Army clarifies complaints about General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc

Army clarifies complaints about General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc

I attended a press conference this morning with the US Army's top acquisition managers for unmanned aircraft systems -- Col Greg Gonzalez and Tim Owings.

I asked about a lot of things, but I was particularly interested in their thoughts about one of their biggest contractors -- General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc (GA-ASI).


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TDL: This\nis about your contractor on Sky Warrior -- General Atomics Aeronautical Systems\nInc.  The BAMS protest came back and\nthere was some documentation in there that quoted an army contracting officer\nfor Sky Warrior with some very specific concerns about the contractor's performance\n-- specifically obligating performance beyond the capacity of the company. [Read more: \"General Atomics may have a customer relations problem\"]

As we're\ntalking about the acquisition strategy [review] coming up in January -- and\nobviously the importance of this program -- what is your relationship with General\nAtomics, and, these concerns that have been talked about, how have they been\ndealt with?

GONZALEZ: The\nfirst thing I have to say is General Atomics has a tremendous history of providing\nvery high quality products. The products that they have produced -- even the\nearlier pre-production models that we've fielded and are using in theater -- have\nhad outstanding success. But there's always room for improvement.

One of the\nthings we have found with that particular contractor is that there are some process\nthings that could be improved in terms of software development and predictive capability\nof software.

And we are working\nas a project management office very closely with them and they have been very cooperative\nin improving those processes. And we're very confident that shortly they will\nmake the changes that need to be made and they'll continue to provide those\nquality products.

But they'll\nalso be able to - in addition to providing those products -- they'll have a better\ncapability to predict how long it will take to do certain software upgrades and\nthose types of things.

COLIN CLARK (DOD Buzz): So on the hardware side, you're confident. Software is --?

GONZALEZ: Hardware\nhas never been an issue.

OWINGS : And\nin fact they are producing product right now that's -- ... we're very satisfied\nwith. They're producing on schedule. So it's not an issue from a standpoint of\nnot getting the product. At the end of the day the products have been very,\nvery good. It's just the software processes probably need to be matured some. And\nthey've been very cooperative in working through those issues that we outlined for\nthem.

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