The DEW Line

What should be the news angle if the US Navy awards the UCAS-D contract to either Boeing or Northrop Grumman later this week, which as Defense News reports is a very large possiblity? I've got four options:

a) Assume Northrop Grumman wins. Bill Sweetman at Ares points out that Boeing has got nothing else in the pipeline after the F/A-18E/F/G runs its course (okay, they've still got P-8A and perhaps even YAL-1, but I'm looking for angles here, people, not facts. But clearly this is a problem for the company.
b) Assume Boeing wins. That would mean another strategic defeat for Northrop, coming soon after having its Kinetic Energy Inteceptor program downgraded to alternate booster status earlier this year, fumbling the AOC-WSI contract to Lockheed Martin last year and allowing the E-10A Multi-sensor Command and Control program to be abruptly derailed the year before that. So not a pretty picture there either.
c) Assume either wins. What are the future prospects for the the UCAS-D program's survival? Probably not very good, judging by the fact that industry-paid think-tanks in Washington DC are already hosting "congressional forums" to plead to lawmakers to save the program from budget cuts.
d) How does the US defense industry build another carrier-based strike aircraft if the UCAS-D line-item is eliminated? As my colleague The Woracle explains, the inudstrial base needs to start a new development program every five years to refresh the engineering talent. Without that talent pool to call on, the next development programme may be much more difficult.

Even though some dumb jerk recently predicted a Boeing victory, the US Navy has selected the Northrop Grumman X-47B for the $635 million prize of the UCAS-D contract. Gee, I bet that guy feels silly now.

Pardon me a moment to wipe some egg off my keyboard.

That's better. Anyway, the end result is a good indicator that Northrop's long-term relationship with the US Navy on the unmanned combat air systems program in all its many guises simply overwhelmed Boeing's chances. Boeing's X-45B was the air force's baby, and now appears to be an orphan.

The challenge now for Northrop is to keep the program sold both to the navy and the Congress. But that can wait until tomorrow. Today is for Northrop's victory lap, and for my turn to eat crow.

"Niiiiice cockpit" Source: DARPA

Lots of angst has been spilled this week on the pages of the trade and mainstream press over the sad fate of the Boeing X-45N. This navalized variant certainly suffered a blow by losing the US Navy's UCAS-D contract to its longtime rival -- the Northrop Grumman X-47B.

But don't fret. Multi-billion dollar military technology development programs never die. They just go black.

Besides, on August 2, Dyke Weatherington, DOD's unmanned systems guru, confirmed that the X-45 technology will surely not go to waste. He noted that the USAF still wants a more robust stand-in jammer aircraft than the Raytheon Miniature Air Launched Decoy-Jammer.

Sure enough, the air force's budget justification documents this year include a "recoverable unmanned stand-in" platform as a "potential" component of a future airborne electronic attack architecture, which, I may add, is a very slick way to surreptiously resurrect the X-45C program that the air force cancelled nearly two years ago. Bravo!

"I like to call it a 'stand-on' jammer" (Source: Boeing)