11 janvier 2022 | International, Naval
Northrop looks to adapt electronic attack system for smaller ships
Northrop Grumman is looking to adapt its SEWIP Block 3 capability built for Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to smaller ship types.
22 juin 2018 | International, Naval, Terrestre
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — BAE Systems has won a contract to build the Marine Corps' new amphibious combat vehicle following a competitive evaluation period where BAE's vehicle was pitted against an offering from SAIC.
The contract allows for the company to enter into low-rate initial production with 30 vehicles expected to be delivered by fall of 2019, valued at $198 million.
The Marines plan to field 204 of the vehicles. The total value of the contract with all options exercised is expected to amount to about $1.2 billion.
The awarding of the contract gets the Corps “one step closer to delivering this capability to the Marines,” John Garner, Program Executive Officer, Land Systems Marine Corps, said during a media round table held Tuesday.
But the Corps isn't quite done refining its new ACV. The vehicle is expected to undergo incremental changes with added new requirements and modernization.
The Corps is already working on the requirements for ACV 1.2, which will include a lethality upgrade for the amphibous vehicle.
BAE's ACV vehicle will eventually replace the Corps' legacy amphibious vehicle, but through a phased approach. The Assault Amphibious Vehicle is currently undergoing survivability upgrades to keep the Cold War era vehicle ticking into 2035.
BAE Systems and SAIC were both awarded roughly $100 million each in November 2015 to deliver 16 prototypes to the Marine Corps for evaluation in anticipation of a down select to one vendor in 2018.
[BAE, SAIC Named as Finalists in Marines ACV Competition]
All government testing of the prototypes concluded the first week of December 2017 and the Marine Corps issued its request for proposals the first week in January 2018. Operational tests also began concurrently.
Government testing included land reliability testing, survivability and blast testing and water testing — both ship launch and recovery as well as surf transit.
Operational evaluations included seven prototypes each from both SAIC and BAE Systems, six participated and one spare was kept for backup.
BAE Systems' partnered with Italian company Iveco Defense Vehicles to build its ACV offering.
[BAE Systems completes Amphibious Combat Vehicle shipboard testing]
Some of the features BAE believed were particularly attractive for a new ACV is that it has space for 13 embarked Marines and a crew of three, which keeps the rifle squad together. The engine's strength is 690 horsepower over the old engine's 560 horsepower, and it runs extremely quietly. The vehicle has a V-shaped hull to protect against underbody blasts, and the seat structure is completely suspended.
SAIC's vehicle, which was built in Charleston, South Carolina, offered improved traction through a central tire-inflation system to automatically increase or decrease tire pressure. It also had a V-hull certified during tests at the Nevada Automotive Test Center — where all prototypes were tested by the Marine Corps — and had blast-mitigating seats to protect occupants.
The 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 1st Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton, California, is expected to receive the first ACV 1.1 vehicles.
Marine Corps Times reporter Shawn Snow contributed to this report.
 
					11 janvier 2022 | International, Naval
Northrop Grumman is looking to adapt its SEWIP Block 3 capability built for Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to smaller ship types.
 
					7 décembre 2021 | International, Aérospatial
Air & Cosmos consacre un dossier au « nouveau champ de bataille » spatial. Le Général Friedling, Commandant du Commandement de l'Espace (CDE), le Général Mille, chef d'Etat-Major de l'Armée de l'Air et de l'Espace, et Philippe Duhamel, Directeur général de Thales Systèmes de Défense, accordent chacun une interview au magazine. « La France est déjà la deuxième force spatiale de l'OTAN et les Etats-Unis nous considèrent comme leur allié le plus capable dans ce domaine », souligne le Général Friedling, qui détaille les objectifs de la feuille de route « Maîtrise de l‘Espace » présentée à la ministre des Armées, Florence Parly, en juillet 2021 : « trois cercles structurent cette approche : le cœur souverain, le cœur étendu et le complément capacitaire », précise-t-il. Cette feuille de route prévoit notamment la montée en puissance du commandement (C2) des opérations spatiales, indique le Général Mille, ainsi que le Programme à effet majeur ARES (Action et Résilience dans l'Espace). « L'innovation est très présente au sein du CDE», se félicite le général Mille, qui alerte : « les rivalités de puissance sur Terre se projettent désormais dans l'espace ». Philippe Duhamel (Thales) explique quant à lui : « la guerre électronique est un domaine critique pour la défense de notre pays ». Il revient sur la contribution de Thales au programme CERES (CapacitÉ de Renseignement Électromagnétique Spatiale), dont le groupe réalise la charge utile et le segment sol utilisateur. Air & Cosmos du 3 décembre
 
					4 novembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Two months after disclosing the existence of a next-generation fighter jet demonstrator, the U.S. Air Force is staying mum on which company may have built it. But one thing is for sure: Classified aviation programs are on the rise, and opportunities abound for the three major American defense aerospace primes — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. During an Oct. 20 earnings call with investors, Lockheed Martin Chief Financial Officer Ken Possenriede revealed the company's Aeronautics division recently won a classified contract that would necessitate the construction of a new building in Palmdale, California, where the company's Skunk Works development arm tests and creates prototypes of secret aircraft. Sales for the division were up 8 percent in this year's third quarter compared to the same period in 2019, with about $130 million of the $502 million boost attributed to classified work. But Possenriede alluded to even more growth on the horizon. “For Aeronautics, we do anticipate seeing strong, double-digit growth at our Skunk Works, our classified advanced development programs. We continue to execute on those recent awards,” he said, adding that there were a “multitude of opportunities” still out there. Classified work also increased at Northrop Grumman's Aeronautics Systems unit, with “restricted activities” in the autonomous systems and manned aircraft portfolios helping bolster sales by 5 percent for the quarter and 4 percent year-to-date when compared to 2019, Chief Financial Officer Dave Keffer told investors Oct. 22. It's tempting to draw a line from these contract awards to the recent flight of a demonstrator for the Next Generation Air Dominance program — the Air Force's effort to field a suite of air superiority technologies that could include drones, high-tech weapons and what some have termed as a sixth-gen fighter, although service officials have said any warplane in the mix might not resemble a traditional fighter. Even though the Air Force announced in September that at least one NGAD demonstrator exists, it's unclear which companies are involved. Still, there are plenty of other longstanding and emerging Air Force requirements that could be the source of this classified work, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group. “It's pretty clear that there's more prototyping activity going on out there than was generally known. I had assumed that most of the work related to NGAD was happening at the systems level. It's clearly happening at the airframe level too," he said. "And then of course there are a lot of potential drone developments that are certainly worth watching,” from the MQ-9 Reaper replacement to strategic reconnaissance requirements, “which is fundamentally a very expensive activity.” The wild card in this situation is Boeing. Because of investors' focus on the commercial side of the business — including plans for the return of the Boeing 737 Max to flight, as well as the continued downward spiral of sales caused by the global pandemic and its chilling effect on air travel — executives did not speak about Boeing Defense, Space and Security's classified activities during the company's Oct. 28 earnings call. “Overall, the defense and space market remains significant and relatively stable, and we continue to see solid global demand for our key programs,” a Boeing spokesman said in response to questions about the company's classified business. “We project a $2.6 trillion market opportunity for defense and space during the next decade, which includes important classified work.” After years of lost competitions, there are signs that the company's combat aircraft production facilities in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as its advanced projects division, Phantom Works, are returning to health. Over the past two years, the company has banked major awards, including the Navy's MQ-25 tanker drone and the T-7A trainer jet, both of which were developed by Phantom Works. Boeing's work on the T-7 received praise from Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper for its use of digital engineering, which involves simulating the design, production and life cycle of a product in order to drive down costs. The company has also started selling the advanced F-15EX fighter jet to the Air Force, breathing a second life into that aircraft with this latest variant. But Aboulafia worried that pressure on Boeing's commercial business — combined with its strategy of leveraging the work of other aircraft makers on projects like the T-7, where Swedish manufacturer Saab had a heavy influence in shaping the design — may have led to a loss of resources and engineering talent at Phantom Works. “Either they're sitting it out now because their focus is elsewhere, or they don't have the capabilities and the commitment that the others do, or we're just not hearing about it now,” he said. Boeing is not the only company investing in digital engineering and advanced manufacturing processes. Northrop CEO Kathy Warden pointed to her company's use of digital engineering in the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, which the company won in September to build the Air Force's next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles. “The work that we have done with the customer already, even under the tech maturation and risk reduction phase of the program, was done in a digital environment,” she said. “We delivered artifacts for review in a fully digital environment where they were actually looking at things in a model, not documents produced. This is the first time on a program of this size where that's been the case.” “Those investments that we're making for GBSD are being utilized across our entire portfolio,” she added. “So as we think about Next Generation Air Dominance and the programs that are part of that overall campaign ... they too will benefit from a full digital engineering thread as being required by our customers.” https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/11/03/defense-aerospace-primes-are-raking-in-money-for-classified-programs/