Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - August 20, 2019

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  17 décembre 2024 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Hackers Use Microsoft MSC Files to Deploy Obfuscated Backdoor in Pakistan Attacks

  Tax-themed phishing targets Pakistan via MSC files, delivering stealthy backdoors with obfuscated malware.

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  2 mai 2019 | International, Terrestre

  Army to outfit all Double V-Hull Strykers with 30mm firepower

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The Army has decided to outfit all of its brigades equipped with Double V-Hull A1 Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicles with 30mm guns following an evaluation of the vehicle equipped with the cannons in Europe, according to an Army official. The service plans to open up a competition to integrate and field up-gunned DVHA1, the official told Defense News on background. The Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and the Army Requirements Oversight Council decided on March 20to equip future Stryker brigades with 30mm Medium Caliber Weapon System (MCWS) capability after reviewing lessons learned from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Europe, but also directed the Army to ensure that the new MCWS capability be applied to the more mobile, better protected DVH ICVVA1 that will be the basis for the future Stryker fleet, according to the official. Based on an urgent operational need out of Europe, the Army was provided emergency funding from Congress in 2015 — a little over $300 million — to rapidly develop and field a Stryker with a 30mm cannon specifically for the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, which is permanently stationed in Germany. The funding covered development, eight prototypes and upgrades to 83 production vehicles, as well as spares. The Army spent 18 months to put together its upgunned Stryker using off-the-shelf solutions, such as the remote turret, from Kongsberg in Norway, and the 30mm cannon from Orbital ATK and shipped those vehicles off to Europe for an evaluation that went on for the better part of a year. The plan going forward is to execute a competition in two phases to select a 30x173mm-equipped MCWS integrated onto a Stryker DVH ICVVA1, the official said, which will lead to equipping the first brigade with a new capability in fiscal year 2022. Army Contracting Command released a Request for Quote to begin the first phase of the Stryker MCWS program on April 9. The recent request called for integration designs. The Army will award up to seven design integration study contracts for potential vendors to study integrating a MCWS onto a Stryker ICVVA1 platform. The Army will supply both a Stryker platform and the XM813 30mm cannon to build production representative system samples, the official said. The service will then circulate a draft request for proposal this fall to begin the second phase of the program, which will establish a full-and-open competition to award a production contract for a MCWS integrated onto an ICVVA1, which will be based on vendors' production representative system samples and proposals. The MCWS will be part of a suite of lethality improvements for Stryker formations which include the Common Remote Operated Weapons Station-Javelin (CROWS-J) — that was also on the Stryker ICV Dragoon in Europe — and the Stryker Anti-Tank Guided Missile Vehicle (ATGM) engineering change proposal program. The Army is also developing a host of other capabilities for the Stryker through the Army Futures Command Cross-Functional Team initiatives, according to the official. Col. Glenn Dean, the Stryker program manager, told Defense News last fall that between early user testing in 2018 and subsequent fieldings, there had been an overall “very positive response” to the lethality and effectiveness of the Stryker ICVD. “The cannon provides a tremendous standoff and additional maneuver space, and it is very effective against the threats they are concerned about in Europe,” he said. But some feedback suggested that the physical layout of the vehicle could use some improvements, particularly when it came to situational awareness. The turret for the cannon takes up a lot of roof and hatch space and also affects how equipment is stowed. But the Army was already making modifications to the Dragoon based on feedback from the field, according to Dean. It is unclear what the specific requirements might be for a more lethal Stryker, but one factor up for debate could be whether there is a need to reload and operate the turret under armor, which could change the physical nature of the vendors' designs. Another issue to work out is what is necessary for a field-of-view inside the vehicle and how that might be achieved and who might control the cameras providing a view of the battlefield. Soldiers in the Stryker ICVD noted a lot of dead zones where users couldn't see. The Army made improvements to the cameras used on the vehicles in Europe providing an overlapped field-of-view. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/05/01/army-to-outfit-all-double-v-hull-strykers-with-30mm-firepower/

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  26 avril 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  US Army picks 5 teams to design new attack recon helicopter

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — AVX Aircraft Co. partnered with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems, Bell Helicopter, Boeing, Karem Aircraft and Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky have won awards to design a new Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) for the U.S. Army over the next year, the service announced April 23. Only two teams will move forward, at the end of the design phase, to build flyable prototypes of the future helicopter in a head-to-head competition. The Army laid out a handful of mandatory requirements that the vendors had to meet and also a list of desired requirements for initial designs, Col. Craig Alia, the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team chief of staff, told a select group of reporters just ahead of the contract awards. The service also looked at the vendors' execution plans and evaluated timing as well as funding profile requirements. “The ones that were selected were clearly meeting the mandatory requirements and were in the acceptable risk level of the execution plan and the desired requirements," Dan Bailey, who is the FARA competitive prototype program manager, added. The prototype program falls under the purview of the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center's Aviation Development Directorate. AVX and L3 unveiled its design for the FARA competition at the Army Aviation Association of America's annual summit in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month. The design uses AVX's compound coaxial and ducted fans technology. The companies said its single-engine design meets 100 percent of the Army's mandatory requirements and 70 percent of its desired attributes. The CEO of Textron, Bell's parent company, said during a recent earnings call, that its FARA design will be based on its 525 technology rather than its tiltrotor technology. Bell has built and flown a tiltrotor prototype — the V-280 Valor — for the Army's Future Vertical Lift program. Karem has been working to develop technology under a small contract to help build requirements for FVL aircraft focused on a medium-lift helicopter. Sikorsky's offering will be based off of its X2 coaxial technology seen in its S-97 Raider and the Sikorsky-Boeing developed SB-1 Defiant, which are now both flying. “This is the culmination of years of investment in the X2 Technology Demonstrator and the S-97 RAIDER aircraft that have proven the advanced technology and shown its ability to change the future battlefield,” Tim Malia, Sikorsky's director of Future Vertical Lift Light, told Defense News in an emailed statement shortly after the announcement. “We continue to fly the S-97 RAIDER to inform the design for FARA, which provides significant risk reduction to the program schedule and technical objectives. We are eager to continue to support the US Army, and we are excited that the Sikorsky FARA X2 will be ready for this critical mission," he said. A total of eight teams submitted data and potential designs for FARA, but upon evaluation, three of those did not meet mandatory requirements, according to Bailey. It is not publicly stated who the losing teams were, but MD Helicopters had previously protested the Army's decision to not enter into a first phase agreement with the company to develop a FARA prototype, arguing to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the Army “unreasonably” evaluated its proposal and failed to promote small business participation. The GAO denied the protest earlier this month on the grounds it did not have authority to review protests of contracting mechanisms like Other Transaction Authorities (OTA) which the Army used in this case. The awards were made two months ahead of an already ambitious schedule to get FARA prototypes flying by 2023. A production decision could happen in 2028, but the service is looking at any way possible to speed up that timeline. The Army has to move quickly, Alia said. Echoing his boss, Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, the FVL CFT director, he said the Army is “at an inflection point. We can't afford not to modernize. We know the current fleet is fantastic, but we can't indefinitely continue to incrementally improve 1970s to 1980s technology.” FARA is intended to fill a critical capability gap currently being filled by AH-64E Apache attack helicopters teamed with Shadow unmanned aircraft following the retirement of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters. The service has tried and failed three times to fill the gap with an aircraft. The Army is also planning to procure another helicopter to fill the long-range assault mission, replacing some UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters in the fleet, simultaneously. With the advent of the new Army Futures Command — that is focused on six major modernization priorities of which FVL is third — the service is moving faster on prototyping capability to ultimately procure major weapon systems at a somewhat unprecedented speed. Through the AFC and the use of contracting mechanisms like OTAs, the Army has found a way to compress parts of the acquisition process that previously took three to five years into periods of time often amounting to less than a year. “What is exciting about the new process the Army has put in place,” Bailey said, “in basically a year's period of time, we've gone through concept, through an approved set of requirements, to developing an innovative approach to contracting, to building industry partnerships to have industry propose to us a plan and a solution.” And the Army rigorously evaluated those FARA proposals, Bailey said, all within that year. The teams have until January or February next year to provide design plans and an approach to executing the build of the prototypes followed by potential larger-scale manufacturing, Bailey said. The second phase of the program will be to build prototypes, and “only two will make it into phase 2 and they all know that now,” Bailey added. According to Rugen, when the request for proposals was released, the Army did not want to get locked into keeping inflexible requirements, but the request did state that the aircraft should have a maximum 40-foot rotor diameter. The Army also asked for the aircraft to be able to accept some government furnished equipment including an engine, a gun and a rocket launcher, Alia said. When it comes to some of the desirable attributes for a new aircraft, the Army is considering speed, range and payload possibilities, Alia said, but the service “wanted to encourage innovation by industry to come to us with their ideas and unique ways of meeting both mandatory and desirable characteristics and that is where we got some great feedback from industry and some innovative designs.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/aaaa/2019/04/23/us-army-picks-5-teams-to-design-new-us-army-attack-recon-helicopter/