1 octobre 2018 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — Boeing is the biggest aircraft manufacturer in the world, but the losses of the joint strike fighter program and Air Force's long range strike bomber still weigh heavily on the company's defense unit, and had prompted some in industry to wonder if the company's days of making cutting edge combat aircraft were numbered.
Conventional wisdom held that Boeing needed to win either the Navy's unmanned tanker drone or the Air Force's next-generation trainer aircraft contract to keep its St. Louis, Mo.-based facility building tactical aircraft into the 2030s. a contract for the Air Force's Huey replacement helicopter was seen as out of reach as the service had formerly expressed a preference for sole-sourcing Black Hawks.
But in a matter of weeks, Boeing racked up all three contracts, shocking the defense establishment.
First came the MQ-25 Stingray award for the Navy's unmanned tanker drone on Aug. 30. An initial $805 million contract covers the design, development, fabrication, test and delivery of four Stingray drones, but Navy acquisition boss James Geurts said the entire program could be worth up to $13 billion for 72 aircraft.
“It is a big win on a high-visibility competition/program and gives Boeing a franchise unmanned program,” wrote Roman Schweizer of Cowen Washington Research Group on Sept. 4.
Boeing defeated Lockheed Martin and General Atomics to win the program — and that victory allows Boeing to cement its own status as the Navy's premier manufacturer of fixed-wing aircraft.
“A Lockheed Martin win would have cemented its position as the builder of ‘next-gen' naval aviation platforms while Boeing would have been relegated to manufacturing fleet workhorses,” Schweizer said in his assessment of the award. “General Atomics would have a been a one-off, but we thought they would been a favorite for a low-cost, low-risk design.”
Then on Monday, Boeing won another big competition — this time worth up to $2.38 billion — for the Air Force's UH-1N replacement helicopter. Boeing and Leonardo were immediately obligated $375 million for the initial four MH-139 helicopters, which will be built at Leonardo's commercial AW-139 production plant in Philadelphia.
It was huge news for Leonardo, a large Italian defense contractor that had been attempting to break into the U.S. market with a major program for about a decade.
But for Boeing, it was still a relatively small aircraft procurement program, with Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, writing that there were probably few opportunities for Boeing-Leonardo to sell the MH-139 to other users in the U.S. military.
However, Boeing on Thursday won the major opportunity it had been seeking: the Air Force's T-X program. Boeing's clean sheet design beat out Lockheed and Leonardo to win a contract worth up to $9.2 billion.
It's likely the actual program will be worth considerably less — Boeing would be obligated a total of $9.2 billion over time if the Air Force decides to execute all options on the contract for 475 training jets, and the services' program of record sits at 350 jets.
But its importance to Boeing extends past the award's total contract value.
Winning T-X was “possibly critical” for Boeing's St. Louis plant and for its defense business to remain a competitive player in tactical aircraft design, said Callan.
“The MQ-25 win helps sustain production at that facility, which now builds F/A-18s and F-15s,” he wrote after the Sept. 27 announcement. “However, the F/A-18 and F-15 lines may end by the mid-2020s. T-X enables Boeing to keep that facility humming and therefore in the hunt for Penetrating Counter Air and other new military aircraft programs.”
Analysts like Callan and Schweizer had speculated that Boeing would bid very aggressively to try to win the contract, but the question was whether the company could possibly offer a new purpose-built design at a significantly lower price point than competitors Lockheed Martin and Leonardo, which both proposed aircraft designs already in production and use by foreign militaries.
It appears Boeing may have been able to do just that. Richard Aboulafia told Defense News in 2017 that the Lockheed and Leonardo trainers came with a price tag of about $25 million, although both companies were expected to bid lower than that to be competitive.
Meanwhile, Jim McAleese of McAleese & Associates pegged the unit cost of Boeing's T-X at an “eye-watering” $19 million, far below the Air Force's $45 million per plane expectation.
That low price “establishes an extremely high burden for disappointed offerors of Lockheed or Leonardo” to launch a successful protest with the Government Accountability Office, he stated in a Sept. 28 email, although Lockheed and Leonardo could potentially argue that the Air Force's cost and schedule risk assessments are too optimistic, given that Boeing offered a new airframe.
Callan also pointed out that the MQ-25 and T-X wins could be advantageous to Boeing's commercial business. In the past, the defense sector has developed new materials that have later been adapted for use by the airline industry. With Boeing acquiring autonomy-focused businesses like Liquid Robotics and Aurora while investing in startups through its HorizonX organization, it is possible advances in military unmanned tech could give way to autonomous commercial cargo planes or other future concepts.
11 février 2022 | International, Naval
The newly elevated Naval Safety Command will work throughout the chain of command to identify risks at their most manageable level, before they burden units and put sailors in danger.
24 octobre 2024 | International, Terrestre
This partnership focuses on the joint development of the Omega360 radar program, which will serve as the central sensor for Qatar’s national anti-drone system.
4 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
By Steve Trimble The U.S. Air Force has released the full, sweeping vision for the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a two-year-old concept that proposes to disrupt modern norms for the service's command-and-control doctrine, military acquisition policy and industrial participation. The newly released ABMS architecture defines not a traditional program of record but 28 new “product lines” divided into six major components. The implementation strategy is not focused around traditional acquisition milestones measured in years, but rather development “sprints” fielding morsels of new capabilities every four months. The rights for much of the technology, including a new radar, communication gateway and software-defined radio, are claimed not by an industrial supplier, but by the Air Force itself. USAF adopts lead systems integrator-like model ABMS architecture built on government ownership The release of the strategy on Jan. 21 comes three weeks before the Air Force plans to release a budget plan that would shift $9 billion over the next five years for a “Connect the Joint Force” initiative. The proposed funding would come from retiring certain capabilities, including aircraft fleets, within the next five years, with a clear implication: The Air Force is willing, if Congress approves, to trade some capability now to obtain the ABMS over time. “I think of it as we're finally building the ‘Internet of Things' inside the military, something that is very overdue,” says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, explaining the ABMS to journalists during the unveiling of the architecture in the Pentagon. The scale of the project's ambition has evolved since the ABMS was first proposed in 2018. Air Force leaders unveiled the concept two years ago as a replacement for the airborne Battle Management and Command and Control (BMC2) suite on the Northrop Grumman E-8C Joint Stars fleet. By September 2018, Roper first suggested the same technology could be applied to replace the aging fleet of Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joints and, sometime in the 2030s, the Boeing E-3C Airborne Warning and Control System. Those aims remain intact, but the revealed architecture clarifies that the goals of the ABMS are far broader. If the system is fully realized, the Air Force will create a “combat cloud” on a mobile ad hoc network, transposing the Internet of Things model from civilian technology to the battlefield. As a result, the nearly four-decade-old concept of a centralized command-and-control center—either ground-based or airborne—would be swept away by a future, decentralized digital network. Using computer processors and software algorithms instead of humans, machines would identify targets from sensor data, select the weapons and platforms to prosecute the target automatically, and finally notify the human operator when—or, crucially, whether—to pull the trigger. Roper compares the ABMS' effect on command and control to commercial services on a smartphone, such as the Waze app for drivers navigating traffic. Waze is not driven by a human staff monitoring and reporting traffic hazards, who then review each request for directions and customize a recommended route. Instead, Waze harvests traffic and hazard data from its users, while algorithms mine that information to respond to user requests for services. The Air Force's command-and-control system is constructed around the human staff model, but Roper wants to move the entire enterprise to the Waze approach. “If it didn't exist in the world around us, you'd probably say it was impossible,” Roper says, “but it does [exist].” The challenge for the Air Force is to defend and, if successful, execute that vision for the ABMS. The Air Force needs to secure the support of the other armed services, whose participation is vital to extracting the benefits of such a system. Moreover, the Air Force needs to sell the concept to Congress, despite a system that lacks obvious employment connections to specific legislative districts, such as future factory sites and operational bases. Roper acknowledges the problem of building support for an architecture, rather than a platform, such as a new fighter, bomber or ship. “Those are easy things to sell in this town. You can count them,” he says. “But the internet is not something that's easy to count or quantify, even though we're all very aware of its power.” The Air Force has briefed congressional defense committee staffs on the ABMS concept, but some remain skeptical. A Capitol Hill staffer familiar with the ABMS program doubts that other services will support the Air Force's vision. The ABMS model also appears unlikely to be embraced by industry, the staffer says. A key point of Roper's plan requires companies to cede some intellectual property rights on key elements of the ABMS architecture to the Air Force. But the Air Force is not waiting. Development of the ABMS started last year, even before an analysis of alternatives is completed. In December, the service staged the first demonstration of four new capabilities: transmitting data on a low-probability of intercept link via a gateway between stealthy Air Force and nonstealthy Navy fighters; connecting a C-130 to the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation; demonstrating a cloud-based, command-and-control network up to a “secret” classification level; and setting up an unclassified common operational picture display at a remote command center inside a tent. As the second in the planned series of triannual events, the Air Force plans to stage the next ABMS demonstration in April, this time involving U.S. Space Force, Strategic Command and Northern Command. Roper, an Oxford-trained physicist, has little patience for the military's traditional development process, although he has made exceptions for complex, hardware-driven programs, such as the Northrop Grumman B-21 bomber and the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. For most other programs, Roper wants to trickle out new features at Silicon Valley-speed. A common refrain by military acquisition reformers for decades has been to emphasize delivering an incomplete, “80% solution” sooner than waiting for a system that meets each of sometimes hundreds of detailed requirements. However, for Roper the timeline for delivering even an 80% solution in certain cases is far too long. “[We should] covet the 10-15% solutions that take the next step forward,” Roper said. “Because the learning in that step is so valuable to keep the velocity.” To execute the ABMS vision, Roper appointed Preston Dunlap last year as the lead architect. Unlike a traditional program executive officer (PEO), the architect is a role introduced to the Air Force by Roper, who previously in his career served as the chief architect for the Missile Defense Agency. The six components and 28 production lines for the ABMS are spread across multiple program offices, rather than consolidated under a single PEO. Thus, the role of the architect is to define the vision and then shape acquisition schedules as the various technologies reach maturity. Under Dunlap's architecture, the ABMS is built around six components: new sensors feeding databases in a cloud-based computing environment using software-defined radios, with new apps fusing the data into a common operational picture and integrated effects allowing cruise missiles, for example, to automatically retask sensors on other platforms during flight. Among the 28 product lines, the Air Force proposes to own the rights to the radar, software-defined radio and communications gateway. The Air Force's role resembles the lead systems integrator (LSI) model used for a series of largely failed acquisition programs 15-20 years ago, including the Army's Future Combat System and Coast Guard's Deepwater. In this case, however, the LSI is the Air Force, not an industrial supplier. Such an approach is not unprecedented. The Navy is using a similar model to manage the MQ-25A program, with Boeing selected as a subcontractor to deliver the air vehicle and Naval Air Systems Command providing the ground station and integrating both on an aircraft carrier. The gateway used in the first ABMS demonstration in December offers an example, Roper says. “We took a radio system that was actually built in concert with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to be able to deal with both platforms with the waveforms, and then a Honeywell antenna was able to speak across the frequencies associated with both radio systems,” Roper said. “So we got those three primary vendors working together underneath our government leadership.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/us-air-force-defines-radical-vision-command-control