Here’s how the Corps could shave about 6 pounds off your body armor

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  14 février 2024 | International, Terrestre

  Marines test robotic mule that could carry weapons, sensors

  The program seeks to take the load off of dismounted troops.

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  25 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense

  Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - August 24, 2020

  ARMY Veraxx Engineering Corp., Chantilly, Virginia, was awarded a $218,000,000 hybrid (cost-plus-fixed-fee, firm-fixed-price, fixed-price-incentive and time-and-materials) contract for advanced planning and preview systems, mission simulators and rehearsal capabilities that enable live, virtual and constructive training in support of special operation's unique joint training and mission requirements. Bids were solicited via the internet with three received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 23, 2028. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Orlando, Florida, is the contracting activity (W900KK-20-D-0014). Astlanda Ehitus Ou, Harjumaa, Estonia (W912GB-20-D-0017); Framaco International Inc., Rye Brook, New York, (W912GB-20-D-0018); Relyant Global LLC, Maryville, Tennessee (W912GB-20-D-0019); Semi SA, Madrid, Spain (W912GB-20-D-0020); SKE Support Services GmbH, Goldbach, Germany (W912GB-20-D-0021); and Tartu Bryan JV, Colorado Springs, Colorado (W912GB-20-D-0022), will compete for each order of the $49,950,000 firm-fixed-price contract for providing real property repair and maintenance, design build, environmental work, force protection work and construction services for U.S. forces and/or facilities throughout Estonia. Bids were solicited via the internet with 11 received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 23, 2025. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Wiesbaden, Germany, is the contracting activity. Southwest Water Design LLC,* Albuquerque, New Mexico, was awarded a $40,000,000 firm-fixed-price contract for civil works and hydrology and hydraulics services. Bids were solicited via the internet with 15 received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 24, 2025. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the contracting activity (W912PP-20-D-0003). Phillips Contracting Co. Inc.,* Columbus, Mississippi, was awarded a $24,000,000 firm-fixed-price contract for rental of construction equipment. Bids were solicited via the internet with one received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 23, 2025. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Mobile, Alabama, is the contracting activity (W91278-20-D-0076). B&K Construction Co. LLC,* Mandeville, Louisiana, was awarded a $15,218,859 firm-fixed-price contract for construction of hurricane protection features in Plaquemines Parrish, Louisiana. Bids were solicited via the internet with four received. Work will be performed in New Orleans, Louisiana, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 21, 2025. Fiscal 2020 civil construction funds in the amount of $15,218,859 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Vicksburg, Mississippi, is the contracting activity (W912P8-20-C-0050). Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., Stratford, Connecticut, was awarded a $13,500,000 order-dependent contract for technologies to be developed and demonstrated in the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft technology risk mitigation and maturation effort. Bids were solicited via the internet with two received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 23, 2025. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, is the contracting activity (W911W6-20-D-0005). GiaCare and MedTrust JV LLC,* Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was awarded a $7,779,386 modification (P00001) to contract W81K04-19-D-0021 for registered nursing services for the San Antonio Military Health System. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Sept. 30, 2024. U.S. Army Health Contracting Activity, San Antonio, Texas, is the contracting activity. AIR FORCE SRC Tec, North Syracuse, New York, has been awarded a not-to-exceed $90,000,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for force protection Counter-small Unmanned Aerial System (C-sUAS) with Medusa sustainment. This contract provides for the acquisition, upgrade, sustainment, installation support and design and analysis support of C-sUAS and subsystems manufactured by SRC Tec. Work will be performed at locations to be determined in each delivery order and is expected to be completed Aug. 24, 2028. This award is the result of a sole-source acquisition. Fiscal 2020 procurement funds in the amount of $2,137,000 are being obligated at the time of award. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, is the contracting activity (FA8730-20-D-0045). DEFENSE LOGISTICS AGENCY Aurora Industries LLC,** Orocovis, Puerto Rico, has been awarded a maximum $25,608,088 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for coats. This is a one-year base contract with four one-year option periods. This was a competitive acquisition with 10 responses received. Location of performance is Puerto Rico, with an Aug. 23, 2021, ordering period end date. Using military services are Army and Air Force. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2020 through 2021 defense working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (SPE1C1-20-D-1283). NAVY General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., Poway, California, is awarded a $15,485,103 modification (P00009) to previously awarded firm-fixed-price contract N00019-18-C-1063. This modification adds performance for site relocation activities and exercises an option to extend intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance services utilizing contractor-owned/contractor-operated MQ-9 unmanned air systems. Work will be performed in Yuma, Arizona (34%); Poway, California (14%); and various locations outside the continental U.S. (52%), and is expected to be completed in December 2020. Fiscal 2020 operations and maintenance (Navy) funds in the amount of $15,485,103 will be obligated at time of award, all of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity. Management Services Group Inc.,* doing business as Global Technical Systems, Virginia Beach, Virginia, is awarded a $13,601,735 firm-fixed-price modification to previously-awarded contract N00024-20-C-5608 for procurement of network, processing, and storage technical Insertion 16 (NPS), Modification 1 storage equipment, which will be incorporated into area storage area network cabinets during production. The NPS program consists of enterprise products in use across surface Navy combat systems which introduce powerful commercially available off-the-shelf processors as part of a general strategy to achieve a modular and open architecture design. Work will be performed in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and is expected to be completed by June 2021. Fiscal 2020 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); fiscal 2020 other procurement (Navy); fiscal 2019 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); fiscal 2018 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); fiscal 2018 other procurement (Navy); fiscal 2015 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); fiscal 2014 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); and government of Australia funding in the amount of $13,601,735 will be obligated at time of award and funding in the amount of $2,069,033 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity. Areté Associates, Northridge, California, is awarded a $9,745,580 cost-plus-fixed-fee, firm-fixed-price, cost-with-no-fee contract for integration services supporting incremental upgrades, block upgrades and future generations of MK 18 Family of Systems unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), additional UUVs and remotely operated vehicles. This 17-month contract includes no options. Work will be performed at Tucson, Arizona (75%); and Valparaiso, Florida (25%). The period of performance is from Aug. 24, 2020, through Jan. 23, 2022. Fiscal 2020 funds will be obligated using other procurement (Navy). Funds in the amount of $6,885,495 will be obligated at the time of award. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract is awarded using other than full and open competition in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulations Subpart 6.302-5 and 10 U.S. Code 2304(c)(5). Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California, is the contract activity (N66001-20-C-0025). *Small Business **Small disadvantaged business https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/2323086/

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  26 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  FARA: Five-Way Fight For Army’s Future Scout

  By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: After four decades of failed attempts to replace its Vietnam-vintage OH-58 Kiowa scout, next month the Army will choose two of five competing teams to build prototypes for a new Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. Those prototypes, in turn, will compete for a mass-production contract in a 2023 “fly off,” with deliveries no later than 2028. A new scout is urgently overdue as the US faces ever-more-sophisticated Russian and Chinese air defenses that can keep traditional aircraft at bay. But with limited budgets, the Army will have to pick and choose high-priority units to get FARA first, and the rest of the force will have to wait. “We've got to look at, where are the most critical spots to bring capability,” said Brig. Gen. Michael McCurry, director of aviation for the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for operations and plans. The priority is the cutting-edge combat units that must break open sophisticated anti-aircraft defensives for the rest of the force to follow, he told me: “That penetrate force, that's where FARA is going to go.” Learning From the Past Now, the Army has made its job easier in a couple of important ways. Perhaps most important, instead of the traditional dozens or hundreds of detailed technical specifications that hem in designers' ingenuity, Future Vertical Lift director Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen told me, “we have very few critical attributes within our FARA spec.” One huge thing that the Army is not asking for: stealth. Unlike the costly Boeing Comanche cancelled in 2006, the FARA won't have to be shaped and coated to be impervious to radar – which is largely irrelevant to low-flying helicopters hiding behind hills, trees, or buildings, which are most often detected by the sound of their rotors, not by radar. Like the Comanche, advertised as a “digital quarterback,” FARA will act as an electronic hub for battlefield intelligence, collecting target data from drones and passing it to Army artillery, hypersonic missiles, and Air Force strike fighters – but network tech has come a long way since 2006, the year before the iPhone went on sale. Finally, unlike the Comanche, FARA won't be a conventional helicopter with a single main rotor and a small tail rotor for stability. The speed and range required to survive the future battlefield are greater than that classic set-up can achieve. That's driven all four firms who've discussed their designs in public – Boeing has not revealed anything – to adopt innovative configurations the Army's never fielded before. Only one of the designs, Sikorsky's, is based on an existing aircraft that's done actual flight tests. But the Army is confident the competitors can deliver. In detailed modeling, Rugen said, “all those offerings are beating those [minimum] mission critical attributes that we're trying towards.” Congress actually cut the FARA budget for 2020 by $34 million. That won't slow the program down, the Army has said, but it will reduce the amount of Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) the service can provide the contractors to build their prototypes around: weapons systems including a 20-millimeter autocannon and a missile launcher, Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) electronics, and the GE Improved Turbine Engine. To simplify and speed up development, all the competitors are required to include these standard-issue systems in their design — but the aircraft they build around them are radically different. Design shop AVX has proposed an aircraft with two helicopter-style main rotors for vertical takeoff, wings for extra lift, and a pair of their characteristic ducted fans for speed. AVX, founded by Bell alumni, has never built an actual aircraft. But it's backed by the manufacturing might of the much larger L3Harris, a firm created by the merger of the 18th and 26th-largest defense contractors in the world (as per their 2019 rankings on the Defense News Top 100). By contrast, Bell – part of Textron, No. 34 on the Top 100 – is a major builder of both military and commercial helicopters, as well as the revolutionary V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, from which the company's contender for the Army's future transport aircraft, the V-280, derives. Ironically, the Bell 360 Invictus is the most conservative-looking of the four known FARA designs: It's a streamlined single-main-rotor helicopter (looking kind of like Comanche) with the addition of two short wings for extra lift. Inside the aircraft, though, Bell is using new fly-by-wire flight controls and other technologies developed for its civilian Bell 525. Aerospace giant Boeing – No. 2 of the top 100, counting its defense contracts alone – builds the Army's current mainstay armored gunship, the AH-64 Apache; its heavy lifter, the CH-47 Chinook; and, with Bell, the V-22 tiltrotor. But Boeing, which built the stealthy Comanche, is so far in public-relations stealth mode on FARA, declining to discuss its design. Karem Aerospace is another design shop with an excellent pedigree – its founder is the father of the Predator drone – but no track record of actually building an aircraft. However, it's partnered with Northrop Grumman (No. 3 of the top 100) and Raytheon (No. 4) for this program, giving it serious manufacturing heft. The Karem AR-40 design has a unique combination of a single main rotor on top, a propeller at the tail that can swivel to act either as a tail rotor for stability or a pusher propeller for thrust, and wings that can tilt for the optimum aerodynamic angle in different modes of flight. Last in the alphabet, comes Sikorsky, the helicopter division of the world's biggest defense contract, Lockheed Martin. While Sikorsky's Raider-X design hasn't flown yet, it's essentially a 20 percent larger version of the two S-97 Raiders the company built and flight-tested at its own expense. (One of them was totaled in the process, thankfully with no loss of life). And Sikorsky already knows how to upscale its compound helicopter technology, because there's already an even bigger member of the family, the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 Defiant, now in flight tests for the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). All these aircraft derive from the Collier Trophy-winning X2 and share its configuration: two main rotors on top, using ultra-rigid blades to provide maximum lift with minimum vibration at high speeds, and a single pusher propeller at the tail. Between the X2, the S-97, and the SB>1, Sikorsky's configuration has been through far more flight testing than any of its competitors on FARA. So which team has the best combination of innovative design, proven technology, and the manufacturing muscle to build it at a price the nation can afford? That's a call the Army will make, and soon. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/fara-five-way-fight-for-armys-future-scout