9 août 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The U.S. Army is just weeks away from awarding the final contracts related to the development of its mobile, ground-launched hypersonic missile.
The Army will award a contract within the next three weeks to a company to develop a launching system for the hypersonic missile in co-development across the services, Lt. Gen. L. Neil Thurgood, the service's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office director, said Aug. 7 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.
RCCTO's job is to serve as a bridge between the science and technology community and the program executive offices, helping bring technology out of development and into soldiers' hands, first on a small scale and then a larger scale when passed off to program offices. The office is primarily focused on hypersonics and directed energy.
While the missile is under joint development, the Army needs a special launcher to make the missile road-mobile. The contract will encompass the design and integration of a vertical launcher onto a trailer, Thurgood said.
Additionally, the RCCTO is preparing to award a contract, also in the next three weeks, to a vendor to produce the glide body for the hypersonic missile, Thurgood said.
The Navy will own the design of the glide body, but the Army will own its production, he said.
“We have a company that we are in the final process of negotiating an [other transaction authority contract],” Thurgood said.
An OTA is a contract that allows for rapid prototyping by bypassing the usual red tape associated with acquisition.
“What is interesting about the glide body technology is we also have to create an industrial base to do this. There is no industrial base in the United States for glide bodies,” Thurgood said.
The technology is owned by the government labs, he noted, “so we are transitioning that out of the labs into the commercial marketplace. That is a really hard thing to do, but there's a lot of energy and a lot of momentum behind that outcome.”
Unlike other programs, Thurgood said, there is not a single company that can produce a hypersonic missile and its equipment alone. “It actually takes a collaborative effort amongst the industry partners,” he added.
The first contract will be awarded to one company, but there will be follow-on contracts for other vendors to learn how to make the glide body at the federally funded lab where it was developed. The methodology energizes the supply chain from the prime contractors all the way to sub-contractors should the service decide to make a large number of the weapons, Thurgood told Defense News in an interview at the symposium.
Thurgood noted that in order to bring industry closer to the RCCTO's endeavors, the office established an industry board in addition to its board of directors to promote “horizontal communication.”
The Army plans to field a hypersonic missile and launcher to a unit in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021. The unit will train for an entire year without live rounds, Thurgood said, adding that the canisters the unit will use will be cement-filled to match the weight.
The first live-round test will take place in FY22 and will be conducted by a battery led by a captain.
Thurgood was tasked Feb. 14 to come up with a plan for hypersonic development, and given 30 days to do so. Now, almost six months later, the RCCTO is about to award all associated contracts to move forward in building prototypes that will be in soldiers' hands in just a couple of years, Thurgood said.
5 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial
The Air Force will keep maturing the technology for a potential sixth-generation NGAD fighter, but will let the Trump administration decide how to proceed.
16 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna LONDON — The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin have reached a handshake deal for the eleventh batch of F-35 joint strike fighters, the Pentagon's top acquisistion official confirmed July 15. The lot 11 order will be the largest so far for the F-35 program, purchasing 141 jets for U.S. and international customers. "The JPO and Lockheed Martin have made progress and are in the final stages of negotiation on the Lot 11 production contract,” said Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, in a statement. “We have a handshake agreement which symbolizes the Department of Defense's commitment to not only equip our warfighters with the world's greatest fifth generation aircraft, but it also represents great value to the U.S. taxpayers, our allies and international partners. With each production lot, the F-35 unit recurring flyaway costs continue to come down across the board.” Neither the Defense Department nor Lockheed disclosed either the total contract value nor the unit costs of the latest order, but a Lockheed spokesperson said the company remains on track to decrease the unit cost of an F-35A conventional takeoff and landing model — the most widely used variant — to $80 million by 2020. In a statement, the Lockheed spokesperson stated that the total contract value and price per copy would be released once the contract was finalized, but the “unit price for all three F-35 variants went down significantly in the latest negotiation, demonstrating the program's continued progress, maturity and cost reduction.” A contract for the tenth lot of low rate initial production (LRIP) F-35s, as announced in February 2017, lowered the price of an F-35A to $94.6 million — the first time any version of the joint strike fighter had been sold for less than $100 million. The F-35B jump-jet model used by the U.S. Marine Corps came in at $122.8 million, while the F-35C carrier version sat at $121.8 million. Lockheed and the Pentagon took longer to reach a final contract agreement than either party would have liked, as the department's F-35 Joint Program Office had hoped to finalize an LRIP 11 contract last year. However, the deal could represent a sea change for the relationship, which soured considerably during the LRIP 9 and 10 negotiations. After months of LRIP 9 negotiations went nowhere, the JPO in 2016 forced Lockheed Martin to abide by a unilateral contract action, which allowed the Pentagon to set the price of an aircraft and Lockheed's fee without input from the company. Then, F-35 costs came under fire from President Donald Trump, who publicly lambasted the program and positioned Boeing's Super Hornet as an alternative. The pressure helped the Pentagon and Lockheed make a deal on LRIP 10 in February 2017, with unit costs reduced by about 7.5 percent when compared with the ninth batch of jets. The announcement of the today's deal follows a $2 billion contract award made to Pratt & Whitney in May for the eleventh batch of F-35 engines. Pratt manufactures the F135 engine used in every version of the jet. Going forward, Lockheed and the Pentagon will negotiate lots 12, 13 and 14 together as part of a block buy that will initially encompass international orders but could also accommodate the U.S. services as early as lot 13. The Lockheed spokesman stated that the LRIP 11 deal “along with the technical stability of the aircraft, puts us on a great path to negotiate Lots 12, 13 and 14 as a Block Buy, which will generate additional savings for our customers.” https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2018/07/15/pentagon-reaches-handshake-deal-with-lockheed-on-newest-batch-of-f-35s/
31 décembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — Under the purview of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, reform has become a buzzword inside the Department of Defense, with every office trying to find ways to be more efficient, whether through cost savings or changes to bureaucracy. The department's Acquisition and Sustainment office, headed by Ellen Lord, manages billions of dollars in materiel; and by Lord's own belief, it is ripe for changes that could net the department big savings. On Dec. 17, Lord sat down with reporters and outlined a series of goals for 2019 that she hopes will help transform how the Pentagon buys equipment. Here, then, are six key items to watch for in the coming year. 1. Rework the department's key acquisition rules: The DoD Instruction 5000.02 is a key bedrock that forms the basis of how the defense acquisition system works, guiding acquisition professionals in their day-to-day program execution. And if Lord gets her way, she'll largely rip it up and start over. “In 2019, one of my key objectives is to rewrite 5000.02. We have, right now, this huge, complicated acquisition process that we encourage our acquisition professionals to tailor to their needs,” Lord said. “We are going to invert that approach and take a clean sheet of paper and write the absolute bare minimum to be compliant in 5000.02, and encourage program managers and contracting officers to add to that as they need for specific programs.” Lord envisions taking the massive, unwieldy 5000.02 guidance and getting it down to “a couple page outline of what you need to do,” with “simple” contract language and an easy-to-follow checklist “so that this isn't an onerous process.” “I'm encouraging what I call creative compliance. I want everyone to be compliant, but I want people to be very thoughtful and only use what they need,” she said. “This is literally starting with a clean sheet of paper, looking at the law and the intent, and working to vastly simplify this.” Andrew Hunter, a former Pentagon acquisition official now with the Center for International and Strategic Studies, notes that the instruction is supposed to be rewritten every five years to keep it fresh, and now is probably the right time to start looking into that. But, he added, “a lot of what she says she wants to do are things that sound very similar to my ear to what [Lord's predecessor] Frank Kendall was trying to do in the last rewrite. He tossed stuff out left and right, worked very hard to create the different models, put in extended discussions of different potential models of programs so that it would be obvious to people there's not one single way to do a program.” Hunter is cautious when it comes to a massive shift in the 5000.02 system. “If you literally tell the system, ‘All the rules are repealed, go do everything you want,' the reaction won't be a sudden flood of creativity that astounds you with the amazing talent at the department, even though there is a lot of talent there," he said. “What's more likely to happen is you have total paralysis because everyone is sitting around going: ‘Oh no, the rules are gone. How do we know what we can do? What do we do now?' But over time that might shake out.” If Congress needs to get involved, Lord said, she's prepared to go to Capitol Hill “because I know they are partnering with us and they want to make sure we do things in a simpler, most cost-effective manner.” 2. Intellectual property rules: A long-standing fight between the department and industry is over who should own the intellectual property used by the American military. Before fully taking on 5000.02, Lord hopes to write a departmentwide intellectual property policy. Lord pointed to the “very good job” done by the Army on creating an IP policy and said her goal is to build on that to create a standard across the DoD. “From an industry perspective, we are trying to be consistent across all the services and agencies, so that we don't have different requirements for similar needs,” Lord said. “So intellectual property is a good example. We'd like to have the same kind of contract language that can be tailored to individual needs, but basically have consistent language.” David Berteau, a former Pentagon official who is now the president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, noted it is hard to read the tea leaves for what Lord may be planning based on her public comments. But he pointed out the long-standing challenge for the Pentagon — that nearly 70 percent of all program costs are life-cycle sustainment and maintenance costs — as a sign that something needs to change so the department can avoid major issues in the future. Depending on how new rules are implemented, the use of IP might drive down costs — or, he warned, it might lead to companies unable to compete, forcing the Pentagon to pay more or be less prepared for challenges. Put plainly, Berteau said, “it's complicated.” He hopes Lord will begin interacting with industry on this issue in ways similar to the current “listening tour” on changes to progress payments. 3. Better software development: It's become almost cliché that the department needs to do better at developing software, but in this case it's a cliché that experts, including Lord, agree with. The Defense Innovation Board, a group of tech experts from outside the department, is working on a series of studies on software, including one focused on how to drive agile development techniques inside the building. Lord said to expect that report before the end of March, adding: “I think that will be important in terms of capturing a road map forward on how to do this correctly.” 4. Increase use of OTAs: In 2018, Lord's office released a handbook on when and how to use other transaction authorities — legal standards designed to speed acquisition that critics say are underutilized by the department. Lord called it “sort of a warmup” for creating more useful handbooks for the acquisition community, but said that the goal for 2019 is to get people to correctly employ OTAs. “Usually they should be used when you don't have a clear requirement. So, true prototyping when you don't know what you're going to get,” Lord said. “Prototyping early on, probably before you get to the middle-tier acquisition.” 5. Greater use of prototyping: Speaking of which, Lord said the department has about 10 projects underway for rapid prototyping at the mid-tier level, with the goal of growing to about 50 in the next year. The goal is to take the systems into the field, test them out and then grow the next iteration of the capability based on what is learned. “We're taking systems that are commercially available and perhaps need a little modification, or defense systems that need a modicum of modification to make them appropriate for the war fighter,” Lord said. “That's one of the authorities we are very appreciative for, and we will continue to refine the policy. I signed out very broad policy on that this year. We'll write the detailed policy coming up early next year.” 6. Making the Selected Acquisition Reports public again: Until recently, the department publicly released annual Selected Acquisition Reports for each of the major defense programs. Those reports can inform the public of where programs stand and the costs associated. However, under the Trump administration, those reports have been largely classified as “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a higher level of security. Critics, including incoming House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., have argued there is no need for those once-public reports to be listed as FOUO. It appears Lord is working to open those back up. “We're going to try to minimize the FOUO on that,” Lord said in response to a question about it. “There are certain information [issues] that we have to protect, but [we] understand the need, the requirement, and I will put our guidance to make everything open to the public to the degree we can.” https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/12/27/six-things-on-the-pentagons-2019-acquisition-reform-checklist/