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.”
25 juin 2024 | International, Sécurité
Opinion: Just as the Navy focuses on sea dominance, the Air Force controls the sky and the Army establishes ground supremacy, cyberspace has become a new domain.
29 août 2018 | International, Naval
By: Megan Eckstein THE PENTAGON – The Navy will buy the first of its Future Surface Combatants in 2023 – a large warship that will be built to support the Arleigh Burke Flight III combat system and will pull elements from the Arleigh Burke-class (DDG-51) and Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) destroyer designs. The combatant – not dubbed a cruiser, and potentially not dubbed a destroyer either – will be bigger and more expensive than the Arleigh Burke Flight III design and will have more room to grow into for decades to come, the director of surface warfare (OPNAV N96) told USNI News today. Future Surface Combatant refers to a family of systems that includes a large combatant akin to a destroyer, a small combatant like the Littoral Combat Ship or the upcoming frigate program, a large unmanned surface vessel and a medium USV, along with an integrated combat system that will be the common thread linking all the platforms. Navy leadership just recently signed an initial capabilities document for the family of systems, after an effort that began in late 2017 to define what the surface force as a whole would be required to do in the future and therefore how each of the four future platforms could contribute to that overall mission requirement. With the ICD now signed and providing the service with an idea of how many of each platform would be needed in a future fleet and how each would contribute as a sensor, a shooter or a command and control asset, Surface Warfare Director Adm. Ron Boxall and his staff are now able to begin diving into the finer details of what each platform would look like. The first to be tackled is the large combatant, Boxall told USNI News today. He noted the effort would be more like the move from the Ticonderoga-class cruiser to the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer – where the same combat capability was kept, but housed in a more suitable hull – rather than the move from the Spruance-class destroyer to the cruiser, which maintained the same hull design but added in new combat capability. After the addition of the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) to the DDGs' Aegis Combat System to create the Flight III design, Boxall said the resulting warfighting capability is one the Navy can use for years to come. “We have a new capability on that hull now, so everything's going good – except for, as we look towards going further, we know we've maxed out that hull footprint,” Boxall said of the Arleigh Burke-class hull design, power-generation capability and more. “So the key elements that we're looking at in this work we're doing on the requirements side is, keep the requirements about the same as DDG Flight III, but now look at what do we need a new hull to do.” USNI News first reported last month that the large combatant would pair a new hull with the Flight III combat system. The Navy will spend about the next six months having that conversation about what the new hull will need, though he suggested to USNI News that it would need sufficient space to carry helicopters and unmanned systems; it would need to support long-range missiles and weapons; it would have to include command and control systems able to support a staff onboard for air defense or offensive surface capability, much like the cruiser does today with the air defense commander role for a carrier strike group; it may incorporate DDG-1000's signature controls and integrated power system; and it will certainly have to be flexible and modular enough to quickly undergo upgrades and modernizations in the future as new systems are developed that the Navy will want to incorporate into the next block buy of large combatants or back fit fielded ones. Though there has been much speculation about whether the large combatant would use an existing design or a new design, Boxall said there really are no designs out there that meet the Navy's needs without significant modifications. Whereas the ongoing frigate design effort was able to mandate that bidders use mature parent designs, Boxall said “a lot of people in the world make frigates. Not many people make large surface combatants of the size and capability that we need. So we've got to kind of look to our portfolio of blueprints that we have as a starting point, and we'll edit and modify the hull and design things as we go forward.” “I think what you're going to see won't be a huge deviation from things we have already, but at the same point, we are going to be making changes to anything we have” already in the fleet, he added. In a nod towards the idea the next large combatant will share the same combat system as DDG Flight III and will perform much the same role in the fleet, Boxall said the Navy is starting with the DDG-51 Flight III capability development document (CDD); will go through a Large Surface Combatant Requirements Evaluation Team effort with requirements, acquisition and engineering personnel from the Navy and industry; and after six months call the finished product a “modified Flight III CDD.” Once that modified CDD is complete, it will be clearer how much the future large surface combatant will resemble its predecessor and how much it will be a new class of ship – which will likely determine its name. “It is the big question: what do you call the future large surface combatant? I don't know. I don't think you call it a cruiser. I don't think you call it a destroyer. Maybe – I don't know what it is,” Boxall said, noting that he has commanded both a cruiser and destroyer and that they get used in much the same fashion, save for the cruiser's role as the air defense commander ship, which the future large surface combatant will have the capability of doing with its command and control suite. Once the first large combatant is designed and purchased in the 2023 “block” – following the current block-buy of Flight III DDGs from Ingalls Shipbuilding and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, which spans from Fiscal Years 2018 to 2022 – new blocks will be planned for every five years. As USNI News has reported, this block structure, laid out in a Surface Combatant Capability Evolution Plan, would allow the insertion of new hardware and software in a predictable timeline. This would help researchers and developers in the government and in industry understand when a new capability would have to be matured by to be included in the next block design, and anything not quite ready yet could wait until the next block. This setup is much like the Virginia-class attack submarine's block upgrade approach to adding in new capabilities, and its Acoustic Rapid Commercial-off-the-shelf Insertion (ARCI) process of adding new capabilities in via new construction and back fitting existing subs. However, Boxall noted the surface community had the added challenge of managing this block buy and upgrade effort across four or more types of surface combatants, compared to just one class of attack submarines. Unlike before, when the surface community would undergo a massive planning effort – like the CG(X) cruiser replacement design that ultimately was too expensive and not accepted by the Navy – and then cease planning for many years before undertaking another massive effort, Boxall said he hoped the block upgrades would create a “heartbeat type of effort, where you always have something going on.” https://news.usni.org/2018/08/28/navys-next-large-surface-combatant-will-draw-ddg-51-ddg-1000-dont-call-destroyer
4 mai 2023 | International, Autre défense
Denmark's government on Thursday proposed allocating an extra 38 billion Danish crowns ($5.65 billion) over the coming 10 years to upgrade its armed forces and to cope with a backlog in investments.