At advent of ambitious mod plan, US Army seeks $190B in FY20

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  23 juillet 2020 | International, Terrestre

  Private equity firm buys Humvee-maker AM General

  By: Joe Gould and Jen Judson WASHINGTON — Humvee-maker AM General has been acquired by KPS Capital Partners, a private equity firm known for buying financially distressed manufacturers, the companies announced Wednesday. KPS acquired AM General of South Bend, Indiana, from MacAndrews & Forbes in a deal in which terms were not disclosed. AM General has largely been stagnant since losing the competition for the U.S. Army's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle in 2015 to Oshkosh. Following its loss in the JLTV competition, the company turned to the international market to continue growing its Humvee business, such as through offering to foreign customers a multipurpose truck with a military-grade rolling chassis from its Humvee design with a la carte add-ons. KPS Partner Jay Bernstein said in a joint statement that the firm would continue to work with AM General's chief executive, Andy Hove, as well as its management and employees “to build on this great platform, organically and through acquisition.” “We intend to leverage the Company's commitment to research, technology, innovation and new product development, as well as its heritage and iconic brand name,” Bernstein's statement read. Hove said the firm would work with KPS “to continue to execute our strategy and invest in our very ambitious growth plan.” “KPS' demonstrated commitment to manufacturing excellence, continuous improvement and commitment to invest in technology and innovation will only enhance the Company's ability to compete in today's military and commercial marketplace,” Hove said. “Plenty of industrial companies and investment firms had considered buying AM General,” James Hasik, senior fellow at the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, told Defense News July 22. “And plenty of companies have considered teaming with AM General for a bid on a forthcoming production program.” AM General has continued to try to adapt to the needs of the U.S. military, bringing a robotic combat vehicle to an Army demonstration last year as the service mulls the future of robots on the battlefield. The company also competed for the Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport vehicle program but was not selected. Yet, AM General has remained a single-product firm with the Humvee, Hasik noted, and the future of the Humvee is “hard to call.” Many militaries around the world use Humvees, and the U.S. Army plans to keep some in its fleet, but the U.S. Marine Corps is divesting its stock. According to Hasik, it's possible that since the Humvee is less expensive than the JLTV and would likely be relegated to noncombat roles, the Army might choose to purchase pickup trucks instead. “The Humvee was developed in part because the Army's pickup trucks of the 1970s were unimpressive, but that was 50 years ago, and automotive technology has advanced,” he said. “Today's pickup trucks are much cheaper to buy and operate, and that's what the Canadian Army has done.” While AM General has come up with some novel ideas, “nothing has stuck,” Hasik said. For several years, the company has shown up at trade shows touting a howitzer on a Humvee, like it did at London's DSEI exposition in late 2019. Still, the U.S. Army is struggling to figure out how it would fit into formations. The good news for KPS is that the company has a running factory with “efficient, medium-speed production of 4x4 military trucks and a production team who know how to do that,” Hasik said. “That's an important skill set, as it works better for military programs than enlisting a pickup truck factory, which must make them in the hundreds of thousands to make money.” AM General has advertised on its website that it could build bigger trucks, and the Army has just issued a request for information for a program to replace all of its heavy trucks, Hasik pointed out. “It could also build small trucks, similar to the Humvee, for future autonomous applications. There's no guarantee, but we might see lots of those in a few years.” “All in all, I suspect that KPS didn't buy AM General just to wring some more efficiencies out of the Humvee program. The folks there probably see some of these upside possibilities as well,” he added. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/07/22/private-equity-firm-buys-humvee-maker-am-general/

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  28 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval

  How One Component Improved U.S. Navy F/A-18 Fleet Readiness

  The U.S. Navy's F/A-18 and EA-18G fleets have experienced a dramatic turnaround. In 2017, less than half of the Navy's Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets were able to fly. Now, 80% of its carrier-based fighters are ready for missions. The solution involved fixing a single component within the General Electric F414 engine. The Navy faulted constrained spending following the 2008 financial crisis and increased demand from the wars in the Middle East as reasons for the fleet's lack of readiness. More specifically, those conditions exacerbated an issue embedded in the military's vast supply chain. For 20 years, the Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers have continually had electronic systems and new sensors added that placed greater and greater demand for power from its General Electric engine. That demand taxed a key component of the F414's electrical power generation system—its generator control unit (GCU), which keeps the generator output within a specified range. Initial attempts to address the GCU's issues through “component-level reliability improvements were not sustainable,” Navy spokeswoman Gulianna Dunn tells Aviation Week. Eventually, the GCU, already in short supply, failed to keep pace, causing a cascading effect on the availability of the carrier-based fighters. In the words of a Navy program official, the GCU was the “top platform degrader for all naval aviation.” When sequestration-era spending limits were imposed on the Pentagon in 2013, the entire military faced across-the-board funding cuts, including the operations and maintenance accounts. The Navy had to make tough choices about what bills it would pay and what to defer. At the same time, flight hours for the Super Hornet and Growler in the Middle East increased to meet the high operational tempos of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve. As the Navy reduced aviation sustainment budgets, the program office did not have sufficient funding to purchase spare parts. From fiscal years 2013-16, the program office requested between $193.6-311.5 million and received between $85.2-136.3 million, according to a 2019 Defense Department Inspector General report. To compensate, Navy officials cannibalized aircraft to obtain the required spare parts. Maintainers removed working parts from an aircraft and installed them on a second jet to make that aircraft operational. A backlog of spare parts exacerbated fleet readiness and availability rates—an issue that affected the GCU acutely. New mission payloads created new types of electrical load, straining the aircraft's electronics, and wearing out the GCU at a faster rate. The second-generation (G2) and G3 GCU models that equipped the fleet could handle only about 150 flight hours. To increase reliability General Electric Aviation Systems, in consultation with the Navy, began working to redesign the GCU. A G3-to-G4 conversion kit could reach up to 532 flight hours. A G4 GCU was even better—sustaining 1,220 flight hours. Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) flight-tested the G4 in August 2015, and GE started production in mid-2016, Joe Krisciunas, general manager and president of GE Aviation Electrical Power Systems, tells Aviation Week. But the part was still only being manufactured at a minimal rate. The matter came to a head in October 2018, when then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis set an 80% mission-capable readiness goal. At the time, only 260 F/A-18 and EA-18G aircraft were capable of flying missions—approximately 60%, far short of the mandate. In response, the Navy convened a Reliability Control Board (RCB) in 2019 to improve the F/A-18 and EA-18G mission-capable rate. The board pinpointed the main problem—insufficient production of the F414's GCU. The Navy had 200 of the units on back order. Navair worked with GE to ramp up GCU production, according to Lt. Cmdr. Jason Shaw, power and propulsion lead at the F/A-18 and EA-18G program office. The RCB determined GE was producing roughly six GCUs per month that would funnel into the program office, Boeing or Naval Supply Systems Command (Navsup). The program and Boeing had predictable delivery schedules, but Navsup would only receive GCUs that were produced beyond what the other two contracts required. “It created a hole on the supply shelf,” Shaw says. “When a jet would lose a GCU, there was no other one to replace it from supply.” The team brainstormed and decided GE would increase production to about 21 GCUs each month, while Navair would defer a contract for 320 GCU conversion kits to 2021. Pushing the contract would leave room for Navsup to acquire a more predictable delivery schedule. The company doubled its GCU production rate from 2018 to 2019, and almost doubled it again in 2020 to reach the 21 units per month rate, Krisciunas says. These courses of action resulted in zero GCU back orders by mid-June 2020. Additionally, the team is working with GE to resolve production issues related to GCU testing capacity. The plan is to purchase new, larger test stands and upgrade software on existing test equipment. This would allow the company to conduct more tests and further increase production. The test stand is a large electric motor that simulates the engine spinning the gearbox, and it has a pad that duplicates the GCU interface. A test stand costs approximately $1.5-2 million and typically takes 15-18 months to get up and running, Krisciunas says. Still, more improvements are being made: The program office is now assessing wiring issues that may have also contributed to low GCU reliability. The service awarded a $17 million contract to purchase additional software and cables for Automated Wiring Test Sets, which will allow aircraft mechanics to identify system faults. “The U.S. Navy is the only [Pentagon] military branch to have met and sustained the 80% readiness call that Mattis put out, and that is largely associated with resolving the issues with GCUs,” Shaw says. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/how-one-component-improved-us-navy-fa-18-fleet-readiness

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  7 septembre 2021 | International, Sécurité

  Military cyber software developers fix weaknesses, create mission tools faster

  The services say in-house coders allow them to be more flexible during missions, rather than relying solely on contractor support to build cyber tools.