-generation squad weapons, enhanced night-vision goggles, the Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) systems, the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) and ground-launched hypersonic weapons.

“So in our fires community, massive changeover,” McCarthy said, “so units will be taking on new weapon systems, changing their task organizations, so you have to start divesting legacy weapon systems at a much greater rate of speed. ... Then as you get towards the back end of the [five-year defense plan] FYDP, in '25 and '26, here come the helicopters.”

In FY23, McCarthy said, the Army will also make trades in order to invest in logistics to accommodate new weapons. Questions center on determining whether there are appropriate hangars, maintenance facilities and ranges that accommodate greater lethality and range for things like the Long-Range Precision Fires capabilities.

More difficult decisions could be around the corner should the defense budget face cuts in the future. Some are projecting numbers as high as a 20 percent cut in military spending if there is a change in the administration.

“If we see a reduced top line, I do wonder what would be the impact to some of the things that we put in place,” Lt. Gen. Thomas Horlander, the Army's comptroller, told Defense News earlier this month. “How will things like our modernization plan become pressurized? And so definitely a reduced top line will pressurize some of the programs and we'll be making some tough decisions.”

Should the Army face cuts, McCarthy said, “we'll have a hard look at our readiness portfolio.”

The Army has “been very blessed” to have 27 or 28 brigades at the highest levels of readiness, he added. “So you look at your readiness portfolio and are there ways to do it more efficiently? Do you need that many ready at any given point in time? Can you make an adjustment to that large bucket of funding in the readiness portfolio?” McCarthy asked.

On the modernization side, the Army will have to continue to divest legacy platforms, according to McCarthy. “But you also need to take a very hard look” at priority programs to ensure they are correctly lined up, he said.

As for quality of life, the Army “will not take much risk there,” McCarthy said. “We're very concerned that we spent over a decade at deficit spending on that side and we've made some pretty substantial moves. We're going to make some more here in the next week or two that you'll hear about ways that we're working to improve upon that.”

The Army will do what it can to manage the balance sheet “as efficiently as possible,” McCarthy said. “If the cuts come, they will come. You have to face that down. The fiscal posture of the country has been challenged with the COVID-19 pandemic and we're going to do the best we can with the budgets we are granted.”

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/13/us-army-pegs-fy23-as-tipping-point-for-ending-old-weapons/

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  • Submarine Industrial Base Ready to Grow – But Only If Pentagon, Congress Send the Right Signals

    November 9, 2020 | International, Naval

    Submarine Industrial Base Ready to Grow – But Only If Pentagon, Congress Send the Right Signals

    By: Megan Eckstein November 6, 2020 3:56 PM Huntington Ingalls Industries is confident its businesses are well-positioned for whatever the future of the Navy is – whether it's the implementation of the Pentagon's Battle Force 2045 plan or something else implemented by new leadership, according to the chief executive. HII president and CEO Mike Petters told investors on Thursday that “we are pleased to see our portfolio of ships in the (Battle Force 2045) plan and recognize that there is still much work to be done to bring any plan to fruition.” “We remain confident that we can create additional capacity that may be necessary to support even the most robust shipbuilding plan,” he added. Asked by investors what a potential change in administration means for the company's outlook, Petters said that “national security tends to be pretty bipartisan, and the Pentagon tends to operate in a world where they're looking external to the country, trying to figure out how to do security. This Pentagon has said we need a bigger Navy to be more secure, and they're working through that process right now. If you have a change in the leadership, in the administration, the new folks are going to be looking at the same outside world that the folks that are there now are. And there might be changes on the edges – is it this many ships or that many ships, or anything like. What I take away from what has been said so far is that the future Navy needs to be bigger, it needs to be faster, cheaper, and probably a bit smaller in terms of sizes of ships. So a faster, cheaper, smaller set of platforms, with a lot more of them. We believe that's going to persist.” Specifically, he said, the undersea domain – both manned submarines and unmanned undersea vehicles – will be at the center of future fleet growth. On the submarine side, HII's Newport News Shipbuilding ran into some struggles on the Block IV Virginia-class SSN deliveries. Some of the delays predate the pandemic, as the supply base and the two shipyards struggled to get up to a two-a-year construction rate. COVID-19 has only increased the challenge, with Petters saying during the last quarterly earnings call in August that the Navy asked Newport News to prioritize repair work – on submarines and aircraft carriers – with the workers who were able to come in on any given day, meaning that the submarine construction side of the business fell further behind. At this point, Petters said this week, workforce attendance is up compared to the spring, and while the company hasn't figured out how to catch back up on Virginia-class construction, they're not falling further behind anymore. “We took a pretty big divot in attendance in April and May. Where we've been since then is, we've been pretty steady in terms of what we can predict in terms of the number of people who are going to be there and who's going to be there and how to allocate those resources. So that's working very well for us, and it's really consistent with the schedules that we reset at the end of Q2,” he said. Petters said the company had about 200 active COVID cases in its workforce now, but due to increases in testing the company can keep fewer people in quarantine and can better predict how the virus is affecting the workforce and therefore how many welders, how many electricians, how many pipefitters they might have on any given day and how to allocate them across all the shipbuilding and ship repair activities. After revamping the SSN construction schedule after falling so far behind in the second quarter of the year, “we're tracking the new schedules. The opportunity to really recover the divot that we took out, we haven't quite figured out how to go and accelerate back to where we were in terms of schedule. But we're working on that. But we're definitely supporting the new schedules we have laid out.” In the longer term, Battle Force 2045 calls for a larger attack submarine force, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper called for the Navy to quickly begin buying three SSNs a year – which would put significant pressure on Newport News Shipbuilding and General Dynamics' Electric Boat, as well as thousands of suppliers across the country, to ramp up production even as they're readying to start construction on the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, the contract for which was awarded Thursday. Petters said he was confident industry could act to grow their capacity faster than the government could actually get appropriations and contract modifications into place – though he said industry would only make moves to expand if the government was truly committed to buying more submarines over a long timeframe. “I think the shipyards will have to build, maybe invest in more capacity and more workforce. I think that we're going to have to create some parallel capacity, maybe think a little bit more about buying pieces that we were doing organically before, maybe structural units or fittings or foundations or something like that. ... And then I think you really have to be focused: if you ‘re going to get it there, you really have to get the supply chain up to speed. Our supply chain in support of all of shipbuilding, but in particular our nuclear enterprise, it's very capable, but it's also kind of thin. So you really need to have a persistent, consistent, sustainable set of messaging to the industry that you're going to sustain this rate for a significant time to create or attract the investment in technology, capital and people that the supply chain's going to need to go do,” Petters said. “I think there is the capacity to go do that, but it ain't a light switch and you don't turn it on overnight. My rule of thumb though is that if you're persistent on these signals from the government, the capacity in the industry can be built faster than the government can appropriate the funding to go do it. It takes so long to get to the appropriations process, there's a whole set of signals and long lead times and [requests for proposals] and things like that that would let the industry know you're really serious about doing it,” he added. Navy acquisition chief James Geurts and Electric Boat President Kevin Graney spoke at a separate event Thursday and reiterated to reporters that the whole industry was in a position to ramp up if the Navy became serious about buying more than two Virginias a year. Geurts said the Navy had an undersea advantage today that needed to be expanded in both capability and capacity. “It will take investment to enable us to move to a larger program than we have right now,” he said, which is doable, but only if it doesn't hurt the Columbia program. “The teams are looking at how do we do that and what are the strategic investments that we need to make now that enable us to expand the industrial capacity, should that be where the department goes?” he said. “If that's what we choose to do, we set up the right program to do that, we can deliver whatever industrial capacity output we need for the nation. That won't happen overnight, it will take careful program planning and some investments, just as we've expanded from one Virginia to two Virginias, and two Virginias to two Virginias and a [Virginia Payload Module] to two Virginias and VPM and Columbia. So we know how to do this, I have full confidence in America's ability to produce these should we do that.” Graney said during the media call that expanding would take three things: “we've got to make sure that the supply base keeps pace as we increase the tempo; we've got to make sure that our facilities can accommodate the increased footprint that more modules, for example, for the Virginia program might require; and then the last part – and I think they are kind of in that order – supply base, facilities, and then the last part is really the workforce, training up the workforce and making sure they're on the floor when the modules are ready to be built.” He added that talks with the Navy are ongoing to ensure everyone is clear on what it would take to increase submarine construction rates. For Newport News Shipbuilding's submarine business, the expansion in work might not be limited to construction. The Navy is increasingly realizing that, regardless of what efficiencies they're able to accomplish at the four public shipyards to get subs and carriers in and out of maintenance faster, there's still far too much work for just those yards to accomplish. Naval Sea Systems Command chief Vice Adm. Bill Galinis recently told USNI News that more sub repair work would have to go to private yards – Newport News and Electric Boat – in the future and that the Navy was in talks with the yards to look at what would be needed to increase workload both on the construction and repair side. Petters said Newport News has three submarine repairs taking place now, plus tiger teams deployed to submarine homeports to help with pierside maintenance work. He acknowledged that getting back into submarine repairs after about a decade of not doing that work has been a challenge, but he said it would be an important part of the portfolio going forward. “We're working very closely with the Navy, not just on the work that we have but trying to lay out a sustainable, predictable plan for how the, not just Newport News, but how does the private sector in general support the Navy's need to have more submarines at sea?” he said. “That's a big part of what we're talking about with the submarine repair business. ... That's also a big part of what's happening with the future force and the future of the Virginia class and that construction. At the end of the day, I think, no matter how many submarines the nation puts to sea, we're always going to wish we had more out there. So that's a good spot for us, and we're working very hard in that space.” https://news.usni.org/2020/11/06/submarine-industrial-base-ready-to-grow-but-only-if-pentagon-congress-send-the-right-signals

  • Are OTAs the Thing of the Future?

    August 2, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR

    Are OTAs the Thing of the Future?

    As it looks to get new technologies developed and into the field as quickly as possible, the Department of Defense has been making greater use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA), a quick-strike contracting mechanism that has gone in and out of fashion since the 1950s, but is now seeing a resurgence. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), for example, recently awarded a $49 million OTA to Enterprise Services, teaming with four other companies, for DISA's National Background Investigation Services (NBIS), a shared service intended to combine a number of separate systems to speed up process investigations. The Navy also took the OTA route in awarding Advanced Technology International a $100 million deal to manage work on the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Command's Information Warfare Research Project. The Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx), created in 2015 to foster innovation in partnership with industry, has made extensive use of OTAs, telling Congress earlier this year it had awarded 61 other transaction agreements worth $145 million, with the agreements reached within an average of 78 days. What both projects have in common are that they involve prototyping new technologies and involve companies that don't usually work as DoD contractors. They also aim for rapid development and deployment. The Navy contract “will accelerate acquisition and bring non-traditional sources, research and development labs, and industry together to provide new, innovative information warfare solutions,” said Rear Adm. C.D. Becker, commander of SPAWAR Systems Command. Full article: https://www.meritalk.com/articles/are-otas-the-thing-of-the-future/

  • US Navy inks deal for a tenth Virginia-class submarine

    March 22, 2021 | International, Naval

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