La marine américaine précise ses attentes sur le successeur du F/A-18 Super Hornet

Sur le même sujet

• 

  4 novembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Defense aerospace primes are raking in money for classified programs

  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.” https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/11/03/defense-aerospace-primes-are-raking-in-money-for-classified-programs/

• 

  5 août 2020 | International, Naval

  Stackley: Combined L3Harris Technology Will Compete to Build New Navy Distributed Battle Networks

  By: Megan Eckstein August 4, 2020 3:25 PM A year after L3 and Harris merged into a single $18-billion defense company, the corporation is finding its formerly siloed components can come together to meet some of the Navy's and joint force's most complex needs. Sean Stackley, president of the Integrated Mission Systems segment for L3Harris Technologies, told USNI News in an interview that L3 and Harris each had important pieces of the puzzle to help the Navy achieve its distributed maritime operations concept. But Stackley, who previously served as the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition from 2008 to 2017 and as the acting secretary of the Navy from January to August 2017, said the key to DMO is not just fielding new platforms and tools but rather managing how information flows throughout the network, he said. Under the Navy's DMO vision, rather than deploying concentrated strike groups to a few places around the globe, the Navy would have many dispersed ships and planes that could share data to create a combined picture of the battlespace. He described the future fight as a combination of aircraft, ships, submarines and ground vehicles – manned and unmanned – all with sensors and communications devices, feeding data into a battle management system. The challenge will be the ordnance-to-target ratio and picking out the right targets to control the fight. Before the fight starts, the U.S. needs to ensure it has control of the EM spectrum so that network of platforms can communicate, sense and target. “It's really about linking sensors, providing assured communications, having the ability to disrupt the enemy's communications in their operating picture. It's everything from electronic support to electronic attack. ... That is a tremendous challenge because you have to work across the services, work across the platforms, you have to work across industry, you have to work across systems. So there's not one contract that's going to go out for DMO; it's going to be incremental. It's going to be an incremental approach to building this capability over time, over systems. And frankly the Air Force and the Navy are taking different approaches. I think there are some best practices across the services that they'll benefit by as each of these get more mature,” he explained, saying those were his personal views and not the company's. “I'm frankly studying the way the Air Force is approaching ABMS [Advanced Battle Management System], and I see a lot of strengths to their approach. There's a lot of parallel activities to the way they're contracting ABMS that should allow, if we do it right, should allow the incremental steps that need to be taken to be done in parallel as opposed to one at a time in a series. And I'm frankly also spending time with the Navy trying to link up the Navy's approach to DMO with the Air Force's approach to ABMS, to at least study – the services should be studying each other's approaches – and best practices should emerge, because otherwise we won't get there, it will take too long.” For example, he said, the Navy is preparing to contract for a ship-based signals intelligence program called Spectral. It also has an upcoming competition for a Spear program for electro-optical/infrared targeting. Under DMO, Stackley said, those two could be approached in parallel to ensure the whole network has access to the data they produce, instead of pursuing them separately and waiting for someone down the line to integrate the systems into a larger network. “Traditional (acquisition) says you do the standalone upgrades; inside of DMO, you're constantly looking at the total framework architecture, how do these capabilities integrate” on the front end “so that on the back end you are, in fact, building a distributed maritime operational capability,” he said. Stackley said the company is positioned to adapt to the changing requirements of DMO. “We are on the ocean floor, and we operate from the depths of the sea to the depths of space. We are in every domain. We operate across the entire kill chain, from sensing, communications, tracking, targeting, right down to putting ordnance on target. We operate across the kill chain and across the entire electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. In the acoustic realm, we operate below 10 hertz, and then you move into the [radio frequency] and in the RF end of the EM spectrum we're operating above 50 gigahertz. So we dominate – I would say spectrum superiority is one of our strengths. And we do this to provide capabilities, solutions, for national security, ours and our allies.” The company's advantage is based on “two companies a couple of years ago that had a large number of stand-alone capabilities seeing a match in terms of our separate capabilities, and also seeing the power that comes through integration of these capabilities, understanding where the customer is going in terms of the future fight where that EM spectrum, that spectrum superiority, is so critical. Whether you're talking about the Navy's strategy, the Navy's vision for distributed maritime operations, or the Air Force's advanced battle management system, it is the same capability the services are looking for, which is to have the advanced sensors at the forward edge, have the information that they collect communicated back through secure data links to platforms, have that information integrated into a common picture so that we can control the spectrum, we can ensure our communications, we can disrupt [adversaries'] communications, and we can pull the information from our sensors and get it to where it's most needed so that when the time comes we can put ordnance on target rapidly and reliably,” Stackley said. The two companies had different tools in their portfolios prior to the merger that contribute to this new ability to network together tools for fighting in the EM spectrum. For example, “Harris focuses on tactical communications, electronic warfare, space payloads and supports FAA air traffic control modernization. L3's portfolio is a bit more diverse and includes electronic components, aircraft modernization, flight simulation, UAS/UUVs, airport security and C4ISR components and subsystems,” Defense News quoted Byron Callan, an analyst for Capital Alpha Partners, as writing in a note to investors ahead of the merger. In the interview, Stackley used undersea warfare as an example of where L3 and Harris have been to provide the Navy options to support DMO. On the seabed, the company leveraged each of the halves' legacy systems to create an underwater acoustic system that won a prime contract with the Navy – something neither L3 nor Harris could have done before the merger. “Within the first year, we're offering integrated solutions to the customer that prior to the merger we would never have seen and would never have found together,” Stackley said. The combined portfolio also includes experience with unmanned underwater vessels. L3Harris is competing for the Medium UUV program that will replace separate medium UUV systems for the explosive ordnance disposal and the submarine communities. Stackley said the company had an already-existing, highly modular design that allowed it to work with Navy labs to integrate and operate advanced payloads at sea while the Navy was developing its specifications for the MUUV program. The company's UUV experience, Stackley said, coupled with underwater acoustic systems and above-water communications capabilities that reside within L3Harris, means it can offer a package that allows the Navy to receive real-time or near-real-time updates from this UUV. The company also recently won a contract with the Navy to design and build at least one Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MUSV), with options for more vehicles. Stackley said L3Harris had extensive experience with USVs, including through the Overlord large USV demonstrator program run by the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office. For its MUSV offering, the company is partnering with Gibbs and Cox, which also participated in the Overlord program. Through its in-water testing, L3Harris has learned about autonomy software, vehicle reliability, and command and control. Stackley said the company, outside of the MUSV program, wants to take its USV a step further and demonstrate to the Navy another option for combining several legacy L3 and Harris technologies. The company builds the signals intelligence system on the Air Force's RC-135 surveillance aircraft. That system had been stovepiped in the company's aircraft systems division before, but Stackley said L3Harris plans to use that as the basis for the upcoming Spectral competition, which will be a ship-based SIGINT tool. L3Harris will adapt that system for integration on a medium USV, he said, thereby demonstrating “a sensing capability, where you start with a reliable unmanned surface vessel that has endurance on station, more so than an aircraft; you give it a sensor package that [meets Navy and Joint Force needs]; and then you add to that the data links that L3Harris provides and the secure communications that we provide, so that now you've got a node on the network that's passing critical information to the operating force from an unmanned vessel.” He made clear that the SIGINT package on the USV is not part of the Navy's current MUSV program but that L3Harris would pitch the capability to the service. https://news.usni.org/2020/08/04/stackley-combined-l3harris-technology-will-compete-to-build-new-navy-distributed-battle-networks

• 

  5 juillet 2021 | International, Aérospatial

  Lockheed Martin Wins $1.8B F-35 Support Contract

  Lockheed Martin Wins $1.8B F-35 Support Contract