Sniper ATPs
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On Dec 7/07 the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced [PDF] Saudi Arabia’s request for 40 of Lockheed Martin’s AN/AAQ-33 SNIPER Advanced Targeting Pods, which would replace the older LANTIRN twin-pod systems installed on Saudi F-15S Strike Eagles. Sniper ATP pods significantly enhance an aircraft’s strike capability by adding stabilized long-range laser tracking and targeting illumination, high performance day/night surveillance, GPS targeting capabilities, and even some air-air target detection and tracking abilities to aircraft using them.

Most DSCA announcements attract little attention, but Saudi sales are facing some political hurdles in Congress these days…

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Translators on the ground are an often-overlooked but critically important aspect of US operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, et. al. Indeed, when L-3 Communications acquired Titan Corp. in a $2+ billion June 2005 deal, DID noted that one of the strengths it was buying was Titan’s status as the U.S. Government’s leading supplier of linguists and interpreters under the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command’s (INSCOM) Worldwide Linguist Support Contract.

In a services business, however, such strengths are only as durable as the contracts they’re associated with. Indeed, this is one of the reasons services businesses tend to have low acquisition multiples.

A December 2006 US Army award brought that principle into sharp focus, by handing the 5-year, $4.65 billion contract for Iraq-related translation and interpretation services to Global Linguistic Solutions LLC (GLS), a joint venture formed by security contractor DynCorp International (51%) and McNeil Technologies. But a GAO protest placed the whole process into limbo – and the GAO’s ruling stirred the issue up further. The process has finally resolved again after almost a full year, with L-3 providing all translation services in the interim. And the winner is…

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Basic Nuclear Propulsion
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In October 2006, the US Navy awarded over $1 billion in contracts related to naval nuclear propulsion, some of which echo a set of contracts issued in October 2005 that were worth about $898.5 million. DID has provided related comparative figures for our readers where applicable, and we have continued to track nuclear propulsion-related contracts throughout FY 2007. Including awards over the last week worth over $1 billion.

Note that all contracts are awarded by The US Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, DC, and that completion date or other additional information will not be provided on Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program contracts. Other contracts related to maintenance, however, may show completion dates.

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Patriot PAC-2
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A recent US National Intelligence Assessment [redacted NIE summary] believes Iran’s nuclear program has stopped, but others, including the United Nations and Israel are more skeptical. Intelligence is always a very uncertain and ambiguous exercise, and occasionally features assessments like the somewhat infamous NIE whose 1962 judgment was that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba¹. Uncertainty creates perceptions of risk, and perceptions of risk lead to behaviors aimed at reducing that risk. Iraq is no longer a missile/WMD threat, Iran’s regular and Revolutionary Guards air forces remain relatively weak, and Iran’s ballistic missiles based on North Korean designs lack accuracy. Still, even a lucky conventional missile could create issues in some Gulf states if it hit important oil-related infrastructure, or hit the larger and more nebulous target of business confidence.

Arms spending is an incomplete but very concrete way of tracking a state’s real assessment of threats and priorities. It’s becoming clear that Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, have stepped up their defense spending in recent years. Those expenditures cover a range of equipment, but anti-ballistic missile capabilities appear to be rising to the top of the priority list. Now over $10 billion worth of Patriot missile upgrade requests in the UAE and Kuwait are shining a spotlight on the region’s new defense priorities…

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A330 MRTT with
boom & drogues
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EADS Airbus’ politically controversial “Power 8” restructuring plan is already planning to shift future production out of Europe, and a recent EADS announcement intensified that pressure with more downward pressure on earnings. Worse, Airbus’ customers insist on pricing their contracts in dollars, while its costs are mostly denominated in Euros. EADS CEO has complained that every time the US dollar falls by 10 cents, Airbus loses $1 billion dollars – even as the Euro has risen from $1.20 to almost $1.50 over the last few years. Some analysts think this is a dodge (financial hedging strategies exist), but CEO Louis Gallois has apparently decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, you had better join ‘em. Deutsche Welle:

“We don’t have a choice,” Louis Gallois, chief executive of EADS, told Europe 1 radio Monday. Gallois said the only way to “prepare the company for a dollar that no one can control is—unfortunately—to set up shop in a dollar zone.”

The French government is reportedly less than happy about this, and has fired a shot across EADS’ bow in return…

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Keeping track of…
by John Batchelor
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For the last 50 years, newer fighters have been sold as requiring less maintenance than their predecessors, due to technical advances. As people like Chuck Spinney and the Congressional Research Service have documented, the reverse has been true. Escalating complexity in electronics, engines, wiring, et. al. delivers required capabilities, but creates multiplying points of failure. Each component may be more reliable than its predecessors on an individual level, but the math means they fall short when put together. In addition, the escalating complexity makes fixes in the field more difficult – and sometimes impossible. This shifts more maintenance to large, specialized rear-echelon depots, which in turn requires more transportation of parts, more infrastructure – and either longer turnaround times, a larger parts inventory of expensive equipment, or both.

The result is that each new generation of fighter aircraft not only sports a price tag that rises faster than inflation, it’s also less available for flight. This, in turn, magnifies the impact of the numbers cuts that their higher price tags produce, by creating a drop in operational aircraft that’s even sharper than the drop in replacement purchases. The military’s reaction is to keep numbers up by keeping aircraft in service for much longer periods, hence the aging aircraft issue that plagues the USAF and most other air forces around the globe. New aircraft types are also expected to serve longer, of course, which in turn drives up their initial costs coming out of the design stage. And the flat spin continues…

That decades-long defense death spiral has finally reached a point where it’s prompting musings about the collapse of American TacAir, and European countries with their small and dwindling defense budgets are also strongly affected. If the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter was to have any hope of becoming a commercial and operational success, it needed to change that operating cost dynamic. To do that, Lockheed Martin, BAE, and the international JSF team have turned to embedded HUMS diagnostics. Even that probably won’t be enough, absent integration with ALIS – which an IEEE paper has described as “perhaps the most advanced and comprehensive set of diagnostic, prognostic, and health management capabilities yet to be applied to an aviation platform.”

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RAF C-17
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In 2000 the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) signed a 7-year ‘lease-and-support’ agreement with Boeing and the United States Air Force for the use of 4 Boeing C-17 Globemaster IIIs (three + one “active reserve”) for the period 2001 – 2007, with an option for a possible extension to 9 years. Although it has the ability to operate from unprepared strips, the RAF uses it purely as a strategic transport aircraft to established bases. The C-17 made its RAF operational debut during the Afghanistan conflict in 2001.

Instead of extending the lease, a deal struck with Boeing in 2006 saw the UK buy all 4 aircraft outright. That deal will also add a 5th aircraft to the RAF C-17 fleet when it enters service in 2008, alongside its compatriots at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Now concerns about late A400M delivery, and front-line operational needs, have confirmed the addition of a 6th aircraft with a contract…

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SM-3 seeker: target!
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A lot has been written in recent years about the improvements in air-air missiles. Short-range air-air missiles (SRAAMs) have received particular attention due to their vastly improved wide-angle seekers, computer processor improvements driven by Moore’s Law, and g-tolerant maneuverability several times that of manned fighter aircraft. Some analysts now believe that close-in aerial combat may at last be threatening to fulfill missile engineers’ old claims of “see, fire, and kill” – a development that would make cheap aircraft with new missiles a very significant threat, if true. Medium range AAM (MRAAM) designs have also made significant strides in performance.

How big are these strides? Normally, hitting a missile either in the atmosphere or in the lower echelons of space requires large mid-course interceptor rockets, theater defense missiles like IAI/Boeing’s Arrow 2 or the USA’s THAAD, or the naval SM-3. But what if all the energy required to get off the ground and moving at speed was already taken care of, line of sight expanded by being at altitude, and the defensive missile could be moved very close to the launcher? If that was true, could you take a shorter-range MRAAM, add enhancements to it and a complementary infared seeker from a SRAAM, and use it as a first line of defense to counter, say, a ballistic missile during its early launch phase?

Raytheon – and the US Missile Defense Agency – think the answer may be “yes.” Hence the program called NCADE, the Network Centric Airborne Defense Element… and its potential may be even greater than its sponsors have considered. Now, it also has a successful test under its belt.

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M299 launcher
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Lockheed Martin recently announced a $51.3 million U.S. Army contract to supply an additional 430 M299 helicopter-mounted missile launchers (402 USA, 38 foreign military sales) and 376 launcher electronic assemblies for U.S. and international forces. The contract from the US Army’s Aviation and Missile Command, at Redstone Arsenal, AL also includes multiple spares, engineering services and depot support.

Lockheed Martin produces the electronics for the M299 launcher at its facility in Ocala, FL, and Marvin Engineering in Inglewood, CA performs final assembly and test. This order will extend M299 production activity in Ocala and in Inglewood until late 2011, as Deliveries are scheduled to run through the 3rd quarter of 2011.

DAGRs & Hellfires
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The M299 launcher weighs 145 pounds and supports 4 Hellfire II laser-guided anti-armor missiles, or up to 4 Longbow Hellfire dual guidance (laser/radar) fire-and-forget missiles, or up to 16 of Locklheed Martin’s new laser-guided DAGR 70mm rockets. The M299 launcher is integrated on the AH-64D Apache Longbow, Britain’s WAH-64 MK1 Apache helicopters, the USMC’s new AH-1Z Viper (Cobra family) attack helicopter, Eurocopter’s Tiger scout/attack helicopter, and the SH-60B Seahawk.

John Howard (left)
G.W. Bush (right)
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On Sept 5/07, The Australia-United States Treaty on Defense Trade Cooperation was signed by Australian Prime Minister John Howard and US President George W. Bush. The USA and Canada have had a special agreement for several decades, designed to remove many defense export restrictions on US-Canadian industrial cooperation. In June 2007, Britain and the USA also agreed to a treaty framework.

The new agreements with Britain and Australia were not fully defined when signed, however, and have not been formally ratified. This DID article explains the issues with the current system, the intent of the treaty, and the steps involved on the way to implementing it, now that the full text has been released…

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