The DEW Line

It used to be that only two US defense companies made infrared countermeasures for jamming shoulder-fired surface to air missiles: Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, and both relied heavily upon the same systems supplier -- Selex. That was back when the only targets for MANPADS were military aircraft and the only shooters anybody worried about wore military uniforms.

Those days are bye-bye.

You can't go a week now without seeing a new defense company jump into the IRCM market. First, it was Raytheon, which has been adapting the AIM-9X IR seeker into a pointer-tracker called Scorpion. Last week, General Dynamics announced it was developing its own IRCM technology called CMAPS. Finally, on Monday, the world learned that ITT is also jumping into the game, developing a new IR pointer-tracker that lacks a name.

The guess here is that the complexity and high-cost of military-oriented IRCM systems has created a potential sweetspot in the market for cheaper, simpler systems, especially for the VIP business jet market.

Why is Northrop Grumman a prime contractor for a fishing boat company (see here)? The answer is: because they're not stupid.

"Need some air cover?" (Source: DOD)

Irregular warfare is a growth market, and converting fishing boats into riverine patrol veseels could soon be a booming business with the US Navy, which is standing up a new riverine command for the first time since the Vietnam War.

So far, no company has applied the same approach with aviation, but that will probably change. US Air Force Special Operations Command is talking about standing up an Irregular Warfare wing, with a full squadron of single-engine turboprop fighters to serve as counter-inusrgency aircraft in the mold of the Vietnam-era Douglas A-1 Skyraider.

The Embraer Super Tucano, the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 and the US Aircraft A-67 Dragon are all good candidates for the COIN aircraft role. But each will need a prime contractor, a la the riverine market, to usher the aircraft into operational service.

So, Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and BAE Systems, are you reading this?

In case you're curious what Iran has to say about the multi-billion dollar arms package going to US allies in the Gulf region, which is presumably with the intent to offset reports of new Iranian deals with Russia, here's the Iranian News Agency today:

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Tuesday that the US plan to sell billions of dollars worth of arms and prepare illusive scenarios in the region is an instance of adventurism and a disparate effort.

"Washington has taken such a move to save the US arms manufacturing companies from bankruptcy," said Mottaki in reaction to recent claims by the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

He said the White House rulers, some of whom being major shareholders of the large arms companies, want to use their influence at the end of their tenure in office and wage a
psychological war so as to garner growing benefits for owners of their arms companies.

Thanks to my sharp-eyed, French-speaking colleague Aimee Turner, we now know that Connecticut-based Hamilton Sundstrand has moved its entire propeller business off-shore -- and to France, of all places.

Perhaps not surprisingly, you won't find a press release announcing the outsourcing move that affects about 100 US jobs on Hamilton's web site. Flight magazine's Aimee Turner, who is based in London, found out by reading a French language email sent by Hamilton's French subsidiary -- Ratier Figeac, the lucky beneficiary of Hamilton's 80-year-old heritage in the propeller business. Aimee's news story in this week's magazine is the only place you're likely to read about this truly historic aviation milestone in English.

Hamilton's propellers powered Charles Lindbergh's Ryan monoplane across the Atlantic in 1927, not to mention nearly all the fighter planes built in US factories for World War II. The company still is at the forefront of the technology, with the six-bladed NP2000 propeller powering Snow Aviation's refurbished C-130s and the Northrop Grumman E-2C, as well as a new, 8-bladed turboprop destined for the Airbus A400M transport.

That entire historical and technical legacy now resides with Ratier-Figeac in Southern France. Why? Most likely, it's because Hamilton Sundstrand realizes that's where the market exists for turboprop transports, with Sweden's Saab Aircraft, Italy's ATR and Spain's EADS CASA division now among the technological leaders.

If my hunch is correct, Hamilton's logic mirrors the recent trend by European firms to move wholesale manufacturing of helicopters and military transports to the US. And don't forget Airbus. I struggle to believe the proposed Airbus factory in Mobile, Alabama is intended solely for assembling 12 tankers a year for the US Air Force, especially when the company admits the facility will be sized to build 20 aircraft -- and with room to grow! In 10 years, Airbus will need to build a successor for the single-aisle A320, and sunny Toulouse may be no match for the non-unionized labor climate of the southeast USA.

"We'll always have Paris"(Source: DOD)

The already dubious world of international fighter sales has made some geo-political somersaults this week.

Most significant are reports from Russia and Israel that China is selling 24 J-10 fighters to Iran. This comes after months of speculation that Iran was negotiating a whopper deal to buy 250 Su-30s from Russia. The term "Iranian air defense" suddenly doesn't sound so silly anymore.

Still interesting, but of lesser strategic value, are reports that Korea has decided to skip over a second batch of F-15s in favor of buying a fifth-generation fighter, presumably such as F-22 or F-35. If I read the Pacific Rim geo-political tea leaves correctly, this means Japan and China now must get their hands on a fifth-generation fighter, too. Memo to Tokyo's arms buyers: beers are on Lockheed Martin's tab for the next five years.

From the can-you-believe-it file, France has somehow found a way to lose a gimme contract for Rafale fighters from Morocco, which has reportedly decided to buy the Lockheed Martin F-16. The deal may help to console Lockheed executives who last week lost Thailand as a loyal fighter customer to Sweden's Gripen.

Finally, you can read my story next week in Flight International about the US Air Force's new proposal to keep the F-22 production line alive for at least one more year. The implications for the F-35 budget in 2010 could be profound.

That's one heck of a week in the fighter business.

Boeing is expected by the end of this week to select a manufacturer to upgrade the US Air Force F-15 fleet with an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar.

Vying for this contract are Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, but no matter who wins Boeing's protest-proof selection (take that, GAO) will be sure to set off the first Great Radar War.

The idea driving this industrial war is this: the power of a fighter aircraft's radar may now be as important in combat as the power of its engine.

In the early 1980s, Pratt & Whitney and General Electric fought every year for their share of the USAF's fighter engine budget. The rivalry was so intense it was chronicled in a book called the Great Engine War.

That same industrial phenomenon has started to appear in the radar market. The contract for the F-15 radar modernization will be the first of several to come.

Both Raytheon and Northrop are designing new active arrays for the F-16 in anticipation of foreign buyers (hello, India?) and eventually the USAF.

And I'll bet you a quarter and a coke that the war will extend even to the grand prize of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. In 2001, Raytheon was on Boeing's X-32 team, so Northrop's design for the X-35 is on the program today. But if the USAF can re-open the F-15's radar selection to competition, Raytheon is going to fight to take another shot at the F-35 program.

You can also safely bet that the USAF will think about radar interchangeablility when creating the requirements for the Next-Generation Long Range Strike fleet, which should enter service after 2018.

The Great Radar War will have profound implications for both industry and for the fighter community. For the first time, operators may actually have a choice of radars like they already do for engines. By implication, neither Raytheon nor Northrop can rest anymore after winning the initial contract, but must continually refresh its technology to stay in the chase for new contracts.

This morning I was at Northrop Grumman's offices in Rosslyn, Va., for a press briefing on the DARPA-funded HURT II program. (HURT=Heterogeneous Unmanned Reconnaissance Team).

Click here to see the power-point presentation.

The idea is pretty straightforward. One day, the US Army may want to operate its unmanned aircraft fleet more like a collaborative team, and this could be the software package that makes it happen.

I'm getting asked more and more by defense industry public relations departments about this whole blogging thing. Social media has apparently become a trend that most of them can no longer ignore. Questions are asked: am I a blogger or a journalist who blogs? Have the rules changed? Which bloggers are important and which bloggers can (should??) just be ignored?

I have some long answers to these questions, but there's a short answer that is a lot more helpful: just try it.

Defense companies have been oddly immune from the blogging phenemenon, compared to their high-tech industry counterparts in the civilian sector.

Can you imagine a company like Lockheed Martin, Boeing or Northrop Grumman allowing their employees to blog about their jobs and their company's products -- with no release approval process???

I'm sure to some that suggestion sounds absurd, but there are dozens of non-official bloggers employed at Microsoft. While some Microsoft managers periodically call for one or two to be fired, the bloggers continue to go about their business. Along the way they've done much to change the perception of Microsoft as a borg-like corporate cult, as chronicled in the book, Naked Conversations, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

It won't be long before the same phenomenon creeps into the defense industry. Social media is becoming too pervasive and too important especially to the younger generation of workers to keep under wraps -- even in Big Defense.

The best thing defense PR types can do is to prepare for the inevitable, and experience is the best teacher (to, er, coin a phrase).

Boeing today announced signing a 10-year, $1 billion deal with Hindustan Aeronautics to shift technology development and manufacturing operations to India.

Raytheon announced a similar-but-less-specific plan and signed a partnership agreement with Tata about a year ago, and generally "looks forward to expanding its relationship with India".

Lockheed Martin apparently has been in India the longest, thanks to inheriting Martin Marietta's office in New Dehli after the merger in 1994. It started greatly expanding in 2005, and "within the span of one year ... established its brand in Indian military circles".

Northrop Grumman beefed up its New Dehli office about a month ago, and wants to sell India airborne surveillance equipment, fire control radars, infrared countermeasures and targeting sensors.

The AUSA hosts the Army Aviation Symposium this week, which gives me the perfect excuse to ask one of my favorite questions:
What will it take to get US military helicopter technology out of its long and barren rut?
I believe the last all-new aircraft designed, built and fielded for the US military was the UH-60A Black Hawk. The army spends about $3 billion a year on helicopters, but all of that money pays for derivatives of technology originally deployed between 30 and 50 years ago, or militarized versions of civil helicopters.
Arguably no other sector of advanced US military technology – fighters, airlifters, UAVs, ships, fighting vehicles, missiles, satellites, etc – has tolerated a longer and deeper drought of deployable innovation.
Think about it: the last all-new aircraft designed for the army was the Sikorsky/Boeing RAH-66 Comanche, and that program was cancelled in 2004 after only two prototypes were built.
The Comanche would have been the first helicopter to introduce stealth design characteristics, but the fundamental limitations of helicopter performance – speed, range and payload – have been stuck in a paralyzing rut since the late-1960s.
Of course, there are a few programs in the very early stages of concept design that may offer a solution, but each faces an agonizing and perilous path to delivering a finished product sometime after 2015.
Namely, they are the payload-limit-busting Joint Heavy Lift (JHL) aircraft (post-2015) and the speed-barrier-busting Joint Multi-Role (JMR) aircraft (post-2020).
Elements within the army want to launch an X-Plane flyoff for JHL starting in 2010, but that project will face intense competitive pressure. The alternatives come from the USAF, and they range from the futuristic AJACS concept to near-off-the-shelf derivatives of the C-17, A400M or C-130J.
Requirements and technologies for JMR will continue to coalesce over the next five years or so. But the defense industry is already jockeying to be in competitive position.
Sikorsky plans to fly the speedy X2 demonstrator this year (the original first flight date was postponed in December).
Boeing is working with Piasecki on the X-49 compound Black Hawk. Boeing’s real interest is to apply the technology to the AH-64 Apache, either as a JMR-lite if the army starts pinching its pennies, or as a testbed for an all-new platform.
Another, more near-term, idea is to deploy the technology on the H-1 Cobra, to serve as an armed escort for the US Marine Corps’ MV-22 fleet. Sikorsky’s X-2 will likely also battle for the contract if this requirement emerges over the next few years.
The ground for greater leaps in technical sophistication is being prepared by DARPA, which is supporting BellBoeing’s evolving concept for a “folding tiltrotor” or “tilting stop-rotor”. Boeing also is working with DARPA to develop the concept for a new hybrid aircraft design called “Rotor Disk”.

You’ll see a lot of news print (and electrons) this year on the big US defense procurements with names like KC-X, BAMS, JTRS and the like, and that’s appropriate.
But you won’t see much coverage of a very different sort of contract competition underway within the US Air Force, despite its enormous significance for the defense industry.
The contract is called F2AST for short, or the Flexible Acquisition Sustainment Tool follow-on. It’s scheduled to be awarded in June. The money involved – up to $5.4 billion -- is potentially greater than the BAMS and JTRS deals combined.
The contract focuses on the un-sexy task of sustaining and modifying existing weapon systems, versus developing new platforms. But that’s the market that the US defense industry covets the most as the balance of DOD’s money shifts from procurement to operations and maintenance accounts.
It’s also the hardest part of the market to keep track of, especially as a journalistic outsider. There are no line items in DOD’s annual budget request for small upgrades, no operational test and evaluation reports, no single-issue congressional hearings, no industry press conferences and – unsurprisingly -- virtually no coverage across the trade press.
As a self-appointed watchdog, I’ve never been comfortable with the anonymity of the acquisition process for contracts like F2AST, especially because of the huge sums involved. There’s too much money changing hands behind the scenes for this to be a good thing.
Thankfully, the USAF has just made my job much easier. As part of its new openness policy in acquisition, the USAF has released a motherlode of documentation on the F2AST program, including a detailed database of every task order awarded to a contractor during the previous contract.
Here’s the link to the database: https://pkec.robins.af.mil/FAST2/FAST_FOIA_Data_Release_31Jan07.xls

I started covering the US Navy's off-again/on-again Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) program about five years ago. It's been back on for two years and -- last I checked -- poised for a contract selection decision in five days.

This makes me sad. Why? Because I just thought of an obvious angle for a BAMS story that I've missed somehow for the last five years!

For posterity's sake, I'll tell you about it.

If I had the chance to re-interview all of the competitors and USN program officials, here's the first question I would ask: Why is this a winner take-all award instead of a split-buy?

The competitors for BAMs are the Northrop Grumman RQ-4N Global Hawk (high-altitude, turbofan, active electronically scanned arrays), Lockheed Martin/General Atomics Mariner (medium-altitude, turboprop, mechanically scanned arrays) and Boeing/Gulfstream G-550 (high-altitude, turbofan, optionally manned, multiple active arrays).

Each product is basically an off-the-shelf platform modified to meet the USN's requirement. The USN is not paying to design a new aircraft. It's essentially buying a la cart. That's probably why each platform offers vastly different operational strengths and weaknesses.

This competition isn't a choice between two discreetly differerent rivals, like the YF-22 versus the YF-23. This is more like the YF-22 versus the B-1. Each platform is a completely different capability, but both are useful for their intended purpose.

I agree there are downsides to a split buy award: the upfront costs are higher than a winner-takes-all award, you lose some of the marginal benefits of commonality and training gets more complicated.

But there are other advantages. The USN would not be beholden to one contractor for BAMS for the next two or three decades, but could keep playing the two teams off each other over the life of the program. Instead of a narrowly focused solution, the USN's operators could employ the platform that makes the most sense for each mission.

Not to mention the fact that Congress tends to like split buys, as it spreads the jobs more broadly and subjects the defense industry to greater competition.

I'm not saying a split-buy is the best answer for BAMS, but rather that it's an imporant and seemingly logical question that I should have asked long before now.

But tell me what you think about it.

(Full disclosure: my wife works for Lockheed.)