June 29, 2023 | International, Aerospace
The U.S. State Department has approved the sale of F-35 fighter jets, munitions and related equipment to the Czech Republic in a deal valued at up to $5.62 billion, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
June 3, 2021 | International, C4ISR
Boeing Defence Australia is in the final stages of developing its Integrated-Battlefield Telecommunications Network for the Australian Army under Joint Project 2072 Phase 2B, and is now turning its attention to other local opportunities.
November 2, 2020 | International, C4ISR
Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON ― The Pentagon re-awarded its Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract to CSRA on Friday, nearly 14 months after it awarded it to the General Dynamics Information Technology subsidiary last year. The award to CSRA was delayed several times after the General Services Administration twice took corrective action after protests by Perspecta, the other contractor in the competition. According to the announcement from the General Services Administration and Department of Defense, the blanket purchasing agreement is estimated to be worth $4.4 billion over a decade, with a five-year base. The contract was estimated to be worth $7.6 billion when the award was made last year. The DEOS contract will provide the DoD with productivity tools such as word processing and spreadsheets, email, collaboration, file sharing, and storage across the enterprise. “DEOS is a key part of the Department's Digital Modernization Strategy and its fit-for-purpose cloud offering will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings,” DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said in a statement. “The last six months have put enormous pressure on the Department to move faster with cloud adoption. All across the Department there are demand signals for enterprise wide collaboration and ubiquitous access to information.” The DEOS environment is intended to meet DoD Impact Level 5 and Impact Level 6 cloud security standards that allow access to unclassified and classified work, respectively. "“We were determined that the Department could achieve faster department-wide adoption of cloud collaboration capabilities by moving forward in a federated manner to the DoD 365 (IL 5) cloud environment while ensuring the individual components efforts work together to create an enterprise capability,” Deasy added. “This approach required the government team to assume a greater responsibility up front to shape the enterprise standards. With the award of DEOS, the Department will be able to transfer a significant part of the ongoing technical and management load to the integrator and free up strained resources to execute other priority missions.” The DEOS contract award was marred by several errors, detailed by NextGov, including issues with the statement of work, requirements and a subsequent incident in which proprietary information about Perspecta's bid was shared with GDIT. CSRA is partnered with Dell Marketing and Minburn Technology Group for the DEOS contract. DoD components have waited a long time for delivery of the DEOS solution. When the original award was made last year, the Marine Corps deputy director of command, control, communications and computers, Kenneth Bible, said the service was looking forward to the “promise and substantial benefits” of DEOS capabilities in “disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth [DDIL] environments that are anticipated in 21st century conflicts.” The DEOS re-award comes nearly two months after the department confirmed its other long-delayed enterprise cloud, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, to its original winner, Microsoft. That contract has a $10 billion ceiling. https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2020/10/30/pentagon-re-awards-multibillion-dollar-office-tools-contract-to-csra/
August 14, 2020 | International, Land
WASHINGTON ― KPS Capital Partners is acquiring Humvee-maker AM General, the private equity firm announced last month, marking a new chapter for the South Bend, Indiana-based vehicle maker. AM General President and CEO Andy Hove will continue to lead the company, and KPS Partner Jay Bernstein said the firm would continue to build on the ubiquitous Humvee, leveraging the company's “research, technology, innovation and new product development, as well as its heritage and iconic brand name.” The Humvee appears to have some growth ahead. For one, U.S. Army budget documents call for $1.5 billion through 2025 to pay for modernization of its fleet of High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles and their up-armored variant. That can include replacing major components, applying new technologies or replacing vehicles entirely. After the Army reaches its procurement objective for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, made by Oshkosh, it will have an enduring requirement for 54,800 Humvees. Otherwise, AM General ― which has advertised both its Brutus 155mm and Hawkeye 105mm mobile howitzers ― is expected to participate in the Army's mobile howitzer shoot-off evaluation at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, next year. Meanwhile, the Army is expected to complete a new tactical wheeled vehicle strategy in fiscal 2021, which has thus far received congressional support, per the House and Senate versions of the annual defense policy bill. Hove, who has said KPS will continue to execute AM General's existing strategy, spoke with Defense News on Aug. 6. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Private equity firm KPS Capital Partners is in the process of acquiring AM General. At this preliminary stage, what would you say are KPS' plans and vision for the company? I think [KPS partner] Jay Bernstein represented it in his quote in the announcement that they feel really good about the capabilities of AM General and the strategy we've been executing. We've discussed with them where we can go. They're confident in our business and the growth prospects of AM General. They feel good about and stand behind our strategy, and we're going to work together with them. Will the company focus more on the Humvee, or do you see it becoming more flexible? What is the future for the Humvee? Who are its customers these days? To say we're only focused on the Humvee today would not be a correct premise. We've made investments across the board, in base automotive systems, and then automotive systems that have a particular special use. Our core focus is in solving very complex mobility challenges for customers. So the Humvee has a great future. I would offer that you turn to not what I say about what the Army will do but what the Army says they're going to do on the Humvee fleet, which is to steadily and systematically manage a very large fleet by systematic replacement of that fleet and recapitalization of that fleet going forward. They've been buying new-built Humvees to replace old Humvees over the last four years at a pretty heavy clip and have announced their intention to continue to do that going forward. We're obviously going to focus on the Humvee because there's significant demand. It is today the world's leading military 4x4 in its class, and we build more of them than any other military vehicle manufacturer in the world, and especially more than anybody in our weight class. That won't be the only thing we invest in. You can see our investments in the Hawkeye, which brings game-changing breakthrough technology [in relation to] how artillery systems are moved around and employed on the battlefield, together with a whole other range of implementing technologies such as autonomous navigation, off-board power and those kind of things. The U.S. Defense Department is an important customer, but a considerable portion of our businesses is global business, so we take a global view of how we solve mobility challenges for our customers around the globe. The Army recently issued a request for information about replacing heavy trucks. Is that a potential opportunity? We certainly feel like we have something to offer, a range of things to offer there, and that RFI's only been out for a couple of weeks. We'll will certainly take a closer look at that. We're also taking a look at the JLTV competition they announced back in February. Defense News recently characterized AM General as “largely stagnant” since losing the competition for the JLTV in 2015 to Oshkosh. Do you want to push back at all to talk about AM General's time under McAndrew & Forbes? The JLTV decision was 2015, and the four years since the announcement on the JLTV competition we've built more military vehicles than Oshkosh or any other military vehicle manufacturer by a long shot, and sold them to more customers around the globe than anyone else. I think that's far from being stagnant. There are a lot of adjectives you can apply to the company. “Stagnant” would not be the one I would apply. Private equity firms will typically set up companies they buy for faster growth, and then potentially that'll lead to a future sale. Do you think that's something that might happen here, and what do you predict? Is there any indication of time horizons for KPS? KPS has made a lot of smart investments, they have a pattern, but they're not going to be pigeonholed into a particular time frame for a next-step strategy. https://www.defensenews.com/interviews/2020/08/13/am-general-ceo-on-acquisition-by-a-private-equity-firm/