Acquisition headlines (11/28 – 12/4/2022)

3 keys to bridging the valley of death: get involved early, cut out the middlemen and pray Congress works. (Breaking Defense)

• Hondo Geurts: “If you have awesome tech and there’s no budget line for it, you know, it’s going to take you a while to get money for that.”
• AFLCMC Lt Gen Shaun Morris: “The federal budget process, he said, is a “foundational constraint.” “If…I see the most brilliant idea, my first opportunity, right, to add that into the air force budget is the [fiscal] 25 [Program Objective Memorandum]. Just think about that. I’m in [FY] 22, okay.”’

Biden’s new climate change rules would smack government contractors with a $604 billion bill. (Washington Times) “Under the proposal, companies that do more than $50 million in annual business with the federal government would have to establish carbon reduction targets that line up with the Paris Agreement.”

• The proposed rule estimates that the federal contracting industry would incur $604 billion in implementation costs in the first year and a little more than $442 billion annually after that.
• Christoph Mlinarchik: “Piling up compliance costs disproportionately hurts small businesses that have razor-thin profit margins and less flexibility to spread these costs across many contracts… Eventually, increased costs of compliance get passed to American taxpayers through higher prices for government contracts.”

Anduril raises $1.48 Billion in Series E funding. (Anduril) “Anduril Industries today announced $1.48 billion in Series E funding, valuing the company at $8.48 billion, nearly doubling the company’s previous valuation in June 2021.”

• Nearly doubled the team size, from 700 at the start of 2022 to more than 1100 employees today.

Operational expendable hypersonics and the race for reuseability. (Aerospace America) Liz Stein: “The onerous price tag of current expendable hypersonics can be traced to tight-tolerance exquisite systems reliant on low-volume, time-consuming manufacturing processes for the thermal protection system. Innovators are rising to the challenge.”

• Over $365 million of private capital has flowed into hypersonics in the past two years.

The Army is getting the world’s largest metal 3D printer, here’s what it will print. (Sandboxx) Jointless Hull Large Format Tool: “Once active, the printer will be used to print a spectrum of vehicle hulls – “any vehicles carrying warfighters,” Schrup said. “

• The printer’s size will eliminate the need to print smaller metal parts and weld them together, creating seams and joints that create weak spots on the finished vehicle or platform.
• At 30 feet long by 20 feet wide and 12 feet tall, the project funding tops $45 million.

More drones for Ukraine! Belgium to supply UUVs to Kyiv after tasting success against russian military targets. (Eurasian Times) “The Belgian government has authorized a new military aid package to Ukraine, which includes cutting-edge tools like portable labs and Unmanned underwater drones/vehicles (UUV).”

• Ten underwater drones from ECA Robotics Belgium are included in the aid package. These drones can locate all underwater threats, including mines and surveillance gear.

Navy requests concepts for attritable mother ships for unmanned systems. (Sea Power) “The U.S. Navy has issued a Request for Information for concepts for an attritable unmanned mother ship to “cost-effectively deliver large numbers of UxVs (unmanned systems) to forward locations in a contested environment.””

• The Navy is aiming to award a design and construction by mid-2026, with delivery of the first AUMS withing 24 months of contract award.

Turkey’s future drone carriers. (War on the Rocks) “Ankara is now pursuing the development of fully-fledged “drone carriers,” a class of light carriers carrying several dozen still-in-development Bayraktar TB3 remotely piloted aircraft.”

• The TCG Anadolu, a landing helicopter dock ship, was first launched in May 2019 and continued to undergo substantial refurbishment and testing at Turkey’s Tuzla shipyards near Istanbul. The ship is projected to be delivered by the end of 2022.
• Impressed with its price, capabilities, few export restrictions, and reputation honed on the battlefield, at least 24 countries have placed orders for Turkey’s TB2.

China accelerates Mighty Dragon stealth fighters production to counterbalance US supremacy. (Interesting Engineering) “The application of the new pulsating production lines and domestic engines had pushed the number of J-20s to equal, or even exceed, the number of US F-22 Raptors.” [More than 140 J-20s, possibly more than 200]

• J-20 costs roughly US$110 million to construct, which is less than half the price of an F-22 Raptor [But roughly equivalent with an F-35].

China’s intercontinental military drone Wing Loong-3 can fly 6,200 miles with air-to-air missiles. (Interesting Engineering) “These drones are considered at par with Turkish Bayraktar UAVs, and with the recent upgrades, China has demonstrated the ability to innovate and deliver. Intriguingly, China is also offering the technology to countries that sign up for its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).”

• The Chinese Aviation Industry Corporation of China (Avic) plans to mass produce the Wing Loong-3.

SecDef tells Congress to get a military budget done already. (Military Times) “It is impairing our ability to hire the people we need to accelerate our efforts to eradicate sexual assault and prevent suicide. [It] is delaying needed investments in military infrastructure, including barracks and child care centers.”

• The defense secretary in his letter said that military leaders are operating with nearly $3 billion less a month in funding than they expected under the new fiscal 2023 budget.

Palantir, Lockheed Martin team up to modernize naval combat systems. (Defense News) “

The U.S. Navy has plans to field an integrated combat system on its ships, with containerized software that’s agnostic of the ship’s hardware and can receive over-the-air updates, rather than requiring complex, in-port modernization periods.”

• [Palantir’s] Apollo can deploy, manage and monitor software across multi-cloud environments and legacy on-premises data centers at various classification levels.

Ukraine war: why Indian Air Force chief is 100% correct on little impact of combat drones in warzone. (Eurasian Times) “Inputs about the effectiveness of the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs) have been mixed. While initial reports were largely positive, as the major action shifted to the East, where a structured Russian AD system was available, most inputs indicate high vulnerability and limited impact. [e.g., of TB-2 drones]”

US effort to arm Taiwan faces new challenge with Ukraine conflict. (Wall Street Journal) “U.S. government and congressional officials fear the conflict in Ukraine is exacerbating a nearly $19 billion backlog of weapons bound for Taiwan. [Up from $14B last year]”

• “Taiwan would like to request that the weapons the U.S. sells to Taiwan be delivered as scheduled,” Gen. Wang Shin-lung, the vice minister for armaments.
• One of Taiwan’s biggest U.S. orders—an $8 billion deal for 66 F-16 combat jets made by Lockheed Martin—is now on schedule to be delivered from the mid-2020s as planned.

New technologies improve Ford-class carrier sortie rates. (Naval News) “The AWEs [advanced weapons elevator] can handle 24,000 lb of ammunition in a run, and run at about 150 ft per minute: this compares to a 10,000 lb rating and 100 ft per minute on Nimitz ships.”

• “The AWEs are a big game-changer, because we don’t need to take a piece of our flight deck’s real estate and dedicate that to weapons anymore,”

The Pentagon can’t count: It’s time to reinvent the audit. (War on the Rocks) “The program wouldn’t even need more funds, since the Department of Defense could allocate just 10 percent of the $428 million it was spending on auditors to fund Small Business Innovation Research programs in auditing/data management/finance, generating five to ten new startups in this space each year.”