1 novembre 2021 | International, Aérospatial
GE will provide all F-15EX engines under $1.6B contract
The final delivery of GE's F110 engines would occur in 2031, and the engine deliveries would help produce 136 F-15EXs.
8 janvier 2019 | International, C4ISR
Summary
The majority of forecasts favor Amazon for the Pentagon contract while overlooking the partnerships that MS has made with the DoD since Nadella became CEO in 2014.
By the first quarter of 2019, Azure Government Secret will support "Secret U.S. classified data or Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) level 6" which is on par with Amazon.
The question that remains is if the Pentagon will want to use Amazon for cloud infrastructure while using Microsoft for operating systems and software.
In 2019, the biggest cloud customer in the world will be the United States Department of Defense. The DoD is currently reviewing bids to award a single cloud provider a multi-year contract. Obviously, this isn't your typical enterprise IT department, transferring from on-premise servers, or a startup who needs the flexibility of cloud infrastructure to scale. The program is called the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative, or JEDI, and its purpose is to move the DoD's massive computing systems into the cloud. This one contract is worth $10 billion, or 25% of the current market, which currently stands at $40 billion in annual revenue.
Many prognosticators and reporters unanimously believe the contract will go to Amazon Web Services. This belief is so strong that vendors, such as Oracle and IBM, made a rebuttal to Congress, believing the terms of the proposal favored Amazon. However, the majority of these forecasts overlook Microsoft's strength in security and IT, and the alliances Microsoft has been forming with the DoD since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014. Admittedly, guessing a company other than Amazon will win the Pentagon contract is a pure gamble, however, there are strong indicators for Microsoft that should not be overlooked.
The Pentagon contract will move 3.4 million users and 4 million devices off private servers and into the cloud. The security risks of using servers outside the Pentagon's domain are offset by physically separated government regions and hybrid solutions that extend on-premise servers by adding the cloud where necessary. The benefits of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and other technologies like virtual reality are essential for modern warfare as real-time data will inform missions when soldiers are in the field and also help to prepare them for combat.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4231824-microsoft-amazon-win-pentagon-contract
1 novembre 2021 | International, Aérospatial
The final delivery of GE's F110 engines would occur in 2031, and the engine deliveries would help produce 136 F-15EXs.
11 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial
By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — Support is growing both in Congress and in the Pentagon to pursue a Hawaii-based ballistic missile defense radar that the Missile Defense Agency did not include in its fiscal 2021 funding request. Previous MDA budget requests in FY19 and FY20 asked for funding for the discriminating radar as well as another somewhere else in the Pacific. The plan in FY19 was to field the Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii, or HDR-H, by FY23, which meant military construction would have taken place beginning in FY21. Then in FY20, MDA requested $247.7 million for the radar. Lockheed Martin received an award to develop the radar in December 2018. But in FY21, funding for both the Hawaiian radar and the Pacific radar was missing in the request. MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill said in February, when the request was released, that the agency decided to hit the brakes on its plans to set up the radars in the Pacific, instead planning to take a new look at the sensor architecture in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command region to figure out what is necessary to handle emerging threats. Hill noted that the area is covered by a forward-deployed AN/TPY-2 radar in Hawaii as well as the deployable Sea-Based X-Band radar. Additionally, Aegis ships with their radars are mobile and can be repositioned as needed to address threats in the near term, he added. Yet, over the summer, the Hawaiian radar gained traction in Congress via funding support in the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee's version of the FY21 defense spending bill and the Senate Armed Services Committee's version of the defense policy bill. The House subcommittee injected $133 million to pursue the homeland defense radar in Hawaii, and the SASC added in $162 million to continue HDR-H development. The SASC also included language that essentially reminded the Pentagon that HDR-H was a response to a mandate in the FY18 National Defense Authorization Act to improve coverage for the threat of ballistic missiles in Hawaii. The HDR-H was also listed as an unfunded requirement for FY21 by Indo-Pacific Command. The SASC also directed the MDA to provide an updated plan that accounts for delays related to finding a site in Hawaii, noting it expects the Pentagon to fund the program in subsequent budget requests. During a presentation at the virtually held Space and Missile Defense Symposium on Aug. 4, Hill showed a slide listing focus areas for the agency in FY21. The presentation included the currently unfunded radar, third from the top of the list. “The potential for getting a radar onto Hawaii as part of another major sensor allows us to have that launch-all-the-way-to-intercept view out in a very large ocean area in the Pacific,” Hill said. The HDR-H is categorized as a focus area for the MDA “because if the [Defense] Department decides to move forward with HDR-H, then the HDR-H will be deployed as part of the U.S. homeland defense architecture against long-range threats,” Mark Wright, MDA spokesman, told Defense News in an Aug. 6 statement. The missile defense architecture “must evolve with advancements of the threat,” he added. “Space sensors do not replace but complement ground-based radars by providing track custody during radar coverage gaps. Having both terrestrial radar and space sensors provides dual phenomenology to accurately track and discriminate the threat as it continues to become more complex.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2020/08/07/support-to-pursue-hawaii-based-missile-defense-radar-continues-after-dod-drops-funding/
19 juin 2018 | International, Naval
BY AARON BOYD An accelerated-acquisition office is seeking industry's best ideas for keeping track of parts and repairs ashore and at sea. The U.S. Navy is looking for bleeding-edge technologies to improve its business systems and is using its other transaction authority to solicit ideas. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, or SPAWAR, announced June 14 its intention to use the Training and Readiness Accelerator, or TReX, consortium to manage the solicitation. On or about June 25, TReX will release the full solicitation requirements to its members, which includes “the entire innovation ecosystem including companies from—startups to Fortune 1000—universities, technology incubators, investors, public and private laboratories and non-profits,” according to its website. The solicitation will cover four areas under the Naval Operational Business Logistics Enterprise, or NOBLE, family of systems, with the overall goal of improving the Navy's material and shore readiness—including “reduced failure rate, improved repair time, improved resupply time and accuracy, affordable sustainment, mission capable and secure facilities”—and user experience—including “simplified and expedited decision making, integrated and dynamic work prioritization, digitally enabled training and collaboration and easy and intuitive user experience/interface.” The solicitation focuses on three core areas, with an overarching integrated data environment stretching across the enterprise. The core areas include the Naval Operational Supply System, or NOSS, the Naval Aviation Maintenance System, or NAMS, and the Naval Operational Maintenance Environment, or NOME. According to the solicitation, NOSS will provide planning, requisitioning, procurement, inventory control, logistics services and financial accountability of all material and property across all commodities. NAMS will provide Naval aviation—U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps—with a deployable, scalable and streamlined tactical maintenance solution to maintain the operational availability of deployed and deployable aircraft. NOME will provide the Navy with a deployable, scalable and streamlined tactical maintenance solution afloat to maintain the operational availability of deployed and deployable ships and submarines. Along with the core areas, SPAWAR is also looking for an integrated data environment that can work across platforms. While the data environment will have to work with each individual system, it is being treated as a separate solution area under this solicitation. The data environment will need to be hosted in a government-certified cloud with an impact level rating of 4/5, which cover sensitive controlled unclassified information. “The cloud environment combined with a common IDE will provide a highly available and reliable commercial solution,” the solicitation states. “The environment will also be capable of hosting and integrating applications, data, systems and services planned to be transitioned to modern commercial technologies, and accomplish this migration of government-owned applications with no degradation of services.” SPAWAR will conduct the solicitation in two phases. The first phase consists of submitting white papers for each solution—vendors can bid on any or all of them—with a tentative deadline set for July 24. SPAWAR will then down-select from that pool for Phase II, which will consist of two-hour, in-person demos in Orlando, Florida. Interested parties must be a part of the TReX consortium in order to bid. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/06/us-navy-wants-next-gen-supply-network-and-fast/149082/