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  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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  27 décembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Why the Pentagon’s cyber innovation could fall behind

  By: Justin Lynch Silicon Valley is the home to the transistor and the birthplace of the IT industry. Boston is the home of prominent universities and technology companies such as Raytheon and Boston Scientific. So where will the country's hub of cybersecurity innovation reside? A new paper argues that a nucleus of new cybersecurity technologies may struggle to form in the United States. Because the Department of Defense's research facilities are dispersed throughout the country and located in smaller metropolitan regions, the Army is in danger of stagnating when it comes to technology innovation, a Dec. 18 paper in the Army's Cyber Defense Review argued. “Without immediate, bold action, the Army will miss its best opportunity to seize the initiative in the current Cyber Cold War,” wrote Col. Stoney Trent, an Army official who now works for the Pentagon's top IT officer in the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. “The Secretary of Defense fully understands the need for dramatic improvement, and fifteen years of Army acquisition failures have created the crisis necessary for change.” Trent took aim at the Army's decision to move its cyber headquarters to Fort Gordon, Georgia, saying it “lacks most of the characteristics that have attracted technologists to other innovation regions.” “Limited public infrastructure and services, sparse employment options, a humid subtropical climate, a lack of a private research university, and distance from urban centers will likely delay the emergence of innovative technologists in Augusta-Richmond County,” he wrote. The state of Georgia, which is partnering with the Army on innovation near Fort Gordon, opened the first phase of a planned a $100 million dollar center earlier this year. But while Trent argued that the Army has “limited input over the location of its installations and major activities,” because basing decisions are made by Congress, the dispersed locations are not ideal for improving the Pentagon's cyber prowess. “Due to the location of Army research activities, very few scientists and engineers have access to the operators and analysts who will have to use the technologies under development,” he wrote. On the contrary, large cities are engines of innovation because they have more local resources, a higher degree of subject area experts and a larger local workforce, Trent argued. “This exponential increase in innovation is related to social networks and access to ideas, resources, and expertise in more populated urban settings.” That makes locations like Moffett Air Field in Santa Clara County near Silicon Valley, Fort Devens near Boston, and Fort Hamilton in New York City as potential hubs that “have been left fallow,” Trent argued. “Decades of studies indicate the importance of a culture of experimentation. While our adversaries are experimenting, we must not dither.” https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2018/12/26/why-the-pentagons-cyber-innovation-could-fall-behind

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  7 mai 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Contracts for May 6, 2021

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