US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

just not to forget what's going on which is "Though the
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keeps the government open, the 2018 appropriations bill won’t pass until March 23rd, almost halfway through the fiscal year. Once it passes, federal agencies will have to rush to spend any additional one-year money before it expires on Oct. 1. For the many programs getting budget increases, the challenge will be efficiently spending whatever the extra amount is about the CR level. For new-start programs, however, where the CR level is zero, they’ll have to spend all their one-year money in the next six months."
(quoting
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)
 
some time ago
Sep 24, 2015
this is interesting:
Navy Set to Install Hybrid Electric Drives in Destroyer Fleet Staring Next Year

source:
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and US Navy canceling program to turn gas-guzzling destroyers into hybrids
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The Navy is canceling a program to install fuel-efficient hybrid electric drives in 34 destroyers, leaving only one destroyer with the technology, the Navy confirmed in a statement.
The Navy will use Truxtun as a test bed to see if the technology pays off in the long run, Chatmas continued.

“Installation on DDG-103 is in progress and when installation is complete, operational usage of HED on DDG-103 will be monitored and evaluated to determine the effectiveness of HED. This will inform future decision on the fielding of HED.”

The program
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was designed to switch power to the drive shaft, which turns the ship’s propellers, from the main LM2500 gas turbine motors to the ship’s electrical generators at speeds below 13 knots. At those speeds the ship could perform night steaming, ballistic missile defense or anti-submarine operations, but not keep up with the speedy carriers.

Citing “department priorities,” the service requested
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to finish the installation on the destroyer Truxtun, but has zeroed out funding in 2019 and in the out years. The service has spent about $52 million on the program to date. The whole program was expected to cost $356.25 million, according to the Navy’s FY2017 budget submission.

“Based on the Department’s priorities, President’s Budget 2019 removes funding from Hybrid Electric Drive program in FY 2019,” said Lt. Lauren Chatmas in a statement. “There are no further procurements or installations planned beyond DDG-103 in the Future Years Defense Program.”

As the program began to materialize and development progressed, a number of problems began to materialize, according to a former Navy official who spoke on background. Foremost among them was the intense electrical load that running the drive system on the ship’s two running generators was putting on the ship.

Destroyers have three generators, two of which run while a third remains in standby, which rotates through while generators are down for maintenance or in case of an emergency. Running the electrical motor that turned the shaft while also running the ship’s power-hungry radars and related systems maxed out the capacity of those generators.

“At that point you are a light switch flipping on away from winking out the whole ship,” the official said.

Furthermore running the generators at that load wasn’t exactly as fuel efficient as they had hoped it would be.

Those issues, while valid, could probably have been solved through engineering, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

To Clark, canceling the program seems a bit shortsighted, given the potential for the technology to make a real difference in fuel efficiency in future ships and classes.

“If it’s a money thing, that’s one thing,” he said. “If it’s either this or invest in over-the-horizon anti-surface weapons, well OK. But if it’s this or another science and technology or research and development program — one of the major challenges we have is figuring out how to be more efficient at certain profiles. That would be worth knowing.”
 
just pictures as I have to go now (source is
This Is Boeing’s Play For MQ-25 ‘Stingray’
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):

BOEINGMQ25-1_Boeing.jpg


BOEINGMQ25-2_Boeing.jpg


BOEINGMQ25-3_Boeing.jpg
 
good luck Comptroller: Pentagon’s First Audit Will Be Worth Its Nearly-$1B Pricetag
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At a Senate hearing, DoD's David Norquist defended the cost of the first-ever financial accounting and provided new details about the effort.

The top financial managers at Pentagon this week assured senators that the nearly
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at the Defense department will be worth the price.

Defense Undersecretary and Comptroller David Norquist—under questioning by Senate Budget Committee members seeking efficiencies and defense budget reforms—said the price of $367 million in contract audit costs just in fiscal 2018 is about 1/30th of 1 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. That is “less than what Fortune 100 companies such as General Electric, Proctor & Gamble and International Business Machines Corp. pay their auditors,” he said.

“I anticipate the audit process will uncover many places where our controls or processes are broken,” he told the committee. “There will be unpleasant surprises. Some of these problems may also prove frustratingly difficult to fix. But the alternative is to operate in ignorance of the challenge and miss the opportunity to reform.”

Norquist delivered a timeline for reporting to Congress the results of outside auditors working at 24 stand-alone Defense components, only nine of which have achieved clean books since 2014, when Congress stepped up pressure for the department to achieve the auditability theoretically required since 1990. The first significant results can be expected this fall, he said, with a final report due in June 2019. “In the second year, we can go deeper,” Norquist said

Budget Committee Chairman Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., opened the hearing saying, “A successful Pentagon audit will require sustained congressional oversight and a renewed commitment to accountability at the department. He linked the empowering of managers using “more accurate financial reporting systems and data” to better decision making for the troops and more money for equipment and training. “Gaining insight into which problems the Pentagon is fixing and why will motivate Congress to continue supporting the audit,” said Enzi, who is also pursuing broader budget process reforms.

At Enzi’s request, Norquist sent a
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on March 6, detailing how the pricey audit will allow the Pentagon to “drill down” into business processes.

Reinforcing the importance of the new audit on broader Pentagon reforms was John Gibson, Defense’s new chief management officer. The audit will “reveal business systems and processes which need to be reformed and can be incorporated into our ongoing reform efforts” in shared services and obtaining enterprise-wide cost data. “By improving these business processes we drive improved operational measures such as timeliness, productivity, and simplification,” Gibson added. “Many of these processes will have direct, positive impacts on lethality.”

The reasons for failing audits lie in and gaps in field offices’ communications and documentation practices, Norquist said. His examples of concrete cross-component fixes the audits have already pointed to include “updating our records to reflect [an] accurate count, condition and value of our real property, military equipment and supplies.” He added: “It also includes fixing our systems’ configurations for how they record accounting transactions. The Army’s audit, for example, uncovered the fact that 39 Blackhawk helicopters had not been recorded in the property system. The Air Force identified 478 buildings and structures at 12 installations that didn’t show up in the real property system.

The controller agreed with Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that no one can know the exact costs of the fixes before the audits are complete. “We’re going to get a lot of bad news out of this audit if we do it right,” Kaine said. But he expressed hope that the audits will improve budgeting. “If we’re spending money on the wrong things, we may be underfunding the right things.”

Under prodding from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Norquist agreed that achieving fully clean books might take as long as 10 years. “But,” the comptroller said, “the benefits of the audit we will start to get right away.”
 

Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator

a billion dollars for the "bean counters" to tell us, we can't afford to spend anymore money,, hell, the "Honey Badger" tells me that everyday! for nuthin! I think I'll loan her to the USN for a full top to bottom review, and only charge em 10,000,000... that would get them to reality, and she could do it too, but might scare em to death! the "Honey Badger" just don't care!
 
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