28 décembre 2023 | International, Sécurité
24 septembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
Pentagon Mulls F-35 Sustainment Proposal
The Pentagon is assessing Lockheed Martin's proposal to reduce Joint Strike Fighter sustainment pricing by 16% over five years through a performance based logistics (PBL) contract, but the largest F-35 customer, the U.S. Air Force, says there are several things that must be worked out before signing the dotted line.
The company delivered a white paper to Ellen Lord, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, in August outlining how a five-year PBL contract could save the military money on F-35 sustainment, Ken Merchant, F-35 sustainment vice president for Lockheed Martin, told reporters last week at the Air Force Association's annual conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Current F-35 sustainment contracts are annual and do not allow the Joint Strike Fighter's supplier base to conduct forward planning, he said.
“What a PBL would do for us is give a five-year contract with [the] government and it would allow our suppliers to make those investments knowing that they have five years worth of business guaranteed,” Merchant said.
The F-35 program has delivered over 425 aircraft to the fleet and will continue to grow; in fact it will double over the next few years. This is something the Pentagon must consider before entering a PBL with Lockheed Martin, Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told Aerospace DAILY in an exclusive Sept. 18 interview.
“Normally a performance-based logistics contract makes sense when you have a majority of the fleet fielded, then you can start doing stable buys,” Roper said. “Those are the details that we'll need to look at. It's not just, would the performance-based logistics contract make sense if the fleet size were frozen? Does it make sense as the fleet size grows?”
The Pentagon also must consider supply chain issues and software for the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) as the fleet size grows, he said.
“Those problems might grow linearly as the fleet size grows [or] we might get a non-linear effect where they compound,” Roper said. “Those are the things we'll need to think through.”
In a perfect world, Lockheed Martin would like to negotiate a multiyear sustainment contract for the F-35, but executives admit the construct would be hard to sell on Capitol Hill.
“Multiyear contracts that are performance based can be very successful because they invite industry to make the upfront investment so that they can recoup their investment in terms of profit at a predictable period without worrying about the variability and the vacillations of the budgeting cycle,” Roper said. “The theory is sound, it's just the practice that has to be reviewed.”
Roper worries about F-35 software the most because it is not only needed to sustain the system but also is integral for modernization.
“Agile software development is so critical on our programs and I think it's not going to be a ‘nice to have' for the F-35, it's going to be an absolute ‘must have,'” he said.
Under Roper's direction the Air Force launched Mad Hatter, a software coding project tackling ALIS that has delivered initial applications to the flightline at Nellis AFB in Nevada.
“I'm really pleased that new [F-35 Joint Program Office] leadership under [Lt. Gen.] Eric Fick have viewed that as a very favorable direction for all of F-35 software that goes forward,” Roper said. “We're making the results available to them—not just the results in the field, but the process that produced them.”
Lockheed Martin has pledged to migrate ALIS to the cloud by 2020 and Roper agrees this is paramount for the future of the program because the enterprise must use cloud-based development tools. This is the way the commercial industry is heading and it provides security benefits, he added.
“I've directed numerous programs in the Air Force to move to our cloud-based DevSecOps stack, which is called Cloud One. F-16, F-22, B-21, [Ground Based Strategic Deterrent]—these are programs that need to write a lot of cloud quickly and securely,” Roper said. “Cloud-based development, if done correctly ... you can write secure code really quickly and get it accredited quickly, which we also want.”
https://aviationweek.com/defense/pentagon-mulls-f-35-sustainment-proposal
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6 avril 2021 | International, Aérospatial
Airbus et Dassault Aviation ont remis une offre sur l’avion de combat européen SCAF
Le cabinet de la ministre des Armées, Florence Parly, a confirmé, vendredi 2 avril, avoir reçu « une offre » de la part des principaux industriels concernés par la deuxième étape de développement du système de combat aérien du futur (SCAF), indiquent Reuters, La Tribune et Le Monde. « Les Etats ont reçu une offre des industriels concernés pour la réalisation d'un démonstrateur d'un nouvel avion de combat, dans le cadre du projet de système de combat aérien du futur », précise le ministère des Armées. Le ministère indique que les négociations se poursuivent entre les industriels et les Etats sur l'ensemble du projet SCAF. Reuters, La Tribune, Le Monde et L'Usine Nouvelle du 6 avril
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12 février 2018 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
US Air Force requests $156.3 billion in FY19, plans to retire B-1, B-2 fleets
By: Aaron Mehta ROME — The fiscal 2019 budget for the U.S. Air Force plans to grow the service from 55 to 58 combat squadrons over the next five years, while buying dozens of high-end aircraft and preparing to retire the B-1 and B-2 bomber fleets as the military retools for the high-end competition forseen by the Pentagon. The National Defense Strategy, released in January, focused on the potential for great power competition between the U.S. and Russia or China. And in any such battle, the U.S. Air Force would play a critical role; hence, the service's request for $156.3 billion for FY19, a 6.6 percent overall increase from the FY18 request. Click here for full coverage of President Trump's FY19 budget request! In FY19, the Air Force is requesting 48 F-35A fighter jets, 15 KC-46A tankers and one more MC-130J aircraft. Ther service is also investing $2.3 billion in research and development in the B-21 Raider bomber, up from the $2 billion request in the yet-to-be-enacted FY18 budget. The latter is notable, as the Air Force has formally announced it will be retiring the B-1 and B-2 bomber fleets once the B-21 — which will be dual-capable for both conventional and nuclear missions — starts to come online in the mid-2020s. The budget request also calls for investing in new engines for the B-52 fleet to keep that aircraft going through 2050 — making it an almost 100-year-old design. “If the force structure we have proposed is supported by the Congress, bases that have bombers now will have bombers in the future,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in a service release. “They will be B-52s and B-21s.” The budget request also seeks to move forward with a new light-attack aircraft, likely either the Embraer-Sierra Nevada Corp. A-29 Super Tucano or the Textron AT-6, to provide a low-end capability. Although that program seems at odds with the high-end challenge foreseen by the Defense Department, Susanna Blume of the Center for a New American Security believes it fits in nicely, as such an aircraft would remove the need to fly expensive, high-end aircraft for that mission. Overall, the budget request calls for buying 258 F-35A fighters through the next five years. And in terms of space, the service is requesting $2 billion to fund five launches of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle. The service also seeks to increase funding for F-16 modernizations to speed upgrades with the active electronically scanned array antennas, radar warning systems and Link 16 systems. Naval warfare reporter David B. Larter contributed to this report from Washington. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/federal-budget/2018/02/12/air-force-requests-1563-billion-in-fy19-plans-to-retire-b-1-b-2-fleets/