F-35 jet deliveries can resume following waiver for Chinese-origin alloy. (Reuters) The waiver, signed Oct. 8 by William LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, allows an alloy in the engine’s lubricant pump that does not comply with U.S. procurement laws. Those bar unauthorized Chinese content in the jet…. The magnet does not transmit information or harm aircraft, and that there are no security risks involved.
Republic of Korea Air Force F-35A stealth fighters grounded 172 times over 18 months, unable to carry out certain missions 62 times, Lawmaker says. (Aviation Geek Club) Grounded fifth-generation fighters could carry out missions for only 12 days on average last year and 11 days in the first half of this year. In comparison, the F-4E and the F-5 older generation fighters were grounded 26 and 28 times, respectively, over the 18-month period… The ROKAF received the last of 40 F-35As in January under the country’s first project to procure the stealth fighter manufactured by Lockheed Martin.
Issue Brief: Fiscal Year 2023 space force budget analysis: Missile warning and tracking looms large. (Aerospace) This year’s budget request includes a 36 percent increase for the U.S. Space Force from last year’s appropriations. Despite this significant bump, much of the requested budget for the newest military service is relatively flat. The dramatic growth in missile warning and tracking has allowed the administration to pursue a new approach for the mission, including exploiting lower orbits. However, as reflected in recent congressional bills, there is not yet consensus on how DOD should transition to this new approach.
US Marines warn against Navy’s FY24 decommission plans. (Defense News) Only 45% of the amphibious ship fleet is ready today, compared to the Navy’s 80% readiness goal. And that fleet could shrink dramatically if the Navy gets its way. The service may ask to decommission four amphibious dock landing ships — known as LSDs — in fiscal 2024, even though two congressional committees denied a similar request this year for four different LSDs. The Navy also plans to end construction of the Flight II San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, meant to replace the LSDs, after buying three of them… Each maintenance period is growing longer and more complex as time goes on, Abrahamson said; the average depot maintenance period for an LSD from 2019 through this year is 461 days.
Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System: Research Report. (AIRC HQ) Recommendations:
- Make the current JCIDS staffing process leaner (reduce delays): With no change in policy, we found that standard lean process improvement techniques had the potential to reduce end-to-end time by 25% or more.
- Change JCIDS process steps and documentation requirements: A discrete-event simulation showed that combining the ICD and CDD into an integrated document (an Initial CDD with an update) potentially could reduce the 852 days to an average of 444 days. The simulation showed that changing JCIDS to more broadly use SOCOM’s expedited Special Operations Rapid Requirement Document (SORRD) process could reduce the time to an average of 309 days.
- Make further changes to better align JCIDS with the Defense Acquisition System using the Adaptive Acquisition Framework and the PPBE budget process: Based on a literature review and interviews with experts on best practices, we identified ideas meriting further consideration to improve JCIDS in the context of “Big A” (e.g., major) acquisition.
Stealth rubber coating could make submarines nearly invisible to sonar. (New Scientist) Sonar locates submarines by emitting sound at many different frequencies. Those sound waves reflect off the vessel as an echo which can then be detected by a receiver. But objects covered in materials that absorb sound are hard for sonar to spot. Qingxuan Liang at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and his colleagues have now designed a new coating for masking submarines from sonar
White House raises contract spending goals for small disadvantaged businesses. (FCW) The Office of Management and Budget is directing agencies to award at least 12% of all federal contracting dollars to small disadvantaged businesses in fiscal year 2023… Federal agencies met the White House goal of awarding at least 11% of all contracting opportunities to SDBs in fiscal year 2021 with a record-setting $62.4 billion awarded to Black-owned, Latino-owned and other minority-owned businesses, according to SBA.
New Aussie deal forwards SPACECOM commander’s goal of ‘persistent awareness’ of the heavens. (Breaking Defense) One of the biggest continuing challenges to improving space domain awareness, he explained, is building a command and control (C2) system that can rapidly makes sense of the mounds of raw observational data and disseminate targeted information to operators… Dickinson said that when SPACECOM stood up three years ago — “so we’re all three-year-olds now in the command,” he chuckled as an aside — it was tracking about 25,000 objects, “everything from active to defunct satellite to paint chips.” That number now is “over 47,000,” he said.
Pentagon awards $200 million spacecraft contracto to private venture York. (CNBC) Known as the T1DES system, York will build and operate 12 prototype satellites that will test satellite communications from low Earth Orbit [missions currently served in GEO], as an addition to the “Tranche 1 Transport Layer” (T1TL) network that SDA is already building. York previously won $328 million as part of a larger contract to build satellites for T1TL… At less than $17 million per satellite, Tournear said “the York solution came back to be very affordable.”
Space Development Agency is now officially part of the Space Force. (Space News) SDA faced early opposition from Air Force leaders and skepticism on Capitol Hill. After Griffin departed in July 2020, there was speculation that it would not survive but the agency pressed on and has gained strong congressional support. Despite its relatively small size of under 200 people, it has had outsize impact in the world of military procurement because of its nontraditional approach of buying satellites under fixed-price contracts and setting ambitious schedule targets.
Boeing’s modular air-to-air missile concepts gets Air Force funding. (The Warzone) The notice does not include any specific details about the Compact Air-to-Air Missile (CAAM) or the Extended Range Air-to-Air Missile (ERAAM) designs, or proposed designs, as they might exist now. However, Boeing has confirmed to The War Zone that “the CAAM / ERAAM is related to the LRAAM [Long-Range Air-to-Air Missile] concept we first displayed last year.” … Boeing’s LRAAM missile concept, as it has been shown publicly, consists of two core components, a “kill vehicle” and a booster section, both of which share a highly common physical architecture.
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