8 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
COLOGNE, Germany — The German Defence Ministry will leave planned air defense investments and other high-profile programs involving U.S. vendors unresolved in the final months of the Merkel government, officials have told lawmakers.
A Feb. 3 list of “important” but unfunded programs, as officials wrote, includes several trans-Atlantic defense efforts that have been simmering for some time. As a result, American contractor behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing are left to wait until a new government re-litigates Germany's defense acquisition posture sometime after the Sept. 26 election.
Lockheed Martin, along with MBDA Deutschland, has been gunning for a contract on the TLVS missile defense program following more than a year of negotiations and several years of German-American co-development. The program's prospects turned dimmer last fall, as new requirements drove up costs. Unsurprisingly, TLVS now officially appears on the to-do list for the next chancellor.
Notably, a project aimed at defending against short-range aerial threats, like drones or mortar fire, is also lacking a budget, defense officials wrote to lawmakers.
Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer late last year reframed Germany's air defense requirements as needing greater focus on drone threats, as evidenced by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. She said a wholesale evaluation of the entire weapons portfolio would determine the way ahead, including what systems the Bundeswehr needs to counter threats of different sizes from various distances.
Whatever happened with the review, it appears it did not spur an appetite to start something new soon. That leaves Germany's fleet of Patriot systems, along with a limited order of counter-drone systems made by Kongsberg and Hensoldt aimed at fulfilling Germany's commitment to NATO for 2023, as the baseline equipment for the time being.
Lockheed also must wait for what happens next in the Bundeswehr's heavy transport helicopter program, which is meant to replace the fleet of CH-53G models. The Defence Ministry effectively halted the acquisition process last fall after Lockheed and Boeing went over budget with their custom offers of the CH-53K King Stallion and the CH-47 Chinook, respectively.
German defense officials recently requested information from the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency about buying more standard, and presumably cheaper, versions of the desired aircraft instead.
In response, Lockheed launched a formal protest, which is now on the docket of the Federal Cartel Office, as newspaper Die Welt first reported. Company officials said they want to get a ruling of whether Berlin walking away from the purchase altogether was in line with fair-competition rules.
German acquisition laws make it difficult for companies to protest when the government chooses not to award any contract at the end of a competition, said Christian Scherer, a public procurement expert with the law firm CMS Germany in Cologne. “Generally speaking, you can't force the government to buy anything,” he said. “But bidders might have compensation claims.”
Judging offers as economically unfeasible, for example, could qualify as a valid reason for the government to withdraw, Scherer told Defense News.
At the same time, there is a legal path if companies suspect abusive implementation of the rules, especially if the government's requirements remain the same, he added. Those rules exist to protect offerers against favoritism and other forms of manipulation. “You can't go ahead and compete the same thing with the intention to award the contract to your preferred bidder.”
Finally, Germany's long-term campaign of replacing its fleet of Tornado combat aircraft will remain untouched during the final months of the Merkel era, according to the Defence Ministry. Defense officials last spring settled on a mixed fleet of mostly Eurofighters plus a smaller number of Boeing-made Super Hornets for electronic warfare and nuclear missions.
The decision has morphed into something more akin to a mere recommendation that would require years to play out, leading Eurofighter maker Airbus to hold out hope that U.S. manufacturers can be entirely kept out of the business when all is said and done.
Tobias Lindner, a Green Party member of the Budget and Appropriations committees in the Bundestag, said the list of unfunded programs is “almost more interesting” than the acquisitions considered doable by the time the Bundestag session ends in late June.
With so many big-ticket programs in limbo (15 overall), Kramp-Karrenbauer could move to set priorities and cut needless projects. “Unrealistic announcements and promises weaken trust within the armed forces and with our allies,” Lindner said.
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This modification exercises options to procure full rate production Lot Five of the BQM-177A Surface Launched Aerial Targets to provide for the production and delivery of 70 BQM-177A and 70...
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The U.S. Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft competition pitted Bell’s V-280 Valor, a tiltrotor aircraft, against Sikorsky and Boeing’s Defiant X.
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By: Jen Judson   16 hours ago WASHINGTON — The Army's once-problem-plagued air-and-missile defense battle command system took out two cruise missile threat targets nearly simultaneously using Patriot missiles in a major live fire event Aug. 13, according to service officials in charge of the effort. The cruise missiles flew at a low-altitude, maneuvering through a mountain range. The Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) took real-time data from Patriot and Sentinel radars and tracked the threat. IBCS sent engagement options to air defenders on the ground and two Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles controlled by IBCS intercepted both threats. The success of the limited user test for IBCS, which began several weeks ago in the New Mexico desert, is like “night and day,” compared to a previous attempt in 2016, Brig. Gen. Brian Gibson, who is in charge of Army air-and-missile defense modernization, told Defense News during its Space and Missile Defense Symposium Debrief event Aug. 5. “We didn't even get through phase one,” which lasted “just days,” in the first limited user test, Gibson said. Space and Missile Defense Command Commander Lt. Gen. Dan Karbler had overseen the Army Test and Evaluation Command during the first IBCS limited user test and told reporters Aug. 5 that during the first attempt “the system performance was so unstable, we really couldn't even get it started. We couldn't collect any good data. There was multiple software challenges within the system just to try to get it into the network. So it was a very, very difficult endeavor and so, honestly, couldn't pass LUT and there was a lot of work to do.” Due to those problems and the Army's new plans to expand IBCS capability to tie to any sensor or any shooter on the battlefield delayed the entire program by roughly four years. The live fire marks the first time an entire operational battalion was involved in an IBCS test along with multiple sensors, shooters and mission command platforms, making it the most complex test the system has seen to date, Gibson told reporters Aug. 13 shortly after the test event. The cruise missile targets were defeated by PAC-3 missiles coming from entirely separate launchers at the same battery site, Col. Phil Rottenborn, IBCS project manager within the Army's Program Executive Office Missiles and Space, said. IBCS also made it possible to move Sentinel radars more forward on the battlefield, providing more time to track the target, which allowed the commander on the ground to engage a single interceptor per target, said Col. Tony Behrens, Army capability manager and director of the Army Air & Missile Defense Command. Typically, two interceptors, one following the other, are deployed against a single missile target in case the first misses. With IBCS, the Army will be able to use fewer interceptors in engagements, Behrens said. The system was also challenged by electronic attack during the live fire where one of the seven integrated fire control network relays was taken out of the mix by a jammer. The system was able to operate and defeat challenging target sets through debris even with a relay removed from the game. The Army will conduct another live fire test next week with senior officials attending, a presence that will up the ante. IBCS will go up against both a cruise missile and a ballistic missile during that event, according to Army Futures Command Commander Gen. Mike Murray. Once the limited user test wraps up in mid-September, the Army will need to go through “terabytes, lots and lots of data” over the following three months, Murray said. The service will then go before a production decision board, currently scheduled for Nov. 20. And if IBCS is approved to move forward, the service will conduct an Initial Operational Test and Evaluation of the system in a year. The Army plans to equip its first unit with IBCS — the same battalion executing the LUT — in fiscal 2022. IBCS will not only serve as the brains of the Army's future Integrated Air-and-Missile Defense System, but will also be the command-and-control system for its future Integrated Fire Protection Capability that will defend against rockets, artillery and mortars as well as cruise missile and unmanned aircraft threats. And IBCS is likely to play an integral part in the next generation program called Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which is expected to provide an information architecture across all services and domains for warfare. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2020/08/13/army-missile-defense-battle-command-system-takes-out-cruise-missile-threats-in-major-test/