US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

US Navy relieves US John S. McCain commanding and executive officers

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

However, in order to avoid a new collision, the US Navy has issued a directive requiring its ships to activate the Automatic Identification System (AIS) in active mode when navigating in heavily traveled maritime areas.

Until now, this device, which operates via a VHF radio, was used only in passive mode, that is to say that the American ships received the position of the other buildings without revealing theirs. This is in the area of Operations Security (OPSEC), with the idea of not communicating information that could be used for hostile purposes.

A US Naval War College professor, Lyle Goldstein, relativized the scope of this measure on operational safety to Stripes. "With their ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) capabilities, the Chinese already have a fairly good idea of the location of US surface vessels, thanks to several sources, including satellite monitoring or Chinese fishing fleets. "

However, he added, "I imagine there will be some sensitive areas (near the Philippines and Japan for example) where US warships will continue to function

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Navy to Surge USS Monterey, USS O’Kane for BMD Operations to Cover Ships Sidelined in Collisions

The Navy is surging two guided-missile warships to cover gaps left by two ballistic missile defense-capable destroyers that were damaged in collisions with merchant ships, USNI News has learned.

The Norfolk-based cruiser USS Monterey (CG-61) and Pearl Harbor-based destroyer USS O’Kane (DDG-77) will be deployed to assist in BMD missions, two Navy officials confirmed to USNI News.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

First New Army M1A2 SEP v3 Abrams Tank Arrives

The Army is preparing to receive delivery of its first of six newly-upgraded MIA2 SEP v3 Abrams Main Battle Tank pilot tank vehicles -- specifically engineered to keep pace
The Army has received delivery of its first of six newly-upgraded MIA2 SEP v3 Abrams Main Battle Tank pilot tank vehicles -- specifically engineered to keep pace with fast changing technology and counter major armored warfare threats for decades to come.

The Army is now building the next versions of the Abrams tank – an effort which advances on-board power, electronics, computing, sensors, weapons and protection to address the prospect of massive, mechanized, force-on-force great power land war in coming decades, officials with the Army’s Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems told Scout Warrior.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Jura said:

Sep 28, 2017

while
Army doubles down on WIN-T’s ‘fight tonight’ problem
13 hours ago

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

As the Navy’s surface ship maintenance and modernization requirements are projected to keep rising, the maintenance community is testing out a few new ideas to bring in more ship repair yards and help those yards be more efficient in their work.

The Navy plans to conduct about 35 percent more surface ship maintenance work in each of the next three years compared to recent averages – and that figure will only go up if the service follows through with plans to increase the size of the fleet – and Rear Adm. Jim Downey, commander of Navy Regional Maintenance Centers and deputy commander for surface warfare at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), told USNI News in a Sept. 28 interview that his biggest concern is drydock availability.

Surface ship maintenance contracting has gone through several iterations in recent years – the multi-ship/multi-option (MSMO) setup was meant to optimize workload predictability for yards, and the current Multiple Award Contract/Multi-Order (MAC-MO) is meant to optimize cost for the Navy.

Now, to deal with the drydock capacity issue, the Navy is trying out yet another contracting structure that would address this by incentivizing two-ship maintenance contracts to make best use of space at repair yards, bringing in new yards that have capacity in a drydock or on land to conduct ship maintenance and modernization work, and adding schedule flexibility that focuses on on-time delivery of the ship instead of meeting specific smaller milestones along the way.

“We have so much work we have a capacity challenge on drydocks,” Downey said.
“We’re looking very hard, where we have sufficient class size – say DDGs, LCSs, cruisers –where we could solicit those ships together and allow industry to propose how they would double-dock those ships, or sequence their docking so they could get more of our requirements done in a schedule that would benefit them and us.”

Downey said his team has met with industry about a dozen times so far to talk about this new “hybrid approach” to ship maintenance contracting, which seeks to get the multi-ship savings associated with MSMO and the competition-induced cost savings from the single-ship MAC-MO approach. After all these meetings, Downey said the Navy and industry agreed to test out a set-up where the Navy solicits bids on two ships in a class at the same time, so industry can find efficiencies in having welding taking place on both at the same time, for example, or one is moved into the dry dock the same day the other leaves, to maximize the dry dock’s usage. The Navy will give up some control on smaller milestones along the way, instead only requiring the repair yard to meet major dates like combat system light-off and delivery back to the fleet. More teaming opportunities are allowed – including with yards outside of fleet concentration areas, those that don’t typically work on warships, or those that primarily do new construction work – to pair up repair experts with those that have dry docks available or room on land to do ship maintenance. And, since work won’t be limited to fleet concentration areas, a single government team will oversee all the work to eliminate any confusion on who industry should be talking to, and to eliminate discrepancies in how work is conducted in different regions.

This new approach will be tested with the USS Cowpens (CG-63) and USS Gettysburg (CG-64) cruiser modernization program work, the request for proposals for which was just released on Oct. 6. Downey said these are “significant docking resets” and have the potential for significant time and cost savings if industry can leverage the hybrid contracting model. Downey said he asked industry to not only bid on the two ships together, but to also submit traditional bids for the two ships separately so the Navy can assess what kinds of efficiencies could be built into the schedule and the cost estimate. The Navy should award a contract by early calendar year 2018 and get a first look at how the hybrid approach plays out.

If all goes according to plan, Downey said, as yards adjust to the dual-ship bids, costs and timelines should decrease as the yards move up the learning curve, much like with new construction work. He would also be looking for fewer change requests, especially for matters related to schedule and sequencing, since the yards would have proposed that in the first place. And he would expect that the common government team working with companies in all regions would reduce discrepancies in how work is conducted on the East Coast versus the West Coast, for example.

Downey stressed that the hybrid contracting effort “is not in any way a reflection that we’re dissatisfied with the repair yards. There’s just a significant volume of work here, and we would expect, looking out to 355, that this is just the beginning of the additional work. So we need to increase capacity.”

He added, “we believe we’ve got the capacity to get through [the 35-percent increase in near-term workload). There’s some schedule adjustments we’re working on to smooth some of those efforts and to continue that smoothing into (FY) ‘19 and ‘20, but our most significant issue there is the sequencing of those ships and the drydock capacity. I think the combining effort may help with some of that.”

Downey also noted that the MAC-MO effort itself, which started as a pilot program in San Diego in 2013, put the Navy in a good position on cost and schedule and created a good jumping-off point for this new hybrid approach.

In the MSMO to MAC-MO transition, the Navy moved from cost-plus contracts that gave a single yard several year’s worth of guaranteed work on a single ship class, to a fixed-price contract setup where each ship was bid on individually to allow for more competition and therefore lower prices. The Navy also separated the planning work from the maintenance execution, which Downey said was one of the biggest successes of the MAC-MO pilot program.

The Navy was challenged to articulate its requirements to the third-party planners in enough detail that awarding a fixed-price maintenance contract was appropriate, but Downey praised the effort as forcing the Navy to think harder about what it needed out of each maintenance availability.

MAC-MO has now been in use everywhere except Hawaii for about two years now, he said. A year ago, the Navy was tracking about 60-percent on-time delivery of ships, Downey said; today, with a comparable number of ships in maintenance, the Navy is over 80-percent on-time.

“We’re seeing on-time delivery is occurring in execution. We’re seeing, candidly, significantly less questions and lack of clarity in the bidding process, less contract changes, less questions from industry on clarifying the solicitation,” Downey said.
“And we’re also tracking closer to budget. What was a 30-plus percent budget overrun in some cases is much closer to the 10 percent now. And in some cases, in the DDG area, we’re seeing us underrun what the planned budget was. So we’re seeing significant benefits there.”

The one-star admiral credited the third-party planning with most of that success.

“Challenges for industry, and candidly for all of us, are, as they compete on every one (ship contract) they don’t know what they’re going to win, so workload in some cases can become less predictable for them,” he explained. Still, he said, “the (MAC-MO) pilot … was really beneficial to the Navy, and the ships, and ultimately the taxpayer. You can separate the work, you can plan it by a different entity, and you can reuse some of those planning products sufficient enough for other yards to go ahead and execute them.”

USNI News understands that some yards had preferred the MSMO setup because it allowed them to become experts in certain types of ship work only required on one class of ship – corrosion issues on the cruisers’ aluminum superstructure, for example. Going forward, the Independence-variant Littoral Combat Ships, with an all-aluminum hull, will present similar challenges. Downey acknowledged that concern but said that the Navy’s ship maintenance needs would change anyway as the ships aged and as the fleet composition evolved, so specializing in a certain type of work would only bring short-term benefit to the yards. In the long-run, he said, this hybrid approach’s predictable workload would be most beneficial to repair yards.

Click to expand...

The Department of the Navy recently declared the

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

ready for full operational capability.

All U.S. squadrons are now outfitted with JSOW C-1, the Navy’s first air-to-ground network-enabled weapon capable of attacking stationary land and moving maritime targets.

“Formal declaration of full operational capability for JSOW C-1 is the final step in a phased approach to introducing this weapon and its capabilities to the fleet,” said Cmdr. Sam Messer, JSOW deputy program manager. “It is the culmination of a complete team effort to deliver not only the hardware, but the training, tactics development and support infrastructure to ensure we field a meaningful warfighting capability.”

JSOW C-1 reached initial operational capability in 2016. The program then began a series of four fleet-wide exercises that demonstrated the capabilities of the weapon in increasingly complex scenarios.

The road to full operational capability began with RIMPAC 2016 where the JSOW training team executed a virtual network-enabled weapon mission during the harbor phase. The two-day training mission culminated in the loading of Super Hornet mission cards with the appropriate keys and JSOW files for Carrier Air Wing Nine (CVW-9) to fly a JSOW C-1 mission.

A month later, using real-time lessons learned from RIMPAC, CVW-5 executed the first operational shots of live JSOW C-1's during the Valiant Shield 2016 SINKEX, resulting in high-order impacts and sinking of the former USS Rentz.

This event included multiple firsts for JSOW including the first ever operational employment of an air-launched network-enabled weapon and receipt of targeting data from the Littoral Surveillance Radar System (LSRS).

In support of the SINKEX, the JSOW team delivered four Captive Air Training Missiles (CATMs) to CVW-5 in Atsugi, Japan ahead of schedule. Naval Air Facility Atsugi was the first fleet location to receive the JSOW C-1 CATM.

Next, JSOW C-1 engaged in Northern Edge 2017, a contingency exercise that prepares joint U.S. forces to respond to crises in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. During this joint forces exercise, at the Gulf of Alaska and around central Alaska, approximately 6,000 military members gather to take on the most challenging scenarios in the Pacific theater.

Northern Edge 17 facilitated network-enabled weapon kill-chain CONOPS development at all threat levels, including the contribution of off-board joint participants in tactical scenarios.

The JSOW training team also delivered CATM training to Top Gun and the Naval Air Warfare Development Center at NAS Fallon, Nevada, and CVW-9 at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California, in preparation for the exercise.

Following Northern Edge, the JSOW team embarked aboard the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) in support of coalition network-enabled weapon operations during exercise Talisman Sabre 2017. The biennial combined Australian and United States event is designed to train military forces in planning and conducting combined task force operations to improve the combat readiness and interoperability between the two militaries.

Twelve maritime strike exercise events were conducted employing embedded Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Super Hornets with JSOW C-1 CATMs alongside their U.S. Navy counterparts. RAAF Super Hornets carried JSOW C-1 free-flight vehicles, while U.S. Navy Super Hornets were outfitted with JSOW C-1 CATMs.

This latest JSOW variant includes GPS/INS guidance, terminal IR seeker and a Link 16 weapon data link.

Click to expand...

HII's LPD-Based Future Surface Combatant Concept Could Replace Ticonderoga-class Cruisers

During the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space 2017 exposition held recently near Washington D.C., Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) was showcasing its "Future Surface Combatant" based on a LPD-17 / San Antonio-class hull form.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

USN Bunker Hill Begins Western Pacific Deployment Sporting New Hull Number Style

Click to expand...