Navy Hires Boeing To Develop A Very Fast And Long-Range Strike Missile Demonstrator

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  21 janvier 2020 | International, Naval

  Australian defense leaders defend submarine buy with France’s Naval Group

  By: Nigel Pittaway MELBOURNE, Australia – Australian defense leaders this week denied claims that their department was urged to consider alternatives to the navy's plans of buying 12 large conventionally-powered submarines from France's Naval Group. The claims, reported by local news media in the wake of an Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) report about the program earlier this week, suggested negotiations with Naval Group were at such a poor state the Commonwealth-appointed Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board had earlier recommended drawing up contingency plans. However, in a statement released Wednesday by Secretary of Defence Greg Moriarty, Chief of Defence Force Gen. Angus Campbell, Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Mike Noonan and Deputy Secretary Naval Shipbuilding, Tony Dalton, denied the claims. “Contrary to media interpretations of ANAO's latest report on the Future Submarine Program, Defence was not advised to ‘walk away' from Naval Group by the Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board,” the statement read. “In line with best practice and following the advice of the Advisory Board, Defence has continued to assess all of the risks that attend this highly complex program. At each stage, we are adopting relevant risk mitigation strategies. The ANAO acknowledges that Defence has taken steps to manage risks.” The 12 Attack-class submarines are being acquired under Australia's Sea 1000 (Future Submarine) program to replace six existing Collins-class boats which, without a major service life extension program, will need to be retired by 2036. The design is based on the French Barracuda-class nuclear attack boat, and the program is valued at either $34.5 billion (50 billion Australian dollars), or $55.2 billion (AUD 80 billion), depending on accounting practices. Either way, it is Australia's largest-ever defense acquisition program. The ANAO report, titled “Transition to Design,” found that the design phase of the program is already nine months behind schedule and two important milestones had been missed. It said Defence “could not demonstrate” its expenditure of $396 million (US $273 million) on the design to date has been fully effective in achieving the two milestones to date. The Defence Department has spent 47 percent of all program expenditure thus far on design work and, despite the risk mitigation strategies, it continues to describe program risk as “high”. “While the first scheduled major milestone under the Submarine Design Contract was reached five weeks later than planned, Defence and Naval Group are working towards the recovery of this delay by the next contracted major milestone in January 2021. Importantly, the delivery of the Attack-class submarine has not been delayed,” the statement continued. “Acknowledging the scale of this program, we remain confident that our work on the Attack-class program with Naval Group and Lockheed Martin Australia (as the Combat Systems Integrator) is progressing thoroughly and will result in the delivery of a regionally-superior submarine from the early 2030s, establishing a truly sovereign capability as we maximize the involvement of Australian industry.” The Sea 1000 program timeline calls for delivery of the first Attack-class boat in 2032 with service entry around 2034. https://www.defensenews.com/2020/01/17/australian-defense-leaders-defend-submarine-buy-with-frances-naval-group

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  7 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  UK facilities for American F-35 jets are delayed and over budget

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is on track to begin permanently basing its F-35 jets abroad next year, with RAF Lakenheath in England set to become the service's first international F-35 base. But construction on new hangars and facilities necessary for supporting the high-tech stealth jet have gone over budget and over schedule, and many buildings won't be ready when the first planes arrive in November 2021. On average, construction projects associated with the F-35 beddown at Lakenheath are about 25 percent over the initial $480 million budget estimated in 2015, said Lt. Col. Clinton Warner, who leads the 48th Fighter Wing's F-35 program integration office. “The overall trend has been projects are late and also over budget,” he told Defense News during a July interview. “A lot of the assumptions that were made back in 2015 weren't necessarily valid. There's been cost growth that was outside of the planning assumptions that were made back in 2015.” The cost increase is not the only problem. As RAF Lakenheath's first F-35 squadron stands up, neither the hangars planned to house the jets nor the headquarters building used for planning operations and maintenance will be ready, Warner said. A training simulator building will also be late. Despite the delays, the Air Force still plans to move forward with the beddown of the jet. Warner said the service is exploring options to keep operations on track, such having the new F-35 squadron share space with existing units — which include three American F-15 squadrons — or potentially leasing additional facilities on base from the United Kingdom. “In terms of getting here and flying the aircraft, we will still do that. [There is] really no difference in terms of the capability is going to be delivered, but it'll just look different in how we do it,” Warner said. “It will be some strain on the units here at the base, as there's more crowding and with waiting for those facilities to come online.” The arrival of U.S. Air Force F-35s in Europe has been a long-awaited milestone for the service, which announced in 2015 that RAF Lakenheath would become the first international location to get the jets. Since then, F-35s temporarily deployed to the base in 2017. “Having a fighter with the capability of the F-35s one hop closer to a part of the world that's seemingly less stable certainly will have a deterrent effect,” said Frank Gorenc, a retired four-star general who commanded U.S. Air Forces in Europe from 2013 to 2016. “Being able to daily train with the partners that have F-35s will have a deterrent effect,” Gorenc told Defense News. “It will cause interoperability to soar both on the maintenance side and on the operations side. I think the benefits of having that equipment — the demonstration of having a fifth-generation [fighter jet] in theater combined with F-15Es and F-16s — I think is the right signal.” Under the current plans, F-35 pilots and maintainers will begin to arrive at RAF Lakenheath in June 2021, with the first aircraft to follow in November. The base will eventually be home to two F-35 squadrons, each with a total of 24 jets. That beddown will follow more than five years of planning and development on the part of the Air Force, which stood up a team in 2015 to get the base ready for the incoming jets. In 2018, the U.S. Air Force chose Kier-Volker Fitzpatrick, a joint venture of U.K.-based design and construction firms Kier Group and VolkerFitzpatrick, to build and renovate all installations associated with the F-35 presence at RAF Lakenheath. Construction began in July 2019, with seven of 14 new facilities — which will include new hangars, a building for flight simulation, a maintenance unit and storage facilities — currently either being built or already complete. As unforeseen costs have mounted, the base's program integration office has had to request $90 million in additional funding from Congress, as well as permission from the Pentagon to revise the scope of the projects, Warner said. But there's no overarching answer for why costs have ballooned. “Each individual project had a different set of assumptions, a different set of risk profiles, and some were correct and some are not correct,” Warner said. With only a few years between the decision to base F-35s at Lakenheath in 2015 and the original planned start of operations in 2020, the U.S. government wanted to put a construction firm under contract sooner rather than later, said Stephen King of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, a U.K. government agency charged with overseeing the building and maintenance of military facilities. But workforce costs grew as the project was discovered to be more complex than originally anticipated. “When the workers are tendered, the prices that are coming back in are found to be different from those originally estimated, and it seems to be the price of doing business on a military establishment. There seems to be an ‘add-on' to the outside market,” King said. Because the F-35 is a stealth jet that processes large amounts of classified information, many of the installations linked with its operations must meet certain security specifications. Building those structures to both U.S. and U.K. standards while using a foreign workforce of U.K. citizens posed challenges that the U.S. Air Force did not foresee during the design process, Warner said. “Luckily most of these problems are behind us, but they did cause delays in terms of when we were programming out in the schedule and looking at what we thought it would look like,” he said. “Some of the challenges associated with building those secure facilities were not fully understood.” Air Force officials have said keeping the projects on track was always going to be a challenge. In 2016, Col. Robert Novotny, who was then the commander of the base's 48th Fighter Wing, predicted construction projects could face troubles getting funding or finding a skilled workforce to build the new facilities, and that F-35s likely wouldn't begin to arrive on base until at least 2021 or 2022. “For me, the concern I have when I look at Lakenheath is not the F-35,” he told Defense News in July 2016. “For me, the concern I have is: Are we going to be able to build enough stuff fast enough?” https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nato-air-power/2020/08/06/uk-facilities-for-american-f-35-jets-are-delayed-and-over-budget/

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  10 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Industry could wait months for COVID reimbursements from Pentagon

  By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — As the defense department seeks billions in emergency funding to reimburse industry for costs incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pentagon's top acquisition official pledged not to rush that money out the door. Speaking at the annual Defense News Conference, Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said it will likely take five to six months before any reimbursements to industry under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) act will take place as the department seeks a “very data driven approach” to that money. Section 3610 of the CARES act allows firms serving the federal government to seek reimbursement for pandemic-related expenses, but Congress hasn't passed corresponding appropriations. Defense officials have said they need roughly $10 billion, and that without added funding from Congress, the Pentagon would have to dip into modernization and readiness funds. “We believe we need that appropriation to maintain readiness because if we do not get that what we are going to find is we are not going to get the number of units delivered, we are not going to maintain warfighter readiness, we're not going to move forward in modernization,” Lord said. “We would like to take the one-time hit and then see where we go from there.” Should Congress appropriate the requested funds, the Pentagon would issue a request for proposal, with the large primes gathering data from up and down their supply chains before returning with their requests to the Pentagon. That process will likely take two to three months, Lord said. “Then we want to look at all of the proposals at once. It isn't going to be a first-in-first-out and we have to rationalize using the rules we've put in place, what would be reimbursable, and what's not,” she added. “So overall, we think five to six months, in terms of a process.” When the COVID pandemic struck in March, hundreds of defense subcontractors had to close up shop. As of now, only 30 remain shuttered, Lord said, although she acknowledged that the department is keeping a wary eye on the situation. “What we are looking for is whether or not we're maintaining warfighter readiness for our production programs, and then relative to modernization, whether we are hitting key milestones relative to development programs,” she said. “We have seen some slowdowns. We are carefully monitoring, using monthly metrics, where we are.” While the most recent round of quarterly earnings reports from public defense companies did not show a major slowdown from COVID, Lord warned that those reports “in large part don't reflect the hits that were taken by business,” warning of a “delayed response” in terms of the diseases' economic impact on the sector. “I would contend that most of the effects of COVID haven't yet been seen, because most companies gave their employees time off, they stretched out production, paid a lot of people for working 100% when perhaps they were only getting 50% of the hours in and so forth,” she said. “So I think the system has absorbed it up to this point in time. Now when we get to the point where we're having payments and incentive fees and award fees earned, and if we haven't done the deliveries, that's where you're going to see the hit.” https://www.defensenews.com/smr/defense-news-conference/2020/09/09/industry-could-wait-months-for-covid-reimbursements-from-pentagon