21 septembre 2020 | International, Terrestre
WASHINGTON: The defense industry, Congress, and thinktanks breathed a unanimous sigh of relief at the Army's latest announcement on the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program. In an email to reporters Thursday afternoon, the Army said it would no longer seek to enter its own design team in the OMFV competition, a controversial plan it had suggested in a draft Request For Proposals in July.
“The whole purpose of publishing a Draft RFP was to elicit feedback from our industry partners. We take their feedback seriously,” the Army's armored vehicle modernization director, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, told me. “We won't always agree — and must act in the best interest of our soldiers — but we will always listen.”
Thursday's announcement is the latest twist in the decades-long struggle to replace the Reagan-era M2 Bradley, a heavily armed and armored troop carrier. It also suggests the notoriously bureaucratic and inward-looking Army acquisition system is finally starting to take defense contractors seriously when they say something is a bad idea.
“The only surprising thing here is that the Army may have actually taken into account and listened to the over 500 industry comments received,” said Bill Greenwalt of thinktank AEI, a former Hill staffer who spent years reforming military procurement. “I expect they got an earful.”
While the Army's announcement Thursday said it was still “carefully reviewing and analyzing industry comments (over 500 in total) [for] the next few weeks,” the message from industry on the government team seems to have been so strong the service didn't want to wait any longer to take action.
25 mai 2021 | International, Naval
The deal reinforces the company's commitment to developing a sustainable knowledge and innovation-based economy in line with the UAE's Vision 2030, CEO of Abu Dhabi Ship Building told Breaking Defense.
11 décembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
By: Nathan Strout Congress wants the Missile Defense Agency to take the lead on developing a space-based sensor layer capable of tracking hypersonic weapons, despite a number of objections made by the Trump administration earlier this year. The administration claimed in a Sept. 4 letter that selecting a lead agency for the sensor layer this early “would limit DoD's ability to establish the most cost-effective missile defense architecture for the nation,” but the conference committee apparently brushed those concerns aside to place the project squarely in the hands of the MDA in their report on the annual National Defense Authorization Act, released Dec. 9. The Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor would be a new addition to the nation's missile defense architecture, supplementing the current Space-based Infrared System and the future Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared system in detecting and tracking ballistic weapons from space. Unlike those two systems, however, HBTSS is specifically designed to detect and track hypersonic weapons as well. Compared to traditional ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons are faster, maneuverable and dimmer when viewed from space. Both SBIRS and Next Gen OPIR were designed for ballistic missile threats and are ill suited for tracking the dimmer, faster targets presented by hypersonics. HBTSS meets that challenge in two main ways. First, unlike the two previous systems operating in geosynchronous orbit, HBTSS will be located in low-Earth orbit — far closer to the action. Being that much closer allows them to overcome the dimness of hypersonic threats in order to effectively track them. Secondly, the HBTSS sensors are meant to pass information from satellite to satellite, allowing uninterrupted tracking even as the hypersonic weapons move quickly out of view of any one satellite. The fate of the sensor layer has been up in the air for much of the year. The MDA didn't include the effort in its fiscal year 2020 budget, but listed it among their unfunded priorities in a report to Congress, asking for $108 million for the project. Authorization for that funding was included in both the House and Senate versions of the legislation, and unsurprisingly has been included in the conference report. To date, HBTSS has been a combined effort split between multiple organizations — primarily the MDA, the Space Development Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. While the MDA is in charge of the actual payload, DARPA's Project Blackjack has served as a prototype effort for the design of the new sensor layer. Meanwhile, the SDA was established earlier this year to build a new multilayered space architecture in low-Earth orbit, of which HBTSS would comprise one layer. The dividing issue between the two legislative bodies was whether to put the MDA firmly in charge of the operation or continue to let it develop between the MDA and the Space Development Agency, an organization stood up earlier this year to create a new space architecture comprised of hundreds of small satellites providing a variety of capabilities in low-Earth orbit. While the Senate wanted to have the MDA take the lead on development and deployment of HBTSS, the House supported a coordinated approach with responsibility shared between the MDA, the SDA and the Air Force. “This is one of the interesting boundary cases that is going to keep coming up between what do you give to the space service and what do you keep in the other agencies and services,” said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In this case, the MDA had already been working on the payload, and so I think there was a lot of angst in taking the MDA's work on that and giving it to another organization where it might lose some momentum.” The conference report comes down on the Senate side of the equation, directing the secretary of defense to assign primary responsibility for the development and deployment of HBTSS with the MDA. The legislation would also require the secretary to submit a plan for how the agency will work with the SDA and the Air Force to develop and integrate the payload. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2019/12/10/this-is-who-congress-wants-in-charge-of-new-hypersonic-tracking-sensors
7 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR
By: Daniel Cebul WASHINGTON — In the era of great power competition, the speed at which competing militaries are capable to innovate and evolve could determine who would win in a war. In light of the need for speed, military innovation experts at the Defense News Conference tackled the question of whether the Department of Defense can still move quickly to develop new technologies and capabilities. While the conversation surrounding innovation tends to revolve around the development of new technology, other organizational changes are arguably more important for military innovation. Col. Liam Collins, director of the Modern War Institute, said that while new technologies play a role, they are not the driving force of innovation. “Sure, there were technological innovations that were part of it, such as new signals intelligence capabilities, but it was really more of an organizational or doctrinal innovation in which technology played a part,” Collins said. “Technology facilitates those other innovations, which are really often the most critical and often the less studied [of] what we focus on.” One example of changes to organizational doctrine and behavior is the DoD's uptick in using other contracting authorities, or OTA. Shawn Black, vice president and general manager for electro-optical and infrared systems are Leonardo DRS, said that from the commercial side, these alternative contracting authorities are appealing because they move quicker and better communicate requirements. “They represent a faster procurement cycle. You are able to move through the process of responding to a solicitation and providing a proposal much quicker. There is more flexibility in the intellectual property provisions,” Black said. "[Leonardo] has seen much-improved communication with the acquiring organization as you move through the process. “Right up until the submission we are able to zero in right on what they are looking for.” So how fast are these alternative options able to pump out contracts? Mike Madsen, partner and head of Washington operations at Defense Innovation Unit, said his office is looking to “leverage the OT authority and put award prototyping contracts within 60 to 90 days." "The fastest we've been able to do is just under that, and we are averaging 100 days,” he added. Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/smr/defense-news-conference/2018/09/06/can-the-us-military-still-innovate-quickly