The Navy’s ongoing carrier conundrum

Sur le même sujet

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  21 août 2019 | International, Terrestre

  Pentagon terminates program for redesigned kill vehicle, preps for new competition

  By: Jen Judson UPDATE: This story has been updated to include a statement from Raytheon. WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has moved from taking a “strategic pause” on the Redesigned Kill Vehicle program to outright killing it. The Department of Defense decided to terminate the current Boeing contract to develop the RKV — effective Aug. 22 — “due to technical design problems,” according to an Aug. 21 statement by the department. Raytheon is the actual developer of the RKV and serves as a sub-contractor to Boeing. The RKV would have replaced the current Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) on the Ground-Based Interceptor, which makes up the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system designed to protect the homeland from ballistic missile threats. It would have also been fielded on all future ground-based interceptors — a total of 64 ultimately. The EKV is designed to destroy targets in high-speed collisions after separating from the booster rocket. The EKV required technical changes in the past several years due to issues in tests. The Missile Defense Agency decided to initiate a program to redesign the kill vehicle. In the meantime, MDA has had several successful tests of the GMD system with the EKV following engineering changes. Now that the RKV is dead in the water, the Pentagon plans to move forward with a new, next-generation interceptor competition, the statement said. According to a defense official, no more ground-based interceptors will be built, and all future interceptors that are fielded as part of the GMD system will be the new interceptors. “Ending the program was the responsible thing to do,” Mike Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said in the statement. “Development programs sometimes encounter problems. After exercising due diligence, we decided the path we're going down wouldn't be fruitful, so we're not going down that path anymore. This decision supports our efforts to gain full value from every future taxpayer dollar spent on defense.” With the blessing of the undersecretary of defense, Griffin made the decision on Aug. 14 to terminate the program, one week after he told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, to expect a decision on the way forward for RKV soon. MDA and Boeing in December 2018 deferred a critical design review of the RKV “due to the failure of certain critical components to meet technical requirements as specified in the development contract,” the statement noted. After MDA assessed the issues, it issued a stop work order on the contract in May to analyze alternative options. “The department ultimately determined the technical design problems were so significant as to be either insurmountable or cost-prohibitive to correct,” the statement said. The DoD plans to take data garnered from research and testing of the RKV prior to its cancellation to inform the next-generation interceptor program, “which will include a new kill vehicle,” according to the statement. “The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is updating its requirements in the face of an increasingly complex threat environment," Raytheon said in a statement. The company “supports their decision to cease work on the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV) and initiate a competition for the next-generation interceptor to meet these advanced threats. Raytheon will continue to develop and offer a wide range of advanced missile defense technologies available to protect the United States now and in the future.” There are 44 ground-based interceptorss in place at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, with plans to add 22 additional missile silos at Fort Greely to support 20 more ground-based interceptors. The defense official said the Pentagon is still working through the details of a new, next-generation interceptor competition, including when it will be initiated and the pace at which the technology will be developed and fielded. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/08/21/dod-tanks-redesigned-kill-vehicle-program-for-homeland-defense-interceptor/

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  22 juin 2018 | International, Naval

  Upgrading US Navy ships is difficult and expensive. Change is coming

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Navy is looking at extending the life of its surface ships by as much as 13 years, meaning some ships might be 53 years old when they leave the fleet. Here's the main problem: keeping their combat systems relevant. The Navy's front-line combatants ― cruisers and destroyers ― are incredibly expensive to upgrade, in part because one must cut open the ship and remove fixtures that were intended to be permanent when they were installed. When the Navy put Baseline 9 on the cruiser Normandy a few years ago, which included all new consoles, displays and computer servers in addition to the software, it ran the service $188 million. Now, the capability and function of the new Baseline 9 suite on Normandy is staggering. The cost of doing that to all the legacy cruisers and destroyers in the fleet would be equally staggering: it would cost billions. So why is that? Why are the most advanced ships on the planet so difficult to keep relevant? And if the pace of change is picking up, how can the Navy stay relevant in the future without breaking the national piggy bank? Capt. Mark Vandroff, the current commanding officer of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center and former Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program manager, understands this issue better than most. At this week's American Society of Naval Engineers symposium, Vandroff described why its so darn hard to upgrade the old ships and how future designs will do better. Here's what Vandroff had to say: “Flexibility is a requirement that historically we haven't valued, and we haven't valued it for very good reasons: It wasn't important. “When you think of a ship that was designed in the ‘70s and built in the ‘80s, we didn't realize how fast and how much technology was going to change. We could have said: ‘You know what? I'm going to have everything bolted.' Bolt down the consoles in [the combat information center], bolt in the [vertical launch system] launchers ― all of it bolted so that we could more easily pop out and remove and switch out. “The problem was we didn't value that back then. We were told to value survivability and density because we were trying to pack maximum capability into the space that we have. That's why you have what you have with the DDG-51 today. And they are hard to modernize because we valued survivability and packing the maximum capability into the minimum space. And we achieved that because that was the requirement at the time. “I would argue that now as we look at requirements for future ships, flexibility is a priority. You are going to have to balance it. What if I have to bolt stuff down? Well, either we are going to give up some of my survivability standards or I'm going to take up more space to have the equivalent standards with an different kind of mounting system, for example. And that is going to generate a new set of requirements ― it's going to drive design in different directions than it went before. “I suppose you could accuse the ship designers in the 1980s of failure to foresee the future, but that's all of us. And the point is they did what they were told to do. Flexibility is what we want now, and I think you will see it drive design from this point forward because it is now something we are forced to value.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/21/upgrading-us-navy-ships-is-difficult-and-expensive-change-is-coming/

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  16 février 2023 | International, C4ISR

  NATO members line up to join new space-based data collection effort

  Sixteen governments, plus alliance invitees Sweden and Finland, have so far joined the initiative.