Sean M. Gallagher

The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. won a contract for  $10,250,000 modified contract through the Foreign Military Sales Program  to cover the Italian purchase of MQ-9 Reaper aircraft. So far, $5,022,500 of that contract has been obligated.

The contract is in response to an Italian request last August for four Reapers, over 5 years, including ground stations, for $300 million.   The Italian Air Force currently operates  RQ-1A Predators in its 32nd Wing’s 28 Squadron at Amendola.

The Reaper is the follow-on to the Predator, a “hunter-killer” UAV that can carry over 1,000 pounds of ordnance and stay “on station”  for as long as 48 hours.  28 have been built thus far, the first deploying in 2007.

The SLAM ER attack missile

Boeing has modified its SLAM ER air-launched attack missile to allow it to attack moving targets on land. The Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response was declared operational by the Navy in July, and now Boeing is preparing to roll it out to the fleet.

“Upgrading the SLAM ER’s system software to include LMT capabilities was a Navy Rapid Technology Transition effort to fill a critical need by making SLAM ER an effective weapon for destroying or disabling high-value land-based moving targets, such as missile launchers and mobile radar. The software enables F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet aircraft to continuously receive updated target coordinates from appropriate Command and Control platforms, on-ship radar, or other third-party targeting sources, and then transfer these updates to the SLAM ER in flight.”

“Third party” could, concievably, include Predator UAVs and other unmanned vehicles.  Theoretically, SLAM ER could be flown on the Raptor UAV, though that would require additional engineering.  A “man in the loop” mode allows the pilot or operator to adjust the impact point during the final approach to the target; doing that from a ground station would require additional bandwidth to the launching UAV, or direct control of the SLAM ER by someone on the ground.  But tying that capability to a long-range C4ISR platform like the Predator or Raptor would significantly extend their reach in supporting ground units in places like Afghanistan.

The SLAM ER is an evolution of the Harpoon antiship missile, which uses infrared terminal guidance to lock onto its target instead of the radar used by the Harpoon. It can be navigated by a combination intertial guidance and GPS navigation system, and has a range of over 150 nautical miles.

A Polish newpaper has reported that the Obama administration will scrap plans for “missile shield” bases in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of a sea-based approach and potential bases in Turkey and Israel.

The move comes on the heels of Obama’s recent meeting with Russian leaders, and recent revelations that Iran’s latest ballistic missile could strike targets in Europe.  It may also have been bolstered by the progress of the Aegis ABM program, which has a much better track record thus far than the land-based ABM program.

Today, Army Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O’Reilly, the director for the Missile Defense Agency, pointed to the successes of the program as a whole, in an interview at the Pentagon. “A few years ago the question was, ‘Could you even hit a missile with a missile?’ We have proven we could do that well over 35 times.”

O’Reilly said that 39 of the last 45 tries at stopping a test missile were successful. All but one miss were early in the program, and he said that one was because of a manufacturing problem, which was fixed as demonstrated by a successful test three weeks ago.

The Defense Department recently committed an additional $900 million toward fielding the Army’s Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) mobile missile defense system.

Jane’s reports that the US Army will release its new direction for ground combat vehicles in September. After canceling the majority of the Future Combat Systems program’s vehicles, the Army is taking a new look at what new vehicles should be built, and how current vehicles should be incorporated across the Army’s Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs).

The Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, hosted a workshop on June 15 at the National Defense University to bring together the Army’s ground vehicle thought leaders to hammer out the way ahead for a new ground combat vehicle. “We will work to include both lessons from the current fight and what we’ve learned from technology and build a better vehicle,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey.

While FCS was cancelled, it is expected that the FCS Network and the System of Systems Common Operating Environment (SoSCOE) Boeing developed for the vehicles will likely be incorporated into both the new ground combat vehicle and existing vehicles, according to people familiar with the program.

(UPDATE: The Air Force is reportedly considering C-130 AMP for cancellation. )

Jane’s reports that Boeing is chomping at the bit to move forward with Milestone C for its  C-130 Avionics Modernization Program. The Air Force cancelled the scheduled Defense Aquisition Board meeting on July 3o a few days in advance, and has not yet rescheduled.

Mark Angelo, program manager for C-130 AMP, told Jane’s that he and Boeing “have been given no idea as to … why it was postponed. With development complete, the risk is behind us, and the aircraft upgrade is ready.”

The C-130 AMP program is intended to “modernize, standardize, and reduce total ownership cost for the US Air Force C-130 fleet,” according to Boeing.  Its features include a “glass cockpit”, with the majority of instrumentation replaced by digital displays. Milestone C is the acquisition process decision point that approves the production and deployment of a system.

YONHAP NEWS reports that South Korea’s first attempt to put its own satellite into orbit has failed.  One of the two fairings — the aerodynamic covers for the satellite–failed to detach, resulting in it not achieving enough lift to make orbit.  The satellite is suspected to have re-entered and burned up.
“Only one fairing was ejected 216 seconds after launch with the other section remaining in place until the Science and Technology Satellite-2 (STSAT-2) separated from the second stage rocket 540 seconds into the flight, the ministry in charge of the country’s science and technology policies said. ‘The fairings weigh 300kg or three times more than the scientific satellite, making it effectively impossible for the second stage rocket to generate the necessary thrust to keep the satellite in orbit,’ said Vice Science and Technology Minister Kim Jung-hyun.”

Iran’s Sejil missile ‘threatens Europe’ .

“Uzi Rubin, former head of Israel’s ballistic missile defense program, says Iran has made a “technological and strategic breakthrough” with its Sejil-2 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which will be able to hit a swathe of European states in three to four years.That assertion…intensified concerns that Iran has stepped up its drive to acquire ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. He said that the two-stage Sejil-2 has an estimated range of 1,560 miles, not 1,250 miles as previously thought, and that the successful testing of a solid-fueled missile on May 20 was a major breakthrough for Iran.”

Watch for this being used as justification of additional work on the land-based ABM defense, and, as a result, further diplomatic tension with Russia over that system — either that, or the Obama administration is going to have to come to some sort of agreement with Russia over cooperative policies on Iran and on missile defense.

DefenseLink News Article: Stavridis: Afghanistan Situation Challenging, But Winnable.

“The situation in Afghanistan is “extremely serious,” Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis wrote, but he expressed confidence that “the coalition, working with the Afghan people, will ultimately win.”

Adm. Stavridis, the new NATO commander and former commander of US Southern Command, is at least not pulling punches.  He laid out what he sees as the keys to success in Afghanistan, and none of them are easy. Stopping collateral damage, balancing civil and military activities, and training the Afghan forces–all of these are pretty traditional counterinsurgency tasks made all the much harder by the geography and political economy of Afghanistan.  And then there’s owning the information war:

– Effective strategic communication. Messages must be well defined and communicated to the citizens of Afghanistan as well as to the 42 nations that make up the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force there, Stavridis said. Meanwhile, he cited the need for a truthful, realistic antidote to negative Taliban messaging.

The Defense Department has been reaching out to bloggers for some time now, in an effort to reach around traditional media gatekeepers to access the public.  And taking a cue from the new administration, DOD leaders have embraced social media. For example, Adm. Mike Mullen tweets. And now he’s using YouTube to solicit questions from military members and their families — and the general public — on issues surrounding the military.

(more…)

The Navy announced a few interesting C4ISR related contracts this week. One of the biggest was a $22 million cost-plus-incentive contract awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, Inc., in Fairfax, Va. The contract is for design and development of one release of Naval Integrated Tactical Environmental System-Next Generation (NITES-Next) software. The program was awarded by SPAWAR on behalf of the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence systems (PEO C4I). NITES is a system for inputting weather data into the Navy’s segment of the Global Command and Control System.

” This contract includes options for a second NITES-Next software release, as well as options for deployment, operations, and support services, support for demonstrations and exercises, and AN/UMK operations and support, which, if exercised, would bring the cumulative value of this contract to an estimated $67,719,984. If all options are exercised, work could continue until February 2015. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year.”

Also awarded:

ERAPSCO, Columbia City, Ind., is being awarded a $7,242,977 cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for the procurement of 500 AN/SSQ-125 engineering developmental model sonobuoys in support of Navy Antisubmarine Forces for the mission of detection, classification and localization of adversary submarines during peacetime and combat operations. Work will be performed in DeLeon Springs, Fla., (55 percent) and Columbia City, Ind., (45 percent), and is expected to be completed in August 2012. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured pursuant to the FAR 6.302-1. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, Patuxent River, Md., is the contracting activity (N00421-09-C-0073).

Not C4ISR but just damn cool:

Lockheed Martin Corp., Manassas, Va., is being awarded an $8,119,625 firm-fixed-priced contract to advance the development of ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology system components and subsystems for Navy applications. The work will support the Naval Facilities Engineering Services Center (NAVFAC ESC) Ocean Facilities Department in the execution of ocean energy systems development to advance OTEC as a renewable ocean energy technology for future applications at Department of Navy facilities. The primary work to be performed includes identifying and supporting the most efficient and direct path to OTEC commercialization, and OTEC component and subsystem design, fabrication and validation tests. Work will be performed in Hawaii, California, Texas, and Virginia, and is expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2010. Funds are provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was competitively procured via the Navy Electronic Commerce Online website, with four proposals received. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Specialty Center Acquisitions, NAVFAC, Port Hueneme, Calif., is the contracting activity (N62583-09-C-0083).

This was originally posted as “mess casualty incident response”, which would have described most of the meals in the enlisted mass I sampled while a naval officer:

Cipher Systems, LLC. Crofton, Md., was awarded on August 18, 2009 a $9,291,882 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to create a prototype for state of the art mass causality incident response. This prototype will be designed to provide surge capacity to mass casualty incidents such as terrorist attacks, pandemic flu, natural and accidental disasters. The contractor should address all aspects required to provide a viable, sustainable response. This includes equipment, training, staffing, coordination re-imbursement and innovative medical care suitable for civilian and military use or technology transfer. Work is to be performed in Crofton, Md., (66 precent) and Hackensack, N.J., (34 precent) with an estimated completion date of Aug. 17, 2012. Bids were solicited on FedBizOpps.gov with ninety (90) bids received. Defense Threat Reduction Agency BE-BCR Fort Belvoir, Va., is the contracting activity (HDTRA1-09-C-0059).

And the Army is fixing networks at APG:

Federal Network Systems, LLC/Verizon, Arlington, Va., was awarded on Aug. 18, 2009 a $ 6,893,091 IDIQ fair market firm-fixed-price contract for the acquisition in support of the Installation Information Infrastructure Modernization Program for Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Work is to be performed in Aberdeen Proving Ground with an estimated completion date of Sept. 30, 2010. Ten bids solicited with six bids received. Army Contracting Command, National Capitol Region Contracting Center, Alexandria, Va., is the contracting activity (W91QUZ-06-D-0030).

Also in the maritime domain:

Lockheed Martin MS2, Manassas, Va., is being awarded a $25,104,813 modification to previously awarded contract (N00024-04-C-6207) for Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off-the-Shelf Insertion (A-RCI) Hardware consisting of Virginia Class long lead material and economic order material. A-RCI is a sonar system upgrade that integrates and improves towed array, hull array, sphere array, and other ship sensor processing through rapid insertion of commercial off-the-shelf-based hardware and software. It has already been successfully integrated into the first ten ships of the Virginia Class which have now begun a modernization program and the procurement of new construction systems for the next four ships. Work will be performed in Manassas, Va., (62 percent) and Clearwater, Fla., (38 percent), and is expected to be completed by December 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington Navy Yard, D.C., is the contracting activity.

GYROCAM Systems LLC, Sarasota, Fla., is being awarded a $5,910,000 modification under a previously awarded firm-fixed-priced contract (M67854-07-D-5075) to exercise an option period for the procurement of Spare 360 Camera Systemsfor the MRAP vehicle. The MRAP vehicles are armored vehicles with blast resistant underbodies designed to protect the crew from mine blasts, fragmentary, and direct fire weapons. Work will be performed in Sarasota, Fla., and work is expected to be completed Jul. 31, 2010. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Marine Corps Systems Command, Quantico, Va., is the contracting activity.

BAE Systems National Security Solutions, Burlington, Mass., was awarded on Aug. 14, 2009 a $7,010,160 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract. The purpose of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology URGENT) Phase II Program is to extend accuracy and productivity to human geospatial analysts by advancing the state-of-the-art in automated scene analysis. BAE’s design concept proposes to achieve this by fusing Light Detection and Ranging and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data source (sources used to help detect and classify urban geospatial features) for reasoning over scene content, automatically characterizing object attributes and function, and capturing analyst expertise using advanced machine learning approached. As a result, the program aims to achieve a significant reduction on latency between collecting geospatial data and suing it for mission planning, navigation, targeting, etc. Work is to be performed in Burlington, Mass., (93 percent), and Los Angeles, Calif., (7 percent) with an estimated completion date of May 15, 2011. Bids were solicited on the World Wide Web with one bid received. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, Va., is the contracting activity (HR0011-09-C-0101).

Science Applications International Corp., San Diego, Calif., was awarded on Aug.14, 2009 a $6,138,668 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract. The primary objective of Science Applications International Corporation Retriever project is to advance technology development and demonstration programs for location and identification or radio frequency signals. Work is to be performed in Ypsilanti, Mich., (62 percent), Nashua, N.H., (20 percent), Piscataway, N.J., (13 percent), and Vienna, Va., (5percent) with an estimated completion date of May 14, 2012. Bids were solicited on the World Wide Web with thirteen bids received. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, Va., is the contracting activity (HR0011-09-C-0112).

Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., Herndon, Va., was awarded a $9,661,654 cost plus fixed fee contract to provide national security strategic simulations, exercise analysis for the Center for Applied Strategic Leadership, Institute for National Studies, National Defense University. At this time, $275,000 has been obligated. 55TH Contracting Squadron, Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., is the contracting activity (SP0700-03-D-1380).

ITT Corp., Electronic Systems Radar Systems – Gilfillan, Van Nuys, Calif., is being awarded a $29,191,730 firm-fixed-price contract for AN/SPS-48G(V) radar modification kits to support the recovery obsolescence availability radar used to enhance launch on search capability aboard Navy ships. AN/SPS-48′s radars enhance capability of missile guidance. The modification kits are expected to increase operational availability and decrease operating and support costs. Work will be performed in Van Nuys, Calif., and is expected to be completed by August 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, Navy Yard, D.C., is the contracting activity (N00024-09-C-5395).

DRS Sensors and Targeting Systems, Cypress, Calif., is being awarded a $5,676,407 cost-plus-fixed-fee completion contract for research and development in the area of photon-trap structures for quantum advanced detectors. This effort will include: research to develop an infrared imaging system that operates over a bandwidth extending from 0.5 to 5.0 microns and a resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels. The focal plane array of this imaging system must exhibit a high detectivity and low noise equivalent temperature at 200 K. Work will be performed in Cypress, Calif., and is expected to be completed by January 2013. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was competitively procured via Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Broad Agency Announcement with 22 proposals received. The Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Newport, R.I., is the contracting activity (N66604-09-C-3652).