NATO’s London meetings are off to a rocky start

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  21 juin 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense

  Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - June 20, 2019

  MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY Coleman Aerospace, a wholly owned subsidiary of Aerojet Rocketdyne, Orlando, Florida, is being awarded a $140,184,433 firm-fixed-price modification (P00114) to a previously awarded contract (HQ0147-14-C-0001). The value of this contract is being increased from $366,376,257 by $140,184,433 to $506,560,690 by exercising this option. Under this modification, the contractor will provide six additional Medium Range Ballistic Missile targets and associated nonrecurring engineering. The work will be performed in Orlando, Florida. The performance period is from June 2019 through December 2027. Fiscal 2019 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $22,469,742 are being obligated on this award. One offeror was solicited and one offer was received. The Missile Defense Agency, Huntsville, Alabama, is the contracting activity. NAVY BAE Systems Land and Armaments L.P., Sterling Heights, Michigan, is awarded a not-to-exceed $67,000,000 modification for firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract line item numbers 8000, 8001, 8002, and 8100 to a previously awarded contract (M67854-16-C-0006), for the development of engineering drawings, manufacture, and test support for three Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) command and control Mission Role Variants (MRVs), and the development of engineering drawings for the ACV medium caliber cannon MRV. The ACV program is managed within the portfolio of Program Executive Officer Land Systems, Quantico, Virginia. Work will be performed in York, Pennsylvania (85 %); and Aiken, South Carolina (15 %), and is expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2022. Fiscal 2018 research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) funds in the amount of $2,500,000; and fiscal 2019 RDT&E funds in the amount of $20,075,743 will be obligated at the time of award, and funding in the amount of $2,500,000 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract modification was not competitively procured, in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1 and 10 U.S. Code § 2304(c)(1). The Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico, Virginia, is the contracting activity. Leidos Innovations Corp., Gaithersburg, Maryland, is awarded a $29,962,608 cost-plus-incentive-fee, cost-plus-fixed-fee, cost-only modification to previously-awarded contract N00024-16-C-5202 to exercise the options for integrated logistic support, fleet support and life cycle sustainment of the Navy's AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 surface ship Undersea Warfare (USW) Systems. The AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 is the USW combat system, with the capabilities to search, detect, classify, localize and track undersea contacts and to engage and evade submarines, mine-like small objects and torpedo threats. Work will be performed in Norfolk, Virginia (61 %); San Diego, California (18 %); Pascagoula, Mississippi (6 %); Bath, Maine (4 %); Manassas, Virginia (4 %); Yososuka, Japan (2 %); Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (2 %); Everett, Washington (1 %); Mayport, Florida (1 %); and Rota, Spain (1 %), and is expected to be completed by June 2020. Foreign Military Sales; fiscal 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 other procurement (Navy); and fiscal 2019 operation and maintenance (Navy) funding in the amount of $15,418,688 will be obligated at time of award, and $2,846,455 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, District of Columbia, is the contracting activity. General Electric Co., Lynn, Massachusetts, is awarded $24,891,442 for modification P00020 to a previously awarded firm-fixed-price contract (N00019-17-C-0047) to procure 72 F/A-18 F-414-GE-400 install engines devices for the Navy (24); and the government of Kuwait (48). In addition, this modification provides for two spare and six test F414-GE-400 install engines devices for the government of Kuwait. Work will be performed in Evandale, Ohio, and is expected to be completed in December 2020. Fiscal 2018 aircraft procurement (Navy); and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) funds in the amount of $24,891,442 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the fiscal year. This modification combines purchases for the Navy ($7,316,280; 31 %); and the government of Kuwait ($17,575,162; 69 %) under the FMS program. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity. Austal USA, Mobile, Alabama, is awarded a $13,197,241 cost-plus-fixed-fee, firm-fixed-price, and cost-only modification to previously awarded contract N00024-17-C-2301 for littoral combat ship class design services and integrated data and product model environment (IDPME) support. Austal USA will provide efforts to support littoral combat ship class ships, including but not limited to technical analyses, non-recurring engineering, configuration management, software maintenance and development, production assessments, and diminishing manufacturing sources and seaframe reliability analysis. Austal USA will also maintain an IDPME that will enable the Navy to access enterprise data management, visualization, program management applications, and network management and control. Work will be performed in Mobile, Alabama (60 %); and Pittsfield, Massachusetts (40 %), and is expected to be complete by June 2025. Fiscal 2016 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy); 2018 other procurement (Navy); and 2019 research, development, test, and evaluation (Navy) funding in the amount of $13,197,241 will be obligated at time of award and will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, District of Columbia, is the contracting activity. Gravois Aluminum Boats LLC, doing business as Metal Shark Boats,* Jeanerette, Louisiana, is awarded a $12,818,790 firm-fixed-price modification to previously awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract N00024-17-D-2201 to exercise options for the construction of Near Coastal Patrol Vessels in support of U.S. Southern Command partner nations and Foreign Military Sales program. Work will be performed in Jeanerette, Louisiana, and is expected to be complete by August 2021. No funding will be obligated at this time. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, District of Columbia, is the contracting activity. Fairmount Automation Inc.,* West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, is awarded a maximum value $12,439,633 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, supplies/services contract for the commercial procurement of Fairmount Automation's G4 Design Pad family of controller models and accessories, Windows based configuration software package licenses and engineering services to work with the government design teams to assist in programming and troubleshooting network interfaces. The services under this contract cover system design, software programming, program logistic support, and equipment analysis and repair. Work will be performed in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania (90 %); and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (10 %), and is expected to be complete by June 2024. Fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance (Navy) funding in the amount of $261,175 will be obligated at time of award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured in accordance with 10 U.S. Code 2304(c)(1) - only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements. The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia Division, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the contracting activity (N64498-19-D-4023). SR Technologies Inc., Sunrise, Florida, is awarded a $12,360,400 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, cost-plus-fixed-fee, firm-fixed-price contract for engineering services, materials, and support for integration and operation of information operations payloads into multiple unmanned aerial vehicles used by the U.S. Special Operations Command and Navy. This two-year contract includes one three-year option which, if exercised, would bring the potential value of this contract to an estimated $23,433,021. All work will be performed in Sunrise, Florida. The period of performance of the base period is from June 20, 2019, through June 19, 2021. If the option is exercised, the period of performance would extend through June 19, 2024. No funds will be obligated at the time of award. Funds will be obligated as task orders are issued using operations and maintenance (Navy); other procurement (Navy); and research, development, test and evaluation (Navy). This sole-source procurement is issued using other than full and open competition in accordance with 10 U.S. Code 2304(c)(1), as implemented by Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. The Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, San Diego, California, is the contracting activity (N66001-19-D-3404). Bell Boeing Joint Project Office, Amarillo, Texas, is awarded not-to-exceed $7,458,000 for modification P00005 to a delivery order N0001918F0016 previously issued against basic ordering agreement N00019-17-G-0002. This modification provides for non-recurring engineering to facilitate additional structural improvements, tooling assessment, and test aircraft retrofit tooling in support of theV-22 Nacelle Improvement effort. Work will be performed in Fort Worth, Texas (84 %); Ridley Park, Pennsylvania (5 %); Patuxent River, Maryland (4 %); Fort Walton Beach, Florida (4 %); and Amarillo, Texas (3 %), and is expected to be completed in August 2020. Fiscal 2019 aircraft procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $1,923,688 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the fiscal year. The Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Maryland, is the contracting activity. DEFENSE INFORMATION SYSTEMS AGENCY DRS Global Enterprise Solutions Inc., Dulles, Virginia, was awarded a firm-fixed-price task order to support the Army's Wideband Enterprise Satellite Systems Commercial Satellite Communications (COMSATCOM) Network. The face value of this action is $23,756,299 funded by fiscal 2019 operations and maintenance funds. The total cumulative face value of the task order is $127,496,857. Proposals were solicited via the General Services Administration's Complex Commercial SATCOM Solutions (CS3) multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts, and two proposals were received from the 20 proposals solicited. Performance will be at the contractor's facility in Dulles, Virginia. The period of performance is June 24, 2019, to June 23, 2020, with four one-year options. The Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, is the contracting activity. (GS00Q17NRD4006 / HC101319F0092). DEFENSE LOGISTICS AGENCY Oshkosh Defense LLC, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, has been awarded a maximum $10,200,705 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for vehicular axle assemblies. This was a sole-source acquisition using justification 10 U.S. Code 2304 (c)(1), as stated in Federal Acquisition Regulation 6.302-1. This is a five-year contract with no option periods. Location of performance is Wisconsin, with a June 20, 2024, performance completion date. Using military service is Army. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2019 through 2024 Army working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Land and Maritime, Warren, Michigan (SPRDL1-19-D-0129). ARMY Longbow LLC, Orlando, Florida, was awarded a $9,267,724 modification (P00087) to contract W31P4Q16-C-0035 for Laser and Longbow Hellfire engineering services. Work will be performed in Orlando, Florida, with an estimated completion date of June 19, 2020. Fiscal 2017 and 2018 missile procurement, Air Force funds in the amount of $9,267,724 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, is the contracting activity. *Small business

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  13 novembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  German military refuses new A400M deliveries over safety concerns

  CLEMENT CHARPENTREAU The Bundeswehr, the German military, announced it would not accept deliveries of two A400M Atlas transport aircraft due to recurring technical problems. While defining the aircraft as the “backbone” of its air transport capabilities, the Bundeswehr is concerned about recurring technical problems affecting its fleet. “During routine inspections of the mounting nuts on the propellers of the A400M already in flight, it was found that not all 24 nuts per propeller have the intended tightening torque,” revealed the Luftwaffe, the German air force, in a statement. Increased inspections of the engine mounts, combustion chambers, and engine flap, as well as crack testing on several points, are also required and reduce the readiness of the A400M fleet. In addition to technical deficiencies, the two latest aircraft that were about to be delivered did not meet the “contractually guaranteed properties”, leading to the refusal. So far, the Bundeswehr has received 31 of the 53 A400M it ordered. In total, 174 A400M airlifters were ordered, with 84 already in service. Outside of the partner countries of the program, namely Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, and Turkey that total 170 orders, the remaining four were acquired by Malaysia. AeroTime has reached out to Airbus for comment but did not receive an answer at the time this article was published. The A400M is a military transport aircraft designed by Airbus Defence and Space. It entered service in 2013, and is offered as a successor for older transporters such as the C-130 Hercules or the C-160 Transall. It recently achieved the certification flight test for the highly awaited simultaneous dispatch of paratroopers from both side doors. The feature had been delayed by the design shortcomings of static lines. https://www.aerotime.aero/clement.charpentreau/24189-german-military-refuses-new-a400m-deliveries-over-safety-concerns

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  22 septembre 2020 | International, Naval

  Is the US Navy winning the war on maintenance delays?

  David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy, beset by maintenance delays, is making progress on getting its ships out of the shipyards on time, fleet officials say. Over the past three years, the Navy is on track to more than double the percentage of ships getting out of maintenance on time, key to the service's efforts to make deployments more sustainable for its ships and sailors, Capt. Dave Wroe, U.S. Fleet Forces Command's deputy fleet readiness officer told Defense News in an email. “On-time ship maintenance availability completion rates in private shipyards improved from 24% in FY18 to 37% in FY19,” Wroe said. “Current performance trends in FY20 are projected to be 65%.” The improvement is a sign that the Navy may be turning the corner on a fight to restore readiness from its nadir in the early part of the last decade, when the Navy was running ragged filling unsustainable requirements for forces around the globe. Getting ships through their maintenance cycles on time is the linchpin of what the Navy calls its “optimized fleet response plan,” which is the system through which the Navy generates deployable ships that are maintained, manned and trained. Late last year and again in January, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told audiences that repeated delays in the shipyards was undermining the Navy's Optimized Fleet Response Plan, and turning that around was vital. “We are getting 35 to 40 percent of our ships out of maintenance on time: that's unacceptable,” Gilday said at the USNI Defense Forum in December. “I can't sustain the fleet I have with that kind of track record.” A recent Government Accountability Office report found that between 2015 and 2019, only 25 percent of the Navy's maintenance periods for ships and submarines. Improvements Getting out of that hole has been difficult for a number of reasons: High operational demand for Navy forces makes planning maintenance difficult, and inevitably when the ships go into maintenance after years of hard use, workers discover more work that needs to be done, creating delays. And those delays make executing OFRP difficult, Wroe said. “OFRP provides the construct to best assess and optimize readiness production — down to a unit level — taking into account all the various competing factors to produced Navy readiness,” Wroe said. “Bottom line: OFRP helps mitigate fundamental points of friction, such as shipyard capacity and manning gaps at sea — but in itself doesn't solve key degraders like depot level maintenance delays and extensions.” But some key factors in the delays have been identified and the Navy is working to mitigate them, Fleet Forces Commander Adm. Chris Grady said this week at this week's Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium. One area that has a tendency to drive delays is when workers discover things that need to be fixed, the fix may not cost much but the adjustment must go through an approval process that slows everything down. Those kinds of changes add up to about 70 percent of the so-called “growth work.” Part of it is anticipating and building in ways to deal with growth work into every maintenance period, and the other part is making it easier to address small changes to the scope of the work, Grady said. “When we began this initiative, cycle time for the small value changes averaged about 30 days,” he said “We're now at six and aim to bring it down further to only two days.” Other things that have helped the problem has been bundling maintenance periods for ships, meaning that contractors bid on multiple ships to fix, and can plan hiring further out, Grady said. Additionally, improving base access for contractors has helped, as well. “Last year, we averaged 110 days delayed per ship in private avails,” Grady said, using the short-hand term for “maintenance availability.” “Things much better this year — even with COVID-19,” he continued. “We go from about one-third avails finishing on-time to two-thirds. That is great. But, again, each delay has real impact on our readiness, and we need to keep working together to do better.” What happened? Because the U.S. Navy is set up to meet standing presence requirements and missions around the world, it must cycle its ships through a system of tiered readiness. That means ships go on deployment fully manned, trained and equipped. Then the ships come home, and after a period of sustained readiness where the ship can be redeployed, it goes into a reduced readiness status while undergoing maintenance. Following maintenance, the ship and crew goes into a training cycle for another deployment as an individual unit, then as a group, then returns to deployment. The whole cycle takes 36 months: Rinse and repeat. OFRP was designed in the 2013-2014 time-frame when the Navy was deploying well beyond its means, with carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups going out for nine-to-10 months at a time. The excess use wore hard on the ships and sailors who manned them and put more wear on the hulls than they were designed to sustain. That meant that when ships went in for maintenance they were more broken than they were supposed to be, and funding to fix them was hampered by spending cuts. For nuclear ships — submarines and aircraft carriers — the funding cuts were a double whammy of work stoppages and furloughs that contributed to a wave of retirements in the yards, meaning the public yards were understaffed and had to hire and train new workers. Work took longer, throwing a wrench into an already complicated system of generating readiness. All that added up to significant delays in getting ships through their maintenance cycles and contributed to astonishing delays in attack submarine maintenance especially. What OFRP was meant to do was create a system whereby the Navy could meet combatant commander demands but not break the system. That meant that the Navy would generate as much readiness as it possibly could but that the demand would have to be limited to what the Navy could reasonably maintain, man, train and equip. But getting to that system has been immensely difficult because of the deep hole the Navy dug meeting requirements that well outstripped funding and supply. For example, there was a two year period when the service was forced to supply two carrier strike groups to the Arabian Gulf at all times, a requirement only canceled when automatic across-the-board spending cuts in 2013 made it impossible for the Navy to fund the two-carrier requirement. Adding to the difficulty: some of OFRP's founding requirements were nigh impossible to pull off. One was that the all the ships in group would go into and come out of their maintenance availabilities on time and together. Another was that a group would go into the first phase of their training, the so-called basic phase right after coming out of maintenance, fully manned. Both have been immensely difficult to pull off. But Fleet Forces, headed then by OFRP architect Adm. Phil Davidson, was given ample warning that those assumptions would be difficult to achieve. Then-NAVSEA head Vice Adm. William Hilarides told USNI News in January 2015 that getting ships to come out of the yards simultaneously would be hard. “The challenge to me is, let's say you want four destroyers in a battle group, all to come out at the same time in one port? That's a real challenge,” Hilarides told USNI News. The current head of NAVSEA, who at the time was in charge of the Regional Maintenance Center enterprise, backed up his boss to USNI News, saying it would be particularly challenging in places with less infrastructure. “Your big rub there is, the challenge of OFRP is ... all those ships [in a carrier strike group], they go through maintenance together, they go through training together and they deploy together,” said then-Rear Adm. William Galinis. "So, what our challenge is, is to be able to take all that work from all those ships and try to schedule it for roughly about the same time, and to get all that work done on time. So that's our challenge. “Now, in a port like Norfolk or San Diego, we have big shipyards, a lot of people, a lot of ships. You can kind of absorb that type of workload. When you go to Mayport, they've got like 10 ships down there [and typically cannot work on more than one or two destroyers at a time.],” he told USNI. Galinis said that Fleet Forces would have to be responsive to the shipyards because at least that way they could plan for delays. “They know if they give us all this work at one time, it's going to go long anyway,” he told USNI. “So they'd rather be able to plan that and at least know when they're getting the ship back, as opposed to, ‘nope, we're not going to talk to you, you've got to go do it,' and then the ships go long because we don't have enough people to do the work.” Fleet Forces Command has been reviewing its assumptions this year and is preparing to release a revised OFRP instruction, but the core is likely to remain the same. In any case, Wroe said in the email, it was always going to take a long time to dig out of the hole the Navy found itself in when OFRP was implemented fully in 2015. “It was clear at the inception of OFRP, and remains clear today, that it will take the entire 2015-2025 period to recover readiness and establish stable readiness production,” Wroe said. “That makes sense when readiness production is planned over 9-years and large blocks of time have already been scheduled for depot maintenance periods.” Ultimately, if the process of OFRP is funded correctly and ships can get out of maintenance on time, it's a sound way of moving forward, Fleet Forces Commander Grady told the audience this week. “My bottom line here is that, as a process, OFRP works,” he said. “If we are looking where to improve upon it, each of these studies came to the same conclusion: the biggest inhibitor to fleet readiness is maintenance and modernization performance in the shipyards. We simply must get better, and I know you share my concern.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/09/19/is-the-us-navy-winning-the-war-on-maintenance/