30 novembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Northrop Grumman has been awarded a $4,800,000,000 contract for Global Hawk surveillance drone development, modernization, retrofit and sustainment activities for all Air Force Global Hawk variants, a Pentagon contract announcement said.
This contract provides for management, including program, business and technical areas; configuration management, data management, reliability, availability and maintainability. Technical refresh; studies and analyses; design, development, integration, test and evaluation; contract/production line closeout/shutdown; training; sparing; overseas contingency operations support; fielding; cyber security/information assurance; interoperability support; facilities modifications/renovation; integrated logistics support; requirements management specification management; and quality assurance.
Guidance will be included within each individual delivery order/task order statement of work and performance work statement regarding these and other tasks.
This contract provides flexibility to accommodate the broad enterprise of activities associated with the Global Hawk program. Work will be performed in San Diego, California, and is expected to be completed Sept. 30, 2030.
Global Hawk drones provide the US Air Force with wide area surveillance. The high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned system provides leading-edge intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability that is able to deliver near real-time 24X7 situational awareness.
5 juillet 2023 | International, Autre défense
Up to half of the 100 billion euro ($109 billion) special fund set up to modernize the German military will likely go to U.S. defence companies, a leading tank gear box maker said, accusing Berlin of lacking a strategy for its defence industry.
22 avril 2021 | International, Naval
ARLINGGTON, Va. — The Navy has awarded a contract to Boeing to integrate the AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) into the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol reconnaissance aircraft. The Naval Air Systems Command awarded Boeing a $74 million cost-plus-fixed-fee order for...
9 août 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre
By: Jen Judson HUNTSVILLE, Ala. —The U.S. military is a few years from launching offensive hypersonic weapons that are currently under development. But building those initial missiles is one thing — manufacturing the weapons in multitude is another issue entirely. “I would say we really need to understand, again, how can we produce precision hardware at scale,” Michael Griffin, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told a group of reporters Aug. 7 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “If we talk about ballistic missile defense or hypersonic offense and we talk about proliferating architectures, we need any dozens, many hundreds, maybe thousands of assets,” he added. “This takes us back to the Cold War where at one point we had 30,000 nuclear warheads and missiles to launch them. We haven't produced at that kind of scale since the wall came down.” As hypersonic missiles become a reality, industry is going to have to relearn how to effectively, efficiently and economically produce them, Griffin said. While industry has developed warheads, glide bodies and other components, there is no industrial base equipped to manufacture hypersonic weapons. Things are moving in the right direction when it comes to bringing industry up to speed and preparing for larger-scale manufacturing of missiles, Griffin said. But building these systems is challenging because, for example, hypersonics require a greater degree of thermal protection than what has been required of other weapons in the past, he noted. Building hypersonics is no longer a technical issue or a matter of understanding physics, but rather an issue of understanding the industrial engineering required to produce a larger number. “I'm not sure how much help the government can be there,” he said. “Mass production is not what we do. ... That is going to be an industry problem.” The Army is just weeks away from awarding a contract to a company that will work with the federally funded laboratory that developed a hypersonic glide body to develop manufacturing plans and strategies. Other companies will have a turn as well. The effort is spearheaded by the service's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office. Griffin stressed that the weapons manufacturing process needs to be affordable. “Our adversaries have clearly found ways to make them affordable. China has these things now by the thousands. What do we do to learn, once again, how to produce sophisticated things at scale and affordably?” he said. China is able to field new systems every few years, Griffin noted, while the U.S. takes a decade or more to get through a cumbersome acquisition process. “It don't believe that the issues facing the United States aerospace and defense establishment are issues of specific technologies,” he said. “I believe that over the last 30 years ... we've become lost in our processes.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2019/08/08/hypersonics-by-the-dozens-us-industry-faces-manufacturing-challenge/