The U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, CA awarded General Dynamics Robotic Systems a $12.7 million contract for 4 Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) for the Littoral Combat Ship’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Mission Module.
As the prime contractor in this team effort, General Dynamics will provide the Navy with an 11-meter USV that can perform long endurance missions due to its efficiency. The USVs will employ towed arrays, dipping sonar sensors and acoustic sources as payloads to carry out their Anti-Submarine Warfare mission. General Dynamics’ teammates on this project include:
The US Department of Defense has submitted its FY 2007 budget request for $439.3 billion. This is 7% more than the FY 2006 request, but slightly less than the $441.5 billion eventually appropriated by Congress in the FY 2006 budget. Note that this is just the first step in a long process that involves bills drawn up in both the House of Representatives and the US Senate, which will add some things, subtract others, and impose conditions. Then the House and Senate bills must be reconciled in committee into one common bill for the President to sign into law. Last year’s FY 2006 budget, introduced in February 2005, was finally signed into law on December 30, 2005.
This budget would wait until October 17, 2006 for Presidential signature as Public Law No. 109-364. It provides $462.8 billion in budget authority, and Senate and House conferees added the $70 billion defense supplemental budget request to the act – overall, therefore, the act authorizes $532.8 billion for FY 2007.
Because this budget was put together in parallel with the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, it bears some imprints from that process and begins to implement some of the QDR’s proposed directions. Rather than try to summarize such a vast document for our readers, DID will simply link you to the key source and ancillary materials, which contain their own summaries as well as access to more detailed information.
