US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

The Boeing team preparing for the F/A-18E-F Super Hornet service life modification (SLM) program has begun tearing into one of the fleet’s most-used aircraft and found the plane does not have as much age-related damage as predicted, the company’s service life modification program director told USNI News.

When Boeing and the Navy sought to extend the life of the legacy F/A-18A-D Hornets

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

, major structural damage was found in many of the planes and the life-extension work took longer than anticipated, as the Boeing team had to wait on additional materials and figure out how to address unforeseen work.

This time around, as the newer Super Hornets are brought in for a similar life extension, Boeing completed a Service Life Assessment Program to predict age-related damage to the planes, and the company is now validating those predictions against two learning airplanes – high-use jets, one of them being the fleet leader in catapult launches and arrested recoveries.

“We have not found any significant indications beyond what we were expecting. In fact, in some areas we found significantly less than what we were expecting,”

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

told USNI News on Oct. 17.
“But that’s just the first aircraft, we still have the second one we have to get into.”

He cautioned that Northrop Grumman still has to complete its work on the aft end of that first aircraft, and then the companies will tear apart the second learning plane for additional information.

But so far, “we haven’t found anything that resembles

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. … That said, from the number of locations on the aircraft we’re attacking in order to get the life extension, I would call it, from a planned work perspective, commensurate in terms of the number of locations and degree of difficulty of accessibility. But again, we haven’t found any of those kind of big bone structural issues that the classic Hornet ran into.”

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

, the team conducted an age exploration piece, which looked at both the material condition of the planes and sought to understand how internal components could best be reached from the outside when the modifications begin. On the material condition piece, Sears said the two planes looked “actually very good” and “better than we would have expected,” given the condition of some of the other Super Hornets that have come through Boeing’s Cecil Field for depot maintenance work.

On the accessibility piece, he said it was a mixed bag.

“We thought we were going to have to remove wings to gain access to some locations to do the [service life extension program] mods. We proved that we were not going to have to do that, which is great – that’s both a lot of effort in terms of turnaround time and duration as well as the opportunity to introduce risk,” he said.
“We did learn we were going to have to remove some fuel cells to gain access, and while that’s not great news, it allows us to plan for it and get ahead of it in the supply chain.”

Now that the first plane has been torn apart, the company is looking for signs of other damage not predicted in the assessment program, which would then be analyzed and potentially added into the work package if it is likely to be a prevalent problem.

Even as this learning process is still underway, the company is already ordering materials and getting the production facility set up for the first aircraft’s induction, which now appears to be set for April 2018.

Four airplanes will come in for the SLM work in calendar year 2018, and those will be worked on in St. Louis, where the company also builds new Super Hornets. Having the life-extension work take place near the production engineering team leverages a lot of experience, and it also provides more options if material is delivered late, or the first couple planes require unplanned work.

Ultimately, about 80 percent of the airplanes will be worked on in San Antonio, Texas, in a facility set to begin accepting aircraft in 2019. Prior to that facility opening, Sears said the idea was to “validate things here in St. Louis and then replicate them down in San Antonio.” Once the San Antonio facility is up and running, Sears said Boeing expects to be working on about 50 airplanes at any given time. While the first plane is expected to take about 18 months to complete – the company will have an idea of how to sequence the work but will learn a lot when they actually conduct that work package on a plane – Sears said later planes will hopefully take closer to 12 months.

Material is already being purchased, he said, though as to specifically what each aircraft will require, “at this point, it’s a guess. It’s a guess based on data, but it’s still a guess. So we’re erring on the side of buying heavy early, trying to buy down risk on material lead time for those first jets. But our forecast – we’ve shown this on other programs – as we go through quantity, our forecast will get much much better in terms of being able to predict quantity of parts over time,” Sears said.
“There will be materials challenges; it’s how we respond that will make or break this.”

Finally, the company is still in talks with the Navy about

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

.

“The Navy has said SLM is not your traditional SLEP program, it’s their comprehensive service life [modification] program. So to focus solely on getting the structure to survive but not focusing on capabilities is, I think, shortsighted, is what they’ve said,” Sears said.

Boeing believes its Block 2 aircraft – the majority of Super Hornets flying today, and the configuration coming off the production line today – are the best candidates for the Block 3 capability upgrade. The Navy is in talks with the company about introducing a package of upgrades into the new production line in late 2020, Sears said, with planning and engineering taking place between now and then. Retrofitting the upgrades into the planes going through the SLM process could piggyback off that planning and start a few years after being inserted into the production line.

“It’s a great opportunity to insert capability like the Block 3 in a method that is least impactful to the fleet, so that when an aircraft is returned with an extended life it’s also got the right capabilities for the next decade,” Sears said.

Click to expand...

Jura said:

I see NAVSEA boss: Mothballed ships not a major factor in fleet buildup

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

In the

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

full-court press to build its fleet out to the 355 ships that recent service structure assessments demand, one idea that has gained traction among leadership is the possibility of pulling old

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

out of mothballs and readying them for present-day missions.

The head of the House Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee agrees the ships should be refurbished but says he has a better idea for their use: Transfer them to allied nations to improve global defenses and expand the Navy’s network of knowledge around the globe.

“I think we could look at and say, ‘Are these assets that our allies could use that would be helpful force multipliers for us, because we’re going to operate jointly in many of these environments,’ ” Rep. Rob Wittman, a Republican from Virginia, told Military.com on Tuesday.

The chief of naval operations, Adm. John Richardson, revealed in June that the Navy

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

at resurrecting the old frigates, which were built in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and began to be retired in 1997.

“We’ve got to be thoughtful about this,” he said at an address at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. ” … Those are some old ships, and the technology on those ships is old. And in this exponential type of environment, a lot has changed since we last modernized those. So it will be a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how we do that.”

Wittman called the idea of repurposing the frigates for the Navy’s own use “a little bit of a stretch,” but said the service could reap multiple benefits by repairing them and equipping them with current-day technology for allied use.

He suggested several “Pacific nations” would derive significant value from adding a Perry-class frigate to their navy.

“They’re a much more modern ship than what a lot of these navies have,” Wittman said. “And the good thing about it is, you can do these modernizations here in the United States, so the yardwork’s done here.”

Of the 51 Perry-class frigates built by the Navy, 12 are listed in the holdings of the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, which maintains the service’s “mothball fleets” in

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

; Philadelphia; and Bremerton, Washington.

Some of these have already been earmarked as candidates for foreign military sale.

A number of the ships were transferred to international navies, including those of Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan, upon their decommissioning in the U.S. Navy.

In 2014, the House passed a bill, co-sponsored by Wittman, that would sell four Perry-class frigates to Taiwan, and give two more each to Mexico and Thailand. Ultimately, however, the measure died in committee in the Senate.

Expert analysis shows repairing and refurbishing the frigates in inactive reserve would cost under $600 million, Jerry Hendrix, director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security and a retired Navy captain, told Military.com.

In addition to providing valuable shipyard work, Wittman said the project could prove a “force multiplier” for the Navy.

“We can put on board systems that we know will work with our systems, so that if you’re in a combat environment, you know that you have the opportunities whether it’s Link 16 or other commonalities to make sure those systems work back and forth,” Wittman said, referencing a NATO military tactical data exchange network the U.S. military uses on both ships and some aircraft.

He added, “You don’t have to give up critical systems technology, but you could have those ships communicate with ours, so if they gather [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] — if they do a target acquisition — that information is available to us in that theater. That’s another set of eyes, another set of platforms that can really expand our reach.”

That makes the plan a “win-win,” Wittman said.

Despite stated advantages, Wittman’s proposal regarding the frigates would not directly advance the Navy’s goal of rapidly growing the fleet from its current 278 deployable ships. And that fact might give some pause.

“I think we’ve got to get early points on the board with our ship counts,” Hendrix said. “And the Perrys give us an option with that. It allows us to add 11 to 13 new ships in our ship count in the next 4 to 6 years. That ship count is a deterring factor with countries like China and Russia on the high seas.”

Click to expand...

Jura said:

no word about F-35 inside Boeing Examining High-Use Super Hornets to Validate Life-Extension Plans; Already Buying Material, Setting Up Facility

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Boeing believes an upcoming service life extension of its Super Hornet fleet, set to begin next year, would be an optimum time for the Navy to build in new upgrades, add conformal fuel tanks and to make it more stealthy.

The Navy and Boeing are currently negotiating the first service life modification (SLM) contract — expected to be awarded early 2018 — which will lay out the structural modifications the company will conduct to extend the life of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet from 6,000 to 9,000 flight hours.

But for an additional cost, the company could also upgrade the Super Hornets to the more advanced Block III configuration during the modification period, said Mark Sears, Boeing’s director of SLM.

“What SLM allows is, while we have the aircraft open to do the life extension mod, we can go ahead and apply the provisionings for the conformal fuel tanks, the advanced cockpit station and also the advanced networking [system],” he said. The company could also apply low observable coating to the aircraft to help reduce the aircraft’s signature.

Sears couldn’t provide a specific price tag for inserting the Block 3 mods into SLM, but acknowledged that there would be an additional cost to develop retrofit kits as well as “a few million” dollars more per plane to make the relevant changes.

While the Navy plans to invest $267.9 million over the next five years to develop Block III technologies, which would roll off the line as new Block III Super Hornet jets as early as 2020, it currently has not sought out money to bring its older F/A-18E/Fs to the more advanced configuration. However, Navy budget documents note that the service intends to transition “Block II Fleet aircraft (lots 26 and up)” to Block III during SLM.

“We haven’t necessarily seen the funding for the retrofit piece of it yet, but I think it is in their plan to do Block II to Block III conversions,” Sears said.

“Those jets are going to fly for another 10 or 15 years. … They’re going to be in the fleet for a while, so getting the advanced capabilities is a big deal to sustain them out into the next decade,” he said.

But while it makes sense to incorporate Block III modifications in the life extension effort, Sears acknowledged that Boeing will not be ready to retrofit the initial planes coming in for SLM. The first Super Hornet is expected to come in for its service life extension next April, and four aircraft total will be inducted in 2018.

Meanwhile, the company will not have the Block III retrofit kit ready until the early 2020s, which mean that the first SLM jets would get those upgrades at a later date.

The Super Hornet SLM effort is set to take about 10 years, with as many as 50 aircraft going through the process modifications per year starting in 2023, according to the company.

When the “classic” F/A-18A-D Hornets went through the life extension process, the Navy’s strike fighter inventory was dogged by shortfalls caused in part by difficulties in getting the Hornets out of depot. Sears said Boeing is taking the lessons learned from the classic Hornet life extension and applying them to the Super Hornets.

For instance, Boeing is doing work to help the company understand which structural changes need to be done to the Super Hornet and the best way to do that work at a much earlier time in the F/A-18E/F’s lifespan. The company has bought new material from suppliers ahead of the start of SLM, and it’s sought out special permissions from the Navy that will empower it to make certain engineering decisions without the service’s permission.

Boeing also split two aircraft in half to take a look at the material condition of jet and figure out how to access “hot spots.”

The two aircraft have been “surprisingly clean” of corrosion and Boeing has found that it won’t have to take the jets’ wings in order to do structural modification work, Sears said.

“We learned that we are going to have to remove fuel cells from most of the jets in order to do mods, and while that’s not great news, at least now that we know, we can go ahead and plan than into the supply system.”

Click to expand...

A renewed focus on sea combat and rapidly advancing technologies mean the Navy will have to leverage open architecture in its future ships, weapons and other systems, the Navy’s new deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development, test and evaluation said today.

On the job for about 45 days, William Bray detailed his vision for his new post in the Pentagon at the Defense Daily Open Architecture Summit on Thursday. The Navy is becoming more of a sea combat navy, Bray said – something he said hadn’t been the case for more than a decade – which means bringing ships and sailors into harm’s way in places such as the South China Sea.

During the past several years, Bray said, the surface Navy’s offensive strike capabilities languished. In trying to regain advanced strike capabilities, Bray said there’s “a strong recognition a single system no longer can do the job by itself.”

Responding to a threat today means using unmanned systems to collect data and then delivering that information to surface ships, submarines, and aircraft, Bray said. The challenge is delivering this data quickly and in formats allowing for quick action.

“I don’t know how you do that unless you have open systems,” he said.

Using his history with the Aegis Combat System and the Ship Self Defense System development as an example, Bray described the importance of open architecture. In 2006, he worked on upgrading these programs as the director of Integrated Combat Systems for the Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems.

At the time, the Navy was sinking ships that were too costly to upgrade. After just 17 years in service, the $1-billion Aegis cruiser ex-Valley Forge (CG-50) was used for target practice. When built, Valley Forge was a technological marvel, but the ship wasn’t designed to change,

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. Carr introduced Bray to summit audience Thursday.

The first five Ticonderoga-class cruisers were decommissioned early, “an expensive lesson in adaptability,” Carr wrote.

Bray’s team worked to open what it could with the both Aegis and SSDS. They separated the hardware and software. The end result wasn’t a completely open system, he said, but they were able to drive down costs because of changes to space and weight and through using common source software, thus passing on savings to shipbuilders.

The key to incorporating open architecture, Bray said, is remembering “open architecture, in my mind, is an art, not a science.”

The Navy has to get away from creating lists of requirements when developing new designs, Bray said. If there’s a set list, then designers will deliver something matching the list, but without considering how to adapt the end product to changing mission needs. Instead, he wants the Navy to provide designers with ranges of options. This way, once a system is developed, designers can evaluate a system’s overall capability with warfighters, and quickly make adjustments when needed.

“Open system architecture is the foundation of where we go forward,” Bray said.

Click to expand...

A new Department of Defense

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

finds the US military is carrying 19 percent excess capacity across all its properties and recommends a new round of base realignment and closure (BRAC) to address the problem. “The time to authorize another BRAC round is now,” the report concludes, adding that such a move would “reduce excess while enhancing military value” and reap “recurring savings.”

The report claims further delay will force the DOD to “expend valuable resources on unnecessary facilities instead of weapons systems, readiness, and other national security priorities.” The report does not estimate the savings that could be generated by a new round of BRAC.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis drew upon the report’s conclusions in a

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

to Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), asking the chair of the House Armed Services Committee to “enact the Department’s legislative proposal authorizing a 2021 BRAC round.” Mattis wrote, “an updated defense strategy must be supported by an updated basing strategy” in order to “shift resources to readiness and modernization.”

The DOD report found the Air Force maintains 28 percent excess capacity, while the Army has 29 percent and the Navy six percent.

In July, the House

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would have allowed a new BRAC round, and the Senate version of the NDAA also includes a provision barring a new round. The White House has made it clear that it

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

another round of BRAC.

For more of Air Force Magazine’s coverage of BRAC, see also

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

from the February 2015 issue;

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

from the February 2016 issue; and

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

from the June 2016 issue.

Click to expand...

Jura said:

McCain says he is on the rocks with Mattis and McMaster
23 hours ago

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

"The House and Senate, as of Tuesday, are due to go to conference to reconcile their versions of the bill."

just the closing sentence here because of Politics inside; time to recall
Sep 19, 2017

Click to expand...

Jura said:

according to AirForceMag DOD Has 19 Percent Excess Capacity, Mattis Asks Congress for BRAC
10/18/2017

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis formally began pushing Thursday for another round of politically toxic base closings.

In letters to the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, Mattis said, “An additional Base Realignment and Closure round, in my view, remains a significant opportunity,” although Congress has rejected attempts to shutter bases for the past five years.

“We have studied shortcomings of previous rounds and are confident the savings generated by a new BRAC in 2021 would save $2 billion or more annually,” Mattis wrote in the letter.

Mattis’ letter is in line with Pentagon budget documents showing the military has about 20 percent more buildings, bases and infrastructure than it needs.

In principle, senators and representatives are generally in favor of trimming excess, but not if the excess is in their state or district.

Lawmakers opposed to shutting bases also consistently point to the last BRAC round in 2005, which cost more than projected to initiate. The House earlier this year rejected a proposal for another BRAC round, but House Democrats are seeking to revive it.

At a Heritage Foundation forum last month, Lucian Niemeyer, the Pentagon’s new installations chief, tried a different approach in arguing for another BRAC round.

He said a new round of base closures and troop realignments would give the Defense Department an opportunity to increase combat readiness by stationing forces closer to their optimal training facilities.

“The country should embrace a process that allows us to put our forces at locations that ultimately will provide the most benefit — the most effective force available at the most efficient cost,” said Niemeyer, the assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment.

In a report to Congress accompanying Mattis’ letter, the Pentagon said, “DoD has not been authorized to undertake a BRAC analysis for over 14 years” — a reference to the analysis that preceded the last BRAC round in 2005.

“In those years, the Department has undergone considerable changes that have impacted the force structure, mission requirements and threats facing the United States,” the report said.

Excess infrastructure across the services averages about 20 percent, the report said, but hits 29 percent in the

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

and 28 percent in the

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

.

“Reality and common business sense dictate that infrastructure should be reconfigured to meet specific needs and changing threats,” the report said. “Congress should authorize the Department to undertake a BRAC 2021 round as it has requested.”

Click to expand...