8 avril 2024 | International, Terrestre, Sécurité
11 juin 2018 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — The F-35 fighter jet is finally cruising toward the end of its development phase, but a congressional watchdog is warning the Defense Department not to move to full-rate production until it's certain it's resolved all critical technical issues.
The F-35 Joint Program Office intends to make a decision in October 2019 on whether to move to full-rate production, but had planned to defer certain critical technical deficiencies until after that time, the Government Accountability Office stated in a June 5 report.
That could make the program more expensive overall.
“In its rush to cross the finish line, the program has made some decisions that are likely to affect aircraft performance and reliability and maintainability for years to come. Specifically, the program office plans to resolve a number of critical deficiencies after full-rate production,” it wrote. “Resolving these deficiencies outside of the developmental program may contribute to additional concurrency costs.”
The GAO advised the F-35 JPO to resolve all critical deficiencies before full-rate production — a recommendation with which the JPO concurs and says it will pursue.
However, it's important to understand what “resolve” means in this case.
“The Department of Defense expects the F-35 Program to resolve all critical deficiencies prior to entering Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E), with either a fix, a Service Operational Test Agency approved workaround or a formal acceptance of the deficiency,” the JPO said in a statement.
“The full-rate production decision will include an assessment of SDD [development phase] and IOT&E DRs [deficiency reports], as well as follow-on improvement DRs deferred for post-SDD action.”
Translation: While the JPO will take steps to address all critical deficiencies, there are some that may require future work in order to be completely fixed.
GAO noted that it is common practice for Defense Department acquisition programs to require that problems are “resolved” and not “fixed” because it “affords the department with more flexibility to develop alternative solutions rather than technical fixes.”
In a statement, Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin's vice president of the F-35 program, said the company was working with the JPO to prioritize and correct issues.
The F-35's next stage
The GAO report was also critical about the JPO's new plan for Block 4 follow-on modernization, telling its congressional audience that it should consider holding back funding for that phase of the program until the JPO provides full details including an independent cost estimate, final acquisition strategy and test plan.
Last year, Vice. Adm. Mat Winter, the F-35's program executive, announced that the JPO would pursue a path of rapid, agile software modernization during Block 4 called continuous capability development and delivery, or C2D2. The thrust behind C2D2 is for the government to constantly be developing, testing and delivering new capabilities as they become available, instead of as part of a traditional batch of upgrades every couple years.
Currently, the cost of the new plan is unknown. The Department of Defense plans to update its acquisition strategy in time for a Defense Acquisition Board meeting this month, when it will decide when to start the competition for Block 4 development.
By: Valerie Insinna
Currently, the cost of the new plan is unknown. The Department of Defense plans to update its acquisition strategy in time for a Defense Acquisition Board meeting this month, when it will decide when to start the competition for Block 4 development.
Sign up for our Military Space Report
Get the latest news about space and strategic systems
Subscribe
However, a full business case won't be finalized until March 2019 — despite the fact that the Pentagon has asked for $278 million in fiscal 2019 for Block 4 development.
“As a result, DOD requested funding for modernization over a year before the program has a business case for Block 4,” the report stated.
“This means that the program is asking Congress to authorize and appropriate funds for Block 4 without insight into its complete cost, schedule, and technical baselines. Furthermore, once Congress appropriates these funds, DOD would be able to award a contract, beginning a long-term commitment to Block 4, the costs of which are not fully understood.”
However, the GAO also acknowledged that there are some elements of that plan that could end up being a boon to the DoD.
For one, it plans to use “government-owned open systems architecture and acquire data rights” for Block 4 development, which could increase competition throughout the F-35's life cycle and make it easier and cheaper to upgrade the platform.
The C2D2 strategy may also “potentially shorten time frames for delivering capabilities over a traditional acquisition approach,” the agency said in the report.
Most of the noted flaws in the C2D2 plan revolve around oversight — specifically the DoD's decision to keep Block 4 underneath the F-35 program instead of making it a separate acquisition program.
“According to DOD's January 2018 report, however, each capability will be baselined separately in the program's future Block 4 annual reports to Congress,” the GAO noted. “We will review these future reports to Congress to determine what level of insight they provide into the program's cost, schedule, and performance goals.”
8 avril 2024 | International, Terrestre, Sécurité
12 août 2023 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
Instead of assuming that autonomy will offer an obvious panacea for perennial challenges, it’s smart to take a step back.
29 septembre 2020 | International, C4ISR
KELSEY ATHERTON Offering Ground-Stations-as-a-Service means customers are only obliged to pay for the amount of time they actually need to use on the station. ALBUQUERQUE: Azure Orbital, the space-connections wing of Microsoft's cloud service Azure, launched last week. By offering Ground-Stations-as-a-Service, Microsoft wants to position itself as the bridge between the Pentagon and commercial satellites. Ground stations are vital infrastructure for satellite communication, the physical node that makes all the images and information they collect useful. With the advent of lower-cost satellites, and the expansion of small satellite constellations in low earth orbit, the space industry is moving away from a locked-in model, where specific vendors only grant access to their satellites through their ground stations. “Space is just so critical to everything we do here on earth,” says Frank Rose, a former assistant secretary of state for arms control who is now at Brookings. “Deploying additional capabilities, especially small satellites, in low earth orbit will definitely improve the resiliency of our national security space architecture.” Earlier this year, Microsoft Azure won the $10 billion JEDI contract for Pentagon cloud services. Offering Ground-Stations-as-a-Service means that the customers are only obliged to pay for the amount of time they actually need on the station. Cloud service providers already have a great deal of experience in flexible demand management and in processing the data received in their servers. That makes ground stations a natural outgrowth of existing cloud competences, the company argues. In June 2020, the Space Development Agency said that rentable ground stations make it easier for the military to piggy-back on existing commercial infrastructure. When it comes to constellations of small satellites, what companies are “trying to do is to optimize their processing architecture, trying to minimize how much compute you need to do on board because of the [Size, Weight and Power] constraints, which inevitably leads them to do more on the ground,” says Mikhail Grinberg, principle at Renaissance Strategic Advisors. Yet that principal doesn't apply evenly across all applications. “For some military applications, given resiliency requirements,” says Grinberg, “they're trying to do more networking processing on board, as opposed to having an open pipe that can be tapped into.” While Azure Orbital appears aimed at the space sector broadly, it is specifically cultivating ties to the Pentagon and the defense contracting community. Partners signed up at launch include Amergint, Kongsberg Satellite Services, Viasat, and US Electrodynamics, all of whom have long histories of working with the Pentagon. Of particular note is Azure Orbital's partnership with Kratos, a company already actively working to make low-earth-orbit satellite space viable for military applications. “Right now, the current national security space architecture is very vulnerable to other countries' Anti-Satellite capabilities, primarily China's and Russia's,” says Rose. “If we can proliferate this constellation of small satellites, we can improve the resiliency of America's national security space architecture.” The military is planning for low earth orbit satellites in the battle management layer, ones that will primarily be processing data on board, having access to commercial infrastructure through Ground-Stations-as-a-Service increases the likelihood that they can be used when needed. “For satellites in low earth orbit it might be days, three to four days before it's overhead again. That's the core problem,” says Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation. “One way you can solve that is by building a lot of ground stations.” “The more you have commercial guys doing infrastructure on the ground,” says Grinberg, “if you can partition the data right, you can provide more resiliency.” As part of its bid to build strong ties between Azure and the Department of Defense, Microsoft has specifically hired career professionals of the military and intelligence communities. In late, Azure hired Chirag Parikh from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Parikh had previously served as the Director of Space Policy for the White House. William Chappell, CTO of Azure Global, announced Sept. 22nd that Azure Space had hired Stephen Kitay, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for space policy, to head Azure's space industry division. It is, actively, a project to embed Microsoft in the infrastructure of orbit. By positioning itself as an intermediary between the space sector and its end users, Microsoft can become another almost-invisible piece of that same infrastructure. Azure Orbital would also offer Microsoft a greater role in other Pentagon satellite-based projects, like cloudONE and the Advanced Battle Management System. Being able to surge connections with sensors in orbits, on demand, makes space far more flexible for human commanders. “In the last 5 years, there's been a push from the military to move towards more common ground systems,” says Weeden. What remains to be seen is if the military will be comfortable with commercial companies operating those common ground systems, or if security concerns will instead preclude military traffic riding commercial channels. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/09/microsoft-positions-itself-to-win-space-data-market-with-azure-orbital/