US Navy Awards L3Harris Nearly $1 Billion IDIQ Contract

On the same subject

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  July 19, 2019 | International, Other Defence

  This is Knight’s Armament’s new machine gun suppressor

  Knight's Armament Company of Titusville, Florida, unveiled a new suppressor at this year's Special Operations Forces Industry Conference where members of the SOF community get to interact with vendors and industry partners to preview and try out the latest and greatest in special operations kit and gear. KAC's suppressor is designed primarily to be used with the company's premier belt-fed Light Assault Machine Gun platform, chambered for 5.56 NATO and marketed more towards the SOF and private military contractor communities than to conventional infantry forces. True to its name, the LAMG is indeed very light, weighing only 8.6 pounds unloaded. In comparison, the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon weighs in at 17 pounds unloaded. According to KAC, one of the LAMG's biggest selling points is its ability to put down a high volume of fire with a low cyclic rate of just around 575-625 rounds per minute, allowing the end user to maintain a greater degree of control over the weapon and concentrate accurate fire on target. The suppressor, delivered in kit form, mounts to a threaded barrel included in the kit, and makes heavy use of a unique Pressure Reduction Technology system, which vents the gasses from each shot forward, preventing the gas from venting backwards into the shooter's face. Additionally -- and probably its best feature -- the PRT system allows the LAMG to keep its factory cyclic rates during sustained fire without any major dips. The LAMG is currently available to defense buyers, which means that the new suppressor will likely only be targeted towards military sales. At the moment, US SOCOM doesn't list the LAMG in its belt-fed arsenal, though it's possible that there are foreign SOF units that make use of KAC's innovative light machine gun platform, and might potentially avail of a sustained fire suppressor. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/gearscout/irons/2019/07/09/this-is-knights-armaments-new-machine-gun-suppressor/

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  December 1, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  What Do Pentagon Leaders Aim To Achieve Before Inauguration Day?

  Jen DiMascio November 30, 2020 What does the current Pentagon leadership team want to achieve with the time it has remaining before the Biden administration takes office in January? Aviation Week Executive Editor for Defense and Space Jen DiMascio answers: Pentagon Editor Lee Hudson put this question to Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's acquisition chief, during the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Ascend conference on Nov. 18. According to Lord, she is focused on protecting the supply chain and helping the acquisition system adapt to acquire software. Lord is working to protect the supply chain in two primary ways: • One is to protect companies critical to national technologies from investment by adversaries. • The other is to protect the supply of rare metals used to make microelectronics. The Pentagon has been working with the U.S. government's Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews foreign transactions in the U.S. for national-security implications to “block or undo a lot of transactions” in which adversaries are buying critical U.S. technologies or real estate adjacent to military installations, Lord says. Rather, the Pentagon is trying to partner with companies that can help the U.S. increase its technological and economic security. To that end, the Defense Department is building an electronic marketplace that Lord compares to a dating app—to match clean investors with companies building defense technologies. “We've practiced this in some different one-off events,” Lord says, “but we are literally just going through federal paperwork right now to launch this in December.” A related matter is lessening the U.S. dependence on countries like China for rare minerals such as those used in the microelectronics industry. “COVID has shown us that we cannot have dependencies on non-allies and partners and makes sure that we get the supplies we need when we need them,” Lord says. The Pentagon has a real need for radiation-hardened micro-electronics for its space-industrial base and nuclear enterprise. “Although we developed over 50% of the intellectual property around micro-electronics domestically, the bulk of manufacturing and almost all packaging and testing are conducted offshore. That just does not lead us in a place where we have a secure and resilient microelectronics industrial base,” she explains. And finally, Lord aims to continue to roll out tools for the acquisition workforce to incorporate iterative software development into the way it works. “We know that, if you do software correctly, it's a constant iteration of development, production and sustainment,” she adds. “We don't want to be constrained by different budgets and get into too much [of an] administrative hurdle. We've tried to be very innovative on the business side.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/what-do-pentagon-leaders-aim-achieve-inauguration-day

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  December 8, 2022 | International, Aerospace

  Production of Air Force’s next-gen training jet delayed to 2024

  Boeing expects the Air Force will order its first set of operational T-7A Red Hawk aircraft in 2024.