September 9, 2022 | International, C4ISR
As technology and adversary techniques advance, so do the technical skills required by the federal workforce at all levels
April 3, 2023 | International, Land
The Boxers to be built in Australia are intended for the German Army?s ?schwerer Waffentr?ger Infanterie? (heavy weapon carrier infantry), a direct tactical fire support vehicle for infantry forces
July 3, 2018 | International, Naval
By: Megan Eckstein A $50,000 investment in laser scanning equipment saved the Navy nearly $2 million during the planning effort for USS George Washington‘s (CVN-73) refueling and complex overhaul. A small team of engineers with a LIDAR system did the work of the usual 20-person team, inspecting the nooks and crannies of the carrier to inform the overhaul plans. Now the Navy is looking to leverage that win and expand its use of laser scanners to not only cut down costs for aircraft carrier maintenance planning and execution but also tie into virtual reality trainers and other cutting-edge technologies. In the case of the George Washington RCOH, a team of two or three engineers from Newport News Shipbuilding flew out to the forward-deployed carrier in Japan with a LIDAR scanner atop a tripod. As the tool slowly spins around it gathers millions of data points depicting how far away objects are from the scanner. The resulting 3D point cloud shows the precise location of items in the room – not where a server rack was supposed to be according to the blueprints, for example, but where it actually is. Capt. John Markowicz, the in-service carrier program manager, told USNI News in an interview that the $1.8-million savings from that one ship check effort was about 15 percent of the total cost of that portion of the RCOH planning, and that his office was already employing the laser scanning technology ahead of the next RCOH for USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74). He said it was too early to guess a percent savings the laser scanning will yield this time around, but that it would likely be on par or better than with George Washingtonbecause Newport News Shipbuilding has continued to invest in the laser scanners and learning how to best leverage them. Markowicz said the tripod-mounted scanners cost about $3,600 each, and smaller handheld ones for scanning small spaces cost about $600. The actual scanning service can cost between $50 and $250 an hour, and post-production work can cost $100 to $300 and hour. USNI News visited Newport News Shipbuilding last October, and during a lunchtime meeting a company engineer scanned the whole conference room and produced a point cloud model of the room within about 30 minutes, as an example of how quickly the scanners can work. Once those point cloud models are created, the Navy and Newport News have already found several uses during the RCOH and other carrier maintenance planning and execution phases. First, for the actual planning, the point cloud models can offer some spatial perspective that flat blueprints can't, as well as an updated “as-is” assessment of the space instead of the “as-designed” view the blueprints contain. Mark Bilinski, a scientist at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific and its Battlespace Exploitation of Mixed Reality (BEMR) Lab, and his team are working on laser scanning technology and ways to leverage the 3D point cloud product. He showed off some of the technologies to USNI News during the U.S. Naval Institute and AFCEA's WEST 2018 conference in San Diego in February. During a panel presentation at WEST, he said that sometimes the 3D scans just show discrepancies between where an item was supposed to be installed versus where it actually was installed. However, he ran into a case where the blueprints depicted an escape hatch of a certain size, but it was larger in reality; in that case, a planner might have thought there was room to install something nearby, when in reality putting the equipment there would actually partially block the hatch and cause a safety issue. In another case, the blueprints showed a hatch as being much larger than it actually is, and so the planner might have thought the space was unusable. “That's an opportunity cost because that might be some space that you could use for an install that you don't think is available to you,” Bilinski said. Once the planning is done and execution is set to begin, Markowicz said the 3D models, unlike 2D blueprints, can help identify interferences and obstructions, help find the best route down narrow passageways for bringing in bulky equipment to install, aid in laying in pipes and wires and more. “That is valuable, it cuts down time in the shipyard,” which ultimately cuts down cost and allows the next carrier to come in for maintenance quicker. Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility are beginning to embrace this technology, which could spread to the other two public shipyards to support submarine maintenance activities too, and Newport News Shipbuilding is “all in” on the private sector side, he said. Markowicz noted that taking the scans and making mockups in a 3D digital environment can not only save time on major efforts like finding the best routing for piping, but can also help with little things – for instance, there was a case of trying to install a laptop in a phone booth area, but it turned out that the laptop couldn't open all the way without hitting the phone. “We stumble upon these things sometimes a little late in the design process, or actually the install process. It's not as efficient as it can be,” he said. Every time a maintenance or modernization activity takes place, the scan would become slightly outdated, but Markowicz said the idea would be to rescan periodically and maintain records of all the scans as “selected records” that accompany the 2D drawings for the Nimitz class today. “Once we have this digitally, I think that's pretty useful. We can share it with multiple activities and have the documentation for future use and future availability planning,” he said. Bilinski also noted the ways laser scans could help during a major maintenance period, when multiple program offices are trying to get their own equipment in and don't always have a great way to coordinate. In many availabilities, Bilinski said, someone goes to install a piece of equipment in a space, only to find that that space is taken. Instead, he will just take the next closest space that meets his need. Then the next person comes in to use that space and finds that it was just taken, causing a cascading effect. If everyone involved in the maintenance period were working off a shared digital plan that could be updated in real time as systems were installed, conflicts could be identified sooner and plans could be rearranged as needed without any on-ship confusion. “If you have that collaborative environment where everyone is planning off of the scan data, the installer can see not only that this space is physically available, but hey, it's also available in the planning environment; no one is planning to put anything there. Or, maybe someone is planning to put something there but you've got to put your equipment somewhere, so you put it there, but you at least know who to notify so that we can start fixing this problem earlier than discovering it when the next program office shows up to install their equipment,” he said. Virtual reality application Virtual and augmented reality tools are already changing how ships are built, with Newport News Shipbuilding telling USNI News during the October visit that the use of VR goggles while laying pipes and cables for the future John F. Kennedy (CVN-79) has cut the required man-hours in half. Newport News is also sending its shipbuilders out with tablets that can use VR to show what's on the other side of a wall or where to cut a hole into a wall, and can also include how-to videos to show step-by-step how to do the day's tasks. Markowicz said there would likely be less applicability for that technology on the ship repair and maintenance side compared to the ship construction side, but he hopes to explore how the public shipyards can use VR and tablets to drive efficiency up and cost down. Where VR and laser scanning could converge, though, is on training. Because each ship has a different set of navigation and steering systems, surface search radars and other systems, allowing a sailor to train on his or her own ship is more useful than training on a generic ship. Markowicz said his office is working with Bilinski's BEMR Lab to create ship-specific VR training tools for while ships are in maintenance. They scanned destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) after its collision last year, and while the ship undergoes a lengthy repair process, sailors could use VR goggles to practice maintenance and repair work on McCain's specific configuration without having to actually be on the destroyer. The BEMR lab already has Virtual Eqiupment Environment (V2E) tools that let the user walk into a room, spot a server rack, for example, and begin to take apart and put back together the server rack. Similarly, when a carrier is in RCOH for four years, sailors are often times flown around the world to get training time on other carriers. Though the ship is safe for them to be in while in RCOH, the systems are all ripped out. If the Navy had scans of the last carrier that came out of RCOH and could insert a finished product view into VR goggles, sailors could train on their own ship at Newport News while the RCOH goes on around them. “We've got to find creative ways to do training. Normally they leave ... and they go out to the fleet and ride another ship and get their training that way. But a lieutenant had the idea of, okay, you can go up to pri-fly (primary flight control), any everything's ripped apart but you can put on these goggles and see what your space is going to look like 48 months from now ... and visualize it all and stand there in your space without having to go to another ship,” Markowicz said. “I definitely see a partnership with the BEMR Lab and laying that out for training for ship's force, closing that gap in readiness. Because I was part of the Carl Vinson (CVN-70) overhaul, and our skills atrophied as we stayed in overhaul for that length of time. So we have to find opportunities to sharpen our skills.” Bilinski said there could be other uses for combining a current ship scan and VR goggles or tablets. For example, if scans of ship spaces were taken correctly, they could be woven together to create essentially a Google Maps of sorts. New sailors could use it to learn their way around the ship. Or, more importantly, “let's say a fire breaks out on a ship and you need to go into a compartment and fight that fire – it's going to be smoke-filled, it can be dark, you may not have ever been in that space, there could be plenty of places where you can fall, you could twist your ankle, you could bump into equipment in the space. If you were to understand where you were, you could look through that wall and see what the last as-is condition of the ship was and sort of get an idea of what you're getting into before you go into that space,” then firefighting or other emergency response efforts could be done potentially more safely and quickly. Policy and technical barriers Much like other emerging technologies, Markowicz said those trying to implement laser scanning are facing the usual set of challenges: how does the Navy balance the need to ensure technical rigor while also not being too proscriptive and excluding potential scanners or data formats that could be useful? What legal and ethical concerns need to be addressed through policy changes? “That's the rub right now,” Markowicz said. “You see us working with Newport News. I'm sure there's other pockets within NAVSEA that are working on it. But alignment across the whole NAVSEA equities hasn't happened yet. So where we are successful at NAVSEA (Naval Sea Systems Command) is where we have a singular tech warrant holder who owns turbines or fire protection or what have you. So we're really successful in employing that model across NAVSEA. I see a vision someday where you have a tech warrant holder for a laser scanner that's able to establish standards, policy, requirements to go forward and articulate that to industry.” His team is hosting a laser scanning summit later this month to identify barriers and develop courses of action to begin to address them – everything from how many dots per inch are needed for the scan to be useful, to, are there any engineering decisions that cannot or should not be made based on laser scanning and 3D point cloud modeling work. Markowicz suggested that anything related to the nuclear propulsion system is going to require much more technical rigor than other parts of the ship, but he said he still sees great potential for savings with laser scanners beyond what the Navy and Newport News Shipbuilding are doing today. “I think across the board we will save money, and in that way the leadership is behind it if it helps us be more efficient,” he said. Back when the Navy and Newport News first did the George Washington ship check, then-Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley's message to Markowicz was, “I absolutely needed to make it my mission to leverage new technologies and be more efficient in the repair business,” the captain said, and he believes this is a prime example of how to do that. To be successful enterprise-wide, he said, “I think the real key is setting the standards, which will provide a framework where contractors and Navy can plug into. To get there, we need to provide technical leadership, host conferences ... flush out all the issues. At least create a standard so that we can contract and have deliverables. One software package or one laser scanner, I don't think we need to be that proscriptive. I think we set a standard for industry, like an ISO standard, and people will come around to it.” He likened the point cloud image to a PDF that could be opened on a Mac or a PC and is readily sharable among users, and said it would be important that, regardless of what scanner is used, the output has these qualities too. He suggested that some scans would need to be precise while others could forsake precision for speed if the user just needed a general idea of how a room is laid out, and all those types of issues would eventually become written out and standardized. https://news.usni.org/2018/07/02/navy-use-of-laser-scanning-already-showing-big-savings-summit-this-month-to-refine-plans
June 2, 2020 | International, Naval
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — In the coming years, the U.S. Navy will be faced with a decision that will radically shape the carrier air wing: Is the service willing to sacrifice dozens of new Super Hornet jets for the promise of a sixth-generation fighter in the 2030s? The Navy is opting to buy a final 24 F/A-18E/Fs in fiscal 2021, slashing a planned purchase of at least 36 Super Hornets that would have spanned FY22 through FY24. The move will save $4.5 billion, which the service plans to redirect to its sixth-generation fighter program, known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or F/A-XX. However, the decision may not be as clear cut — or final — as budget documents make it seem. The Navy is at the very start of the NGAD development process, having completed an analysis of alternatives in June 2019, as well as broad requirements and guidance for a concept of operations. The effort is now in the concept development phase, during which defense companies explore ideas “that balance advanced air dominance capabilities and long-term affordability/sustainment,” said Navy spokesman Capt. Danny Hernandez. But with an economic downturn potentially leading to even more pressure on the defense budget, the Navy may not have the funds to proceed with NGAD as a clean-sheet fighter jet. “Although the Navy would like to start developing the next generation of aircraft ... I just don't think — and increasingly people in the department are thinking — there's not going to be the money to devote to this next generation of fighter,” said Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Hudson Institute and a retired naval officer. “I think they are going to fall back to looking at F/A-XX as a modification or an evolution of the F-35,” he said. “Instead of the other half of the air wing being some new aircraft, you'll have a combination of F-35Cs and then some modified version of the F-35 or a modified Super Hornet." Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and an analyst with the Telemus Group, said the service's enthusiasm for F/A-XX is a sign of a continued preference for manned aviation as well as a desire to shut out any hope of fielding a long-range, penetrating strike drone. “I've always been in favor of extending the Hornet production line because it is solid and stable,” Hendrix said. “But the extension was based on the proviso that we're extending in order to get to an unmanned combat aerial vehicle. If it was an extension to get to the next manned fighter ... we're missing the idea of what the future competitive environment, or really the present competitive environment, is all about.” A tightrope of risk The Navy has grappled in prior years with the question of whether to cease production of the Super Hornet in favor of a future fighter, and it is an argument that lawmakers are wary of. The Navy first planned to stop buying the F/A-18 in its FY15 budget — a decision made to fund the transition to the F-35. But technical issues and delays pushed out the fielding of the Navy's F-35C takeoff-and-landing model for aircraft carriers to 2018, leaving the service dependent on a fleet of aging, battle-worn F/A-18s in need of a service-life extension. The Navy ended up listing the F/A-18 on its unfunded priorities list, and Congress followed by funding enough Super Hornets to keep Boeing's line running. “If we go back a few years and we look at what happened when we thought we were going to plant the F-35, we let the F-18 slide down,” Rep. Donald Norcross, D-N.J., said in a March 10 hearing. Norcross is the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. The process of standing up the F-35C was much slower than expected, and the Navy ended up buying additional F/A-18s to bridge the capability gap, he said. “Yet, here we are getting ready to curtail 36 Super Hornets because we are expecting, you know, the F/A-XX to come online,” he added. Asked how he could be confident that F/A-XX would stay on schedule, Rear Adm. Gregory Harris, the Navy's director of air warfare, said he could provide lawmakers a more detailed defense of the Navy's Next Generation Air Dominance family of systems in a classified setting. “We're working closely with the Air Force to ensure the systems that we put on that have the [technology readiness level] that gives us confidence that we can achieve that aircraft on time in the early 2030s to replace the F/A-18E/F as it reaches the end of its service life,” Harris said. Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, the subcommittee's top Republican, pointed out that the Navy already has a fighter shortfall of about 49 aircraft, with additional F/A-18s being pulled from the operational fleet into a service-life extension period that will take at least a year. “I feel like this is too much operational risk,” she said. “If you add all those up, this is a severe shortage that we are experiencing, and if you don't account for the attrition rate, actually in combat we would have a very large gap there potentially.” James Geurts, the Navy's assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition, said there is always risk when transitioning from legacy to new aircraft, but that improved mission-capable rates and a steady flow of jets moving through upgrades will help balance the shortfall. “We're taking risk until the late 2020s. I think 2029 is when we will get to the full fighter inventory, and so we had to take some risk as we balance that,” he said. The most likely scenario is that, as the Navy presses forward with its plan to curtail funding for F/A-18s, Congress will simply continue buying more of them, Hendrix said. But one unanswered question is whether lawmakers will also intervene to force the Navy to consider a wider range of aviation options that could give the carrier air wing longer legs. “I'm hopeful that there will be a broader conversation, led by Congress and the administration, perhaps together, to say: ‘We are looking at the future security environment. We are looking at the Chinese threat. We are looking at what's happening in Taiwan, what's happening [in] Hong Kong and within the first island chain, and we really need to have this new capability of long-range, penetrating strike,' ” Hendrix said. “What I do realize is that because the Navy is very conservative right now in how it's approaching its procurement programs, the Navy will not be the one to say we need this mission.” No matter what the Navy decides, it could impact its procurement of the MQ-25 unmanned tanker drone currently under development by Boeing. Hendrix sees the MQ-25 program as a likely bill payer, particularly if the service continues to buy Hornets. “What was the reason for the MQ-25? It was to take the strain off from the Hornets,” which were being used to refuel other F/A-18s and burning through their service lives faster than anticipated, Hendrix said. “When you reopen the Hornet production line and you add 120-something new Hornets, you actually took that strain off the Hornet fleet. So there really isn't a requirement now for a recovery tanker.” Clark agrees that the Navy should develop a long-range unmanned combat aircraft but is unlikely to do so. But should the Navy choose not to proceed with an F/A-XX program, Clark believes the service could funnel some of that money into modifying the MQ-25 to supplement strike, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capacities, and could even end buy more MQ-25s than planned. “The MQ-25 program, once it gets fielded and proven out, I could see the Navy expanding it,” he said. “I think the operational and programmatic pressures have driven the Navy to embrace the MQ-25, and because it's a complement to the manned aircraft, it's generated less resentment among the manned aviation community.” https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/06/01/at-a-budgetary-crossroads-the-us-navys-aviation-wing-must-choose-between-old-and-new/