15 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial
By THERESA HITCHENSon July 14, 2020 at 4:44 PM
WASHINGTON: Air Force acquisition head Will Roper is worried the ever-shrinking US defense industrial base may force DoD to nationalize major programs in the not-so-distant future — expressing surprise that other senior leaders are not more concerned.
“I think it's really important that we find a new model where there are no big winners, and no big losers, but continual competition,” he told reporters today. “Because if our industrial base collapses any more, we'll have to nationalize advanced aviation — and maybe other parts of the Air Force that currently aren't competitive.”
While rushing to say that, as of now, there has not been any internal Pentagon discussion about nationalization of the aerospace industry, he told reporters today: “I don't think that's out of the tea leaf reading.
“It has surprised me in this job that there's not more concern in the Pentagon about the continual shrinking of the defense industrial base,” he added. “And it's not because the defense industrial base has gotten worse — it's just that programs are so few and far between.”
He explained that this reality forces defense companies to acquire “a pretty diversified portfolio” because the only competitions “may be a fighter one year, a satellite the next year, and a helicopter the next year.
“We've seen this trend of major acquisitions to get those portfolios diverse enough so that you can deal with the chutes and rapids of few and far between major acquisitions. So that should be a huge concern to us, especially with our research and development dollars in defense only accounting for 20 percent of the total nation's.”
A shrinking base means less competition; combine with that the fact that innovation now happens primarily in the commercial sector, not the defense sector.
“I don't have to tell you that, eventually, we will nationalize warfighting capabilities and the defense industrial base, it will happen by necessity — by national security necessity, but I don't think that that's a fait accompli,” he said.
Digital Century Series
That concern is one of the reasons Roper is betting on the Digital Century Series concept as the Air Force considers its development plans and procurement strategy for the highly classified Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD).
“My hope in the Digital Century Series is to stabilize, at least for tactical aircraft, the collapse of our aviation industrial base any further,” he said.
The new Program Executive Office for Fighters and Advanced Aircraft working on those programs has drafted a study to determine whether that concept — where new versions of aircraft are rotated into the fleet every 15 or so years — is actually cheaper than traditional programs, where up front unit costs are low but vendors make bank on modernization and sustainment.
In major acquisition programs where one winner takes all, he explained, “there is no way to tell industry, in a way you can enforce, not to significantly invest — it's too big of a deal, they have to win. That internal investment is then what creates that strong incentive to lock into the program, to put intellectual property into all different interfaces, no matter how good we are at trying to police it out of the system.”
“The designer always have mechanisms to skirt around our best policy and oversight,” he said wryly, because without being able to ensure future contracts for upgrades and upkeep, the firm wouldn't have a business case. But for the Air Force, modernizing and sustaining aircraft after year 15 results in increased costs of somewhere between three and eight percent per year, he said.
The idea with Digital Century Series, by contrast, is to break out of this model into one where the up-front price the Air Force pays for new aircraft — “somewhere between X-planes and mass production” — is essentially the “total price of ownership.” The hope, he said, is that while the up-front unit prices will be higher, the cost over time will be significantly lower than a traditional major program buy. And in fact, he said, Air Force's “compare and contrast” study of the two different acquisition models so far has found that the Digital Century Series concept is “slightly cheaper.”
“Maybe significantly cheaper,” he added, “but slightly cheaper than a traditional acquisition,” even one leveraging digital engineering to help keep the costs of future modernizations down.
However, Roper said he has now brought in independent experts to “check our assumptions, check our math,” and is awaiting the results of their assessment.
“I think in three weeks, I'll be able to go from pencil to ink and say whether this is viable or not,” he said.
MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-Next
In the wide-ranging briefing, Roper also touched on the hot-button MQ-9 Reaper replacement effort that has piqued congressional concern. The reason the service is taking a bit of time to study future options, he explained, is the belief that future peer combat will require not just a new unmanned aerial vehicle for ISR/strike — but instead a multi-mission family of drones to do everything from air-to-air missions to ISR/strike to base defense.
“We need these UAVs to be true utility players, to use the baseball analogy,” he suggested.
But Roper knows he's got to keep a close eye on the Hill, because “building a utility player that can meet multiple mission demands is not something that our acquisition system has historically been good at. And we've got to get good quickly to convince Congress that this is a good pivot, and I look forward to having those discussions that summer.”
Roper said he met with the development team studying concepts for the “Next Generation UAS ISR/Strike Platform” two weeks ago to discuss everything from how high-end drones could be teamed with relatively inexpensive and attritable ones to how to do “smart automation” that limits the number of people needed to operate them.
“We made the pivot to divest MQ-9 to pivot into high-end warfighting, and we're gonna have to build new systems for high-end warfighting and teamed systems for high-end fighting. So I think the litmus test for ‘MQ-Next' is going to be what other letter can we assign to its name because it's doing a mission other than is ISR strike,” he said, with a chuckle.
“Ones that that jumped to the forefront for me,” he added, “are arming systems with air-to-air weapons, not just air-to-ground, so that you could play a role with forward tac air, but also being able to pull said system back to defend high-value assets that don't have defensive systems that are able to hold adversary air at risk. I think that would be a wonderful combination.”
Roper said it's necessary for the Air Force “to explore more than just the MQ-9 mission” of gathering ISR data and striking targets in places like the Middle East, because there simply isn't enough budget leeway to do otherwise as the service shifts focus to combat with peer competitors.
Lawmakers are concerned that the service doesn't yet have a solid acquisition strategy for replacing the venerable MQ-9 — a platform that has flown more than 4 million operational flight hours.
Thus there has been a wave of congressional opposition to the Air Force's decision in its 2021 budget request to begin divesting of the aircraft, and its February stop-order on production by prime General Atomics.
The full House Appropriations Committee today approved its subcommittee's decision to add $343.6 million for 16 MQ-9s to the Air Force's budget — with Rep. Ken Calvert noting the importance of the drone to combatant commanders. Report language accompanying the bill highlighted concerns among lawmakers — also voiced by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees — that the Air Force's replacement effort is moving too slowly could result in a gap in capability.
Roper, however, said that not only can the Air Force have new drones fielded by 2030, but that there should be several iterations of improved platforms developed over the next decade.
“Absolutely we can get there by 2030. In a digitally engineered future,10 years is an eternity. I would hope we could spiral multiple times within that 10 years,” he stressed.
Responses to the Air Force's June request for information are due July 24, and judging by discussions so far,. vendors are likely to offer a number of approaches.
“I expect to see a lot of high-end tech options in the submissions that are trying to help us do a current mission, other than ISR strike, differently,” he said, noting that if a system can do that, it also makes ISR easier especially in a permissive environment. “If you can do those high-end missions, then I'm willing to hit the ‘I believe' button,” he said.
On the other hand, he also expects contractors to come in with “a different approach to survivability” — perhaps proposing large quantities of cheap attritable drones; or concepts that team sensor carrying drones with others carrying munitions, Roper said.
“You can imagine, designing things that may not return is a complete cultural shift for us and for industry, but I've been pretty pleased with the informal engagements thus far,” he said, “and I expect to see some really creative thinking.”
1 septembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial
This contract reflects the importance of the bilateral relationship between France and Serbia, and testifies to the determination of both Presidents to make this partnership a success
19 juin 2019 | International, Aérospatial
Julien Lausson C'est une annonce qui a été partiellement éclipsée par la présentation de la maquette en taille réelle de l'avion de combat du futur, qui mobilise la France, l'Allemagne et l'Espagne, et qui devrait vraisemblablement succéder au Rafale à l'Eurofighter Typhoon au milieu du siècle. Mais c'est une annonce qui revêt pourtant elle aussi un caractère hautement stratégique : le renseignement spatial. Profitant de l'ouverture du salon du Bourget, la ministre des Armées, Florence Parly, a officialisé lundi 17 juin la mise en chantier de deux nouveaux programmes spatiaux, qui ont été baptisés « Iris » et « Céleste ». Le premier proposera des capacités d'observation optique renouvelées , tandis que le second devra améliorer le renseignement d'origine électromagnétique, c'est-à-dire la captation de signaux en tout genre. CSO ET CÉRÈS Ces nouveaux satellites, dont l'entrée en service ne devrait vraisemblablement pas avoir lieu avant 2030, sont annoncés alors que la France est déjà en train de renouveler sa flotte de satellites militaires. Deux programmes sont en cours : « CSO », qui signifie « Composante Spatiale Optique », et « Cérès ». Le premier est spécialisé dans la prise de vue, tandis que le second s'occupe de la collecte des ondes. Fin 2018, la France a d'ores et déjà envoyé un premier satellite CSO (il y en aura trois en tout) en orbite. Il a été placé sur une orbite basse, à 800 km d'altitude. Il sera rejoint par un autre satellite en 2020 et par un troisième en 2021. L'un d'eux sera placé sur une orbite encore plus basse, à moins de 500 km d'altitude, pour générer des clichés en très haute résolution. PROTECTION RENFORCÉE Du fait de leur caractère stratégique, ces lancements de satellites militaires font l'objet d'un haut degré de protection : avions de chasse Rafale envoyés depuis la métropole, avec le soutien d'un avion ravitailleur et d'un avion radar AWACS, mais aussi navires déployés le long des côtes, hélicoptères en vol, radars à longue portée et fantassins dispatchés tout autour du centre spatial guyanais. Ces moyens renforcent de facto la bulle de protection qui est systématiquement activée à chaque tir de fusée et qui est organisée dans le cadre de l'opération Titan. C'est ce même dispositif qui sera donc renforcé pour CSO-2 et CSO-3 ainsi que pour Cérès (acronyme de (Capacité d'Écoute et de Renseignement Électromagnétique Spatiale), qui impliquera plusieurs satellites. Le premier doit être lancé en 2020. « Nos opérations ne peuvent plus se passer de nos capacités spatiales qui contribuent de façon décisive à notre autonomie d'appréciation, de décision et d'action », a observé la ministre lors de son discours. C'est aussi vrai dans le secteur des télécommunications : la France peut aujourd'hui compter sur Sicral 2, Athenas-Fidus ou encore Syracuse 3. Et demain, elle pourra miser sur Syracuse 4. La durée du service opérationnel de CSO et Cérès sera d'environ une dizaine d'années. https://www.numerama.com/politique/526882-renseignement-spatial-la-france-officialise-deux-nouveaux-programmes-de-satellites-militaires.html
23 avril 2018 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
DAVE MISTICH In elections past, the integrity of the vote was protected by poll workers and election officials. But in 2018 and likely beyond, elections are being protected by people like the anonymous man who works in the basement of the West Virginia Capitol. He's member of the West Virginia National Guard who is a cybersecurity specialist responsible for monitoring any computer-related threats to the state's elections. Since August of last year, he's been attached full time to the office of Secretary of State Mac Warner. After Russian-backed hackers probed election-related systems in at least 21 states in 2016, election officials, whose focus has traditionally been on making sure that polling places run smoothly and that results are speedily reported, now have to focus on protecting their computer systems. Oftentimes lacking those resources in-house, National Guard specialists have been called in to monitor vital election systems in a handful of additional states, including Colorado, Ohio and South Carolina. Neither the West Virginia National Guard nor Warner's office would permit the soldier to speak on the record, but Warner emphasized how crucial the role is. "We, just like every other government entity and people in business, are getting pinged all the time. Somebody is checking to see are there any open doors [or] open windows for targets of opportunity," Warner said. Warner's current use of the National Guard builds upon his predecessor, Natalie Tennant, who enlisted their cybersecurity expertise to scan the state's election systems for vulnerabilities and patch them in the final stretch of the 2016 election. In January 2017, the outgoing Obama administration designated elections as part of the country's critical infrastructure. That meant new federal resources and scrutiny. The Department of Homeland Security is working to give security clearances to state officials so they can receive intelligence briefings and assessments. Warner, like other state-level election officials, is in the middle of a months-long process of getting cleared. Using Guard soldiers who already have a high-level clearance, "is a way to bridge the gap without causing a problem in that security system process," said West Virginia National Guard Adjutant General James Hoyer. State officials are trying to figure out how to prepare for a threat they had never before anticipated, said Eric Rosenbach, a former Defense Department official who now directs a program on election security at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "These state election officials are the pointy tip of the spear for nation-state actors like the Russians trying to attack our democracy. That's never before been their job," said Rosenbach. "If part of [the National Guard's] responsibilities is to protect the things most precious to a state — it kind of makes sense that you would want them to support an effort like that." While the regular military can't be involved in domestic law enforcement due to a post-Civil War federal law known as Posse comitatus, National Guard soldiers are under the jurisdiction of the governor unless they're activated by the federal government. "The threat is new and we need to evolve with the times — as long as it still fits in the right legal framework and we're doing something that, you know, all Americans would agree are part of our democratic traditions," Rosenbach said. Moving forward, Warner sees his office's partnership with the National Guard continuing. "The cybersecurity arena is one of those where we as public officials have to get it right every time. The hackers only have to penetrate one time to do substantial damage," Warner said. "So, it's a foot race that we have to stay one step ahead and it never ends. It just goes on and on." So far, the National Guard has monitored a few small local elections in West Virginia and Warner's office says they have yet to receive a threat that has risen to a level of what they called "actionable." With the state's primary election slated for May 8, the Guard's first big election cybersecurity test is already underway. https://www.npr.org/2018/04/11/601201517/states-turn-to-national-guard-to-help-protect-future-elections-from-hackers