Battle Force 2045 could work — if defense leaders show some discipline

Sur le même sujet

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  25 octobre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Lockheed: DoD Focused on Lowest Price in Recent Competitions; May Affect LM Participation in Future Bids

  By: Ben Werner Lockheed Martin officials say their loss to Boeing in three recent aircraft competitions indicates that Pentagon weapon buyers are valuing low price tags over high-tech capabilities, which may lead the company to question its participation in some future competitions. The company reported strong revenue growth and expected solid earnings in the future, but during a Tuesday morning conference call with Wall Street analysts, company officials sounded burned by losing out on three significant contracts during the recently completed third quarter of 2018. “We do see that affordability is a very important element for them,” said Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin's chief executive, referring to the Pentagon's weapons buyers. In a competition pitting designs from Lockheed Martin, General Atomics and Boeing, the Navy awarded Boeing an $805-million award in August to build the first four unmanned carrier-based aerial refueling tankers, the MQ-25A Stingray. Ultimately, the Navy wants to purchase 72 more vehicles, for a program price of roughly $13 billion. Boeing also beat out Lockheed Martin for a pair of Air Force contracts – $2.38 billion to replace the Air Force fleet of H-1 Huey helicopters, and $9.2 billion for the new fleet of Air Force T-X trainer jets. “We believe our proposals represented outstanding technical offerings at our lowest possible pricing,” Hewson said. “Had we matched the winning prices and been awarded the contracts, we estimate that we would have incurred cumulative losses across all three programs in excess of $5 billion; an outcome that we do not feel would have been in the best interest of our stockholders or customers.” Hewson and Bruce Tanner, Lockheed Martin's chief financial officer, downplayed the long-term significance of missing out on this trio of large contracts. Lockheed Martin reported revenues of $14.3 billion for the quarter, compared to revenues of $12.3 billion a year ago. Earnings for the quarter were $1.5 billion for the quarter, compared to earnings of $963 million a year ago. Increased sales of F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters as production increases, as well as increased demand for missiles, were vital to the revenue increases. Looking forward, even with Pentagon spending not expected to grow, Tanner expects Lockheed Martin's profits from sales to grow, resulting in cash from operations to remain in the $7-billion range for the next three years. However, neither Hewson nor Tanner masked their disappointment in the selection of Boeing over Lockheed Martin for the three aviation programs. “Those were disappointing for a lot of reasons. But the fact they really decided, all three, on an LPTA (lowest price technically acceptable) basis, didn't help the situation,” Tanner said. “It's not getting the best capabilities for the warfighter in the hands of the warfighter.” A year ago, when discussing the MQ-25 program, Navy officials suggested capability was their primary focus. Cost estimates were specifically not addressed because the Navy wanted to learn what was possible, Rear Adm. Mark Darrah, Program Executive Officer Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons, told USNI News in July 2017. “When we put a number out there, eerily they tend to get to that number and go backwards, go backwards in their development, so they hit that number. We are taking a different approach this time. We're not going to define that number at this point and direct them to provide us with their input so that we can adequately and accurately determine what they truly can do,” Darrah said in the 2017 interview. On Tuesday, Hewson acknowledged the types of projects Lockheed Martin bids on in the future could be affected by the Pentagon's focus on price when seeking new weapons programs. “We're going to pursue good business opportunities for us,” Hewson said. “We have talked about this before: affordability is an important value for them.” Hewson also addressed the growing speculation over whether defense contractors would be allowed to continue doing business with Saudi Arabia, as the United States government still grapples with the fallout from the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi after last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istambul. The kingdom is a Lockheed Martin customer, but Hewson said the company had relatively minor exposure to any fallout from having arms deal nixed by the U.S. government. Currently, the largest contract Lockheed Martin has with Saudi Arabia is to build the kingdom's fleet of four multi-mission surface combatant ships, based on the Littoral Combat Ship, worth $6 billion. Saudi Arabia just awarded Lockheed Martin a $450-million detailed planning and design contract, which is related to the planned four-ship purchase. “The largest order we've been waiting on obviously is for THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense), ” Tanner said. “That has not taken place yet. Not sure when that will take place. The interesting thing with the THAAD order is, while it brings a significant increase in backlog, the resulting sales, profit, and cash flow with that order are very much pushed to the right.” Required upgrades to Saudi Arabia's radar technology will delay the $15-billion THAAD order delivery for at least four years, Tanner explained. Without the technical refresh, he said Saudi Arabia would be unable to use the missiles effectively. “I think we have in 2019 about less than half a billion dollars of sales planned, and I looked out into in 2020, and it's less than $900 million in sales,” Tanner said. “So it's not a huge amount of dependency on the activity, even though the opportunities we've described are much larger than that obviously.” https://news.usni.org/2018/10/23/37506

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  16 octobre 2018 | International, Naval

  How the Office of Naval Research hopes to revolutionize manufacturing

  By: Daniel Cebul WASHINGTON — The Office of Naval Research awarded Lockheed Martin Oct. 1 a two-year, $5.8 million contract to explore how machine learning and artificial intelligence can make complex 3-D printing more reliable and save hours of tedious post-production inspections. In today's factories, 3-D printing parts requires persistent monitoring by specialists to ensure intricate parts are produced without impurities and imperfections that can compromise the integrity of the part overall. To improve this laborious process, the Navy is tasking Lockheed Martin with developing multi-axis robots that use lasers to deposit material and oversee the printing of parts. Lockheed Martin has multiple partners on the contract including Carnegie Mellon University, Iowa State University, Colorado School of Mines, America Makes, GKN and Wolf Robotics and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The contract covers what Glynn Adams, a senior engineer with Lockheed Martin, describes as the pre-flight model of the program's development. Initial work will focus on developing computer models that can predict the microstructures and mechanical properties of 3-D printed materials to generate simulation data to train with. Adams said the Carnegie Mellon team will look at variables such as, “the spot size of the laser beam, the rate of feed of the titanium wire [and]the total amount energy density input into the material while it is being manufactured.” This information helps the team predict the microstructure, or organizational structure of a material on a very small scale, that influences the physical properties of the additive manufactured part. This data will then be shared with Iowa State, who will plug the information into a model that predicts the mechanical properties of the printed component. By taking temperature and spot size measurements, the team can also ensure they are, “accurately controlling energy density, the power of both the laser and the hot wire that goes into the process,” Adams said.. “All of that is happening before you actually try to do any kind of machine learning or artificial neural networks with the robot itself. That's just to try to train the models to the point where we have confidence in the models,” Adams said. Sounds easy, right? But one key problem could come in cleaning up the data and removing excess noise from the measurements. “Thermal measurements are pretty easy and not data intensive, but when you start looking at optical measurements you can collect just an enormous amount of data that is difficult to manage,” Adams explained. Lockheed Martin wants to learn how shrink the size of that dataset without sacrificing key parameters. The Colorado School of Mines and America Makes will tackle the problem of compressing and manipulating this data to extract the key information needed to train the algorithms. After this work has been completed, the algorithms then will be sent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where robots will begin producing 3-D titanium parts and learn how to reliably construct geometrically and structurally sound parts. This portion of the program will confront challenges from the additive manufacturing and AI components of the project. On the additive manufacturing side, the team will work with new manufacturing process, “trying to understand exactly what the primary, secondary and tertiary interactions are between all those different process parameters,” Adams said. “If you think about it, as you are building the part depending on the geometric complexity, now those interactions change based on the path the robot has to take to manufacture that part. One of the biggest challenges is going to be to understand exactly which of those parameters are the primary, which are the tertiary and to what level of control we need to be able to manipulate or control those process parameters in order to generate the confidence in the parts that we want.” At the same time, researchers also will tackle AI machine learning challenges. Like with other AI programs, it's crucial the algorithm is learning the right information, the right way. The models will give the algorithms a good starting point, but Adams said this will be an iterative process that depends on the algorithm's ability to self-correct. “At some point, there are some inaccuracies that could come into that model,” Adams explained. “So now, the system itself has to understand it may be getting into a regime that is not going to produce the mechanical properties or microstructures that you want, and be able to self-correct to make certain that instead of going into that regime it goes into a regime that produces the geometric part that you want.” With a complete algorithm that can be trusted to produce structurally sound 3-D printed parts, time-consuming post-production inspections will become a thing of the past. Instead of nondestructive inspections and evaluations, if you “have enough control on the process, enough in situ measurements, enough models to show that that process and the robot performed exactly as you thought it would, and produced a part that you know what its capabilities are going to be, you can immediately deploy that part,” said Adams. “That's the end game, that's what we're trying to get to, is to build the quality into the part instead of inspecting it in afterwards." Confidence in 3-D printed parts could have dramatic consequences for soldiers are across the services. As opposed to waiting for replacement parts, service members could readily search a database of components, find the part they need and have a replacement they can trust in hours rather than days or weeks. “When you can trust a robotic system to make a quality part, that opens the door to who can build usable parts and where you build them,” said Zach Loftus, Lockheed Martin Fellow for additive manufacturing. “Think about sustainment and how a maintainer can print a replacement part at sea, or a mechanic print a replacement part for a truck deep in the desert. This takes 3-D printing to the next, big step of deployment.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/industry/2018/10/15/how-the-office-of-naval-research-hopes-to-revolutionize-manufacturing

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  8 juin 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  Italy-Azerbaijan energy talks spawn C-27J aircraft sales for Leonardo

  Rome's defense ministry is increasingly seen as going to bat for state-owned defense contractors Leonardo and Fincantieri to advance sales.