2 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

F-35 program costs are evolving, and these savings matter

Last month, Congress held an oversight and accountability hearing regarding the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's burdensome logistical IT system. The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General reported earlier this year that millions of additional dollars were spent in the form of labor hours by military personnel who manually tracked the plane's spare parts since its electronic logistical system didn't. The congressional review was undoubtedly warranted, especially as the F-35 program office phases in a newer system over the next two years to replace its legacy IT platform.

But noticeably absent from this testimony, was a more fulsome discussion (and understanding) about the affordability of the program and how both acquisition costs and the price to fly the aircraft are significantly trending downward at a time that matters most.

In an era of increased military competition against peer adversaries and during a period of tremendous budgetary constraints in the United States, incremental savings across a large enterprise such as the F-35 program matter. The Defense Department understands this well. It has smartly leveraged its buying power, driving down the cost of each F-35A to approximately $80 million one year earlier than planned — now costing taxpayers less than some of the less capable fourth-generation aircraft, and on a par with others. The F-15EX, for example, costs nearly $88 million, and gives our forces no help in a fifth-gen fight.

Why spend more for less? This is critical because over the next five years, the number of F-35s purchased will more than double to approximately 1,200 aircraft. That translates to increased capacity and capability for the United States and its allies as they operate in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters.

Congress recognizes that the costs to acquire the aircraft have been significantly reduced, and it has now rightfully turned its attention to the costs associated with sustaining the aircraft. But most lawmakers missed the opportunity during July's hearing to more fully explore a key statement made by the F-35′s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed announced that it has reduced its share of the aircraft's sustainability cost per flying hour over the past five years by nearly 40 percent, plummeting the costs to fly the aircraft to nearly $5,000 less each hour than earlier hourly costs.

The company says it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build state-of-the-art tools, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, which has led to labor efficiency gains as well as improvements to supply response times and data quality. The company implemented robust asset management tools and robotic automation to eliminate manual tasks, while placing a concerted focus on improving the reliability of aircraft parts to meaningfully reduce future repair requirements and material costs.

This is significant because the number of hours flown each year will increase by approximately 140,000 hours over the next five years alone. Those savings add up.

And more can be done. The F-35′s manufacturer believes it can further drive down its cost share to fly the aircraft by approximately an additional 50 percent. This is all the more significant when considering that the military services and aircraft's engine maker, Pratt & Whitney, are responsible for more than one-half of the total sustainment costs of the program.

If a similar level of savings can be achieved by the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Pratt & Whitney, those savings can be confidently reinvested back into the program to ensure enough aircraft are being procured to deter and, if necessary, fight our adversaries. As the military services and foreign countries consider future threats and the capabilities needed to impede adventuresome opponents, these savings matter.

These savings come at the same time the DoD reports that the aircraft's mission-capable rate has increased from the mid-50th percentile to the low 70th percentile from just a couple of years ago. And further improvements in the aircraft's mission-capable rate should be forthcoming as repair backlogs and mismatched spare parts are corrected by a new IT logistical system.

A theoretical military principle suggests that steady quantitative changes can lead to a sudden, qualitative leap. After many, many years of sustained focus to drive down F-35 costs, the program may be representative of that maxim and allow the Defense Department to fully realize the advantages of the F-35′s gamechanging technologies.

Steven P. Bucci is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He previously served as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense. The Heritage Foundation takes no funding from any government. It does take donations from corporate entities, which average about 4 percent of their total funding in any given year. The think tank reports it does not take a position based on donations, nor do donors have editorial input..

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/09/01/f-35-program-costs-are-evolving-and-these-savings-matter/

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22 mai 2020 | International, Sécurité

UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency to get latest radar technology from Leonardo
Rome, May 21, 2020 - The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) will upgrade to Leonardo's latest Osprey radar to support missions such as search and rescue, border protection, fishery and pollution patrols. The Osprey 30 radar will be installed on-board the two customised Beechcraft King Air aircraft provided to the UK MCA by UK-based aviation services company 2Excel. Currently, the UK MCA is operating Leonardo's Seaspray 7300E radar, which has been employed to great effect in support of regular fishery and pollution patrols around the UK. The radar comes equipped with Leonardo's patented small target detection capability, allowing it to spot shipwrecked individuals in the water at long range, even in the most difficult environmental conditions and sea states. Additionally, the radar provides the ability for MCA crews to identify oil spills and rogue polluters at very long range, day or night. 2Excel will build on this success by equipping the MCA King Airs with Leonardo's second generation Osprey radar, the latest entry in its range of E-scan surveillance radars. Osprey benefits from all of the capabilities of the Company's Seaspray family whilst also adding additional modes and optimized overland and coastal imaging capabilities. This makes the radar ideally suited to mixed environment operations, such as along the coast. Traditionally, coastguard aircraft have used radars with restricted fields of view and limited detection capabilities, making searches laborious and resource-intensive. Leonardo's radars solve these problems. The Company is a world leader in E-scan, also known as AESA (Active Electronically-Scanned Array) technology, which uses a matrix of hundreds of tiny radar modules to ‘steer' an electronic beam, rather than mechanically moving the radar to point at a target. With a Leonardo E-Scan radar, crews can lift off, scan in 360 degrees and almost-instantaneously detect, track and classify hundreds of maritime contacts, allowing crews to quickly task cooperating aircraft to deeply search an area of interest. Other E-scan advantages include extremely high reliability, as the radar can continue to operate effectively throughout a mission even if a number of its individual radar modules fail. Customers in 30 countries have selected Leonardo's E-scan radars including the Seaspray and Osprey families, with the US Navy procuring the Osprey 30 radar for its Fire Scout unmanned helicopter programme. View source version on Leonardo: https://www.leonardocompany.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/21-05-2020-uk-maritime-and-coastguard-agency-to-get-latest-radar-technology-from-leonardo
10 juillet 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Autre défense

Here’s the No. 1 rule for US Air Force’s new advanced battle management system
By: Valerie Insinna LE BOURGET, France, and WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has started work on a data architecture for its Advanced Battle Management System, the family of platforms that will eventually replace the E-8C JSTARS surveillance planes. But the “biblical” rule for the program, according to the service's acquisition executive Will Roper, is that “we don't start talking platforms until the end,” he told Defense News at the Paris Air Show in June. “It is so easy to start talking about satellites and airplanes and forget what ABMS is going to have to uniquely champion, which is the data architecture that will connect them,” Roper explained. “I'm actually glad we don't have big money this year because we can't go build a drone or a satellite, so we've got to focus on the part that's less sexy, which is that data architecture,” he said. “We're going to have to do software development at multiple levels of classification and do it securely. All of those are things that are hard to get people energized about, but they're going to be the make-or-break [undertakings] for this program.” Some initial work has begun on identifying the requirements for ABMS data architecture. The service in March named Preston Dunlap, a national security analysis executive at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, as the program's “chief architect.” Dunlap will be responsible for developing the requirements for ABMS and ensuring they are met throughout the menu of systems that will comprise it. The Air Force Warfighter Integration Center, or AFWIC — the service's planning cell for future technologies and concepts of operation — provided feedback to Dunlap about how ABMS should work, Roper said. The Air Force is still deliberating what ABMS will look like in its final form, although officials have said it will include a mix of traditional manned aircraft, drones, space-based technologies and data links. The effort was devised as an alternative to a replacement for the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System. While the service first considered a traditional recapitalization program where it would buy new JSTARS aircraft equipped with more sophisticated radars, leaders ultimately backed the more ambitious ABMS proposal, believing it to be a more survivable capability. But defense companies are hungry for more information about the platforms that will comprise ABMS, seeing the opportunity to develop new systems or upgrade legacy ones as a major potential moneymaker. Once the service has defined an ABMS data architecture — which Roper believes will occur before the fiscal 2021 budget is released — it will need to form requirements for the data that will run through and populate it as well as the artificial intelligence that automatically sorts important information and passes it to users. “Maybe one sensor needs to be able to fill a gap that others are creating,” he said. “We're going to have to look at requirements at a systems level and tell satellites that you need to be able to provide this level of data at this refresh rate. UAVs, you need to be able to do this rate and so on and so forth. Once we do that, then we'll be in the traditional part of the acquisition, which will be building those satellites, building those UAVs.” The Air Force intends to conduct yearly demonstrations throughout this process, the first of which will involve “ad hoc mesh networking,” which will allow platforms to automatically begin working together and sharing information without human interference. By FY21, full-scale prototyping could start, he said. In the commercial sector, where devices can be seamlessly linked and monitored over the internet, this concept is known as the internet of things. But that construct — where companies build technologies from the get-go with open software — is difficult to replicate in the defense world, where firms must meet strict security standards and are protective of sharing intellectual property that could give competitors an edge. “Openness in the internet of things makes sense because you can monetize the data,” Roper said. “That's not going to exist for us, so we're going to have to have a contracting incentive that replicates it. The best theory we have right now is some kind of royalty scheme that the more open you are and the more adaptation we do on top of your system, the more you benefit from it.” The service wants to hold a series of industry days to see whether such a construct would be appealing to defense companies, and how to structure it so that it will be fair and profitable. One unanswered is how to incentivize and compensate defense firms that build in new software capability. “If you create the system that allows us to put 100 apps on top of it, you benefit differently than if we can only put one. But the details are going to be difficult because maybe that one app is super important,” Roper said. “But if we can't replicate profit and cash flow on which their quarterlies depend, then they're going to have to go back to the old model of saying they are for open [architecture] but secretly giving you closed.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/paris-air-show/2019/07/09/rule-no1-for-air-forces-new-advanced-battle-management-system-we-dont-start-talking-platforms-until-the-end/
31 mai 2019 | International, Aérospatial

Ministry of the Armed Forces brings development of future Joint Light Helicopter forward
The French Minister of the Armed Forces, Florence Parly, has announced that the launch of the Joint Light Helicopter (Hélicoptère Interarmées Léger, HIL) program has been brought forward to 2021. The HIL program, for which the Airbus Helicopters' H160 was selected in 2017, was initially scheduled for launch in 2022 by the current military budget law. Launching the program earlier will enable delivery of the first H160Ms to the French Armed Forces to be advanced to 2026. During a visit to the Airbus Helicopters headquarters, the Minister also revealed the full-scale mock up of the H160M that will be presented on the Ministry of the Armed Forces stand at the next Paris Air Show. The helicopter was also given its official name and will be designated as “Guépard” (“Cheetah”) by the French Armed Forces. The H160 was designed to be a modular helicopter, enabling its military version, with a single platform, to perform missions ranging from commando infiltration to air intercept, fire support, and anti-ship warfare in order to meet the needs of the army, the navy and the air force through the HIL program. “We are proud that the HIL is considered a strategic program. I would like to thank the Ministry, the French Defence Procurement Agency DGA and the armed forces for their trust and for the close collaboration which helped create the conditions for the program to be brought forward within the framework of the current military budget law,” said Bruno Even, CEO of Airbus Helicopters. “This will make it possible to speed up the replacement of the older generation of aircraft, while optimizing the support and availability of the French State's helicopter fleet. Our teams are committed to delivering an aircraft in 2026 that meets the needs of the French Armed Forces in terms of availability, performance and capability, thus enabling it to rapidly become the new benchmark on the world's medium-lift military helicopter market.” Built around a platform that will enter service next year, the HIL program will benefit from many of the advantages inherent in the civil H160, particularly in terms of support, with simplified maintenance and lower operating costs than the previous generation of helicopters in this category. https://www.verticalmag.com/press-releases/ministry-of-the-armed-forces-brings-development-of-future-joint-light-helicopter-forward/

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