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O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 1

WWW.NATIONALDEFENSEMAGAZINE.ORG

News Features

Industry Perspective

18 Making the Case for Irrational Behavior BY JIM THOMPSON AND KRISTIN WHITE

Commentary

20 In with the Old, Out with the New: The Army’s Modernization Challenge BY BOB SMITH

Viewpoint

22 Defense Needs Better Ways to Test Software BY BERNIE GULF

Cybersecurity

24 Fears of Devastating Cyber-Attacks on Critical Infrastructure Grow BY YASMIN TADJDEH

Unmanned Systems

26 Pentagon Recruiting Software Developers for Drone ‘App Store’ BY SANDRA I. ERWIN

28 Navy’s New Drones Taking Center Stage BY VALERIE INSINNA

30 Reconnaissance Robots’ Place On Battlefields Still Unsettled BY STEW MAGNUSON

Soldier Tech

32 Army’s Battlefield Network Requires New Thinking on Soldier Power BY DAN PARSONS

34 New Technologies Fuel Advancements in Night Vision Goggles BY VALERIE INSINNA

Combat Vehicles

38 Over Army Objections, Industry And Congress Partner to Keep Abrams Tank Production ‘Hot’ BY STEW MAGNUSON

41 Commitment to Swimming Vehicle Throws Off Marines’ Tight Modernization Schedule BY DAN PARSONS

Departments2 President’s Perspective Defense Budget Picture Begins to Take Shape by Lawrence P. Farrell Jr.

4 Defense Watch Ruminations on current events by Sandra I. Erwin

6 Inside Science + TechnologyTackling the military’s toughest problems

by Dan Parsons

8 Ethics Corner

10 Business + Industry NewsWhat’s new and next for the industrial base

by Valerie Insinna

14 Homeland Security News Monitoring the homefront by Stew Magnuson

44 NDIA Calendar Complete guide to NDIA events

48 Next Month Preview of our next issue

48 Index of Advertisers

Cover Story 38� The Army says it has enough upgraded Abrams tanks. Service officials feel they can free up funding for other programs by tem-porarily shuttering the production line. But political and economic pressure will ensure that the Ohio plant where they are produced keeps running for the time being.

October 2013

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 1

COVER: PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION / THINKSTOCK, DEFENSE DEPT. PHOTOS

National DEFENSE (ISSN 0092–1491) is published monthly by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), 2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22201–3061. TEL (703) 522–1820; FAX (703) 522–1885. Advertising Sales: Dino K. Pignotti, 2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22201–3061. TEL (703) 247–2541; FAX (703) 522–1885. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily

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OCTOBER 2013

VOLUME XCVIII NUMBER 719

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2 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

As the new fiscal year gets under way, the budget landscape is beginning to shape up. Critical decisions will be made that

will have huge implications for defense. Major adjustments will be required across the defense com-

munity — the military services, agencies, commands and industry. Significant decisions are becoming harder and harder to duck.

In fairness, some notable decisions have already been made, beginning with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ efficiency initiatives in 2009 and 2010. This was followed by spending reduc-tions of $487 billion over 10 years as stage one of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA). Then came the continuing resolution of 2013 accompanied by across-the-board sequester of funds for failure to comply with the funding caps in the BCA. This caused the latest squeeze as the services were forced to curtail training and maintenance, and to cancel or slow procurements as they repro-grammed funds from procurement accounts to shore up readiness from unacceptable to marginal, at best.

With all that as background, what’s next? Recall Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s

Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR), the results of which he unveiled July 31. He has followed that up with a mandate to cut headquarter staffs by 20 percent. From fis-cal year 2015 through fiscal year 2019, the ser-vices are to reduce budget dollars and personnel — both civilian and military — by 4 percent per year, starting, if feasible, in fiscal year 2014.

These cuts apply to personnel, contractor costs, facilities and information technology programs. By organization, they apply to the office of the defense secretary, defense agen-cies, Joint Staff, service secretaries, service chiefs, service four-star major commands, ser-vice component commands and combatant command staffs. Intel-ligence staffs will be affected as well — both military and national intelligence program-funded centers. The directive is to eliminate and not shift to other areas. “Subordinate headquarters should not grow,” said the memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Plans are to be submitted Sept. 23 along with the program objective memorandums, which are the military’s five-year budgets.

To implement some of the choices in the SCMR, Hagel has stood up a team that will make efficiency recommendations, to include the aforementioned 20 percent reduction in headquarters and OSD staff.

The team is led by former Air Force Secretary Mike Donley. It will additionally seek to reduce direct reports to the secretary of defense by focusing on the 16 principal staff assistants. The focus will be on streamlining, consolidating and eliminating redundancies. The review will be completed by Sept. 27, with an initial report by the end of the month and monthly reports beginning Oct. 1.

All this will be happening at the same time as Congress and the Obama administration will need to agree on fiscal year 2014 appropriations for the federal government to keep defense and civil-ian agencies going. We will likely see a continuing resolution with sequestered funds agreed upon and signed into law sometime around Oct. 1, hopefully without a partial government shutdown.

Around the middle of October, the White House Office of Management and Budget has announced, the U.S. government will

begin to run out of money, as it will have only $50 billion left to obligate. That is about five days of operation — at $9 billion per day. The nation cannot go into default, so the debt ceiling will have to be lifted or things will shut down.

What can be expected at this stage? The Defense Department is hoping that somehow predictability will come with the fiscal year 2015 budget. The department is planning two budget scenarios. One would be a $150 billion cut through fiscal year 2021, consis-tent with the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget submission which fails to comply with the BCA. The second budget will assume full BCA compliance and $500 billion in cuts through 2021.

Some of the cuts proposed include the aforementioned 20 per-cent headquarters reduction. Bloomberg analysts estimate a $10 billion savings over five years and $40 billion over 10 years. This is obviously not enough to make a significant dent in the $500 billion bogey. Along with this will come cuts of five fighter squadrons, two to three carrier battle groups, Air Force bombers, as well as Army

and Marine Corps end-strength. Meeting the $150 billion reduction in the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget proposal requires a reduction of 40,000 to 70,000 troops in the Army beyond the current plan of drawing down from 580,000 to 490,000. Cuts larger than $150 billion require either further force size reduction or a “modernization holiday.”

Haven’t we seen this movie before?The sequester for 2014 will see a base

budget of $475 billion with a 16 percent reduction to investments (procurement, research and development); a 12 percent cut to operations, maintenance and military con-struction accounts; a reduction of 6,000 civil-ian employees, and a large reprogramming

to protect as much combat readiness as possible. One must keep in mind that this would require the concurrence of Congress, and that is far from assured. Although the services would try to protect major key programs — F-35, KC-46A tanker, long-range bomber, major ship buys — some procurement attrition will be unavoidable. Expect cutbacks in purchases of ships, fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, as well as some delays or cancellations of maintenance and overhauls. Some areas such as munitions could see a big hit.

It looks as if the Defense Department will tilt to investment over force size, though getting to major force reductions will take time. As a result, further major pressures on readiness and training are inevitable.

The situation gets even more difficult with the national debate surrounding the possibility of attacking Syria. The discussion so far has swirled around whether we should do it. So far there has been no debate on how ready our forces are, not only to mount and sustain an effective first action, but whether an already lowered readiness status will permit an extended engagement. One must remember that while it may be our decision to initiate hostilities, the enemy and allies will get a vote. We won’t control the evolving scenario.

For a nation like the United States — with its far-flung com-mitments and allies — readiness, technological superiority and the ability to sustain operations are not optional.

President’s Perspective by lawrence p. farrell jr.

Email your comments to lfarrell@ndia.org

Defense Budget Picture Begins to Take Shape

“For a nation like the United States — with its far-flung commitments and allies — readiness,

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4 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

U.S. manufacturers are the ones to beat in the international arms market. Sales over the past two years have exceeded

$60 billion, and there are still no signs that distant runners-up in Russia and Western Europe will catch up any time soon.

Pentagon contractors, despite their dominance, need their inter-national arms business to grow substantially if they hope to com-pensate for declining sales to the U.S. military.

Targets of opportunity do exist overseas. Between now and 2018, countries outside the United States expect to purchase more than $100 billion worth of conventional arms, according to estimates by The Avascent Group, a consulting firm. Half of those opportunities will be in Asian countries, and the other half about equally split between Europe and the Middle East. Countries whose defense markets are legally off limits to U.S. firms, such as China, Russia and Vietnam, were not included in the estimates.

The data crunched by Avascent paint a promising picture for U.S. defense firms, but also illustrate the steep climb they face as they seek a bigger slice of the global arms pie. The Pentagon — projected to spend $158 billion on weapons research, develop-ment and procurement in 2013 — is such a huge customer that all other markets pale by comparison. The equivalent investment in weapons by all of Europe, for instance, is $68 billion, followed by $67 billion in Asia and $41 billion in the Middle East and North Africa.

Of these regions, though, Asia will experience the fastest growth in the years ahead, says Avascent partner Douglas Beren-son. It will not be long before Asia’s defense spending surpasses Europe. He estimates the compound annual growth rate from 2013 to 2018 for European arms sales will only be 1 percent, in contrast to 6 percent for Asia and 5 percent for the Middle East and North Africa.

A handful of countries have been tagged as hot markets — India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. “Every aerospace and defense company is there now,” says Jon Barney, also a partner at Avascent.

The most coveted arms deals are likely to be in Asia. “The only defense budgets in the world that are climbing are in Asia,” says Air Force Gen. Herbert Carlisle, commander of air forces at U.S. Pacific Command. “We want to expand that engagement.” Military leaders overseas are champions of American manufacturers because they believe they can build closer ties with allies if everyone owns the same equipment.

Missile-defense systems are among the most sought-after U.S. technologies. The United States has sold to allies every major sys-tem that the Pentagon developed to protect troops from enemy bal-listic missiles. More sales are expected, predicts the Congressional Research Service. “There is a potential for significant further sales if South Korea and Australia decide to emphasize ballistic missile defense in future budgets, or if Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines or Singapore begin to view ballistic mis-siles as a threat to their security,” states a CRS report.

The opportunities clearly are there, but analysts caution against over optimism. In Europe, American firms must contend not only with shrinking defense budgets but also strong protectionist ten-dencies, Berenson says. “It is not an impossible environment for U.S. suppliers, but it is increasingly difficult.”

In the Middle East, there are fewer challenges from domestic

industries, but U.S. firms there face cutthroat competition from European arms makers. Russian and Chinese manufacturers also are entering the fray. In Asia, there’s a general preference for U.S. hardware, but some of the biggest spenders, including Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, are investing in their domestic industrial base, Berenson notes, which means U.S. suppliers must find a way to work with domestic players.

Barney also warns against the hype that has built around some countries. India is a case in point. “It has opaque acquisition process-es,” he tells industry executives at the Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies. “A lot of companies are frustrated. They’ve been there for a long time” waiting for the government to make good on procurement decisions, he says. “India would have a trillion-dollar defense budget if everything that was announced materialized.”

Another piece of advice for U.S. firms: Dig in for the long haul. Many U.S. defense companies are not convinced they need a per-manent presence in a given country to court customers. The reality is that they do, says Barney. “The ‘fly in, fly out’ approach by U.S. companies” does not go over well in some countries. “Customers on the ground notice that,” says Barney. “I recommend boots on the ground.”

Relationships are a “huge deal” in the international arms commu-nity, says James J. Lovelace, a retired Army lieutenant general and head of international programs at L-3 Communications, a company that is heavily reliant on exports. About 25 countries make up 70 percent of L-3’s business.

Lovelace worries that U.S. firms are not as aggressive as their European counterparts. “When you go downrange to [the Middle East], you see a heck of a lot of Europeans,” he says. “The United States shows up but not in the ways others do.”

The idea is to not be seen as an “industrial tourist,” he says. “You can’t parachute in.”

By far the most daunting hurdle for U.S. companies will be how to satisfy buyer nations’ ravenous demand for “offsets.” In the defense trade, offsets are industrial compensation arrangements required by foreign governments as a condition of purchase. Offsets have always been part of the international defense business, and arms sellers view them as a necessary tool for closing a sale. But as the defense market becomes more competitive, buyers will set the offset bar higher than ever, Lovelace predicts. Countries in Asia and elsewhere will need jobs for their exploding populations, he says. They will expect arms sellers to provide those jobs. “This is going to be a big deal in offsets,” he says.

As importers jack up their offset demands, multinational com-panies with a global presence will be increasingly sought by U.S. exporters to help fulfill offset obligations.

Gregory Horton, vice president of electronics manufacturing giant Flextronics, says the company is working with several U.S. defense and aerospace firms to “help extinguish offset credits.”

Avascent’s forecast shows that, by 2017, U.S. aerospace and defense exporters will rack up a half-trillion dollars worth of offset obligations. “This will be a challenge for every major company,” Barney says. Economic development will be sine qua non in any major defense sale, he adds. “Over the years, companies have ignored this.”

Defense Watch by sandra i. erwin

Email your comments to serwin@ndia.org

The Promise and Limits of Foreign Markets

6 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

Both the Army and Marine Corps hope to one day deploy troops that can operate at length with little or no resupply.

But there are limits to how much an individual can carry and how long those supplies will last.

Marines especially can count on being far from base for days on end during amphibious forced entry operations. And once in com-bat, they can’t count on resupply.

There are two schools of thought on how to mitigate the risk of running out of supplies in the field. One is to artificially increase a Marine or soldier’s load-bearing capability. The less expensive, sim-pler avenue is to develop ways in which necessities can be foraged.

Short of developing Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit and disregarding farsighted exoskeletons that would allow troops to carry hundreds of pounds, Marine Corps engineers want troops to gather what they need to survive and communicate where they fight, rather than lug-ging water and batteries into battle.

The Marine Austere Patrolling System, or MAPS, may go a long way toward achiev-ing that goal. Wearing MAPS on a chest rig, a Marine can harness solar energy and purify found water without any peripheral equipment. It moves in the direction of making a Marine’s communication and other equipment “transpar-ent,” said Capt. Frank Furman, logistics program manager for the Office of Naval Research’s expeditionary maneuver warfare and combating terrorism department, and a Marine infantry officer with two tours in Afghanistan.

Creating a sense of seamlessness between Marines and their equipment — making sys-tems “transparent” — has been one of the main challenges of the program, Furman said in an email to National Defense.

“The ideal form factor is for it to be com-pletely transparent to the user,” he said. “We’re not quite there.”

ONR has teamed with the Naval Research Laboratory to develop the photovoltaic cells that are incorporated into the rig. The solar panel can be worn on a Marine’s back to draw power while on the go, or laid out on the ground when stopped.

The water filtration system is made by Cascade Designs, an out-door equipment company. MAPS is assembled at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va.

Furman described how the system would be used during a 48-hour operation — a period during which he would likely need at least three disposable batteries. He would likely pack double that number to create a buffer in case one is a dud, or he had to stay in the field longer than expected.

The number of batteries a Marine will carry depends on multiple factors — the mission, its duration and the weather are a few con-siderations. Batteries don’t last long in the cold.

The role of the Marine is another factor — a machinegunner may carry none, while a platoon commander may carry a bunch because he has the radio.

Standard 5590 and 2590 radio batteries weigh about 2 and 4 pounds, respectively. On the high end, Furman said he has carried as many as eight cells on an operation, for a total battery load of

up to 32 pounds. A normal battery load for a dismounted Marine is between 2 and 4, or up to 18 pounds of batteries.

“Here’s where MAPS comes in,” Furman said. “Because it uses a central battery, you don’t need spares for each type of battery.”

The central battery is connected to devices like GPS and night vision goggles by way of an energy management system that divides up the available charge, ensuring that nothing goes dead before the others. A Marine will not lose his radio before his night vision, for instance.

The 20-watt solar panel has a charging throughput rate of about 20 watts — more than enough to recharge the battery in sunlight, or run a radio directly, he said. The photovoltaic cell captures more of the sun’s energy and is more flexible than previous versions, which allowed them to be worn as part of a garment. Where previous cells were about 6 percent efficient, MAPS cells are 30 percent efficient.

“Because it incorporates energy harvesting, you mitigate the risk of running out completely,” Furman said. “So if you’re running low, you lay out your solar panel, and at least have the energy to send out a critical transmission like, ‘We’re running low, send me a helicopter!’”

The Army has a similar system that runs on the flexible conformal battery and peripheral communications equipment, which is gaining acceptance with the Marine Corps as it is fielded in Afghanistan (see story on page 32).

The Marine Corps went one step further with MAPS by building in a water filtration system that is attached to the Marine’s Cam-elback water bladder. As with batteries, water is something a Marine doesn’t want to run out of in combat. Furman said if he estimated he would need a gallon of water for an operation, he would routinely bring two, adding 17 pounds to his load.

“If you run out of water, you die. If you can get water locally, the risk of running out is much less,” he said. “So you can afford to reduce that safety factor. This is a critical point.”

The “ultra filtration hollow-fiber” filter is an inline system that connects directly to the tube of a Camelback worn by the Marine. Sucking on the tube draws water from the bladder through the filter, automatically cleaning it before it is consumed.

Work is ongoing to develop a self-cleaning passive filtration sys-tem that sits inside the bladder itself. Furman believes such a system will be ubiquitous within five years.

Such a suit offers demonstrated advantages to the individual Marine going ashore. It also has a ripple effect on the logistical tail that keeps that Marine and fellow troops fighting.

Marines who need water need convoys to truck it in. Those con-voys need drivers who are vulnerable to attack on the road. Those trucks need fuel and mechanics and other support personnel.

A Marine with a personal, reusable filter can gather water from anywhere as long as the source is fresh water.

“You have cascading effects down the chain,” Furman said. “This type of product can harness the same principal, but in a positive way.”

Inside Science + Technology by dan parsons

Email your comments to dparsons@ndia.org

Marines Create Power, Filter Water on the Go

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and communicate where they fight, rather than lugging water and batteries into battle.”

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8 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

Violating the False Claims Act may be easier than one thinks. It can be violated without any intent to lie to or to defraud

the government.Under the “reckless disregard” standard, a contractor can violate

the act by not paying attention to the truth or dishonest informa-tion provided to the government in a manner that can be character-ized as “reckless.”

“Reckless disregard” is not “deliberate,” but this invariably is a threshold inquiry whenever a government official finds the inac-curacy of information provided to be inexcusable. And reckless disregard can be found even in instances in which an attorney acts on behalf of the contractor in submitting a claim. Even though the claim is based on erroneous legal advice or mistakes made by the attorney, contractors nonetheless can suffer consequences.

A recent Court of Federal Claims decision reinforces this point and provides guidance on the reckless disregard standard and potential liability stemming from actions of an attorney.

In Gulf Group General Enterprises Co. v. United States, the court recently ruled that a military contractor had acted in reckless disre-gard when it failed to make a minimal examination of records that were submitted in support of a claim for payment from the gov-ernment. Ironically, this case initially was brought by a contractor seeking money contractually owed, but resulted in a government counterclaim for violation of the FCA.

The contractor’s initial suit challenged termination of contracts for items such as dumpsters and latrines for military bases in Kuwait and sought damages for delays when the contractor was forced to travel in military convoys to deliver bottled water. The government coun-terclaimed, charging the contractor with submitting inflated invoices, which had all been reviewed, signed and submitted by the contrac-tor’s attorney. They had also been signed by the contractor’s owner.

Several errors exposed the contractor to liability. First, it was working under a blanket purchase agreement (BPA) contract, under which the government issues “calls” — essentially task orders. The government terminated one of the calls, which precipitated the $10 million claim. This was the total value of the BPA. Therefore, apart from total disregard for the avoided costs of delivering on the entire agreement, the court found no evidence that would support a con-tractor expectation of all possible calls. Thus, in addition to wrongly assuming 100 percent profit on the $10 million dollar BPA, the contractor also inexplicably claimed a right to all calls, even though the contract vehicle allowed the government to order less than the maximum number. The court found that canceling a single call worth $1.4 million hardly constituted the entire $10 million BPA.

The contractor’s attorney testified that he had mistakenly believed in certifying the claim that the entire $10 million BPA had been cancelled. He further testified that he and the contractor honestly believed that the government would issue all of the calls up to the $10 million maximum, thereby entitling the contractor to the full amount. However, the attorney had no case law to support this novel argument.

Furthermore, in submitting the $10 million claim, the contractor also failed to account for payments of $3.1 million of work under the BPA. Lastly, the attorney conceded that the $10 million claim was merely a starting point for settlement negotiations. The court found these arguments so singularly lacking in merit or logic that they were deemed to have been advanced in “reckless disregard” of the truth, and hence in violation of the False Claims Act.

The contractor’s claim also included an expense table seeking payment for equipment previously purchased as well as equipment not yet purchased and no longer needed because the call had been terminated. Several years after litigation had commenced, the con-tractor submitted a revised expense report excluding the not yet purchased equipment, which the court deemed too late in the day to avoid liability.

In its defense, the contractor, a foreign company, argued at trial that it did not know how to compile and submit a government claim. The court, in concluding liability, rejected this argument as well as the argument that the contractor had relied on its attorney’s advice and work in submitting the claim.

For contractors and their attorneys, there are several lessons. First, seeking to establish a wholly unsubstantiated monetary amount as a starting point for settlement negotiations is impermissible. In any context, it is bad form. There may be more leeway for this nego-tiating tactic in a commercial setting. In the government contract world, absent clear factual evidence and a solid legal argument that a specific amount of money is, in fact, owed, contractors should never claim money from the government.

Second, company leadership should ensure that there has been a careful and competent review before allowing any claims to be certified. While False Claims Act liability will not ensue for honest mistakes or innocent math errors, contractors that ignore obvious or glaring errors in their claims, whether they be legal or factual, may well face liability under the reckless disregard standard.

Finally, company leaders should supervise and critically evalu-ate the work of their attorneys in preparing any claims. This case demonstrates that when a principal fails to adequately supervise the attorney and the result is an erroneous or conflicting claim, the con-sequence to the contractor can be considerably more than a denial.

However, contractors should not live in unnecessary fear of making a mistake when preparing a claim. Most are fairly straight-forward, and a little diligence on the part of a contractor should prevent significant errors.

That said, the process is not without its pitfalls, and contractors should be aware that it is not only those who set out to defraud the government who fall into False Claims Act snares.

Ethics Corner by RichaRd L. MooRhouse and Ryan c. bRadeL

Not Hard to Run Afoul of False Claims Act

Joseph Reeder, ChairmanGreenberg Traurig LLP

Glenn BaerG.D. Baer & Associates, LLC

William BirkhoferJacobs Engineering Group

J. Kelly BrownEMSolutions Inc.

Beverly ByronByron Butcher Associates

Dale ChurchVentures &

Solutions LLC

Vincent Ciccone RASco Inc.

Steven GaffneyDynCorp International, LLC

R. Andrew HoveHDT Global

John IllgenNorthrop Grumman Information Systems

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James McAleeseMcAleese & Associates

Richard McConnM International Inc.

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Graham ShirleyThe Pegasus Group Inc.

Lawrence Skantze

Margaret DiVirgiliConcurrent Technologies Corporation

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Richard L. Moorhouse is a shareholder and Ryan c. bradel is an associate in Greenberg Traurig LLP’s government contracts practice group. The views expressed are solely theirs.

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10 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

An information technology company is trying to stretch the limits of a

popular video-game engine with the goal of making its tactical trainer more lifelike, including improvements in non-player char-acters’ intelligence and more realistic virtual landscapes.

The simulation wing of Ashburn,Va.–based Intelligent Decisions developed the Army’s Dismounted Soldier Training Sys-tem, a virtual-reality environment where soldiers’ movements, such as firing a gun, are physically replicated within the game.

The system currently runs the Army’s program of record game called Virtual Bat-tlespace 2, but the service has commissioned Intelligent Decisions to research whether using a commercial video-game engine — the Unreal Engine 3 — can expand the behaviors of soldier, enemy and civilian ava-tars to provide a more realistic experience.

The research project is part of a contract with the Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command at Fort Belvoir, Va.

“Unreal is an open platform, and we’re able to go in and manipulate the source code to do almost anything we want to do because of its flexibility,” said Clarence Pape, vice president of simulation and training. “The program of record, VBS2, is locked, and so I have to work within the parameters that the Army has prescribed.”

For instance, when a soldier walks up to a civilian avatar in a VBS2 scenario, the

civilian character has a limited number of responses. By using Unreal, Pape believes those responses can become more varied and sophisticated, such as a civilian choos-ing to give more or less information about insurgents based upon the facial expressions of the soldier.

“It’s making all of those elements inside the training exercise behave more realisti-cally, more human-like,” he said. “Instead of having them do only one prescribed thing, there is a myriad of activities that they can do based upon what’s going on in their sur-roundings.”

The research focuses on improving the on-screen representation of the soldier’s avatar, such as allowing him to wave his hands above his head, fire around corners or take his hand off the weapon, and showing these movements in-game.

Intelligent Decisions will also look at new capabilities for helmet-mounted displays and how to better integrate sensors.

Many popular videogames such as Bio-shock Infinite and the Mass Effect series are run off the Unreal Engine, which con-tributed to its selection for the research initiative. Pape hoped that familiarity will make gameplay more intuitive and immer-sive. “Our feeling is that soldiers will relate to that look and feel, and they will adopt it much quicker.”

Pape said he could not speculate on whether the Army will ultimately use Unre-al. “The Army has made a substantial invest-ment in VBS2, and so they’re not going to want to waste that investment,” he said.

The Army in July picked up Virtual Battlespace 3 to replace its predecessor as the new flagship for the service’s Games for Training program. That may keep the Army from branching out to Unreal any time soon.

By Valerie insinnaBusiness + Industry News

Virtual reality

■ Oil is a precious commodity, whether for use commercially or by the military to pow-er its myriad vehicles and aircraft. It is also vulnerable to being stolen as it is transported cross-country by fuel tankers.

GlobalTrak — a Dulles,Va.–based cargo-tracking company — announced in July it had completed its shipment of fuel-moni-toring systems to Afghanistan for Defense Logistics Agency contractors who transport oil across the country’s dangerous roads.

Ongoing war in Afghanistan makes fuel transport particularly dangerous, and its dirt roads — which are either dusty or muddy depending on the weather — contribute to tankers running off-road and making fuel delivery more difficult, said Rich Meyers, vice president of GlobalTrak and business development at its parent company, ORB-COMM.

When fuel theft occurs, it’s harder for the military to complete mission-critical goals, but it also may strengthen hostile forces, he added.

“Fuel is kind of liquid cash. It’s very fungible. It can be resold very easily on the black market,” Myers said. “It’s hard to sell an MRAP on the street there.”

The system prevents fuel theft in three ways. First, GPS devices on the tanker ensure the vehicle can be tracked en route. Sensors monitor the amount of fuel the tanker is carrying and can alert the driver to changes. Electronic security seals on fuel access points also send an alarm in case of a breach.

GlobalTrak is not in talks with the DLA to expand the system’s use outside of Afghani-stan, but the company is discussing the product with interested commercial oil and distribution companies in Latin America and the Middle East, Meyers said.

Meyers declined to provide details on the cost of the system, but said that in some cases, the system pays for itself in a matter of months.

“It’s really not as though you have to have a large fuel loss to recover the value of the system. Certainly within single digit loss, the system can pay for itself in a very short time,” he said.

Battlefield logistics

game engine May improve realism of tactical trainer

Military’s fuel tracking system could expand to Private sector

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■ BAE Systems has been fighting to keep its York, Pa.-facility open after the Army announced plans to halt work on the Bradley family of fighting vehicles from 2014 to 2017. The company has been somewhat successful in reducing the time the assembly line would be shut down, with work at the facility planned to con-tinue through mid-2015.

“We continue to work with the Army, and I think that they are beginning to understand some of our concerns. The challenge is, we’re trying to turn off and then turn on a major manufacturing and supply base,” said Mark Signorelli, the company’s vice president and general manager for armored combat systems.

BAE originally was contracted to deliver reset vehicles through the first half of 2014. The company was able to extend that delivery schedule through an agreement with the Army, Signorelli told National Defense at a media day in Sterling Heights, Mich. In 2015, BAE will convert M3 Bradley cavalry fight-ing vehicles to M2 configurations, which increases the number of soldiers it can carry from four to seven.

Signorelli believes there may be more opportunities to meet existing Army requirements in a way that would keep the York plant from shutting down, such as converting additional M3s or upgrad-ing other vehicles in the Bradley family, which includes the M88 recovery vehicle, the M109 family of vehicles, the Paladin integrated management howitzer and the M113 personnel carrier.

Possible sales to Iraq and Saudi Arabia

could also keep the production line hot. Iraq is considering buying up to 200 vehicles. Saudi Arabia, which is the only foreign country with Bradleys, is consider-ing doubling its 400-vehicle fleet.

Decisions from Iraq and Saudi Arabia could come as early as 2014 and 2015, respectively, Signorelli said. “Realistically, those sales won’t really start to impact the base until ‘16. So there’s a six- to 12-month period in there where we’re really concerned about ... are there oppor-tunities to fill this” gap?

Although BAE has mitigated the major risks to the industrial base in 2014, layoffs at the company are unavoidable, and company leadership will have to consider shutting down some facilities, Signorelli said.

“We have already slowed down the pro-curement and manufacturing process, and the unfortunate thing is that it hits your supply chain first,” he said. “Typically six to 12 months in advance of the time that we start to see the impacts in our facilities, it has already hit the supply chain.”

Signorelli would not comment on how many workers could be affected by the closure of the plant. BAE estimates the Bradley industrial base is made up of 586 small, medium and large businesses that employ 7,000 people across 44 states and Washington, D.C.

A week after the media day, BAE

announced the closure of one of the sites that make up the Bradley industrial base — its Fayette facility in Lemont Fernace, Pa. All employees will be either laid off or relocated to another facility by the end of the year, the news release said.

The Fayette plant employs 78 full-time workers and 35 contractors, said a report by ABC 27 WHTM in Harrisburg, Pa.

Combat VehiCles

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There has been a great deal of trepi-dation on the part of the public

about police using unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance, which could possibly vio-late citizens’ highly valued privacy rights.

The reality is that police departments would probably use them for more routine, less talked about tasks, said Donald Shin-namon, a business development executive at UAV-maker Institu Inc., former police chief, and one-time chair of the aviation committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

“Mobile surveillance is not going to be an early use of unmanned aircraft by law enforcement,” he said at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference in Washington, D.C.

There are more everyday incidents like car crashes where they will come in handy, he said.

A small unmanned aerial vehicle with a 3D mapping payload that can be quick-ly launched over a car pile-up would be “invaluable” to police for traffic crash scene photography and reconstruction. It can gather all the necessary data in a short amount of time, he said.

“It is not uncommon for a large crash with fatalities or serious injuries to shut down a highway for three or four hours to map the crash scene,” he said.

There are higher property losses sus-tained in crashes than all crimes combined, and police spend more time testifying in civil cases relating to vehicle accidents than criminal trials, he added.

“Reproducing evidence and testimony in court related to traffic crashes is frankly a big deal in law enforcement,” he added.

Similarly, aerial crime scene photogra-phy can greatly help police reconstruct an incident for jury members, who in this day and age expect strong visuals to help them understand cases.

Searching for missing persons is also a routine police matter.

“It happens thousands of times a day around the country,” he said. A caregiver loses track of a toddler, or perhaps an elderly Alzheimer’s disease patient, and they wan-der off.

In a “defined perimeter search,” police know the missing subject is nearby. A small UAV can more rapidly search an area than a

cop on foot.Another common scenario

is the person pulled over for a routine traffic stop who flees the scene.

“An unmanned aircraft is invaluable in helping locate that person as quickly as possible,” he said.

They can also be used in potentially dan-gerous, but fairly common, tactical opera-tions such as serving high-risk search or arrest warrants. This is normally a drug dealer who may have weapons, and possibly children, in the home. They are routinely carried out in pre-dawn hours when the subjects are fast asleep, he said.

A small unmanned aerial vehicle can be used to peer into a window to look for dogs sleeping by the door, or where adults or children are located, he said.

In this case, peering into a window is legal and not a violation of privacy rights because there is already a warrant in hand.

Another common situation is a barricade

incident, which usually stems from a domestic dispute. One of the arguing parties may lock himself or herself in a home — sometimes with the person he or she is arguing with — or there could be hostages.

Most of these incidents are resolved peacefully, but

a UAV can be flown nearby to give police a better idea where the overwrought person is barricaded.

Police surveillance is used as a basis for search warrants or arrest warrants. There is impending legislation that may severely limit that application for UAVs, Shinnamon said.

There are about 17,000 local law enforce-ment agencies in the United States, and only a handful have police helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft, but the reality is that most police agencies have little money for new technologies such as UAVs.

“Budgets remain tight. Many local gov-ernments are making cuts,” he said.

Funding may come from federal grants, although those are shrinking, too, he noted.

14 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 14 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

Police Want Unpiloted Aircraft for Routine Tasks, Not Snooping, Former Chief Asserts

by Stew MagnuSonHomeland Security News

■ Of the privileged few who received the new Google Glass wearable computer prototype this year, one was MutuaLink, a Wallingford, Conn.-based company that specializes in communication systems for first responders and the military.

Mike Wengrovitz, vice president of inno-vation at the company, said he was attend-ing a training exercise where police were using the MutuaLink systems and a hand-held view screen during a school-shooter scenario. The device worked well, but it was cumbersome.

The real-rime information the police were seeing on the screen was “very valu-able, but so are your hands,” he said.

When the company learned of Google’s “If I Had Glass” program, which offered up the new wearable device to a limited num-ber of users, it applied and received a pair in the mail.

“You need your hands when you are de-livering First Aid or putting out a fire, or

dealing with a school shooting,” he said.The company spent a couple weeks

learning how to use the system and linking it to its Interoperable Response and Pre-paredness Platform product, which allows any entity to join a communication net-work through the Internet no matter what kind of device they are using.

It brought Glass to a recent trade show where it let members of the first responder community see how it works.

In the demonstration, they linked to cameras in a school and displayed the video in real time on the Glass view screen, along with the building’s blueprints.

In a mock command-and-control center, someone annotated the map by circling points of interest, or drawing arrows to tell the user which way to go. Those two appli-cations, plus two-way voice, were the only features MutuaLink has integrated onto the system so far.

Glass does come with a video camera, but there are many wearable cameras on the market already, so it was decided to put that off for the time being, Wengrovitz said. However, the ability for an incident com-mander to view what someone in a build-ing is seeing, would be useful, he added.

Company Experiments With Google Glass for First Responders

Story continues on page 16

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� The Federal Aviation Administration is on track to select by the end of the year six sites where it can test unmanned aerial vehicles, said a representative of an industry trade group.

That will still be 16 months beyond the congressional mandate that the agency was given in 2012. The test sites are expected to pave the way to full integration of remotely piloted aircraft in national airspace, which lawmakers want to happen by 2015.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International esti-mates that the economic impact of U.S. airspace integration will total more than $13.6 billion in the first three years and will grow sustain-ably for the foreseeable future, cumulating to more than $82.1 billion between 2015 and 2025.

“Every year that airspace integration is delayed, the United States loses more than $10 billion in potential economic impact. This trans-lates to a loss of $27.6 million per day that [unmanned aerial systems] are not integrated in U.S. airspace,” said AUVSI spokesperson Melanie Hinton.

The test sites are envisioned as places where remotely piloted air-craft can fly with few restrictions, and crucial data on the technologies that will allow them to travel among regular air traffic are gathered. One of the main issues is how unmanned aircraft will sense other air-craft and take corrective measures to avoid collisions — better known as sense-and-avoid systems.

John Porcari, deputy secretary at the Department of Transportation, said at the AUVSI conference in August that the FAA had received 25 proposals from public organizations in 24 states, but the agency would not be choosing the finalists until the end of the year.

Hinton said the number of applicants is closer to 30. One of the hopefuls, the state of Utah, undertook a study that

explains why so many localities are interested in hosting test sites.The economic impact to the state being chosen would mean more

than 23,000 new jobs adding up to $12 billion in wages, $720 mil-lion in new tax revenues and an overall $23 billion in total economic impact over 10 years, the study said.

Hinton said industry will create more than 70,000 new jobs in the first three years after the aircraft are allowed to fly in U.S. airspace. By 2025, total job creation is estimated at 103,776, and the bulk of these jobs are in the high-paying manufacturing sector, she said.

The total tax revenue to the states is expected to exceed $635 bil-lion in the first 11 years, she said.

FAA Delays Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Test Site Selection to End of Year

Email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org

States that submittedproposals as of May 2013

STATE DISTRIBUTION OF UAS TEST SITE PROSPOSALS

18 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

As U.S. defense spending decreases from a gush to a trickle, contractors are desperately competing for market share. Programs are being canceled, curtailed and restructured.

Many companies coming off all-time highs over the last decade now find them-selves in a declining market. Some are fight-ing for shareholder confidence, while others are just fighting for survival.

Meanwhile, customers facing an unchang-ing list of requirements are under pressure to fulfill them with fewer resources. The result is aggressive action on the part of some contractors, which unsuccessful bid-ders sometimes deem “irrational” behavior.

But is it irrational?History is riddled with examples in

which uninformed and aggressive bid deci-sions have led contractors down a risky path that ultimately resulted in failure. However, capture managers and executive leadership are now recognizing that aggres-sive strategies can be very effective, and therefore appropriate and rational, when driven by the right intelligence. An asym-metric strategy requires a detailed under-standing of competitors and customers in order to manage risk. In an environment where everyone is trying to gain an edge, there are some contractors who have suc-cessfully played to win.

Sometimes, companies will choose to bid a price that is so much lower than the competition that the customer can’t help but award the contract to them. This often results in the company executing the program at a loss for a period of time, but it is typically “made well” at a later date via engineering change orders or operations and sustainment work.

The perception within the capture com-munity is that companies tend to buy in only when there is extreme incentive to win, or no other options for survival. This overlooks recent history, which indicates that the rationale for buying in can be

quite compelling from an overall business case perspective.

Take the Air Force’s aerial refueling tanker competition. While the Northrop Grumman-EADS team offered a technically superior aircraft at a reasonable price, The Boeing Co. recognized that the pro-duction contract was an entry point to a larger and more lucrative role as the sole provider for all services associated with the platform. Boeing used this ratio-nale to bid well below EADS. In this case, Boeing took a calculated risk, which it likely justified with a strong business case based on historical customer behavior. This is a decision that is quite rational.

A less extreme, but more frequently employed strategy is for companies to cut fees aggressively. Bidding the contract real-istically, but with razor thin margins, can seem a noble gesture in the eyes of the cus-tomer. This is particularly effective when the customer is dissatisfied with incum-bent pricing. Competitors may pursue this approach when they have a high incentive to win, can pair it with high margin work, or can make up profit through cost opti-mization. This strategy can save a franchise program, or steal one from an incumbent.

Oshkosh’s takeover of the Army’s family of medium tactical vehicles contract from incumbent BAE Systems is an example of this approach. Oshkosh understood that BAE’s financial motives and reliance on historical pricing were disconnected from customer cost expectations. Paired with a higher-margin business and strong cost-con-trol methodologies, Oshkosh’s low-margin bid helped them to grow their footprint in

a military tactical vehicle market, where one fran-chise program is not enough to guarantee survival.

It doesn’t always pay to be a prime contractor. Winning large prime con-tracts is a key component to many Pentagon contractors’ growth strategies. Not only do prime wins represent a significant and predictable revenue stream, but they also attract a lot of attention and signify which compa-nies are “in the lead” with a given customer.

But companies some-times recognize that the

procurement environment is not well aligned for a prime bid.

Lockheed Martin’s bid for the Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network is a relevant case in point. Initially entering the competition as a prime, Lockheed changed course and joined the incumbent team led by Hewlett-Packard as a subcontrac-tor. Presumably, Lockheed realized that the proposal evaluation structure was not well suited to their preferred bid approach. Rather than continue to pursue the con-tract as a prime and expend the resources that go along with it, Lockheed made a choice to team with the incumbent — a move that saved the company money and ultimately resulted in a win.

Capture managers, business develop-ment executives and corporate leadership need to make informed bid strategy deci-sions that anticipate unexpected competi-tor bid behaviors, which are often perceived as irrational due to a lack of information. The critical success factors in the above cases were a firm understanding of cus-tomer cost expectations, competitor bid psychology, program life cycle business case and internal risk tolerance. The rationality of any bid approach is validated through the overall financial success of the winner and the program, not price differential at submission.

In the end, the only truly irrational bid behavior is to lose every bid, and ultimately risk financial insolvency, in order to avoid the risk that comes with winning. ND

Making the Case for Irrational BehaviorIndustry perspectIveBy JIm thompson and KrIstIn WhIte

Jim thompson and Kristin White are senior associates at Avascent, a strategy and management consulting firm that advises government contractors.

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NDIA Salutes America’s Manufacturers on Manufacturing Day (MFG DAY), Oct 4, 2013

MFG DAY is an opportunity for America’s manufacturers to open their doors and show, in a coordinated effort, what manufacturing is — and what it isn’t. Supported by a group of industry sponsors and co-producers, MFG DAY is designed to amplify the voice of individual manufacturers and coordinate a collective chorus of manufacturers with common concerns and challenges. The rallying point for a growing mass movement, MFG DAY empowers manufacturers to come together to address their collective challenges so they can help their communities and future generations thrive.

For information on how you can support MFG DAY, go to: www.mfgday.com

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20 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

COMMENTARYBY BOB SMiTh

For U.S. Army aviation, uncertainty in fed-eral budgets seems to have elevated the expression of “doing more with less” to a more permanent and enduring status.

After more than a decade of warfare, Army aircraft have been stretched far beyond their original intended lifespans. Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno have stressed that the Army’s ability to field a ready and capa-ble force that meets mission requirements has been placed at risk by fiscal challenges.

As a result of budget constraints, instead of updating its war-fighting capabilities with new platforms, one of the Army’s few remaining remedies is to modernize those currently in use. The concept of platform modernization is not new. The Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, which first entered service in 1979, is now an M-mod-el. The Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter, first fielded in the 1960s, is beginning to emerge in its F-model configuration.

Traditionally, original equipment manu-facturers (OEMs) have performed these upgrades and modernization initiatives. As the originating program contractor, an OEM is already familiar with the platform and in most cases, owns the technical data rights for the platform. For these reasons, it has been advantageous for the Army to rely on the OEM for upgrades and parts, although occasionally with less focus on price or total cost of ownership.

Today, cost reduction has become a driving issue, one that could dramatically increase overall program risk unless decisions are made in a careful and comprehensive way. As troops draw down and seques-tration begins to seriously affect budgets across the service, critical decisions for air-craft survivability and platform management may require careful balance be maintained between short-term readiness and longer-term modernization and sustainment needs.

The Army is adopting alternative ways to get more bang for its buck in sustaining and modernizing its aircraft, and is working with impartial industry partners to develop a platform modernization roadmap to gain greater control over the service-life exten-sion process.

The military must cost-effectively extend the service life of existing platforms while adding new capabilities for evolving mis-sion requirements. Platform modernization

may well be the solution for the military services as they face tight budgets and evolving operational objectives.

For instance, the Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) is focusing on improving effi-ciency at the Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center’s (AMRDEC) prototype integration facility at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala.

Working with private-sector engineers, the prototype integration facility assists in the development, manufacturing, integra-tion and modification of major systems to help the Army extend the service life of avi-ation and missile systems and subsystems.

Another new approach that will help the Army drive value with limited dollars is the platform modernization roadmap. This blueprint gives the Army authority over the total modernization lifecycle, allowing the service to minimize risk while controlling the acquisition process. The platform mod-ernization roadmap is based on joint collab-oration between the Army and contractors in order to plan for the changes needed based on the most beneficial tradeoffs available. Other goals include determining through reverse engineering and physics-based engineering analysis what technology is needed to meet the objectives; and devel-oping a prototype to prove the new design works before proceeding with production.

At that point, the industry partner is able to provide the Army with a technical data package that allows the service to solicit competitive bids for subsequent produc-tion efforts.

The OH-58F Kiowa Warrior helicopter cockpit and sensor upgrade program is a successful example of the platform roadmap approach. The newly updated Kiowa War-rior recently celebrated its first test flight at Redstone Arsenal. In this effort, the Army had the role of system integrator, saving the government more than $37 million dur-ing the research, development and testing and evaluation phase. The Army anticipates saving more than $550 million during the procurement and production phases, while extending the service life of the Kiowa War-rior for at least another 12 years.

This platform modernization roadmap has also been applied to help the Army improve rotorcraft survivability and naviga-tion through degraded visual environments. DVEs include weather conditions or obscu-rants that inhibit the aircraft crew’s situa-

tional awareness and ability to make sense of its immediate surroundings, which can cause pilots to get disoriented and crash. This is a major hazard in environments such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where crews are often forced to battle the granular, sandy terrain.

To improve these capabilities, the Army outlined a multi-pronged approach which includes updating existing flight control systems and aircraft handling characteris-tics, improvement of queuing technologies and use of various sensor technologies.

With an eye toward providing greater tactical and operational advantages to crews operating in poor visibility environments, a platform modernization roadmap seemed like an optimum alignment. The Army, in collaboration with engineers from their Aviation Center of Excellence, the Army Combat Readiness Center in Fort Ruck-er, Ala. and AMRDEC in Huntsville, has developed and integrated DVE-mitigating technologies within an open, rapid pro-totyping environment. This approach is saving lives and aircraft while proving both efficient and cost effective.

On the industry side, companies are making significant investments in advanced scientific engineering, rapid prototyping and total baseline integration to help the Army better manage and upgrade existing aircraft, while driving innovation up and modernization costs down.

But despite this evolution and innovation, problems linger. OEMs are still controlling many engineering changes — especially for older platforms — because they own the technical data describing how pieces fit together. As a result, the Army may not have ownership over its strategic roadmap and risks paying more for a potentially inferior result. The range of technology and innova-tion is limited to a single source.

The Army should embrace this roadmap approach to guide platform modernization.

The benefits will include ownership of important technical data now held by OEMs and greater flexibility in the techni-cal specifications and acquisition of needed aviation improvements. It will save signifi-cant time and money, while sustaining and improving the nation’s vital military equip-ment. ND

In with the Old, Out with the New: The Army’s Modernization Challenge

Bob Smith is a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm. He is based in Huntsville, Ala.

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22 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

viewpointBy Bernie Gauf

Developing software for the Defense Department has many inherent challenges, not the least of which is testing. Traditional software testing for defense systems con-sumes up to 50 percent of development resources. Yet, it is only during this phase that engineers can be assured systems are ready for deployment. Because of the criti-cal nature of military systems, corners can-not be cut.

In brief, the traditional approach to soft-ware testing involves manually creating and running a wide range of tests at all stages of development to ensure that the system requirements have been successfully incor-porated. Additionally, tests must be run to confirm that new software works properly with the software and systems already in place.

With the current manual testing approach, tests are typically documented using a word processor or spreadsheet application, with a step-by-step procedure describing operator actions or input and expected response. Test procedures also describe how the system is required to be configured prior to conducting the test. The pass/fail status of each step is usually writ-ten down by the test engineer on a printed hard copy of the test procedure. Every time a test is run, the test engineer executes each step of the test procedure and records the results. It is a labor-intensive process.

Innovations in software testing technol-ogy provide alternatives to current testing methods. A case in point is automated software testing.

As with manual processes, automated software testing requires engineers to design tests that support the verification of requirements. Automated testing is also similar to manual testing in that the test program is dependent on the design of high-quality tests.

Automated software testing enables the operator actions or input, along with the expected response, to be digitally cap-tured or recorded. When the test engineer executes an automated test, the technol-ogy sends the digitally captured operator actions and input to the system under test and evaluates the response against the expected results. A report is automati-cally generated to document the results. In order to execute the test, the engineer simply launches the automated test and is not required to manually conduct each step.

In order to transform testing, this new

technology must be embraced. Change is slow. Sometimes the best ideas

take years to catch on. Engineers engaged in software development may believe, and rightly so, that they are part of a highly pro-gressive industry. But even there one finds resistance to change.

Progress always involves risk. That is nothing new. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line to auto-mobile production. It was novel. It was threatening. The unions didn’t like it and were worried it would lead to job loss. But this early form of automation boosted production and cut assembly time in half, resulting in improved efficiency, better quality and increased affordability. Within five years, Ford’s process revolutionized the automobile manufacturing industry.

Fifty years later, George Devol designed the first programmable robotic arm. In the early 1960s, this device transported die castings in a General Motors plant in New Jersey. Initially seen as a curiosity, robots also prompted speculation. Would they eventually replace the common worker? It was too early to tell; regardless, robotics soon became another important advance for the manufacturing sector.

As a nation, we say that progress in sci-ence, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is crucial to America’s future. This certainly has been true in the past. Manufacturing was forever altered by the introduction of automation and robotics. However, if we truly believe this, then we need to embrace the outcome of advances in STEM going forward, and apply them to the development of our military’s systems.

Engineering teams could benefit from embracing new technology — specifically the advances now available in software testing.

Program managers and engineers involved in large, highly complex soft-ware projects for the Defense Department devote their resources to planning, design-ing, developing, and testing. Many highly skilled engineers are required to conduct the testing and to analyze the results. Fol-lowing the traditional industry approach, software testing consumes, on average, more than half of a project’s schedule and resources.

In the current budget environment, the pressure is on to streamline the software development process and reduce head-count. As a result, fewer engineers will be available to conduct tests. However, the need to verify system requirements and performance has not changed.

Going forward, limited resources will mandate that systems have longer lifes-pans, increasing the need for more regres-sion tests over time. In addition, the pace of software updates will likely increase, further augmenting the regression testing workload.

Automated software testing technology accelerates execution and reporting time while expanding test coverage. For today’s large, complex, mission-critical systems, this translates to a significant increase in testing efficiency.

The majority of tests that are run manu-ally can be automated, with an expected increase in testing productivity of about 75 percent. Automation can implement a broad range of tests and easily repeat them, covering multiple combinations and increasing the amount of testing complet-ed. Generally, a high percentage of the tests that are part of a manual testing program — functional, performance, concurrency and stress — can be automated.

Automated tests readily produce doc-umented, objective, quality evidence, including requirements traceability and comprehensive pass/fail results. They pro-vide the capability to verify thousands to millions of test permutations in minutes to hours.

Implementing automated testing does involve an initial commitment to design. But instead of defining and executing every test step and command manually, over and over, creating an automated testing solu-tion requires that focus only once. Upon completion, a well-thought-out automated testing program can support the verifica-tion of multiple baselines and configura-tions.

Just as early manufacturing was trans-formed by innovators who were willing to forge a new and different path to produc-tivity, so too those who incorporate auto-mated testing into software development will lead us squarely into the future. We need to accelerate the adoption of inno-vation. Forward-thinking military leaders, program managers and engineers who are still utilizing traditional methods of soft-ware testing should embrace this progres-sive technology. ND

Defense Needs Better Ways to Test Software

Bernie Gauf is CEO of Innovative Defense Technologies, an information technology business headquartered in Arlington, Va., and co-author of the book Implementing Automated Software Test-ing (Addison-Wesley, 2009).

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24 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

By yasmin TadjdehMany remember Aug. 14, 2003 as

the day the lights went out. The Great Blackout, as it is often called, left millions in the Northeast and parts of Canada in the dark for up to two days. Traffic lights went out, commuters were stranded in stalled subway trains, and hundreds of people were trapped in elevators.

In this case, a power line in Ohio mal-functioned after touching an overgrown tree branch, crippling the local electrical system and creating a domino effect of outages.

That massive blackout was a work of Mother Nature, but officials fear similar damage that could be caused by a cyber-attack on the electrical grid.

In her farewell speech, exiting Depart-ment of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned that the United States faces “a major cyber-event that will have a serious effect on our lives, our economy and the everyday functioning of our soci-ety.” Many experts worry that this loom-ing cyber-attack could target the nation’s power grid.

A massive cyber-attack on the nation’s grid has been a top concern among those working in the industry for years. Experts have said that a sophisticated assault target-ing electrical lines or power plants could wreak havoc far and wide, and effectively shut down the government and economy.

The question isn’t if an attack will hap-pen, but rather when, said Doug Myers, the chief information officer for Pepco Hold-ings Inc., an electrical company that serves parts of the Mid-Atlantic region.

“Utilities think about natural disasters as when, not if, and we think about the threat of a cyber-event in the same manner. However, there are several key differences between a hurricane, for example, and a cyber-event,” said Myers. “A hurricane comes with some degree of warning. Utili-ties typically begin their preparatory work days in advance … [but] cyber-attacks are not expected.”

While the electrical grid is vulnerable, industry has an opportunity to blaze trails in cybersecurity, said retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and National Security Agency.

The electric industry is one of the best places to test out new defenses, Hayden said in August at the Bipartisan Policy Cen-ter, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“The electrical industry might actually be the trailbreakers here,” said Hayden.

Utilities may be able to establish a pre-cedence in the cyberdomain that would not only help it better defend its networks, but open the doors for better relationships between the private sector and the govern-ment, Hayden said.

Electric companies do not deal with as much private information as the financial sector — another major hacker target, Hayden said. They can therefore be more aggressive in seeking threats and can more easily share information with other compa-nies and the government without serious repercussions.

There is an ongoing debate about how much personal information the government can look at. From the Edward Snowden scandal to the snooping on private Gmail accounts, the country as a whole has not yet decided how much power it wants to give the government.

Until U.S. citizens embrace spying by the government — which is for the com-mon good and safely collected — the United States will have one of the most unprotected networks in the world for the foreseeable future, he said.

“I’m willing to accept the proposition that the United States of America will forever have one of the least well-defended networks on this planet,” said Hayden. “We as a people have not yet created a consen-sus as to what it is we want our government to do … or what we’ll let our government do.”

While Congress and the American public wring their hands over government intru-sions, the threat is growing.

The United States faces cyber-attacks from three types of “sinners,” Hayden said.

Countries such as Iran or China might launch attacks. In 2012, Iran allegedly

destroyed 30,000 computers belonging to Saudi Aramco, the state-run Saudi Arabian oil and gasoline company. But, while intru-sions could be sophisticated and damaging, governments can be held accountable, and in that way are less of a threat, Hayden said.

Criminal gang syndicates, while danger-ous, usually are after money and can be bought off, if necessary, Hayden said.

The most worrisome actor is the hacktiv-ist, Hayden said. Hacktivists can be unpre-dictable and their motivations are often unclear. Notorious hacker groups such as Anonymous or LulzSec fall into this cat-egory. They are also becoming more sophis-ticated, Hayden said.

“As time goes on, we’re going to see this group down here [hacktivists] — whose demands are actually hard to define, whose demands may be unsatisfiable — begin to acquire the capacities that we now associ-ate with nation states,” said Hayden. “This is going to get worse before it gets better.”

In response to increasingly frequent and dangerous attacks, companies in the private sector have called on the government to implement federal cybersecurity measures.

One of the largest efforts was the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011. Critics claimed that CISPA could erode civil liberties, while proponents said it could help identify cyber-attacks. CISPA cleared the House of Representatives, but failed to pass the Senate in 2012. The act was reintroduced in Congress in 2013 but has since stalled.

In February, President Barack Obama released an executive order that aims to improve cybersecurity within critical infra-structure. The measure puts a premium on information sharing, and encourages the private sector to reach out to the govern-ment and share details about attacks. It also seeks to create a set of best practices while at the same time balancing privacy.

The order stated that securing critical infrastructure — like the electrical grid — is imperative.

“The cyberthreat to critical infrastructure continues to grow and represents one of the most serious national security chal-lenges we must confront. The national and economic security of the United States depends on the reliable functioning of the nation’s critical infrastructure in the face of such threats,” said Obama.

While Obama said he would veto CISPA in the spring, the administration is in full

Fears of Devastating Cyber-Attacks on Electric Grid, Critical Infrastructure Grow

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support of creating federal legislation to combat threats, said Andy Ozment, senior director for cybersecurity for the White House’s national security staff.

While passing anything this congres-sional session would be tough, the White House is optimistic that it can happen, he said.

Cybersecurity, and protecting critical infrastructure in particular, is one of the pri-orities of the administration, said Ozment.

Electric companies are on the front lines, he said. “The executive order is one very clear example of what we’re doing in that space, and you can see we’re focusing on the standards to be developed under the cybersecurity framework … and informa-tion sharing in particular.”

As cyber-attacks have increased, energy companies realize they are prime targets.

It is critical that electric companies treat cyber-attacks as seriously as they do natu-ral disasters, said Chris Peters, vice presi-dent for critical infrastructure protection at Entergy, a utility that serves nearly 3 million customers in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

“We have to treat cyberthreats with the same respect that we give to forces of nature that impact our grid — hurricanes, floods, ice [and] storms,” said Peters. “They impact our grid throughout the year, and we are organized, [we] deal with those threats, [we] are strategic about how we respond.”

Electric companies need to make the proper investments in cybersecurity, he said. CEOs and board members also need to practice a top-down approach when discussing the importance of cybersecurity.

“These cyberthreats are part of our risk profile, we have to fund it, we have to staff it and we have to be prepared to respond as necessary,” said Peters.

Paul Stockton, the managing director for Sonecon, a Washington, D.C.-based economic advisory and analysis firm, and former assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and America’s security affairs, said that lessons need to be drawn from Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled parts of the East Coast last October with flooding and powerful winds. The storm caused billions of dollars in damage and left millions without power for weeks.

When the electrical grid goes down, it’s not just power that goes out. It creates a domino effect that shuts down other essential services such as hospitals and can have major ramifications for public health, he said.

Federal legislation is one way to help bet-ter secure the grid, said Myers.

He asserted that it would better to have

just one federal entity regulating cyberse-curity, opposed to 51 separate regulatory commissions. The actions, or inaction, of just one state could have a cascading effect on a number of different power grids, he said. He pointed to the blackout of 2003, where mistakes made by one Ohio compa-ny following a small power outage caused grids in the Northeast and parts of Canada to shut down.

Scott Saunders, information security offi-cer for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California, said since the execu-tive order came out in February, he has seen an increase in information sharing in the industry, which is critical to stopping the threat.

“We cannot underscore that electric-ity would be a significant target by those intent on disrupting our national secu-

rity and American way of life. Electricity underpins the capability of everything we do and every other critical infrastructure,” said Saunders.

He said implementing universal best practice procedures would be useful and that electric company employees need to use better practices to help curb potential intrusions.

While federal regulation would be wise, he stressed it should not bog companies down with excessive red tape.

“One size does not fit all. We need to be mindful that overly burdensome regulatory regimes can threaten our ability to respond to emerging threats and create complexity where it’s not needed and where it does not add value,” said Saunders. ND

O c t O b e r 2 0 1 3 • N a t i O N a l D e f e N s e 25

Email your comments to YTadjdeh@ndia.org

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26 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3

BY SANDRA I. ERWINThe military’s unmanned aircraft,

like smartphones, need regular software upgrades. For the Defense Department, this is a costly proposition because drones are not disposable devices, and each technology refresh can cost millions of dollars.

With a fleet of several thousand unmanned air vehicles and a shrinking budget, the Pentagon expects to cut back on purchases of new aircraft and to update the existing inventory. Under the traditional business model, the military would pay the aircraft manufacturer to develop new software operating systems and applications. That approach is no longer affordable or desirable, Pentagon officials say.

When Pentagon budgets were soaring over the past decade, such inefficiency was not questioned. That changed in 2009, when then Undersecretary of Defense John Young directed the military services to adopt a “joint standard architecture” for unmanned vehicle ground control stations.

The policy resulted in the creation of UCS, or unmanned air systems control seg-ment. It is a “service-oriented” architecture that guides the development of new soft-ware used in the operation of unmanned vehicles. The Defense Department’s pro-curement policy guide, known as Better Buying Power, endorses UCS as an “open architecture that enables real competition between subsystem suppliers … and subsys-tem reuse across DoD systems.”

In a service-oriented architecture, indi-vidual modules collectively function like a large software application. Owners of sepa-rate systems can share software and cooper-ate, which over the long run could save the Defense Department billions of dollars in software costs, officials predict.

The best analogy to what the Pentagon is trying to do with UCS (www.ucsarchi-tecture.org) is the smartphone market, says Rich Ernst, team leader for interoperability at the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

“The goal is to develop a business model behind the ground control station,” Ernst tells National Defense. Every unmanned aircraft’s ground control station has similar software needs: a weather app, blue-force tracker, cursor on target, weapons release and situational awareness. If those applica-

tions were available in a standard format, he says, the military services could download them and upgrade their ground control sta-tions, rather than pay vehicle manufacturers to develop proprietary software.

In the smartphone world, independent vendors supply the apps, Ernst says. The same model could be used for drones’ ground stations.

Even though ground stations come in vastly different varieties — some are in fixed sites, others mounted in mobile trail-ers or aboard ships — they all need similar applications, says Ernst. He estimates there are about 255 apps that are relevant to ground control stations and could be stan-dardized across the military’s unmanned aircraft fleets.

The intent is not to reinvent the ground control station, but to evolve it to an open architecture so unmanned aircraft owners can reuse software, Ernst says. “We are driv-ing down the cost of inserting new capabil-ity into the ground control station.”

To test the app store concept, the Penta-gon asked unmanned aircraft manufacturers in 2009 to develop 12 apps and install them in each others’ ground control stations. They worked, Ernst says. The average integration time was 77 hours, compared to weeks or months for traditional systems.

The Defense Department wants to take this further. “We are developing a mar-ketplace,” he says. “We are developing the language for the ground control station. We want to eliminate the monolithic approach and the hard coding. We want to prevent vendor lock-in.”

Ernst recognizes that this effort is not as simple as it might sound. The Pentagon consulted intellectual property lawyers to make sure vendors’ IP rights were protect-ed. “We are developing a roadmap for how industry can participate and prosper in the unmanned air systems community,” Ernst says. His office drafted generic “request for proposals” language that the military services can include in their solicitations for software apps.

Since 2009, more than 200 organizations have participated in the UCS architecture, says Ernst. The goal is to have every major drone fleet in the Defense Department compliant with the UCS standards. So far, the Navy and the Army have made the

most progress, Ernst says. The Navy’s future carrier-based unmanned aircraft, called UCLASS, will have UCS “baked into it,” he says.

The Air Force’s Predator and Reaper remotely piloted aircraft fleets are “in the process of becoming compliant,” says Ernst. “It takes time to evolve the standards.”

Air Force drones follow a messaging standard, called UCI (unmanned systems command and control standard initiative), that facilitates machine-to-machine com-munication and reuse of services.

Ernst says the broader UCS standard is compatible with UCI and other protocols that exist across the Defense Department. “Like many project-specific solutions, UCI is driven by a selected small group of con-tractors,” he says. UCS supports “tri-service interoperability across all unmanned air system programs of record, including the Air Force’s UCI.”

The Defense Department wants the ser-vices to embrace the common language and the app store, Ernst says.

One of the companies that is competing for the Navy’s UCLASS vehicle develop-ment and manufacturing contract, Lock-heed Martin Corp., recently tested new software that allows different unmanned air vehicles to be operated by a single com-mand-and-control system. In a simulation, a single operator managed two UCLASS and two high-altitude maritime drones simul-taneously.

Lockheed Martin, teamed with Dream-Hammer Government Solutions, also is in pursuit of the upcoming Naval Air Systems Command’s “common control system” con-tract.

NAVAIR is seeking to integrate current and future command- and-control systems into a common framework. A request for industry proposals is expected later this year.

Navy spokeswoman Emily Burdeshaw says the intent is to standardize software. “All Navy unmanned air systems have some degree of UCS architecture compliance,” she says. Navy leaders will later “evalu-ate the business case to migrate current unmanned systems to the common control software solution.”

Marty Jenkins, director of business devel-opment at Lockheed Martin, applauds the Pentagon for trying to impose some disci-pline into the unmanned systems world. “This is a big step,” he says. Unmanned vehi-cle purchases tend to be “end to end,” which means the military buys the vehicle, sensors and ground station as one package. “As you have more aircraft, it’s not affordable to continue to buy end-to-end systems,” says Jenkins. “It’s like cable TV. … When you add a new channel, you don’t buy a new TV.”

Pentagon Recruiting Software Developers For Drone ‘App Store’

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O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 27

Lockheed’s partner DreamHammer is a commercial firm that is banking on the Defense Department’s app store to help grow its business. The firm spent $5 million to develop an application, called Ballista, which organizes how information is present-ed and displayed in a ground control station.

Nelson Paez, the company’s co-found-er and chief executive, says DreamHam-mer started developing Ballista in 2009 in response to the Pentagon’s push for interop-erability in military systems.

“The Defense Department has had a dif-ficult time making unmanned systems from different contractors interoperable,” he says. “Ballista can integrate any vehicle — mis-siles, aircraft or ground vehicles.”

Rather than wait for a government con-tract, DreamHammer decided to invest corporate funds and create a product that it could sell in the commercial UAV market, which is expected to boom once the Fed-eral Aviation Administration gives the green light to drones in the national airspace.

Paez sees the app store model as exactly what commercial companies need to be able to compete for government business. “To attract outside investors, the product had to be dual use,” he says. “If you go to Wall Street and you say your product is targeted at the government, they will slam the door in your face,” he says. “The acquisi-tion process is a nightmare, and the market is completely cornered by the traditional defense industry.”

DreamHammer licenses its software development kits to UAV manufacturers so they can tailor them to their specific needs, says Paez.

“When budgets were growing, nobody was interested in interoperability, they were just building log cabins,” he says. “Now they are looking at how to do tech refresh, and legacy systems are too expensive to man-age.” The current architecture and systems are not “what they need to move forward and be interoperable,” says Paez. “It’s a bridge too far.”

Boeing probably would never make a ground station or software that controls a Lockheed bird. “But if everyone uses our system they can work with each oth-er,” he says. “Manufacturers are embracing this. They could license software instead of developing expensive proprietary systems.”

The commercial world already is start-ing to make investments in anticipation of a bigger market in commercial drones, he says. The non-defense UAV business is still limited not only by FAA restric-tions but also by the high prices of drones. Small UAVs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Eventually, the “do-it-yourself community” using 3-D printing will build

comparable drones for a couple thousand dollars, he says.

The government should be able to tap into this innovation, Paez says. “Smaller UAVs will have more capability because of our software, and they can integrate with larger systems.”

In the app world, customers often do not know what they want. “That’s exactly where the unmanned systems community in the Defense Department is at,” says Paez. “They are really looking for industry to provide them new and cheaper ways to do their business.”

One of DreamHammer’s angel investors is retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who led the military’s rapid adoption of UAVs.

“They’re developing a software appli-cation that provides something that the

Defense Department has been looking for, for many years,” he says. “Ballista is a solution to the problem of standardization.” Being commercial software, Deptula adds, “You don’t have the problems associated with developing a system inside the ponderous Defense Department acquisition process.”

Paez predicts more vendors will join the UCS marketplace once they see the potential of dual-use UAV technology. The government can get new applications at less cost, and they are not stuck with outdated technology, he says. But the real issue for industry is whether there is a commercial market to justify investment in this tech-nology. That remains to be seen, he adds, although he is optimistic.

“We look at UCS as doing it right.” ND

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28 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

By Valerie insinnaAsk a layman to name an unmanned

aerial vehicle, and he will probably cite one of the armed drones used by the Air Force, such as the Predator or Reaper. Naval UAVs used for reconnaissance, such as the Sca-nEagle and Raven, have stayed mostly out of the public eye.

The Navy finally is developing its own custom unmanned air systems, with the service planning on fielding four new air-craft in the next few years. The coming decade may yield naval UAVs that become just as famous as their Air Force counter-parts — that is, if the service has the fund-ing to do it.

Some of these UAVs will incorporate revolutionary and somewhat risky tech-nologies, such as a system that will autono-mously take off and land from a moving aircraft carrier.

But money, or the lack thereof, could throw a wrench into the equation, said Phil Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at the Teal Group.

“The Navy has the advantage of buying UAVs later than the other services, so it will be able to learn from their experiences and take advantage of operational and techno-logical advances,” he told National Defense

in an email. “However, the difficulty comes in ramping up funding for three major UAV programs at the same time.”

These programs include the land-based MQ-4C Triton surveillance aircraft, the MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopter, and the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS).

Both the Triton and Fire Scout are manu-factured by Northrop Grumman. The Navy was scheduled to release in September a request for proposals for UCLASS after months of delays.

With Triton set to move into production, the UCLASS program needing increased funding for development and purchases of the Fire Scout ramping up in coming years, the Navy will have its work cut out for itself, Finnegan said. “That is quite a chal-lenge in an environment in which carrier reductions are being raised.”

Yet with the military’s rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region, the Navy is facing a ris-ing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles, he added. “It will need increased surveil-lance to protect the fleet from the higher threat level in these areas, and it will be in the forefront of gathering ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] in areas in which the U.S. may not have access to

bases.”The Navy has structured its UAS to part-

ner with complementary piloted aircraft. Triton is paired with the upcoming P-8 Poseidon multi-mission maritime aircraft that will perform anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare. Fire Scout will work along-side SH-60 Seahawk helicopters on the littoral combat ship. UCLASS will operate on the same carrier decks as F-18 Super Hornet fighter jets.

In the past decade, the Navy relied on piloted assets such as P-3 maritime surveil-lance aircraft or F-18s to help collect intel-ligence. The aim with manned-unmanned teaming is to free up those planes to do more complex missions while UAVs handle ISR, said Navy Capt. Chris Corg-nati, branch head for the unmanned aerial systems requirements and resources in the office of the chief of naval operations.

Naval aviators will pilot both manned aircraft and the corresponding unmanned systems, he said.

“The expertise that you need to operate these things are the same,” Corgnati said. “You have to understand the environment, [and] you’ve got to understand the mission whether you’re flying a P-3 or P-8 or you’re flying a Triton remotely.”

The UCLASS is the only naval UAS with a contract still up for grabs. That aircraft will be able to take off from an aircraft carrier, gather intelligence, attack targets and autonomously come back to the mov-ing vessel — all without disrupting normal operations on the flight deck.

Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Mar-tin and Northrop Grumman were awarded $15 million contracts in August to conduct preliminary design reviews.

Northrop Grumman may already have a leg up on the competition. In the past year, its X-47B demonstrator aircraft was the first UAV to ever accomplish catapult launches as well as autonomous touch-and-go and arrested landings on a moving aircraft car-rier. With contracts for Fire Scout and Triton already in hand, an award for UCLASS would be a major win for the company.

UCLASS’s primary duty will be ISR collection, but it also will be able to strike targets with joint direct attack munitions and the small diameter bomb II, according to requirements documents obtained by the U.S. Naval Institute News.

“It’s really going to make the carrier air-wing more effective, more lethal and more survivable,” Corgnati said.

Navy procurement officials want to buy as many vehicles as needed to provide 24/7

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coverage at a “tactically significant range,” said Rear Adm. Mathias Winter, the service’s program executive officer for unmanned avia-tion and strike weapons. If USNI’s requirements documents are cor-rect, that means it must be able to complete two 600-nautical mile orbits at a cost of less than $150 million.

Winter said the system could reach initial operational capability as early as 2018. The service requested $146 million in research-and-development funding as part of its fiscal year 2014 budget proposal.

UCLASS has come under fire by those within the Navy who believe its requirements have been scaled back too far, leaving it vulnerable to cancelation. Initial requirements for aerial refueling were dropped, stealth attributes have been cut down, and the pay-load size has been reduced since the program’s inception.

Dyke Weatherington, director of unmanned warfare and intelli-gence, surveillance and reconnaissance at the office of the secretary of defense, said those changes were the result of the service weigh-ing its needs against budgetary constraints. “Especially in this fiscal environment, DoD can’t afford to start programs that we can’t finish,” he said.

The UCLASS isn’t the only aircraft that will include novel capa-bilities. The MQ-4C Triton built by Northrop is planned to be the first naval drone to include a sense-and-avoid system to keep it from colliding with other aircraft, but the Navy in August announced it had halted work on the system, which is built by Exelis.

The Navy is waiting for Northrop Grumman officials to brief it on possible fixes, said Capt. Jim Hoke, Triton program manager. All options, including recompeting the system, are on the table.

“We are not carving out that requirement,” he said. “We just have to make sure it’s the right system, it’s an affordable system and that it’s going to take care of the things that we need it to take care of. So we have not answered those questions yet, which is why we’ve had to take a pause right now.”

Fielding a sense-and-avoid system would have implications not only for the Navy, but also for the other services and the UAV industry as a whole. Such radars will be mandatory before unmanned aircraft are able to fly in airspace where civilian aircraft operate.

Even without a sense-and-avoid system, the combination of Tri-ton and P-8 aircraft will be a step up from the P-3s currently used to conduct maritime surveillance. The Triton will be able to cover 2 million square miles of ocean in a 24-hour mission, Hoke said.

“The way we used to cover a lot of ocean in a P-3 is we would be flying around out there at about 1,000 feet,” he said. “The sensors weren’t that good. A lot of it was searching with your eyeballs, try-ing to stay alert, trying to stay awake. We won’t have that anymore with the Triton.”

“What Triton will be able to do is get that maritime picture, and then when there are things that the warfare commander, the for-ward commanders are concerned about, they can send a manned platform out there to get a closer look and to take care of things if they need to,” Hoke continued.

Triton has already been a victim of funding delays. The Navy shifted $25 million from the fiscal year 2014 budget request to the following year, pushing back Triton’s production until 2015.

Meanwhile, the Navy is scheduled in October to conduct the first test flights of the larger version of the Fire Scout helicopter, the MQ-8C. The aircraft has three times the endurance and twice the payload of its smaller brother. The Navy wants to buy 28 MQ-8C aircraft for its special forces.

The smaller MQ-8B will be deployed aboard the LCS 3 USS Fort Worth in November 2013. “We’re tracking to get onboard the LCS 2 or LCS 4 in 2014,” said Capt. Pat Smith, the Navy’s Fire Scout program manager.

That aircraft is also getting a new Telephonics AN/ZPY-4 radar and may soon be adding laser-guided rockets. A Fire Scout outfitted with the advanced precision kill weapons system hit 11 of 12 tar-gets during testing at China Lake, Calif., Smith said. More testing is needed, and officials have not decided on when the weapons would be deployed on a ship.

A wildcard in the mix is the RQ-21A Small Tactical Unmanned Air System manufactured by Insitu. Both the Navy and Marine Corps plan on buying the system, but only the Marine Corps has included funding in its fiscal year 2014 budget.

Although the Navy deferred funding for the program, the service still remains interested in the RQ-21, Corgnati said.

The RQ-21A was designed based on feedback from its pre-decessor, Insitu’s ScanEagle, said Ryan Hartman, the company’s senior vice president of programs. Customers wanted the ability to integrate more and bigger payloads than what could fit into the ScanEagle nose and mid-bay compartment.

The RQ-21 is typically delivered with an empty payload bay, which can be used for radar, communications relay, electronics warfare payloads or other systems. The nose turret houses a camera used to collect full-motion video, Hartman said. The Navy’s version will include the automatic identification system, which will give the RQ-21 the ability to locate nearby vessels and report them back to the Navy.

Like the Triton and Fire Scout, the RQ-21 would provide the Navy with ISR, but it has some unique advantages. Unlike Triton, the aircraft can be launched from a ship, and it is less noisy and noticeable than the larger Fire Scout.

Initial operation, testing and evaluation will conclude by the end of this year, and Insitu is preparing for initial operating capability in early 2014, Hartman said. ND

O c t O b e r 2 0 1 3 • N a t i O N a l D e f e N s e 29

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30 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

By STEW MAGNUSONThe fact that soldiers and Marines

want small robots to perform reconnais-sance and surveillance in battle zones — particularly urban environments where they can be used to peer into buildings and around corners — has been established.

There have been numerous urgent requirements coming from the field asking for them, and thousands of units have made their way to Iraq and Afghanistan.

But a permanent spot for the machines has not yet been engraved in stone.

Tactics, techniques and procedures for using them have been invented on the fly. The robots have all been commercial-off-the-shelf products that have performed well, but left the military with large logis-tics bills.

Doctrine that would allow the two ground services to formally make them standard pieces of equipment and programs of record has not been forthcoming.

“There are tasks that soldiers won’t do right now without their robots,” said Lt. Col. Stuart Hatfield, soldier systems and unmanned ground systems branch chief, Army G-8. Cave and tunnel reconnais-sance is one example. “A soldier doesn’t want to grab a pistol and a flashlight and be back in Vietnam and get down in there and be a tunnel rat. They would rather send a robot.”

Checkpoint security and explosive ord-nance disposal are other dirty and danger-ous jobs troops would rather perform with a robot, he said.

It is not as if the benefits of using robots for reconnaissance are a new idea. They were once part of the Army’s plans a decade ago when it kicked off the now-defunct Future Combat Systems program. FCS was canceled in 2009 but its small unmanned autonomous ground vehicle, or SUGV, program survived. The $500 million program was ultimately canceled in 2011. It was envisioned as a reconnaissance robot to accompany small units.

Hatfield said the Army, along with the Marine Corps, has a desire to field a joint, multi-mission ground robot similar to SUGV, but so far they are only aspirations. He is waiting for requirements for a ground robot to come from the Army Training and Doctrine Command. When he has those documents in hand, then he can go out and compete with other Army programs for funding. However, he did not anticipate any

money for such a program until the 2016 to 2020 budget cycle.

The Army has spent $730 million on ground robots, which were all pushed into the field through urgent need statements and rapid fielding initiatives. This all came from overseas contingency operations (OCO) funding.

“As everyone knows, that OCO funding is going away as we pull out of contingency oper-ations. How do we transition those [robots] into programs of record?” Hatfield asked. Current funding streams are for bomb dis-posal robots only.

“With the loss of the SUGV, we don’t

currently have a soldier system, but we do want to continue developing programs of record for that and do recon/surveillance, lighten the soldier load and continue to breech and clear,” he said.

Lt. Col. Michael Hixson, a combat engineer and chief information officer at Marine Corps unmanned ground systems, said the Army and Marine Corps intended to work together to build a common chas-sis and operating systems that will allow the robot to do different missions depend-ing on the circumstances.

“You have the same chassis when you put a reconnaissance payload on there to support the maneuver forces; then you pull that off and put a chemical sensor on there or an engineer payload,” he said at the conference.

“Modularity is the goal,” Hatfield said.Like the Army, the Corps will have to

put these aspirations off until the end of the current budget cycle, or beyond, for any long-term dedicated programs, Hixson said.

Hatfield said, in many respects, the ser-

vices and troops on the ground have been spoiled by the rapid fielding initiatives that sped the robots into the field. Now, acqui-sition personnel are forced to return to the old procurement processes and cycles that are ill suited for robotics.

Rapidly advancing technology is one of the challenges the two services have always had with robotics, he added. “How do you use that [acquisition] system — that is made to build battleships and tanks and bombers and airplanes — to build a system that could be obsolete before you get the first one fielded?” he asked.

Help for robot manufacturers may come in a pot of money that will become avail-able to acquire new robots, software and components beginning in 2015.

The Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Ga., and the Robotic Sys-tems Joint Project Office (RSJPO) will be authorized to buy technologies from ven-dors that can be tested in the field.

Through this process, any military orga-nization can request that the center of excellence and RSJPO procure a robot, or a subsystem, with these dedicated funds and put them in the hands of battle labs so they can inform programs of record.

Industry has told the Army: “You’re kill-ing us with demonstrations and robotic rodeos and all these things where there was no return on investment,” Hatfield said. This will lead to contracts and reduce the research, development, test and evaluation costs for vendors, he said.

The goal is to get to where the services are not buying “small, niche systems,” but buying big quantities as part of programs of record, he said.

To do so, they will have to manage the capability and cost thresholds, he said.

“We want them to be expendable because they are unmanned, but we want them to be survivable because we spend a lot of money getting them out there. You got to have that balance,” he added.

Representatives of two of the major sup-pliers of ground robots to the military said despite the apparent procurement pause, they are optimistic about the technology’s permanent place in ground forces.

Mark Belanger, director of Department of Defense robotic products at iRobot, said, “People are taking a deep breath now and working on their tactics, techniques and procedures and developing their new concepts of operation. And most of those guys are interested in dismounted, small robots,” he said.

Charles E. Dean, director of business development, unmanned systems group, land division at QinetiQ North America, said, there are still plenty of business

Reconnaissance Robots’ Place On Battlefields Still Unsettled

Dragon Runner 10 QinetiQ

opportunities for robot manufacturers even though there aren’t any immediate plans to integrate them into the force.

“They are on a pathway toward becom-ing programs of record,” he said, referring to recon robots, larger robotic mules that can haul heavy loads and other concepts.

Meanwhile, an effort to field small, throwable reconnaissance robots in the waning months of the Afghan conflict — which could provide examples of how they can be used in combat — has been mired in controversy and stymied by a series of protests by a vendor.

The Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, responding to requests from combatant commanders in Afghanistan in 2012, kicked off the ultra-light recon robot program in order to quickly field a robot and controller small and light enough to fit in a backpack for dismounted operations.

It chose three manufacturers, iRobot, QinetiQ and MacroUSA, to produce 100 robots each to send to Afghanistan, where troops would test them out in battle zones.

After the field tests and evaluations were complete in late 2012, JIEDDO asked QinetiQ to produce small robotic arms for its Dragon Runner 10.

MacroUSA was the only one of three of the entrants to have a robotic arm, and it filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office. It accused JIEDDO of “technical leveling.” In other words, lik-ing a feature on one piece of equipment, but going out to ask a favored manufac-turer to duplicate it.

JIEDDO quickly withdrew the arm contract before the GAO could render a verdict.

Earlier this year, MacroUSA filed a sec-ond and third protest after RSJPO abruptly gave two sole source contracts to iRobot and QinetiQ to produce the ultralight robots without proper notices.

MacroUSA prevailed in that protest as well and the Army was forced to pay for the company’s legal bills, and cancel the contracts.

As of press time, neither RSJPO nor JIEDDO had re-released a request for pro-posals for the program.

MacroUSA President Robert Ramos said after prevailing in three protests the com-pany showed that: “Our assumptions that we had all along were right, that we never got a fair opportunity, that we never got evaluated, that they never had any inten-tion of buying our systems,” Ramos said. “I feel there is a lot of favoritism,” he added.

A JIEDDO spokesman denied the accu-sations.

MacroUSA filed a fourth protest with

GAO over JIEDDO’s effort to acquire an ultralight robot with a manipulator arm for the EOD community. The company said the request for proposal documents simply described the QinetiQ Dragon Runner 10 system, to the detriment of other compa-nies.

JIEDDO also withdrew the request before GAO had a chance to rule on the protest.

There are currently no RFPs for an ultra-light robot.

Dean said MacroUSA’s assertion it was the only vendor that had an arm certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology wasn’t true. QinetiQ had a NIST-certified modular arm on its Dragon Runner 10.

“The military had seen our arm on the Dragon Runner 10 from the get-go,” he

said.“We’re not sure which way the govern-

ment is heading in the next few months early into their new fiscal year. But we are positive if there remains a need for such a solution … then they will find a way,” Dean said.

iRobot’s Belanger said, “We certainly respect the Army and the GAO’s decision. We have gotten great feedback from the theater from the ones that we have shipped to date,” he said, noting that while the sole source contracts for additional robots had been terminated, the 300 systems sent to Afghanistan for evaluations remain there and are being used in operations.

“We felt we were fairly awarded a sole source when we got it,” he added. ND

O c t O b e r 2 0 1 3 • N a t i O N a l D e f e N s e 31

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By DAN PARSONSAs the Army extends its battlefield communications network down to the individual soldier, it has greatly improved troops’ ability to access and share informa-

tion. This has created an entirely new challenge — the need for sustainable portable power.

The ongoing need to improve battery efficiency and reduce weight still holds, but the Army also is interested in fielding novel technologies that accomplish more than simply removing pounds from a soldier’s load, said Steve Mapes, product lead for soldier power at Program Executive Office Soldier.

“As you have effectively closed that capability gap for combat information, a consequence is you have created an entirely new one for power and energy,” Mapes said during a recent interview at Ft. Belvoir, Va. “As the Army moves toward bringing entire bri-gades into the network, we have to keep pace with that new Army strategy by providing the necessary support equipment to sustain those formations.”

Mapes likened a networked radio to leaving a cell phone on dur-ing a plane ride at 30,000 feet. The constant search for a signal will drain the phone’s battery much more quickly and it will almost certainly be dead or significantly depleted by the time the plane lands, he said.

“You’re burning through batteries on a networked radio at a rate of two to four hours,” he said. “A battery that is designed to last eight to 10 hours out of the network is consumed in two to four hours on the network.”

The 2.5-pound, 150 watt-hour conformal battery was born out of the necessity to keep radios networked without weighing soldiers down with perhaps a dozen disposable batteries per day.

“There was no ‘prior-to-this’ battery. … There was no need for such a capability with the urgency we have today because you didn’t have all your guys running around with networked radios,” Mapes said. “We’re not necessarily replacing something. We are responding to an entirely new Army strategy with completely new architecture and support equipment.”

The conformal battery is changed once every 24 hours as opposed to swapping out multiple batteries every six to eight hours, which cuts down-time and reduces the risk that a soldier will lose power to peripheral devices, said Steve Aviles, senior operations research analyst for the Operational Energy Branch of the Soldier Division at the Maneuver Center of Excellence in Ft. Benning, Ga.

“Even if we could charge our radio batter-ies and we didn’t have to bring extras out, we would still be changing those out every six to eight hours,” he said.

Introducing considerably more radios to the network also made primary, disposable batteries prohibitively expensive for the Army, he said. Without a state-of-charge indica-tor, soldiers did not know how much energy was left in their pri-mary batteries. Each time they ventured

outside the wire on patrol, they would throw away their old batter-ies and pop in brand new ones out of the package, he said.

The conformal batteries are part of capability set 13 — the Army’s first attempt to bring entire brigades into the network. It introduces networked battlefield communications gear to units at the team-leader level and above.

“Power is a growing issue and it always has been … but it has spiked over the last three or four years and it has significantly spiked in capability set 13, when we actually did what we’ve been planning for a decade — we actually put soldiers in the network,” Mapes said.

So far, four combat brigades have been equipped with the technology suite that includes radios, power management systems, attendant battery chargers and other support equipment. Full fund-ing and fielding is scheduled for fiscal year 2016 for procurement and total small unit power should be completed in 2017, Mapes said.

The conformal battery is a flexible, multi-cell rechargeable power pack that fits into a soldier’s chest or side body armor pouch over the protective plate. It has been proven to withstand more than 300 bends in excess of two inches without the interior cells or outside casing being broken. It also improves on the 5590 soldier-radio bat-tery by providing a series of lights that show how much power the battery holds. The power packs do not offer ballistic protection, but if shot will continue to provide power because each internal cell is independent of the others.

Soldier feedback is informing improvements that Army engineers and industry are using to design the next iteration of the battery and support equipment. They are also providing information on how best to use the equipment in the field, Mapes said.

“The guys never cease to amaze and inform us of the tactical application of how this is used on the battlefield,” he said. “Soldiers don’t only consider it as power worn, they consider it to be power portable. So we go into a forward operating base and a guy has his laptop out, and it’s connected not to a power strip that’s pulling from a generator, but to a conformal battery.”

Rechargeable batteries require battery chargers. Soldiers need ones that operate in sparse environments where a wall outlet or even a car battery may not be available. The squad power manager — another element of capability set 13 — answers that need.

The SPM is basically a collection of power cords that can recharge a conformal battery using any-thing from a vehicle’s cigarette lighter to a solar blanket. A commander with the 82 Airborne Divi-sion in Afghanistan was able to completely elimi-nate battery resupply to his combat outpost using nothing but the SPM and solar blankets, Mapes said.

“They were at static mortar sites, but the note here is that in the commander’s logistics plan, he

no longer had to account for moving batteries to those sites,” Mapes said. “They were able

to achieve what we have been trying to achieve for years and what we are still trying to achieve — autonomous opera-

tions.”The modular universal battery

charger offers another option for

Army’s Battlefield Network Requires New Thinking on Soldier Power

32 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

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Army’s Battlefield Network Requires New Thinking on Soldier Power

recharging conformal and traditional radio batteries. It is another technology that resulted directly from the Army’s effort to bring individual soldiers into the network, Mapes said.

“At this scale, it replaces nothing because there were never so many radios in the formation. There was never a requirement for so many chargers,” he said. “So we had to come up with a way to support all these rechargeable batteries.”

Designed for use in more static positions, the device has charg-ing bays for both radio and conformal batteries and is issued with a 120-watt solar blanket. Based on soldier feedback, the MUBC’s size has been cut in half and its power throughput doubled from 150 watts to 300 watts.

It and the SPM also now have harvesting capability. A soldier can take a half-dead primary 5590 battery and transfer the remaining energy to a rechargeable battery.

The conformal batteries are made by Palladium Energy, which produces the lithium-ion prismatic cells. As in the commercial mar-ket, battery weight, size and power are limited by the periodic table.

“When lithium ion came on the scene, it was a significant leap,” Mapes said, noting that the chemistry allowed for greater energy storage than alkaline batteries and the ability to recharge. “The chemistry of the battery is going to drive possibilities for the future. We are looking to emerging chemistry and innovation because cur-rent technology can only take us so far.”

Industry is already experimenting with battery chemistries that improve energy density and stability along with extending shelf life and length of charge. Energizer, the commercial battery giant, has done just that with its lithium-iron disulfide batteries, called the L91.

The double-A is already the military’s preferred cell for use in small electronics because of its advantages over traditional alkaline batteries, said Bob Devine, the company’s L91 technology manager. The military purchases about 2 million double-A cells per year, he

said. Energizer has been working with the Defense Department for

nearly a decade to develop lighter, more stable battery chemistries like lithium-iron disulfide that are 37 percent lighter than the alka-line cells they replace, among other advantages.

“We have been trying to improve capacity and reliability,” Devine said. “From a capacity standpoint, our focus has been on making adjustments to the overall construction of the battery and removing inert material and replacing it with active constituents.”

The L91, which is commercially available, is commonly used in gear like the defense advanced GPS receiver, AN/PAS-13C ther-mal weapon sight, night vision goggles and monoculars and LED flashlights.

A major advantage the lithium-iron disulfide chemistry has over other cathode-anode combinations is the range of temperatures at which it can provide power. The L91 battery has been tested from negative 40 to 60 degrees Celsius, said Matthew Wendling, a staff technology engineer at Energizer.

“This chemistry is generally extremely stable, which not only contributes to shelf performance but the safety of the battery,” Wendling said. “This is not a lithium-ion product. The chemistry is much more stable.”

Alkaline batteries have a tendency to leak and bleed energy in hot temperatures, he said. They simply seize up at temperatures below freezing. Lithium-iron disulfide will do neither, he said. It also has a shelf life of upwards of 40 years without losing more than 20 percent of charge, which would allow the Army to stock-pile them without worry, he said.

“We have actual, real-time shelf data of 20-year-old batteries that still perform almost as if they are new,” he said. “They are essentially leak proof, which in this case is important so as not to

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34 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

damage some potentially very expensive military equipment.” Energizer has been making L91 batteries for two decades, in

which time the cell has been enhanced from 200 watt-hours per kilogram to 300 watt-hours per kilogram. The company is limited by how much lithium it can put into a single battery, but has shown up to 326 watt-hours in compositions made specifically for the military, said Mike Mansuetto, who also manages the L91 technology.

“For years, the commercial market has been a horsepower race of how much power can be put into the finite package of a double-A cell,” he said. “Some of it is brute force in terms of putting more materials into the battery. We also optimized the cell by reduc-ing the weight of the container materials and other things. The double-A form factor is a fixed volume — double-A cavities are

double-A cavities — so there’s only so much material we can force into them.”

Soldiers have determined that about 150 watt-hours is the ideal amount of power to carry at a time, Mapes said. The Army, there-fore, is undertaking a similar engineering challenge in squeezing that much energy storage into a smaller battery.

PEO Soldier and Research, Development and Engineering Com-mand are seeking “to further improve the design by reducing even more the weight and volume of the battery,” Mapes said. “We’re working hard with RDECOM and industry to get it down from 2.5 pounds to below 2 pounds. As technology improves, we believe within the next five years we can reach that goal.” ND

By VALERIE INSINNAUnlike the massive acquisition programs for fighter jets and

combat vehicles, night vision technologies need to be refreshed every few years in order for troops to maintain their edge against adversaries. Scientists have focused on improving image quality while driving down the size, weight and power consumption of these devices.

For the first time, the Army is simultaneously procuring a new suite of night vision goggles and weapon sights that can combine imagery from both devices. The coming years may bring greater advancements. Officials from military research organizations believe that a shift from analog to digital night vision devices will soon be possible, yielding the prospect of capturing and sharing color video among soldiers.

For decades, the U.S. military relied on analog night vision goggles that use image intensification tubes to amplify existing light, allow-ing troops to see in practically pitch-black conditions.

“The image intensifier is almost a perfect technology. It consumes extremely little power, [and] it’s very light,” said Don Reago, acting director of the communications and electronics research, develop-ment and engineering center in the Army’s Night Vision and Elec-tronic Sensors Directorate. The problem is that image intensifiers cannot operate without some source of light.

The Army’s newest goggles incorporate thermal imaging so that soldiers can see even if there is no visible moon, stars or nearby cities to provide ambient light. The enhanced night vision goggles, manu-factured by Exelis, overlay image intensified and infrared images.

Now the Army is looking for goggles that seamlessly operate with clip-on, infrared weapon sights. The service in February released a solicitation for the enhanced night vision goggle III and a corre-sponding family of weapon sights.

Like its predecessor, the new devices will combine thermal imag-ing and image intensification. However, the ENVG IIIs will also include “rapid target acquisition” technology, which will wirelessly send imagery from the weapon sight to the goggles, allowing the soldier to see both images blended together.

Without rapid target acquisition, a soldier who sees an adversary in his night vision goggle would have to flip the goggle up in order to look through the weapon sight and view the target, said Jeff Miller,

Raytheon’s vice president of combat and sensing systems. “Rapid target acquisition actually puts that image from the sight on the rifle into the goggle, so he can leave his goggle down and fire much more quickly.”

Fielding a rapid target acquisition technology could reduce the time it takes for a soldier to detect and engage a target by 50 per-cent, the solicitation said. That would enable soldiers to be more lethal and effective, while increasing their ability to quickly operate at night.

The sight will be a “weapon-mounted long-wave infrared sensor used for surveillance and fire control of individual weapons during daylight, darkness, adverse weather and dirty battlefield conditions,” the solicitation said.

The government intends on awarding up to two indefinite deliv-ery/indefinite quantity contracts. Exelis and Raytheon are two of the companies gunning for awards, but company officials declined to provide specifics on their offerings.

Ultimately, what company wins the contracts will be determined by which one can meet requirements at the lowest cost, weight and size and with the least power consumption, Miller said. The Army will likely announce a winner in the first half of 2014, he added.

Rapid target acquisition was developed by the night vision direc-torate in concert with industry partners, BAE Systems and DRS Technologies. Work started in 2010, when engineers at the Army’s night vision lab received feedback from soldiers who wanted to view images from their goggles and weapon sights at the same time, Reago said.

“The tricky part, scientifically, is you want the image in the rifle sight to be correctly positioned relative to the imagery in the goggle. So if the rifle sight is looking a little bit to the right, you will see the image a little bit to the right in the ENVG [enhanced night vision goggle],” he said. “We spent a lot of time developing that capability, which is based on software and some sensor technology.”

The directorate will transfer the technology to Program Executive Office Soldier within a year, Reago said. Until then, it is continuing to refine the software and make it more user-friendly.

The most difficult and enduring problem for developers of night vision goggles is how to affordably move from analog to digital technologies while maintaining low size, weight and power con-sumption. The directorate has been working for about 15 years to develop digital alternatives to image intensifiers, and Reago believes a digital device could be ready for fielding as early as three years down the road.

There are no digital head-mounted night vision goggles in use because technology has not advanced to the point where they are small and light enough to be worn on a helmet, said Eric Garris, network systems strategist and lead engineer for Exelis.

Reago said transforming analog images to digital is also difficult.

New Technologies Fuel Advancements in Night Vision Goggles

Email your comments to DParsons@ndia.org

®

36 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

“If you want to digitally combine image intensifier data with thermal data and give the user a truly fused picture, you have to resort to some complex engi-neering to get the information digital, and it reduces performance of the image intensifier and adds to the cost,” he explained.

The directorate formed a digital night vision consortium with industry in 2011 to help pioneer digital image intensifica-tion alternatives. Its members are BAE, Jazz Semiconductor, Sarnoff Corp., Tele-dyne Technologies Inc. and SiOnyx.

Reago would not specify any details about the prototypes being built by the consortium, except that the manufacturers are concentrating on less expensive silicone-based imaging technologies.

Prototypes are expected by the end of the year for testing in 2014 at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Ga. The goal is to manufacture a camera that weighs under a pound and is an inch wide, he said.

There are two ways to create a digital replacement for image intensifiers, he con-tinued. Either they can make a camera sen-sitive enough to amplify very small amounts of light, or they can use a camera with extremely low-noise sensors.

Moving to digital would generate a host of new capabilities. Unlike analog, digi-

tal video can be recorded and transmit-ted over a network, either to a command post or soldier-to-soldier. It could also be fused together pixel-by-pixel with thermal imaging, as opposed to the overlay of ther-mal and optical imaging currently used in enhanced night vision goggles, Reago said.

Color images and video are also a possi-bility with digital night vision technologies. This would allow troops to see if a comrade is wounded or to quickly read and process signs in urban areas, he said.

The directorate is experimenting with filters that help sensors retain the ability to transmit color, even in low light. The technology is still imperfect — in order to convey more color information, the resolu-tion of the image is degraded, Reago said.

Other military organizations are also pur-suing digital technologies for the individual soldier. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on a digital helmet-mounted multiband camera and clip-on weapon sight that can see day and night in any weather conditions.

The camera and weapon sight would fuse reflective light in the visible, near infrared, short-wave part of the spectrum, as well as thermal images from the mid-wave and long-wave portions into a single image, said Nibir Dhar, who manages the program for DARPA. Making the devices as small as possible is another objective of the program, called Pixel Network for Dynamic Visual-ization, or PIXNET.

The research agency in July awarded $8.6 million to Raytheon and $8.9 million to Sensors Unlimited Inc. to develop a helmet-mounted camera. DRS Technologies’ recon-naissance, surveillance and target acquisition division picked up a $15.5 million contract for the weapon sight.

Both devices will be wirelessly connected to an Android smartphone. Although peer-to-peer sharing is not a requirement of the program, soldiers would be able to use the smartphone to send images over a network. “For example, a team leader could look at it and make some sort of app” or could send the image for forensic processing, Dhar said.

The target cost-per-unit for the helmet-

mounted camera is $3,300. A target cost of the weapon sight has not yet been defined, but will likely be more expensive because it has to be able to see at longer distances, he said.

The PIXNET program kicked off in August after manufacturers were selected and met with DARPA offi-cials to compare notes, Dhar said. Testing of prototypes is planned for 2015 with final delivery in 2017.

Small thermal cameras for the dismounted soldier are also receiving research-and-development dollars at both the Army’s night vision directorate and DARPA.

Engineers at the directorate are engaged in efforts to decrease pixel size from 17 to 12 microns, Reago said. It typically takes only three to five years for the research-and-development community to introduce such a reduction.

“As the pixel size gets smaller, it allows us to make the sensors much smaller and it allows us to increase the resolution without making the sensor larger,” he said. “Imagine going from something that’s 2 or 3 pounds and the size of half of a shoe box … to something that is less than a pound and the size of a small water bottle.”

DARPA’s “low cost thermal imager” pro-gram is aimed at refining manufacturing for infrared sensors to make them small enough to embed in smartphones, rifle sights or eye-glasses and affordable enough to purchase for every soldier.

Like the Army’s night vision directorate, DARPA and its industry partners were able to shrink pixel size to 12 and 10 microns. They also developed new optical materials that can be stamped on a wafer in the same way cell phone cameras are manufactured, Dhar said.

DRS, BAE and Raytheon will demon-strate their smartphone-embedded thermal cameras in November, he said. After that, companies will finalize, manufacture and deliver their designs to the Army for field testing in 2015.

Ultimately, it’s possible that small ther-mal cameras will become more common in the commercial sector if industry decides to spin off these technologies to products geared toward the public, Dhar said.

“When you start to make [thermal] cam-eras [for] $500 or less — that’s the goal — it opens doors for a variety of commercial applications,” he said. “You will have these cameras on your smartphone, on your vehicle to drive at night, for security, and so on.” ND

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By STEW MAGNUSONAs far as producing Cold War era weapon systems the military says it has enough of, but Congress continues to fund anyway, there is probably no bigger poster child

than the Abrams tank.The past two budget cycles saw a public debate among the Army,

the contractor that runs the tank manufacturing plant and lawmak-ers as to whether taxpayers should foot the bill for keeping a unique industrial base active, or “hot” in manufacturing parlance, in lean times.

Service leaders have simply said they don’t need any more upgraded M1 tanks until a new version comes along in 2017.

It was assumed that foreign military sales would take up the slack at the plant where they are produced, but concerns grew that this may not be the case.

General Dynamics Land Systems, which runs the Army owned Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio, argued that to close the facility for up to four years would cost more than $1 billion when the day came to ramp up production again.

Members of Congress, whether they stated it overtly or not, saw jobs ebbing away in their districts. The Abrams industrial base is spread far and wide, and proponents are found in more than just the Ohio delegation. More than 120 lawmakers sent a letter to Army Secretary John M. McHugh in May expressing their disappointment that the service was once again stating that it didn’t intend to fund any more tank upgrades.

Headlines proclaiming that Congress was “forcing the Army to buy tanks it didn’t need” made it into the mainstream press this summer, and the program became the butt of jokes on the satirical Colbert Report television show.

By the end of the summer, it seemed that the industrial base argu-ment had won the day. Congress had allocated $181 million beyond what the Army was requesting.

By Aug. 16, details emerged on how that money would be spent.In a letter sent to the chairs of the appropriations and authorizing

committees, McHugh, said he was “pleased” to submit the congres-

sionally mandated report. “Though I must reiterate that the Army has no need for additional

M1A 2SEPv2 tanks, the production of these tanks does contribute to the mitigation of risk to our industrial base,” McHugh said in the letter.

Paying for unneeded hardware in order to maintain the industrial base and keep production lines hot is a practice that may be more common in the future, one analyst said. The munitions, spy satellite and submarine industries are also making the same argument as budgets tighten and wars wind down. The Bradley fighting vehicle is facing a similar pause (See story page 13).

“I think it’s very likely that we will hear defense contractors in other sectors of the industrial base making these arguments very soon,” said Eric Lindsey, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Defense spending will be coming down whether the sequester stays in place or not, he said.

“The ground vehicle manufacturers are feeling the pinch espe-cially bad right now because there are so few prospective contracts out there, and the programs they’re pinning their hopes on, like the ground combat vehicle, are on pretty shaky ground. But contractors in other sectors aren’t in much better shape, they’re just slightly behind in the curve,” Lindsey said.

Congress’ shot in the arm for the tank sector includes money for subcontractors as well. Of the $181 million, $114 million will be spent on 12 upgraded tanks, $26 million will go to purchase 48 transmissions and $41 million to buy 86 Block II second-generation forward-looking infrared sensors “to mitigate Abrams FLIR industrial base risks, sustain development and production capability,” an Army report to Congress detailing these outlays said.

“Each vendor brings essential, unique, and in some cases, irreplace-able competencies to the system production process,” the report said.

General Dynamics Land Systems was not subtle in its efforts to convince members of Congress to keep the plant operating uninter-rupted.

38 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

Over Army Objections, Industry And Congress Partner to Keep Abrams Tank Production ‘Hot’

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The Center for Public Integrity in a July 2012 report documented how General Dynamics and its employees donated a steady stream of campaign donations to key lawmakers. The company also hosted the supportabrams.com website with videos of workers and engi-neers whose jobs would be at risk if a shutdown continued.

Key among the website’s assertions was that a four-year shutdown would cost $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion when the day came to restart the line.

Donald Kotchman, vice president of the armored brigade combat team at General Dynamics Land Systems, said that was the number the company came up with when the Army asked for a report on the state of the industrial base. There are a lot of variables, he said, which is why there is a $500 million spread.

It would depend on the length of the shutdown, and whether the Army would be willing to pay to keep machinery oiled and running periodically, or whether the plant’s components would be completely boxed up and removed.

There would be workers to retrain and hire, and some parts manufacturers may go out of business, he said.

“How would you qualify all of your new suppliers given that you will have lost at least the majority of your suppliers? Not that they would have necessarily gone out of business, but they wouldn’t be producing any Abrams material, and would therefore need to be requalified,” he said.

The Army report listed three key “irreplaceable” subcomponents: Allison transmissions, Honeywell turbine engines and night vision systems for target acquisition produced by DRS Technologies and Raytheon.

Kotchman admitted that these major defense contractors were not at risk of going out of business, but they could still lose their desire and capability to produce these unique systems if there were a prolonged shutdown.

Allison, for example, may no longer see the profit in producing transmissions for vehicles in the 60- to 70-ton class, he said.

The Army has hired an outside consulting firm to study the armored vehicle industrial base, which should let it know which suppliers would be at risk during a turndown in defense spending. That report is due in December.

Lindsey said with major corporations being pressured to maxi-mize profits, they may indeed walk away.

“A point worth emphasizing is that it’s not just about there not being a factory somewhere ready to go,” he said. “The gravest danger might be that we lose the research, engineering and design expertise.”

Although the $1.6 billion restart number was still being touted on the website in September, GDLS spokesman Peter Keating said it is a moot point.

“I don’t think that anybody at this point believes within the [office of the secretary of defense], the Army or Congress that it is

wise to do a total U.S. domestic production halt,” he said.However, there are still risks of production gaps. The $181 million takes production to the end of 2015. The Army

wants to begin new Abrams upgrades in 2017. Kotchman said it is possible with the budget pressures that this could be pushed to 2019.

International sales are expected to fill the gap, but those are not certain.

Ashley Givens, spokesperson for the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems, said “the fleet age for the Abrams tank is low and the Army has determined recapitalization is not required until FY17 in conjunction with the M1A2 SEPv3 production effort,” she said in an email. The Army still believes that foreign military sales will keep the line running until 2017, she added.

GDLS was waiting to hear about an upgrade contract to Saudi Arabia at the end of September. Decisions on other sales to Moroc-co, Iraq and Egypt were expected in 2012 or 2013, but have been pushed back. According to an Army schedule GDLS provided, the timing of two block buys to Morocco are now listed as “unknown.” A 175 tank buy for Iraq is not expected until July 2015. A contract for 125 upgrade kits for the Egyptian military is an even greater “unknown” with all the turmoil taking place there.

“We just don’t know what the Army and the department’s inten-tions are on that one,” Kotchman said. His impression is that the Egypt contract isn’t currently being discussed.

There is also a potential contract from Israel to continue the cur-rent production of Merkava armored personnel carriers. The Army isn’t expecting an award on that until “beyond 2016.”

The APC contract points out the fact that the plant can do a lot more than tanks, and not all of its eggs are in the Abrams basket.

The facility has done work on Stryker armored combat vehicles, the Cougar mine resistant ambush protected vehicle and turrets for other military combatants, Kotchman said. It is the only plant capable of producing ground combat vehicle structures without further investment, he said.

However, that Army program is still in its infancy, and also faces budget pressures.

“We continue to work with the [Army] to find opportunities to offset the need for set production, through foreign military sales, direct international sales or additional work through other Army programs,” Kotchman said.

The misrepresentation in the press and comedy shows is that Congress is forcing the Army to buy more tanks, Kotchman said.

“We are not adding to the quantity of the tanks that the Army has. We are just changing the configuration of those tanks to make them the most capable and most current,” said Kotchman.

He pointed out that the plant has already laid off two-thirds of its workforce since 2010 because of the defense spending downturn. It

Over Army Objections, Industry And Congress Partner to Keep Abrams Tank Production ‘Hot’

O c t O b e r 2 0 1 3 • N a t i O N a l D e f e N s e 39

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now employs about 400 workers.Aside from the “keeping the industrial base alive” argument, law-

makers and others are refuting the Army’s assertion that it doesn’t need more upgraded tanks by citing the need for a “pure force.” In other words, National Guard troops are using older Abrams while active duty units have the latest version.

“When they say they have enough, they have enough based on the Army acquisition objective of M1A2s in the active Army,” Kotch-man said. “But you can convert the Army acquisition objective for the National Guard to M1A2s and continue to do that production.”

The National Guard Association of the United States has made tank upgrades one of its top acquisition priorities. Most units operate the early M1A1 version.

Maj. Gen. Wesley Craig, adjutant general of Pennsylvania and commander of the state’s National Guard, said at the association’s annual convention that the Guard should have the same tanks as the rest of the active duty force.

“How can the Army not equip these units with the same tank as the rest of the force? It is imperative that we avoid the tiered readi-ness of the past and avoid deploying forces to combat with whatever equipment they have on hand rather than the best available,” he said, according to a story in the Army Times.

Only two Guard units have the upgraded tanks, said Kotchman. At least one state will have this wish fulfilled. Language in the bill

authorizing the $181 million justified the unwanted expenditure as bringing the programs closer to a “pure fleet.” The Army’s report to Congress said the 12 upgraded tanks that it is being forced to pur-chase will go to the Army National Guard.

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus military reform project at congressional watchdog the Project on Government Oversight, said, “We are in a period where the defense budget is beginning to level off … and Congress keeps on adding this kind of stuff that makes all the funding problems worse.”

Tanks have all kinds of uses in conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq, and remain relevant to modern combat, but the Army doesn’t need any more of them, he said.

“It’s spectacular how willfully recalcitrant Congress is being on this and several other issues. … I don’t see any prospect that it’s going to change.”

These are upgraded old tanks, he noted. “They keep on saying we have got to preserve the industrial base. This is the tank upgrade industrial base, not the production industrial base.”

“We spend money on national security not to create jobs or give engineers job security, but for security,” he said.

“You can pile up the reasons not to do this, and Congress happily goes ahead.” It’s not just the Ohio delegation or whatever “porkers” are directly involved, Wheeler said. Congressional leadership on the appropriations committees and armed services committees comply so they can protect their own pet projects.

Lindsey, however, said protecting the industrial base is a concern.“I think there is a real risk that if procurement falls drastically,

certain design and manufacturing capabilities won’t be there in the future when we need them,” he said. The United Kingdom shut down production of nuclear submarines and had a hard time restarting its program. Those boats are more complex than fighting vehicles, but making modern tanks is also a unique process that requires specialized knowledge and equipment that can’t be readily found in commercial production, he said.

“I do think DoD would be wise to keep certain sectors hot,” he added. But some strategic choices are going to have to be made about which of them must be kept in business and which ones can be permitted to fade away.

“That’s not a call that a member of Congress with a certain facil-ity in his district should be making,” he added. ND

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BY DAN PARSONSAs with other large vehicle procure-

ment programs, Congress is slowly draining off funding from the Amphibious Combat Vehicle as Marine Corps officials con-tinue to push off a decision on how it will develop it.

Continuing delays in ACV development have had a domino effect on the service’s ambitious and once tightly choreographed modernization plan that includes three new procurement programs. The service remains committed to purchasing several thousand joint light tactical vehicles to replace Humvees. After ACV, plans were to purchase several hundred Marine Personnel Carriers, but that program has been put on hold to free up resources.

Capt. Nicole Fiedler, a spokeswoman for the amphibious combat vehicle team, said a study is in the works to “determine the fea-sibility, costs and risks of developing a sur-vivable, affordable, high-water-speed ACV.”

“We are still conducting this study and are on track to support the commandant’s decision in the fall,” Fiedler wrote in an email.

The analysis has included surveys of enlisted Marines to determine the most important characteristics of an amphibi-ous combat vehicle. The most contentious vehicle attribute has been how fast it should go through the water. A faster vehi-cle can move from ship to shore quickly, which lessens Marines’ exposure to enemy fire and reduces the likelihood they will become seasick. But a faster vehicle is a more costly vehicle.

Between July and August, the ACV team ranked preferences provided by Marines, and applied cost and weight data as part of their feasibility recommendations to senior Marine Corps and defense leaders ahead of an anticipated request for proposals some-time in the fall.

Program representatives held sessions with deployed forces at the Marine Air-Ground Task Force level to determine the importance of high speed through the water in amphibious operations.

Affordability and ensuring that desired characteristics are technologically realistic are key to the renewed amphibious vehicle search. The ACV’s predecessor ultimately passed neither test and was summarily can-celed. Marine Corps officials are haunted by the ghost of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which ate $3 billion before being

killed by its own creators in January 2011, said Dean Lockwood, senior weapons sys-tems analyst at Forecast International. The failure of that program is making Marine Corps brass “skittish” about asking Congress to fund ACV, he said.

“The Marine Corps is definitely still recoiling from the cancelation of EFV,” Lockwood said. “The ripples from that are going to continue to be felt for years. They shot too high and too far and they missed, and they are still literally paying for it.”

EFV was scheduled to enter service in 2015. Ballooning cost and poor perfor-mance of the General Dynamics Land Systems design during operational testing doomed the acquisition effort. A careful study of the initial requirements document is meant to avoid a repeat of that.

An analysis of alternatives compared six capability sets ranging from an enhanced amphibious assault vehicle to the require-ments originally sought under the Expedi-tionary Fighting Vehicle.

The analysis is being folded into the requirements document that will eventu-

ally be published as a formal request for proposals.

Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James Amos had promised a request for proposals by the end of November 2012. A defense acquisition board was scheduled to consider the RFP then, but the meeting never occurred and has not been resched-uled, said Manny Pacheco, a spokesman for the service’s Advanced Amphibious Assault program office.

Marine Corps officials requested the delay so they could further parse the details of the requirements document, especially whether ACV should have a higher water speed than 8 knots.

It will replace the amphibious assault vehicle, which has been in use since 1971. Even with considerable upgrades over the years, the vehicle has “significant opera-tional deficiencies in mobility, firepower and survivability,” according to a report published in June by Andrew Feickert, a specialist in military ground vehicles at the Congressional Research Service.

Of the 1,000 amphibious tracked vehi-

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 41

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cles in the service’s fleet, just under 400 will be reset. It will be another in a laundry list of overhauls the AAV has been through to stretch its service life. Automotive upgrades should be in development and testing until 2014, with reset AAVs returning to active duty between 2015 and 2017.

Plans were to eventually replace the entire AAV fleet with a mix of 573 ACVs and 579 wheeled Marine personnel car-riers, which will also be amphibious, but primarily serve to carry troops once ashore. Officially put on hold in June, it could be 10 years before MPC development is resur-rected, Feickert said.

Congress has expressed concerns about funding two vehicle programs to fulfill the role that a single vehicle currently performs.

Still, the ACV and MPC programs were granted hefty line items in the fiscal 2013 budget, a sign that Congress at least agrees with identifying a suitable replacement for existing ship-to-shore vehicles.

The amphibious combat vehicle program was allotted $95 million in research, devel-opment, test and evaluation funding in fis-cal year 2013. The House and Senate have recommended fully funding both vehicles, but the Senate called for a $12 million cut because of ongoing developmental delays.

The situation is much the same for this fiscal year, which begins Oct.1.

Both armed services committees called for full funding of the Obama administra-tion’s fiscal year 2014 budget request of $137 million in research, development, test and evaluation funding for ACV. This time the House Appropriations Committee is calling for a $14 million reduction of that sum.

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2014 recommended fully fund-ing the administration’s request, but the Defense Department appropriations bill cut the suggested $14 million, leaving the program funded at just shy of $123 million.

So far, the Marine Corps is sticking with its fielding schedule, which would have ACV operational between FY 2020 and FY 2022.

“The Marines are always in an awkward position when it comes to funding because their dollars come through the Navy,” Lock-wood said. “They have to walk a very fine line because they are always the underfund-ed brother. If the Navy decides it is going to put more money into aircraft carriers, the Marines are up the creek.”

That budgetary bind extends beyond top-dollar vehicle procurement efforts, Lockwood said. During the wars of the past decade, the Marine Corps partnered with the Army to share funding for items that were combat essential. Much of the

Marine ammunition budget comes through the Army as an operational requirement, he said.

“Amos can say this [ACV] is his prior-ity, but he doesn’t know if the dollars will be there,” Lockwood said. Already, the service’s prioritized vehicle modernization plan — JLTV, ACV and MPC, in that order — has been affected by budget uncertainty.

Marine Corps officials had planned to begin prototype design and development of the ACV in 2013 with two contractors, to include conducting test support and blast testing on demonstration vehicles within the current fiscal year.

The initial request for information speci-fied ACV should come in several variants, including squad maneuver/fighting vehicle, command and control, and a recovery and maintenance version.

It must be able to “self-deploy” — that is, drive on its own out the back of an amphibious assault ship at least 12 miles from shore with 17 Marines aboard. The service wants a vehicle that can travel eight knots or faster through seas with waves up to three feet.

The ACV must be able to match speed with the M1 Abrams tank both on and offroad and protect against both direct and indirect fire, mines and improvised explosive devices. Marines want an offen-sive capability of at least one machine gun capable of destroying “peer vehicles” and engaging enemy troops.

For now, MPC is on indefinite hold. Once resurrected, it will take several years for the vehicle to be designed, built and fielded. Under those circumstances, “Con-gress might wish to further explore the operational implications of the MPC defer-ment,” the report said.

The deferment raises questions about how the Marine Corps will maintain an amphibious forcible entry capability if purchases of either or both vehicles are reduced, Feickert said. At least, the service must plan for not having the wheeled MPC for another decade. The vehicle mix and how funding is allocated also has impli-cations for acquisition of the joint light tactical vehicle, of which the Marine Corps

wants to buy 5,500. Sensing a budgetary bottleneck, the Army is “wargaming” sce-narios in which the Marine Corps pulls out of that program.

The CRS report suggests that a significant decrease in new vehicle buys without a suitable substitute could force the service to alter how it conducts amphibious warfare.

Restarting the program using current requirements could prove futile or unnec-essary after an intervening decade of tech-nological development and geopolitical change.

The deferment was unfortunate for four companies that earlier this year were award-ed contracts to conduct market research on non-developmental MPC candidate vehicles. BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics Land Systems and SAIC each won a $3.5 million contract to gather data on water performance, survivability, human factors and storage capacity, and compatibility with U.S. military equipment, Pacheco said.

General Dynamics completed water per-formance swim and human factors testing at the Amphibious Vehicle Test Branch in June at Camp Pendleton, Calif., days before the MPC deferment was announced. Lock-heed Martin’s vehicle completed the same tests in April, followed by BAE Systems, which teamed with Iveco Defence Vehicles, in May. SAIC’s Terrex completed its trials in July, a month after Marine Corps officials put the program on the back burner.

Marine Corps teams tested vehicle fea-tures including troop egress and compo-nent storage, reserve buoyancy, center of gravity, water maneuverability, hydrody-namic stability, ocean speed and surf transit capability.

Blast testing was conducted in May at the Nevada Automotive Test Center.

Marine officials have promised to main-tain contact with interested vehicle manu-facturers so that “if the decision is made to restart the MPC program, it can be done in an expeditious and cost-efficient manner,” Feickert wrote.

“Given technological advancements as well as emerging threat weapons systems and the constantly changing geo-strategic environment, it is difficult to imagine that current MPC developmental requirements would be valid or relevant five to 10 years from now,” the report said. “Given this possibility, it might be prudent to establish some guidelines on restarting the program, perhaps establishing criteria on when it would be necessary to initiate a new MPC program as opposed to simply restarting the existing program.” ND

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October2U.S.-Finland Defense and Security Industry SeminarWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/4470

3C4ISR BreakfastArlington, VA

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8Cyber as a Weapon SeminarWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/484A

8-9NDIA Gulf Coast Annual 39th Air Armament Symposium

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16-17Manufacturing Division MeetingWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/419A

22-24PSA Precision Strike Technology Symposium (PSTS-13),SECRET/NOFORNLaurel, MDwww.precisionstrike.org/events/4PSTSee our ad on p. 47

29-3118th Annual Expeditionary Warfare ConferencePortsmouth, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4700See our ad on p. 46

29Embassy/Defense Attaché Luncheon Series - Netherlands

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November1Battle Space Awareness and C2: Defining the FutureMcLean, VAwww.afei.org/events/4A10

5-7Aircraft Survivability Technical Forum 2013Naval Postgraduate School, CAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4940See our ad on p. 46

6Women in Defense Annual DinnerMcLean, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4WI1See our ad on p. 46

7Women in Defense National ConferenceMcLean, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4WIDSee our ad on p. 46

7-82013 Homeland Security SymposiumWashington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/4490See our ad on p. 47

12-13Armaments & Munitions ForumPicatinny Arsenal, NJwww.ndia.org/meetings/4050

18-2025th Annual International Integrated Program Management (IPM) ConferenceBethesda, MDwww.ipmconference.orgSee our ad on p. 47

19-20Guaranteeing Revenue Results Workshop

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O c t O b e r 2 0 1 3 • N a t i O N a l D e f e N s e 45

20-22Agile for Government SummitWashington, DC

• This workshop addresses agile methods in the context of government incremental and modular acquisition. Agile methods have become a mainstay of best practice in private sector businesses that rely heavily on technology to serve their customers. As modern IT for information technology intensive businesses evolves government is seeking new ways to improve how technology is applied to improve information delivery to its “customers.” These include not just agile software development, but the concepts of agile program management, technical debt, and IT Development-Operations (DevOps). www.afei.org/events/4A01

December2-5I/ITSECOrlando, FL

www.ndia.org/meetings/4250

5C4ISR BreakfastArlington, VA

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11Coalition Information Sharing Washington, DC

• Sharing intelligence and operational information with coalition partners is critical for the success of joint operations. This event looks at the progress, needs and challenges of the International Partner Action Group, US BICES, and the Mission Partner Network. www.afei.org/events/4A05

11-12NDIA Mastering Business Development SeminarSan Diego, CA www.ndia.org/meetings/407A

January5Defense Systems Acquisition Management CourseCharleston, SC www.ndia.org/meetings/402A

21U.S.-Austria Industry DayWashington, DC www.ndia.org/meetings/4770

28-29Program Management Systems MeetingWashington, DC www.ndia.org/meetings/4PMI

30Advance Planning Briefing For Industry: CTTSOWashington, DC www.ndia.org/meetings/4090

February6C4ISR BreakfastArlington, VA

• Bi-monthly series focusing on OSD and Defense Intelligence at the Operation and Tactical Levels, addressing topics such as: secure information sharing; data strategy; persistent ISR; and intelligence collection and analysis. www.ndia.org/meetings/492C

10-1225th Annual SO/LIC Symposium & ExhibitionWashington, DC www.ndia.org/meetings/4880

March9-13Defense Systems Acquisition Management CourseAnnapolis, MD www.ndia.org/meetings/402B

18-19PSA Precision Strike Annual ReviewSpringfield, VA adekleine@ndia.org

24-27Munitions Executive SummitMoorestown, NJ www.ndia.org/meetings/4650

For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org. Or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.

46 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3

Monterey, CA • November 5-7, 2013 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4940

• Engage in technical dialogue on current and emerging threats, and the aircraft technologies for surviv-ing these threats

• Hear classified presentations by technical Speakers and Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, OSD/DOT&E

Topic Areas include:

• Surviving Current and Emerging Threats, including Directed Energy, Cybersecurity, Nuclear and Chem/Bio

• Designing for Survivability in New Developmental Versus Existing Aircraft

• Collaborative Situational Awareness and Secure Operations• New Vulnerability and Susceptibility Reduction Technologies• Development of Improved Countermeasures• Combat Lessons Learned

AIRCRAFT SURVIVABILITY TECHNICAL FORUM 2013

N D I A F E A T U R E D E V E N T S

McLean, VA • November 6-7, 2013

“Surviving and Thriving In Uncertain Times”

To soar above the focus on sequestration, furloughs, cutbacks, and more, we have to figure out how to do more than just survive — we have to thrive. Learn from prominent speakers representing industry and government at this one-day conference. Share ideas and information with peers from many parts of the nation.

Women In Defense Annual Dinner

11/6/2013 – McLean, VA

Register now by visiting www.ndia.org/meetings/4WI1

Women In Defense National Conference

11/7/2013 – McLean, VA

Register now by visiting www.ndia.org/meetings/4WID

WOMEN IN DEFENSE CONFERENCE AND DINNER

Portsmouth, VA • October 29-31, 2013 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4700

18TH ANNUAL EXPEDITIONARY WARFARE CONFERENCE

NEW LOCATION! – NDIA’s Expeditionary Warfare Conference has moved to the Virginia Tidewater area. Home of the following Naval activities key to Expeditionary Force employment:

• Expeditionary Strike Group 2• Joint Staff South• NATO’s Allied Command

Transformation• Navy Expeditionary

Combat Command• U.S. Coast Guard Atlantic Area• U.S. Fleet Forces Command• U.S. Marine Corps Forces Command

Already Confirmed Speakers include: • Admiral Jonathan W. Greenert, USN, Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy • Admiral William E. Gortney, USN, Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces • Rear Admiral Scott Jerabek, USN, Commander, Navy Warfare Development Command • Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, USN, Commander, U.S. Pacific Command • Major General Robert Walsh, USMC, Director, Expeditionary Warfare (OPNAV 95) • The Honorable Robert Work, CEO, CNAS (former Under Secretary of the Navy)

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 3 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 47

Laurel, MD • Oct. 22-24, 2013 • www.precisionstrike.org/events/4PST

“Precision Strike in the New Strategic Environment at Home & Abroad”Six Hot Topic Sessions:

• Intelligence—U.S. Global Threats• Cyber—Services’ Roll in the

Operational Kill Chain• Air-Sea Battle Panel—Services’ Perspectives• Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR-14)—Services’ QDR

Directors Discussions• Hot Spots in North Africa—USAFRICOM’s Overview• Nuclear Panel—Strategic Challenges & Nuclear

Deterrence Plus:

• Riveting Critical Global Topics• Powerful Kickoff & Keynote Addresses• Dynamic Luncheon Speakers• Technical Achievement Award Winner• SECRET/NOFORN

PSA PRECISION STRIKE TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM

(PSTS-13)

N D I A F E A T U R E D E V E N T S

Washington, DC • November 7-8, 2013• www.ndia.org/meetings/4490

“All-Hazards Approach to Homeland Security: Mitigation, Response, Recovery, & Resilience”In the face of the growing number of natural disasters hitting the U.S. in recent years, as well as the ever-present danger of man-made threats, the 2013 Homeland Security Symposium will present diverse outlooks on critical infrastructure recovery, focusing on risk reduction and speed, and how industry can support the federal government’s policy implementation.

Topics will include:

• State Sovereignty & the Role of the Federal Responder

• Public-Private Partnerships

• The Threat to Transportation, Cyber & the Electrical Grid

• National Disaster Recovery – Rebuilding More Resilient Infrastructure

• Resilience/Response to Ever-changing Natural Disasters

• Continuity of Operations Planning & Event Recovery for Natural & Man-made Threats

2013 HOMELAND SECURITY SYMPOSIUM

Bethesda, MD • November 18-20, 2013 • www.ipmconference.org

“Finding Opportunities”

Today, more than ever, program managers, analysts and system engineers need to work together to deliver performance. IPM is the place to participate in open discussions with key personnel, interact with experts, learn best practices and explore emerging practice areas.

Speakers and Topics Include:

• Ms. Katrina McFarland – Assistant Secretary of Defense (Acquisition)

• DOD Performance Management

• Civilian Agency Guidance

• Agile Performance Management

• Rebaselining for Budget or Schedule

• Performance Management Training

25TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL INTEGRATED PROGRAM MANAGEMENT (IPM) CONFERENCE

AAR Mobility Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .aarmobilitysystems .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

BAE Systems, Inc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .baesystems .com/nextfront . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Caterpillar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .catdfp .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Concurrent Technologies Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ctc .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Daimler Trucks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .daimler-trucksnorthamerica .com/govt . . . . . . . . . 23

Data Device Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ddc-web .com/SSPC/ND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

DHS Systems LLC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .drash .com/ipt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

EADS North America Inc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .ArmedScout .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4

Engility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .engilitycorp .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

Esterline Power Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .esterline .com/powersystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Fischer Connectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .fischer-minimax .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

FLIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .flir .com/QuarkND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

FLIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .flir .com/NDPT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31

Fuel Safe ARM-USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .arm-usa .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

GATR Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .GATR .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

Hood Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .hoodtech .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Intevac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .intevac .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

iRobot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .irobot .com/natdef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Laser Techniques Company . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .laser-ndt .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Meggitt Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .meggitttraingsystems .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Oshkosh Defense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .oshkoshdefense .com/jltv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 2

Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .sheppardmullin .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Sierra Nevada Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .sncorp .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

SKB Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .skbcases .com/military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

Tecmotiv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .tecmotiv .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

USAA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .usaa .com/wwpcc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

UTC Aerospace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .utcaerospacesystems .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

W .L . Gore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .goremilitary .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 3

48 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • o c t o b e r 2 0 1 3

For information on advertising in National Defense, contact the International Advertising Headquarters or your regional advertising office.

Vice President, AdVertising Dino K. Pignotti(703) 247–2541 Fax: (703) 522-4602dpignotti@ndia.org

cOOrdinAtOr, AdVertising Mike Harrell(703) 247–2576 Fax: (703) 522-4602mharrell@ndia.org

Advertising Headquarters is located at:2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 400Arlington, VA 22201Advertising Fax: (703) 522-4602

AdVertising regiOnAl Offices

• northeastern United states & canada (CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT)

Jo B. Lievsay, Partner(256) 233–6925Fax: (703) 522–4602Natl_Def_Lievsay@att.net

Lievsay Associates25433 Queensbury Dr., Athens, AL 35613

• southeastern United states and Metro dc Area (AL, FL, GA, KY, MD, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV & DC)

Jim Barros (805) 584-2130Fax: (805) 584-3796jim@barrossales.com

6480 Katherine Road # 72 Simi Valley, CA 93063

• south central United states(AR, KS, LA, MO, OK, TX)

Bill Powell(281) 251–0565Fax: (281) 251–8555citadel62@aol.com

J/J/H/S Inc.18103 Mahogany Forest Drive Spring (Houston), TX 77379

• Western and north central United states(AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, MI, MN, MT, ND, NE, NM, NV, OH, OR, SD, UT, WA, WI, WY)

Jim Barros (805) 584-2130Fax: (805) 584-3796jim@barrossales.com

6480 Katherine Road # 72 Simi Valley, CA 93063

international Advertising Headquarters

sPeciAl rePOrt:

global trends that Will shape defense technology

AlsO in nOVeMber:

f-35 Joint strike fighter■ Acquisition officials believe the opera-tions and sustainment cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could be significantly less than originally calculated, based on recent reviews of the program. National Defense investigates what is driving the lifecycle cost of the aircraft down and what the eventual cost will be for a cash-strapped Defense Department.

corporate security■ The Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden cases have brought insider threat concerns in the military and defense industry to the fore. The government has experience rooting out spies, but the pri-vate sector hasn’t made this a top priority. Whether it is an employee absconding with trade secrets as he leaves for another job, a disgruntled worker sabotaging soft-ware, or a spy for a foreign government, all have the ability to permanently damage a business. Defense companies aren’t doing enough to protect themselves against this threat, experts say.

OCTOBER 2013 Index of AdvertisersInteract with the companies whose products and services are advertised in National Defense.

Advertiser interact Page no.

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Wa t e r p r o o f | B r e a t h a b l e | F i r e R e s i s t a n c e | C h e m B i o

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©2013 W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc. GORE, and designs are trademarks of W.L. Gore & Associates.

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Some promised. We delivered. The AAS-72X+ is the only Armed Aerial Scout offering with fl ight-

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