Sequester-Busting Defense Budget a Non-Starter to Majority

• The budget trial balloon floated a few days ago showing the Administration going back to pre-sequestration defense spending increases received an abruptly negative reaction from the Republican-controlled Congress, with members making statements against both the breadth of the sequestration roll-back outside of defense and the tax increases needed to fund the change. The defense spending suggestion appears to have proved inadequate bait to change the majority party’s heart regarding hard spending limits. A Republican counter-proposal of sorts seems to be in the offing, concentrating on entitlement reform as a funding source. The positioning is likely to last throughout the year, with it becoming a bit more shrill as the presidential primary campaigns gain momentum.

Asia

• The Philippine Navy will be the beneficiary of Australia’s recycling of heavy landing craft ships, with a package of spare parts. The two were decommissioned at the end of 2014. There are three others, decommissioned a couple years prior, that the Philippines is considering purchasing.

• The elusive new Russian drone program is slowly becoming more public. The Russian Altair program is not to be confused with the other Altair drone.

Europe

• Germany has been invited into the Space Situational Awareness club that includes seven other countries sharing space telemetry data under stringent secrecy conditions.

• Russia buzzed just outside U.K. airspace with a strategic bomber and a couple MiG-31s, causing multiple interceptions and even civilian air traffic pauses. The news cycle in Britain right now includes much talk of investigation reports of Kremlin involvement with a high-profile assassination of former Russian citizen in the U.K. who was a critic of Russia. The U.K. summoned the Russian ambassador, whose reaction appears to be summed up with “what incident?” In the air, the British Typhoons were supported by both Norwegian F-16s and French Mirage 2000s.

• Airbus sacked its military aircraft chief as European partners chafe at continuing delays in the delivery of the A400M heavy lift plane. Domingo Ureña Raso is out and the program’s industrial activities will be transferred to another unit. A wider reorganization is underway, the details of which are to be announced in late February.

Americas

• The GAO studied construction contracts for the government and found that, while subcontractors were given the impression that their business was competitively bid, there is not much evidence that this is done formally, and further, that the prime contractors appear to give the government bids based only directionally on the subcontractor bids that they receive. The GAO study doesn’t draw too much conclusion from this, but it does appear to be concerned that the government either isn’t benefitting from the bidding, or that it is wrongly relying on assurances that the prices they are getting are the product of competitive bidding.

• Another F-22 suffered a landing mishap last week, this one with a picture of the stealth fighter atop a foamed runway and appearing to list to port. The accident was attributed initially to an overheating brake that caught fire. The last incident cost just under a couple million dollars to fix, or just 1 percent of the loaded cost of a new F-22.

• The odd fellows over at DARPA are looking to formalize a program seeking better networking technology to allow manned and unmanned systems to operate together more independently from headquarters. In its simplest form, it would allow daisy-chaining of lower-powered communications to allow more stealthy interactions and more protection from jamming, in addition to more intelligent interpolation and execution of orders coming from headquarters that may prove intermittently available. The Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program is in initial discussion stages now.

Today’s Video

• The poor state of Russian drone technology addressed above is likely not at fault for the downing of a drone presumed to be flown by Russia or the pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels. This video, reportedly of Ukrainian soldiers shooting down the device, shows what appears to be a very lucky shot.

AN-70 Aerial Transports Finally To Be Produced

AN-70

Antonov’s AN-70 has had a long and difficult development history from its first studies and concepts in 1979. Roadblocks have included the dissolution of its sponsoring state in 1991, the crash of the initial prototype aircraft in a 1995 collision with its chase plane, and the selection of the EADS A400M development project as the basis of Europe’s Future Large Aircraft (FLA). Antonov’s project has been kept alive on a shoestring budget by the participating companies, who believe that they have a winner on their hands if they can just bring it into production. The A400M’s struggles and cost escalation, and the C-130J‘s 20-ton limitations, have validated that assessment – but assessments don’t meet payroll, or pay for equipment.

The FLA loss was indeed a bitter blow to a Ukrainian program that had already seen many setbacks. As the program inched along in limbo for many years, it even looked like the FLA loss might turn out to be fatal, consigning the AN-70 to “what if” status on par with Canada’s fabled CF-105 Avro Arrow fighter. Recent developments, more than 30 years after the project first began, have finally changed that status.

Drone Maker Bakes Exclusion Zone Into Devices

• DJI, the manufacturer of the drone that crashed on White House grounds, is pushing a mandatory firmware “upgrade” that disables their devices within a 15.5 mile radius around Washington D.C. area. The move is a fast and shrewd move for a firm that likely faced – and still might – greater regulatory burdens after a series of ne’er-do-well recreational drone incidents. DJI had already developed the code for location exclusion in anticipation of needing to keep its customers a safe distance from airports and other obvious safety hazards. The White House incident comes just as civilian technology has driven military-class functionality to five-figure prices, and the resulting boom in recreational use has drawn calls for regulation based on safety and privacy concerns. For those who aren’t concerned about breaking regulations, U.S. contractors and others are developing countermeasures of various sorts.

Asia

• Japan’s much-observed three-year defense budget increase is really just a return to the norm when seen historically.

• Russia, facing 10 percent cuts to most budget departments, will hold harmless its defense budget from those cuts, as well as cuts anticipated to be about five percent per year for the next three years. The government statement on the “Anti-Crisis Plan” included language (“…to stabilize the work of system-based organizations…”) that in Russian usage connotes a statist, planned economy.

Europe

• Europe’s commissioner in charge of space policy is raising eyebrows with a pronouncement that she hopes to force member countries that have access to high resolution space imagery to share it with countries who have not made such investments. In the meantime, she has reconfirmed the commitment to using Soyuz rockets for some of the future Galileo network satellite launches, despite the sad outcomes of the last two satellites launched with the Russian technology. They will also purchase the services of three Ariane 5 rockets, which can each lift four satellites to orbit.

Americas

• Just as various think pieces have been proliferating predicting the unaffordability of maintaining the U.S.’s nuclear deterrent, the general leading Global Strike Command told Aviation Week about the secret analysis making the rounds for the Long Range Standoff project. This comes less than a week after the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent RFI was released in hopes of finding a replacement for the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles and related control and launch systems.

• Breaking Defense caught Pentagon procurement chief Frank Kendall between hearings and got him on record indicating that the F/A-XX replacement for the almost fielded and almost affordable F-35 and F-22 will get “significant” funding to develop technologies and keep design teams together and working.

• In the actual hearing that Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, attended, he discoursed to to the House Armed Services Committee about what sorts of reform worked. He pointedly showed that various procurement reforms appeared not to move the cost needle in the right direction, and that the best medicine for keeping costs down was consistent budgeting with long-term planning. “the rules our program managers must follow are still too complicated and burdensome,” said Kendall. “We need the flexibility to tailor our contracts.”

• The Army found out the hard way that rotary aircraft-borne scouts are expensive, grounding the Kiowa upon the onset of budget sequestration. And then an interesting thing happened: an opportunistic use of drones – sometimes even controlled by crews in attack helicopters – burgeoned. In one battalion, more than half of Apache attack missions involved drones. It’s given the Army something to think about, the disadvantage stemming from the lack of a human observer can be made up for with the capability of going higher, faster, and staying longer on mission.

• FedBid, a firm that contracts with major federal agencies to provide reverse auction procurement services, is currently barred from new government contracts until a U.S. Air Force proposed debarment is settled. The news comes four months after a damning Veterans Affairs inspector general report.

Today’s Video

• SpaceX released a rendered video of its Falcon Heavy heavy lift vehicle, the one that the U.S. Air Force is now legally obligated not to arbitrarily dislike.

Administration Budget to Reverse Sequestration

• The Obama Administration is reportedly about to start pushing a suggested defense appropriation 8 percent above last year’s, an increase that by itself would roughly equal Germany’s annual defense spending. Procurement accounts would see a 15 percent increase. $51 billion would be set aside for overseas mission funding, an interesting part of the budget to watch. It has become known as a sanctuary of sorts for unrelated programs that would have been cut during sequestration which will presumably have to be unwound when those missions draw down.

Asia

• Turkey is allowing would-be conscripts to pay a fee to absolve them of military service. The $7,500 fee is put into the Defense Industry Support Fund, which finances defense hardware purchases. Some rough estimates put expected revenues at between $1.2 billion and $1.6 billion. The same fund already raises what is thought to be more than a billion dollars per year with special sin taxes, such as levies on alcohol, gambling and tobacco.

• Korea Aerospace Industries completed its first test flight of the amphibious Surion helicopter.

Europe

• Russia is being accused of deploying Iskander-K cruise missiles within a couple hours drive of Estonia. The U.S. has argued that this is a bright-line violation of nuclear arms control treaties and complained previously about remotely observed testing of either this missile or one very like it.

• The U.K.’s secretary of state for defense wrote a somewhat self-congratulatory think piece that reveals the direction he’s pushing MoD culture. “So as we work towards the next Strategic Defence and Security Review we will do so neither as victims resigned to further budget cuts; nor as fanatics opposed to any reforms at all….”

• Slovakia is warming to Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks for what is thought to be a nine-unit procurement.

Americas

• Orbital Sciences Corporation’s shareholders approved, as expected, the merger agreement with ATK. The deal will close within weeks.

• Another report indicates that the Navy is pushing for the new LX(R) “cost-effective amphibious ship” to be based on the LPD-17 San Antonio class design. This has been well predicted. Meanwhile, Huntington Ingalls, is already producing infographics promoting the use of its LPD-17 platform.

• Continuing a spate of UAV-related technology acquisitions, Raytheon bought the 50-employee firm Sensintel, which will be folded into the Missile Systems business.

Today’s Video

• Footage from Russian television comprising a show of force – an exercise of moving an Iskander-M missile launcher to the arctic (and launch at 2:30).

China Buying Russian S-400s at $500 Million Per

• Russia’s S-300 surface-to-air missile upgrade back in 2010 was so good, they opted to rebadge it the S-400. It has also gone under the names SA-21, Triumf and S-300PMU-3. It has been the object of much diplomatic hand-wringing as western nations have pleaded, begged, cajoled, threatened and otherwise attempted to prevent Russia from selling these to certain countries. China has apparently purchased six battalions of the systems, which means 48 launch vehicles. Interestingly, the battalions are reputedly priced at $500 million per, pricing them roughly on par with the U.S.’s Patriot, although the annual cost of ownership is likely to be much less.

Asia

• As China tries to stand up a carrier group, thousands of novel technologies need to be adopted by the PLA Navy. One more checkbox ticked off is the refueling pods, eight years in the making, blatantly copied from the Russian UPAZ-1A, they’ve now been tested and approved for use. The “ski jump” tip of China’s first carrier allows for a shorter run at the expense of significantly limiting a fighter’s gross weight, making a fully armed fighter launchable only with a partial fuel tank.

Europe

• A report indicates the Finnish Army is having difficulty keeping its NH90s in the air.

Americas

• The Inspector General concluded that the Navy and Marines spent $220 million in IT services that they awarded with no or limited competition. The report, issued just before the weekend, indicated that those awards did properly follow FAR requirements.

• A Californian firm will pay the U.S. back $2 million to settle charges that it inflated costs for remote control military aircraft.

• Flight simulator and training firm CAE will pay $19.8 million to acquire Bombardier’s training services unit. The deal is expected to close by end of year.

Today’s Video

• Boeing’s KC-46 program, an airliner converted to a tanker, got off the ground.

Germany: No Weapons to Saudi

• Unlike other western nations, Germany’s public has been interested and concerned about Saudi Arabia’s record on suppressing minorities and women, as well as lending help to organizations affiliated with violent extremism. With four out of five Germans indicating that the country should disallow arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the Merkel administration announced they would do just that. Germany had about $400 million in arms sales to Saudi Arabia in 2013, and rumor had it a $2.5 billion Euro request for submarines.

Asia

• A U.S. Naval Warfare College professor indicated that China’s anti-ship weapons are essentially succeeding in providing an umbrella of area denial against the world’s most powerful navies.

• Australia sent over its first pilot to become trained (and, eventually, a trainer) on the F-35. The island nation is to receive 72 of the aircraft.

• New Zealand is reportedly looking at replacing its aging C-130 heavy lift planes with C-17s.

Europe

• Searching for ways to reassure allies – and show umbrage to a misbehaving Russia – the U.S. is making a show of looking to base equipment such as tanks in Eastern Europe. Heavy equipment could be in place by as early as the end of 2015.

U.S.

• SpaceX has said it will call off the legal dogs on the Air Force. SpaceX sued after the Air Force bundled up a great number of future space launches and pre-contracted for the services without letting SpaceX bid. In an odd sort of settlement, SpaceX will drop its suit, and in return, the Air Force will add more launches that will not necessarily go to the Boeing-Lockheed-led United Launch Alliance consortium. When asked directly this morning an Air Force representative said that there was not a specific number of launches attached to that settlement. The Air Force has also agreed to work toward getting SpaceX certified for launches, although it is unclear if that last aspect is actually part of the settlement, as it is something that wouldn’t be properly withheld. When asked, the Air Force referred back to the single-paragraph statement. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk previously accused an Air Force official of seeking employment from the bidders during the process, an offer SpaceX had refused. That accusation made news at the time (May 2014) partly because of the significance of the contract size, but primarily because it is fairly rare for a contractor to speak of such alleged behavior publicly.

• The Navy will reportedly show off its long-awaited rail gun at a D.C. conference on the 4th .

• The perennial process of the Pentagon asking for BRAC authority to realistically have a chance at needed base closures has begun, with Congress expected to, again, decline the request for fear of home district hand wringing. The European closures recently announced had the convenient feature of happening in districts where people cannot vote for congressional candidates. Some seem to read that those foreign closures give the Pentagon added moral authority to pursue a domestic closure analysis, but this relationship seems strained.

• F-35 manufacturing is taking shape.

Today’s Video

• Australia’s first F-35 trainee, Squadron Leader Andrew Jackson, will soon be due in Florida to start his studies. Below, is a Lockheed video describing the simulators and other tools available for the program.

Pentagon Commission: $25B/Year Savings to Be Had

The Pentagon’s Defense Business Bureau, an advisory group designed to give private sector expertise to senior leaders, announced its global analysis of DoD practices found potential savings of about $25 billion per year, to be squeezed mostly out of logistics, procurement, property management, HR, and healthcare, in that order.

The savings presume a capacity for the military to create ongoing and cumulative productivity increases – as does the private sector, generally. While the rather top-down analysis is likely to seem far fetched to military professionals, it does starkly compare behaviors in the private sector that differ, and that have resulted in vast, cumulative efficiencies.

When it comes to specifics, speaks generally about four areas of recommendations: renegotiating contracts; cutting the workforce; IT modernization and the catch-all business process re-engineering.

DoD contractors will be interested to see the nature of the target painted on their piece of budget pie. The DDB hopes to realize $9 to $18 billion in savings per year by saving 10-25 percent of contract spending. How they hope to do that? “More rigorous” negotiations; contract aggregation for economies of scale; a push for greater productivity in labor contracts; and the elimination of gold plating requirements.

Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work charged the DDB with producing the report back in October in an effort to gauge the scope of changes that would help modernize the whole of the defense enterprise.

The report doesn’t break too much ground in terms of tactics recommended, as previous reports have largely enumerated the various savings the DDB hopes the military will recognize.

Drug Smugglers Beating DHS at Drone War with <1% Budget

• A Mexican drug operation appears to have operationalized cross-border drug smuggling with helicopter drones. One device – what appears to be a DJI SPreadwings S900 Multi-rotor System, which retails for $1,400 – fell into a Tijuana parking lot after being loaded with six pounds of meth. The wire services and newspapers are indicating that it was overloaded at that weight, but the S900 has an all-up weight of 15 pounds. The weakness of the system is a battery that lasts 18 minutes at hover, which may explain why the device fell short of the border. Interestingly, it appears to be a similar model to the one used in Quebec to deliver contraband tobacco into a prison yard. Among other agencies, the FAA might not appreciate the unlicensed commercial aviation activity; provided the local police officials report it. Homeland Security also has drones to theoretically interdict drugs, but that program costs $12,000 per flight hour, which is one reason why some people would like to take those toys away from them.

U.S.

• With U.S. Commerce Department commercial satellite image resolution limits being somewhat lifted starting in February, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is moving to exploit what is expected to be a flood of additional imagery resources with quicker update frequencies. The move shows a new willingness to look to commercial alternatives, which are proving very significantly cheaper than military-run satellite projects.

• The Army will again delay the release of the formal RFP for a new service pistol to replace the M9 Beretta, which is widely regarded as insufficiently powerful, among other weaknesses. Beretta and the Army cooperated to head this effort off with an M9A3 revision. Army Times reports that Beretta suggested the RFP could be improved.

• Submarine detection may be getting easier with new big data tools that can handle distributed sensors, but there are also evolving commercial technologies that might be able to be exploited to hide them better.

• Some in Congress are concerned that an Air Force general may have attempted to illegally suppress information flowing to Congress regarding that service branch’s efforts to retire the A-10 – a widely derided decision. The Air Force’s long-running ambivalence regarding the A-10 was in part a product of the fact that the A-10’s primary mission has been in support of other service branches’s ground forces. That ambivalence has turned to contempt as zero-sum budget considerations – exacerbated by Sequestration – made the A-10 an obstacle to programs that the Air Force holds as more central missions.

• Of the many differences that come with operating with V-22 Osprey’s, the sternum-shuddering noise is just one. Defense Industry Daily staff have been overflown by V-22s in training evolutions, and can report that there is quite a difference in noise profile, to say the least. As the Marines start training in Prescott, AZ, they are fielding numerous complaints. Said an airport operations technician taking phone calls, “People are saying their houses are shaking.”

• The Littoral Combat Ship, it can be said, did not fare well in the recent weapons systems testing report. USNI gives a rundown of some of the more egregious failures so far. It is known that it has a bit of a glass jaw when it comes to things like armor and fighting, but it even had trouble successfully anchoring over seabeds of sand and shells.

Today’s Video

• DJI, a recreational drone manufacturer, and likely the maker of the drug smuggling drone found in a Tijuana parking lot (see above), makes the S900 drone, which costs roughly $25 per flight hour versus the DHS drug interdiction drone program which has, so far cost about $12,000 per flight hour. DJI also, incidentally, makes YouTube videos with much better production values. Given the extra-recreational uses referred to above, the video is certainly ripe for spoofing.

Today’s Special: Turkey Subs

Preveze Class
(click to view larger)

In 2006, the Turkish SSM procurement agency issued a request for information (RFI) for 4 more diesel-electric submarines. That RFI became an RFP for 6 diesel-electric submarines with air-independent propulsion systems, to replace older boats like Turkey’s U209-based Preveze and Atilay classes.

DID covers the competition, and adds some quick background re: the Turkish Navy’s existing fleet, where its rival Greece stands, and contract developments regarding their new “Cerbe Class”. Turkey has a signed multi-billion Euro contract for HDW’s U214 subs… and are about to add a revolutionary new weapon.

After the F-35: Would-Be F/A-XX Contractors Build Capacity, Expectations

It may yet be a decade or two before the U.S. has an appetite for another “generation” increment for its fighters, but Boeing and Northrop Grumman are hungry now. Northrop is
touting its new design teams dedicated to generating capabilities for the Navy and Air Forces future wish lists. The little information about their initial efforts indicate that it is oddly close to Boeing’s own requirements appetizer, which sported a flying wing design and preceded Northrop’s announcement by more than a year.

The flying wing focus may be a product of these airframes being quite similar to existing development work done for stealth fighter UAV programs, which have featured the more stealthy wing designs.

After seeing how chummy the service branches became in creating a joint strike fighter, Northrop is bowing to current service desires and employing two independent teams to ensure that both the Navy and Air Force can dream big without design compromises.

Some F/A-XX work was generated back in April 2012, when the Navy asked contractors for information about F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and Growler replacements – an early indication that the F-35 was not going to be all things to all services.

One interesting feature, at least in Boeing’s theoretical offering, is that the fighter can be flown by wire – still a politically charged feature in several ways. Pilots have been skeptical of unmanned fighters, such as the UCAS-D/N-UCAS/UCLASS program. The subsequent UCLASS project has been watered down by the Navy, with its role limited to surveillance type activities it is thought in order to preserve the more kinetic jobs for manned aircraft like the F/A-XX.