US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

United Technologies Corp., East Hartford, Connecticut, has been awarded a $436,688,397 cost-plus-incentive-fee modification (P00027) to contract FA8626-16-2139 for designing, fabricating, integrating, and testing complete, flight-weight adaptive engines. The contract modification is for the execution of next generation adaptive propulsion risk reduction for air superiority applications. Work will be performed in East Hartford, Connecticut, and is expected to be completed by Feb. 28, 2022. Fiscal 2018 research and development funds in the amount of $10,000,000 are being obligated at the time of award. Total cumulative face value of the contract is $1,449,687,297. Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, is the contracting activity.

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• One Army weapon, not yet officially named, would be a high-performance
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  , tearing through missile defenses at Mach 5-plus to kill critical hardened targets such as command bunkers.
• The other, the Strategic Long-Range Cannon (SLRC), would use a
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  to launch cheaper, slower missiles at larger numbers of softer targets like radars, missile launchers and mobile command posts.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

The Ah64E Apache Guardian was never supposed to be a new designation it was supposed to be the Block III AH64D Longbow Apache but the Army decided that the changes justify a new designation.
Now as to what I was saying

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The U.S. Army has begun to accept new AH-64E Apache attack helicopters from Boeing

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, according to Brig. Gen. Thomas Todd, the service’s program executive officer for aviation.

The Army was able to resume accepting Apaches into the fleet on August 31, Todd told Defense News in a Sept. 10 statement.

Defense News broke the news in April that the Army stopped accepting AH-64Es into its fleet the month prior because it was not confident in the durability of the helicopter’s strap pack nut, a “critical safety” item. The strap pack nut holds very large bolts that subsequently hold the rotor blades on the helicopter.

The Army was not happy with the performance of the nuts in severe coastal environments and saw corrosion due to climate and stress during routine safety inspections of the fleet.

The service told Boeing it wouldn’t take any more AH-64Es off the production line until the company redesigned a new strap pack nut that would be more durable in tough environments.

In June, Boeing started the Army-directed effort to begin retrofitting Apaches with a redesigned strap pack at no cost to the U.S. government or foreign military sale customers, Todd told Defense News in a Sept. 10 statement.

The strap pack nut will be replaced on all Apaches in the fleet to include the earlier variant, the AH-64D, which is still operational in many foreign fleets around the world.

The new strap pack nut is “a fully qualified and airworthy solution,” Todd said.

The Army anticipates the retrofit of the entire fleet of U.S. government and FMS aircraft will be completed by December 2019, he added.

The first units to receive new parts will be those that fly regularly in severe, coastal environments. Todd estimated that is roughly six units in the Army. There are 653 AH-64s currently fielded in the U.S. Army.

Boeing builds an average of six AH-64Es per month in its Mesa, Arizona, facility.

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Jura said:

in the meantime in real world US Army resumes accepting Apaches from Boeing

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The Army was not happy with the performance of the nuts in severe coastal environments and saw corrosion due to climate and stress during routine safety inspections of the fleet.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

And I Quote.

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Jura said:

it's nuts

(hoping the joke works)

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Jura said:

Dec 22, 2017

Jura said:

oops,Trump administration shelves plans to survey US defense firms

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now inside
US defense-industrial base study team on target to make recommendations, DoD official says

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:

"... Jerry McGinn, the principal deputy director for the Defense Department’s office of manufacturing and industrial base policy ...
left open the option to

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— something industry groups had resisted — at some later time. Survey plans were shelved because the government was running out of time to execute and it already had much of the data it needs, McGinn said.


“We have a wealth of information from across government that we’re using for this analysis,” McGinn said."

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The White House and Pentagon are planning a major rollout of the much-anticipated

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scheduled for Friday, but Hurricane Florence might have something to say about that.

President Trump signed off on the final version of the report during a meeting at the White House last week after meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense

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, who briefed him on its findings, according to several sources.

That presidential seal of approval set the stage for what is planned as a full slate of activities that could come as soon as Friday, which will include an op-ed from the White House in a major newspaper, a series of appearances on morning news shows by White House economic advisor Peter Navarro, and a few lines about the report in speech by the president.

But the president’s role in the release was thrown into question Monday, after the White House announced it was cancelling a planned appearance by the president in Jackson, Mississippi due to Hurricane Florence making landfall in the Carolinas. The speech was set to mention the report, though it was not to be the focus of the president’s address.

The report’s release has already been delayed several times, so defense officials were hesitant to confirm if the release will continue as planned on Friday, but officials for months have been saying it was finished, and was going through the process of being briefed throughout the government and approved at various levels.

Speaking at the second annual Defense News conference on Sept. 5,

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the undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said the study was due this week. The report is the result of an executive order signed by Trump last July, which brought together over a dozen working groups from the Pentagon to the departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. The groups focused on different areas, including shipbuilding, ground vehicles, and specific supply chains stretching across the globe, to workforce training and cybersecurity.

Last month, Breaking Defense

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at the scope of the report, finding that instead of massive long-term changes to policy, the report will spend a lot of time on putting out smaller, more immediate fires that would aim to fix problems and concerns now in the complex web of supply chains and supplier availability.

One of the big issues is cyber hygiene being practiced by the defense industry. Concerns over

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in the defense supply chain will be included in the report, but it is unclear how much detail will be in the unclassified version, and how much will be locked behind the classified firewall.

Speaking at the Farnborough Air Show in July,

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, the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition, told reporters that the days where companies self-report on whether they meet federal contracting regulations are coming to an end.

Given the constant attacks defense contractors experience from state and non-state hackers, “we have to develop a way that we evaluate people’s capability in cybersecurity,”

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There are ongoing discussions over how to make cyber hygiene part of the contracting process and include it as a deciding factor in awarding contracts just like cost, schedule, and performance.

“The only way you make it serious to industry is you make it part of the competition,” Fahey said. “We know it’s really serious now that we need to make that as a priority.”

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, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for industrial policy, said last week at a conference here that it’s not only the single points of failure across the supply chain that concern policymakers, but also its international character. And China, of course, is not far from anyone’s mind.

“As

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articulates a civil-military fusion doctrine, where they are intentionally blurring the lines between their developments on the military side and the commercial side,” he said, “we need to work with our allies to create a safe space where we can work collaboratively to do that.”

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Jura said:

now inside
Reality check: Failures happen, even in missile defense testing

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:
"But despite the failure, experts say that in the long run the SM-3 IIA has no choice but to succeed."

what else are "experts" expected to say huh?

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Japanese Aegis destroyer Atago detected and shot down a short-range

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in space Tuesday in a joint test with the U.S. Navy using the SM-3 Block IB missile, according to a release from the Missile Defense Agency.

The test, which took place at Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands in Hawaii, was designed to test the installation of the capability in Atago's combat system, the release said.

“This successful test is a major milestone verifying the capabilities of an upgraded Aegis BMD configuration for Japan’s destroyers,” said MDA Director

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. “This success provides confidence in the future capability for Japan to defeat the developing threats in the region.”

The Atago is similar in capabilities and appearance to a U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

The Japanese currently have been fielding the SM-3 IA and is working to co-develop the SM-3 Block IIA with the United States. The SM-3 IB is in wide use throughout the US Fleet and is fielded at the Navy’s AEGIS Ashore facility in Romania.

AEGIS missile defense has had a stellar record overall, with 38 of of 47 tests being deemed successful according to

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when including Tuesday's test. Two recent Block IIA tests were failures, the more recent one due to a failure in the boost-phase rocket motor and the one prior due to a sailor error that caused the missile to self-destruct.

The U.S. Navy has been growing restless with the BMD patrol mission, arguing that much of it should be moved to AEGIS Ashore sites, freeing up destroyers and cruisers to do other missions and use the BMD capabilities only in emergencies.

The mission, however, has been the driving force behind major technological leaps that have kept the surface navy relevant.

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Jura said:

LOL

Jul 24, 2018
don't you know the Pentagon will have to have pay tens of billion yearly for F-35s during 2020s EDIT and beyond?!

didn't know the clickbait Yesterday at 8:29 AM would generate three pages of daydreaming

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