Tag: Defense Procurement

Our Glorious Defense Procurement System

No Comments

Yes, the most expensive defense procurement program in history, the F-35, is still not ready for prime time, with its maintenance software still unable to support aircraft operations:

Key software for the troubled F-35 fighter jet has been repeatedly delayed, causing problems for the British armed forces as they wait for Americans to iron out the bugs.

The F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is the heart of the support offering bundled with the F-35 by its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin.

The latest version of ALIS – version 2.0.2 – has been delayed by at least six months and counting, according to the US Department of Defense’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), and units are instead stuck with version 2.0.1.3.

“It has yet to successfully complete testing and likely will not be fielded until early 2017,” according to the F-35 section of DOT&E’s annual report [PDF, 62 pages] to the US Congress. Version 2.0.2 will allow military personnel, rather than engine manufacturers and current maintenance contractors Pratt & Whitney, to read and act upon engine health data, but has not yet been deployed.

Although the release version of ALIS is intended to be version 3, with various beta releases bringing incremental extra capabilities until the release of v3, “delays in ALIS 2.0.2 development have also delayed the development of ALIS 3.0,” said DOT&E. This, warned the director, would result in key functionality being released as updates to v3.0 instead of being baked into the “final” software package deployed to F-35 customers – including the UK.

………

The 62-page report also revealed that the F-35 is temperamental when ground crew plug their Panasonic Toughbook diagnostic laptops into the aircraft and sync them: “In many instances, maintainers must attempt to synch several PMAs [portable maintenance aids – the laptops] with an aircraft before finding one that will successfully connect.”

………

Moreover, testing of ALIS up until 2016 took place on “representative hardware” instead of actual aircraft and ground base equipment. “The current closed environment does not adequately represent the variety of ways in which the Services operate ALIS in different environments,” DOR&E drily noted.

There was also a significant problem the first time that US personnel tried deploying F-35s and ALIS away from their home base:

…they had a great deal of difficulty using ALIS on the local base network. After several days of troubleshooting, Information Technology personnel and ALIS administrators determined that they had to change several settings on the base network at Mountain Home and in the web interface application (i.e., Internet Explorer) to permit users to log on to ALIS. One of these changes involved lowering the security setting on the base network, an action that may not be compatible with required cybersecurity and network protection standards in place.

ALIS is used by naval and air force personnel to determine in real time the state of the aircraft, view flight plans, and review each jet’s entire history from the moment it leaves the factory. It is an end-to-end management and planning system for pilots, maintainers and commanders alike – the ultimate vendor lock-in.

Controversially, it also sends each jet’s history back to the US, regardless of which country actually owns that aircraft – though Lockheed has promised it won’t read the pilots’ names.

(emphasis mine)

That “Vendor Lock-In” snark points to one of the more significant problems with the program, that the inmates (Lockheed-Martin) are running the asylum.

At every step of the process, LM has been allowed to design the system to ensure that it sits athwart all operations extracting a toll, and the results have been buggy under-performing and opaque systems.

Compare this to the latest Saab Gripen, which is on time and on budget, thanks largely to a reliance on modular software and the use off the shelf systems wherever possible.  (Here and here)

Lockheed used the same architecture for the F-22, and updates are tortuous and expensive.

Even if this plane achieves all of its performance goals, it will be unaffordable for many nations from a direct operating cost perspective as a result.

Different Priorities

No Comments

Blah, blah, blah!


Detail of Weapons Bay

The Japanese are working on their own stealth fighter, and they appear to be favoring a large weapons load over agility: (Paid subscription required)

With each published design iteration, Japan’s proposed indigenous fighter appears to be large, perhaps matching the size of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.

 Actually, it is even bigger.

 Drawing up a concept that emphasizes weapon load and endurance over maneuverability, designers at the Japanese defense ministry have come up with an aircraft that is longer than the F-22 and has a considerably greater wingspan. It is low in profile, however, to minimize radar reflections from the side.

 ………

 Official drawings of the proposed aircraft and the model used for weapon-ejection testing show that 26DMU has few differences from the previous iteration, 25DMU. Bulges under the wing roots have been given a revised shape, maybe for aerodynamic reasons. On the model the tips of the main plane are straight, compared with a slightly pointed design on 25DMU. But the major features are unchanged. The design still has two belly bays each holding three big missiles, side bays with one short-range missile each, a wide and shallow fuselage, heavily canted tail surfaces and a large wing of high aspect ratio for efficient cruise and loitering.

 ………

 The miniature missiles in the left belly bay of the model, which had an opened door for the tests, were Meteors with cropped fins, presumably of the design developed by MBDA for internal stowage in the Lockheed Martin F-35. The bay was only just large enough to hold three Meteors, mounted side by side and slightly staggered for tighter lateral packing. If Japan were willing to accept a rocket-propelled air-to-air weapon, the bay could also accommodate three missiles using the airframe of the Mitsubishi Electric AAM-4. Based on the Raytheon AIM-7 Sparrow, the AAM-4 has about the same length as the Meteor, 3.7 m (12 ft.).

Note that the AAM-4 and AIM-7 Sparrow are larger than the AIM-120 AMRAAM, having a body diameter of roughly 200mm, as opposed the 175mm.

The superior range of the AIM-120 comes from two things: Improvements in propellant, which could apply to the larger missiles as well, and improvements in flight profile during flight (more the 2nd than the first. By way of example, by updating avionics, the range of the SM-2 Standard was doubled by avionics changes which allowed it to take an indirect path to the target).

I guess is that the Japanese expect to deal with an opponent **cough** China **cough** at a significant distance from base without tanker support, so they need to carry more fuel and carry more missiles, because of potential threats from both long range interceptors (J-20 and Flanker derivatives) as well as very long range surface to air missiles (one would assume something north of 300 km, as the Russian SA-21 [S-400] exceeds 400 km).

By contrast, the F-22 was designed to fly from bases in the UK , the Netherlands, and Germany to engage Warsaw Pact aircraft at or behind the East-West German border, so there is a greater priority on agility.  (Then again, the Raptor didn’t enter service until after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which says something about how weapons procurement programs take on a life of their own.)

F%$# Me. I Agree with the Inverted Traffic Cone Again………

No Comments

Obviously, the devil is in the details, but Trump’s proposal for a lifetime ban on defense contractors hiring Pentagon contracting officials is a pretty good idea, though a lifetime ban is likely to be unenforceable, based on my knowledge of non-compete clauses, though I must offer the caveat that I am an engineer, not an employment attorney, dammit!*

President-elect Donald Trump has put forth the idea of banning the defense industry from hiring former Pentagon contracting officials, just days after creating a stir in the defense industry by saying Boeing’s contract for an Air Force One replacement should be cancelled.

According to a Reuters news service report, Trump told a rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that “I think anybody that gives out these big contracts should never ever, during their lifetime, be allowed to work for a defense company, for a company that makes that product.”

He added he would “check this out” before making any final decisions, but went on to slam the F-35 joint strike fighter program as “totally, totally, like, uncontrollably over budget.”

I think that this is in response to Northrop Grumman hiring a former USAF Chief of Staff, one who was in charge when N-G was selected as the won the B-21 bomber contract, was named to their board of directors.

Also: the devil is in the details:

  • What about subcontractors?
  • What is to prevent companies from swapping their appointments?
  • What is a big contract?
  • Does this just apply to the uniform military, or civilian Pentagon employees as well?
  • At what level does this apply?

Also, as I noted at the beginning, the legal issues are a complete hairball, and would likely end up in the courts.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

More Stopped Clock News

No Comments

Some truth from Donald Trump’s Twitter, of all things:

The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016

Needless to say, defense contractors are freaking out:

Donald Trump left the collective defense community quaking in its boots last week after he threatened to cancel Boeing’s new Air Force one. Now he’s going after another massive aerospace firm, slamming Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) for “out of control” costs.

As much as I hate to admit it, Trump is right about project flying cluster f%$#.

Your Winnings, Sir

No Comments

I’m shocked! Shocked! To find that gambling is going on this establishment


But their gold plated toilets are amazing*



The Pentagon says that healthcare costs are killing it.  To paraphrase a phony Willy Sutton quote, that ain’t where the money is

The Pentagon decided to look for waste and inefficiency in the Defense Department, and rather unsurprisingly, they found it.

Their response was to cover it up, because as Charlie Pierce pithily notes, “The only institution better than the Pentagon at poor-mouthing its luxurious budgets is Major League Baseball.”

You know, if I were in the business of, “Draining the swamp,” I would start in the places that a most obviously mixture of muck and water that risk sucking people under.

At the top of that list is that large funny shaped building across the Potomac from the Jefferson Memorial:

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

High-priced contractors is how DoD officials and General Officers insure that they have a comfortable retirement:  If you overpay private players for stuff you should do yourself, when it comes time to retire, you get a very respectable sinecure from those same contractors.

………

The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940.

 ………

 or the military, the major allure of the study was that it called for reallocating the $125 billion for troops and weapons. Among other options, the savings could have paid a large portion of the bill to rebuild the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, or the operating expenses for 50 Army brigades.

 But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

 So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

 ………

 Afterward, board members briefed Work. They were expecting an enthusiastic response, but the deputy defense secretary looked uneasy, according to two people who were present.

 He singled out a page in the report. Titled “Warfighter Currency,” it showed how saving $125 billion could be redirected to boost combat power. The money could cover the operational costs for 50 Army brigades, or 3,000 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters for the Air Force, or 10 aircraft-carrier strike groups for the Navy.

 “This is what scares me,” he said, according to the two people present. Work explained he was worried Congress might see it as an invitation to strip $125 billion from the defense budget and spend it somewhere else.

………

 In briefings that month, uniformed military leaders were receptive at first. They had long groused that the Pentagon wasted money on a layer of defense bureaucracies — known as the Fourth Estate — that were outside the control of the Army, Air Force and Navy. Military officials often felt those agencies performed duplicative services and oversight.

 But the McKinsey consultants had also collected data that exposed how the military services themselves were spending princely sums to hire hordes of defense contractors.

 For example, the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors, according to a confidential McKinsey report obtained by The Post. That alone exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.

As I noted above, these contracts are a part of the system of back end bribery that permeates our government:

  1. Give goodies to contractors
  2. Retire
  3. Get a good paying not particularly rigorous job so that they next guy in your position knows which side his bread is buttered on.
  4. ???
  5. Profit!†

At some point, this whole rotten edifice is going to collapse like a bunch of overcooked broccoli.

*I would like to offer my sincere and heartfelt apology to whoever plays the tuba in the Marine Corps band: I was a bit drunk when I took a crap in it.
†Underpants gnomes, dude, underpants gnomes. Get with the program.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

No Comments

It doesn’t float, it’s just so ugly that it repels the water

2 weeks ago, I noted that the extended range munition which was a large part of the justification for the new Zumwalt class destroyers was too expensive to procure, and now we discover that the latest whiz bang ship broke down because it leaks:

The Navy’s newest and most technologically advanced guided missile destroyer had to be towed from the Panama Canal after experiencing “engineering issues,” a spokesman for the service said Tuesday in a statement.

The USS Zumwalt, which cost $4.4 billion, will remain at Naval Station Rodman, a former U.S. base in Panama, to repair problems that surfaced this week while the ship cruised to its new homeport in San Diego, said Cmdr. Ryan Perry, a spokesman for the Navy’s Third Fleet. He said it was unclear how long the ship would remain in Panama.

“The schedule for the ship will remain flexible to enable testing and evaluation in order to ensure the ship’s safe transit to her new homeport,” Perry said in a statement.

USNI News, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, reported the ship was in the canal when it lost propulsion. Crew members also saw water intrusion in bearings that connect electrical motors to drive shafts, it reported.

The 610-foot-long Zumwalt was billed as the most capable surface combat ship in the world when it was commissioned last month in Baltimore. But the most recent issues were not the first it has faced since it left shipbuilder General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Maine in September.

The Zumwalt suffered a similar seawater leak in September and another unspecified engineering problem in October, according to USNI News.

This is becoming a bit of a theme in US defense procurement, and if it continues, it’s going to get very ugly.

Our Broken Military Industrial Complex

No Comments

One of the justification for the Zumwalt class destroyers is that they would be able to engage in shore bombardment up to miles inland using their advanced cannon.

In any case, its capabilities proved too expensive, so only 3 ships are going to be constructed, and now we learn that the high tech shells that were to allow for long distance shelling have been canceled because they were too expensive:

The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is the US Navy’s latest warship, commissioned just last month—and it comes with the biggest guns the Navy has deployed since the twilight of the battleships. But it turns out the Zumwalt‘s guns won’t be getting much of a workout any time soon, aside from acceptance testing. That’s because the special projectiles they were intended to fire are so expensive that the Navy has canceled its order.

Back when it was originally conceived, the Zumwalt was supposed to be the modern-day incarnation of the big-gunned cruisers and battleships that once provided fire support for Marines storming hostile beaches. This ability to lob devastating volleys of powerful explosive shells deep inland to take out hardened enemy positions, weapons, and infrastructure was lost after the Gulf War’s end, when the last of the Iowa-class battleships were retired. To bring it back, the Zumwalt’s design included a new gun, the Advanced Gun System (AGS). As we described it in a story two years ago:

The automated AGS can fire 10 rocket-assisted, precision-guided projectiles per minute at targets over 100 miles away. Those projectiles use GPS and inertial guidance to improve the gun’s accuracy to a 50 meter (164 feet) circle of probable error—meaning that half of its GPS-guided shells will fall within that distance from the target.


………

The “less cost” part, however, turned out to be a pipe dream. With the reduction of the Zumwalt class to a total of three ships, the corresponding reduction in requirements for LRLAP production raised the production costs just as the price of the ships they would be deployed to soared. Defense News reports that the Navy is canceling production of the LRLAP because of an $800,000-per-shot price tag—more than 10 times the original projected cost. By comparison, the nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $1 million per shot, while the M712 Copperhead laser-guided 155-millimeter projectile and M982 Excalibur GPS-guided rounds cost less than $70,000 per shot. Traditional Navy 5-inch shells cost no more than a few hundred dollars each.

When we are discussing the subject of swamps that need draining, the Pentagon should be at the top of the list.

No

No Comments

A contract for the serial production of the fifth-generation T-50 PAK FA fighter jet at the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant is planned to be signed before the end of 2017, Governor of Russia’s Khabarovsk Territory Vyacheslav Shport said.

………

Russian Aerospace Force Commander-in-Chief Viktor Bondarev said earlier that the serial production of the T-50 fighter jet would begin in 2017.

According to the commander, the PAK FA fighter jet will be made operational with the Aerospace Force in 2017 as well.

This is pixie dust.

They are still not flying the aircraft with its intended power plant, and they are suggesting that it will enter service in a year.

Additionally, the current prototypes are still hand built.

Stepping up to mass production from this is a monumental task, particularly given the large portion of the skin and airframe made of composites, and the need to maintain tight tolerances to reduce radar signature.

This would be the first for a mass produced Russian aircraft.

It can be done, but it cannot be done in just 1 year.

This is the Wisest Thing I’ve Read in Some Time

No Comments
Academician Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain makes what should be an obvious point, that that military adventures for the purpose of promulgating the illusion of our national “credibility” is a complete clusterf%$#:

One of the most common criticisms of President Obama is that he has damaged American credibility. Obama’s foreign policy decisions have been thoroughly denounced by Republicans, some members of his own party, and even former members of his administration. When the United States opted not to respond with military action to the 2013 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, many people argued that failing to punish the Syrian regime would diminish U.S. credibility. Similar critiques were leveled when Russia annexed the Crimea and the United States responded with economic sanctions instead of force. “How can we expect other states to take us seriously if we fail to act in these cases?” these critics asked. In other words, tomorrow’s threats will fail if the United States does not follow through on today’s commitments.

In fact, the record of American coercion is entirely inconsistent with this simplistic view of the role of credibility and reputation in international politics. To examine this issue, I studied every international crisis between 1945 and 2007 in which the United States was involved. I found that the real world does not operate in the way that these critics of U.S. inaction seem to think it does. It is foolish for the United States to undertake military action for the primary purpose of reinforcing its reputation. Refraining from acting when U.S. interests are not directly engaged will not diminish America’s “credibility” or its ability to wield power effectively.

………

Threats and promises have credibility, and states and leaders have reputations. When people argue that the United States must act against Syria today to preserve its “credibility” with Russia tomorrow, they are actually making an argument about how the U.S. reputation for action influences the behavior of other states. The logic of this reputation theory is that following through on a commitment today is necessary to make tomorrow’s threat effective. In other words, this theory holds that bombing Libya today will make Putin think twice about invading Estonia tomorrow.

If this reputation theory accurately explains state behavior, then we should be able to observe two basic patterns in the record of U.S. coercion. First, we would expect American threats to become more effective over time if the United States follows through on these threats. That is, if the United States consistently demonstrates that it upholds its commitments, then targets of U.S. threats should be increasingly likely to concede to U.S. demands everywhere (or at the very least targets should not become less likely to concede over time). Second, we would expect threats to be more effective against a target after the United States has already followed through on at least one threat in the past against that same target. Once the United States has demonstrated to a particular state that its threats are credible, then subsequent threats against that same state should be highly likely to succeed.

When we look at the record of U.S. compellence, however, we find that the opposite is true: America’s compellent threats have been both more frequent and less effective on average since 1990 than they were during the Cold War. The target conceded to U.S. demands in 55 percent of Cold War crises in which the United States issued a compellent threat and in only 25 percent of crises in the post-Cold War period. In other words, despite the fact that the United States has demonstrated that it always follows through on its compellent threats, these threats have become less effective over time. This is the exact opposite of what we would expect given the logic of those who argue that U.S. inaction in Ukraine emboldened Putin to intervene in Syria and that inaction in Syria will similarly embolden him to invade the Baltics.

………

These are relatively easy tests, and the reputation theory has failed at both. We have looked for and failed to find two obvious patterns in the evidence from actual cases in which the United States tried to use threats to convince a target state to change its behavior. Even when we set the bar low, the reputation theory cannot clear it.

This is not a surprise, and I agree, but I think that Pfundstein Chamberlain misses part of the dynamic.

Many of the people who invoke “Credibility” to justify military adventures actually profit from these ill conceived actions.

“Credibility” justifies our bloated military establishment.  Defense contractors, retired generals, and their ilk profit from the maintenance of this edifice.

QED.

Let’s Talk About the Backstory Here

No Comments

When Dassault won the medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) contract, it wanted to partner with Reliance Industries, but the Indian Government insisted on local co-production be conducted by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), the company that took over 30 years to deliver the massively under-performing Tejas fighter aircraft.

When Dassault saw the level of technical competence at HAL, they refused to work with them, figuring that it would be a complete horror show, and they would be on the hook for this, so now we have India signing a deal for 36 French made fighters:

India has concluded a deal to acquire 36 Dassault Rafale fighters, with a contract signed in New Delhi by the nation’s defence minister, Manohar Parrikar, and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on 23 September.

 The deal is worth €7.75 billion ($8.69 billion) for the French-built aircraft along with associated weapons and a support package.

 Finalisation of the contract brings to a close a long-running acquisition process to equip the Indian air force with the Rafale, which was selected as the winner of its medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) tender in 2012, defeating the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and Eurofighter Typhoon. Other previous candidates for the deal included the Lockheed Martin F-16, RAC MiG-35 and Saab Gripen.

 The air force was originally slated to acquire 126 aircraft via the programme, but the original deal ran aground over cost concerns. [Cost concerns my ass. Dassault found HAL incapable of executing a co-production deal] It was revived by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to France in 2105, when he declared that 36 aircraft would be acquired in “fly-away” condition from Dassault. This was keeping in view the “critical operational necessity” of the service, he said at the time.

This was the Rafale’s first foreign sale, and it was a very big deal for Dassault, but they could not get co-production to work, but the fact that they had this order made it a viable choice on other foreign markets, which is why there are sales to Egypt and Qatar as well, so the deal, even if much diminished was a lifesaver for the Rafale production line.

The ineptitude of the Indian defense establishment in developing new systems (see the Tejas, the Arjun tank, the INSAS rifle system, etc.) remains staggering.