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J U L Y 2 0 1 4 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 1

NDIA’S BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE

VOLUME XCIX, NUMBER 728

WWW.NATIONALDEFENSEMAGAZINE.ORG

News Features

Trucks

20 Army Switches From Vehicle Procurement to Sustainment Mode

The Army’s truck numbers swelled during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the service must focus on sustaining the youngest fleet in modern history.

BY DAN PARSONS

Command and Control

22 Industry Ready to Compete for JSTARS Recapitalization Program

In order to keep the system affordable, the Air Force plans on using commer-cial, off-the-shelf equipment and mini-mizing new technology development.

BY VALERIE INSINNA

JSTARS 22� The Air Force is preparing to revamp its Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System with new sensors and communication equipment. No requirements are on the books yet, but industry is already gearing up for a fierce competition.

Nonlethal Weapons 26� The worldwide nonlethal weapons mar-ket is expected to double by 2020, accord-ing to recent studies. The U.S. market is expected to follow that trend, increasing from $500 million in 2013 to about $930 million in 2020.

Cover Story 32� Elon Musk’s SpaceX is tak-ing on the Air Force and United Launch Alliance over rocket launch contracts, filing a lawsuit against the service this spring. At issue is a sole source, no-compete contract awarded to ULA to provide government customers 36 rocket cores over five years.

July 2014Twitter.com/NationalDefense Facebook.com/NationalDefense

www.NationalDefenseMagazine.org/blog

Exclusive content on

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Cover: Falcon 9 rocket (SpaceX photo)

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 1

Departments

4 Reader’s Forum

6 President’s Perspective xxxxBy Lawrence P. Farrell Jr.

8 Defense WatchRuminations on current eventsBy Sandra I. Erwin

10 From the National Defense Blog

12 Inside Science + TechnologyTackling the military’s toughest problemsBy Dan Parsons

13 Ethics Corner

14 Business and Industry NewsWhat’s new and next for the industrial baseBy Valerie Insinna

16 Homeland Security NewsMonitoring the homefrontBy Stew Magnuson

40 NDIA Calendar Complete guide to NDIA events

44 Next MonthPreview of our next issue

44 Index of Advertisers

2 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

July 2014

volume xcix number 728

EditorSandra I. Erwin (703)247-2543SErwin@ndia.org

Managing Editor Stew Magnuson(703)247-2545SMagnuson@ndia.org

SEnior Editor Dan Parsons(703)247-2585DParsons@ndia.org

StaFF WritEr Valerie Insinna(703)247-2542VInsinna@ndia.org

dESign dirEctor Brian Taylor(703)247-2546BTaylor@ndia.org

EditoriaL aSSiStant Yasmin Tadjdeh(703)247-9469YTadjdeh@ndia.org

advErtiSing Dino Pignotti(703)247-2541DPignotti@ndia.orgFor additional advertising information, go to the Index of Advertisers on the last page.

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Nonlethal Weapons

26 Nonlethal Technologies Become Lighter, More Potent

Thearmedservices’needfornonlethaltechnologiesisgrowing,withweaponsbecominglighterandmoreportable,havinggreaterrangeandthecapabilitytosendandreceiveinformation.

ByVALERIEINSINNA

29 Nonlethal Weapons Could gain ground in future Missions

Sting-ballgrenades,blunt-impactmunitions,dazzlinglasers,pepperspray,tasersandbatonsareamongtheweaponsattroops’disposal.

ByDANPARSONS

Cover Story

32 Launch Contract Dispute Pits SpaceX against air force, uLa

SpaceXisfightingthemilitaryoverwhatitperceivesasanunfairmonopo-lyintherocketlaunchmarket.

BySTEWMAGNUSON

Space

36 Costs, Benefits of rD-180 rocket Engine replacement Program Debated

ThefutureofRD-180enginesinAtlasrocketsisinquestionastensionsbetweentheUnitedStatesandRussiariseoverUkraine.

BySTEWMAGNUSON

38 New Chinese Threats to u.S. Space Systems Worry officials

Chinaisallegedlypursuingnewanti-satellitetechnologythatcouldonedaythreatencriticalU.S.spaceassets.

ByyASMINTADJDEH

Departments4 readers’ forum

6 President’s Perspective WhataDifferenceWorldEventsMake by Lawrence P. Farrell Jr.

8 Defense Watch Ruminationsoncurrentevents by Sandra I. Erwin

10 from the National Defense Blog

12 Inside Science + TechnologyTacklingthemilitary’stoughestproblems

by Dan Parsons

13 Ethics Corner

14 Business + Industry NewsWhat’snewandnextfortheindustrialbase

by Valerie Insinna

16 homeland Security News Monitoringthehomefront by Stew Magnuson

40 NDIa Calendar CompleteguidetoNDIAevents

44 Next Month Previewofournextissue

44 Index of advertisers

21

http://www.skbcases.com/military

4 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

U.S. Manufacturers Need Access to Metals■ President Obama’s recent announcement of a Department of Defense funded metals manufacturing institute is a nod to the criti-cality of raw materials to national security at a time of growing resource nationalism amongst mineral-rich nations.

The $148 million Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation (LM3I) Institute — also backed by major defense manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin — will focus on the light-weighting of metals crucial to defense and aerospace applications, with the ultimate goal of making U.S. military equipment more efficient, deft and adaptable to the rapidly changing landscape of combat. It could also spur action on an issue that not only threatens our national security, but countless domestic industries includ-ing automakers, high tech innovators and U.S. manufacturers: foreign mineral import reliance.

The LM3I Institute hopes to make the U.S. more competitive and secure by expanding domestic markets for products made with metals such as copper, plati-num, gold, molybdenum, palladium and nickel to lighten vehicles for the military and consumers alike in order to improve performance and fuel efficiency. Lighter vehicles result in fewer emissions and costs while being able to carry larger loads and travel farther distances. And lighter military vehicles can withstand carrying heavy weapons while still being easily transportable.

The innovations pursued by LM3I Insti-tute are just the latest use of minerals and metals to create and improve countless technologies that protect our troops abroad and support homeland security. Each year, the DoD acquires nearly 750,000 tons of minerals used in an array of defense and military applications to keep our nation safe and combat ready. Molybdenum, for example, is a key component in the manu-facturing of armor plating. Minerals such as nickel, titanium and zinc are found in military aircraft like the Boeing EA-18G Growler — the United States’ most advanced electronic warfare aircraft. The Navy’s air warfare division just requested 22 more EA-18G Growlers in order to reduce the duration of military missions and bring our troops home quickly and safely.

Unfortunately, it’s increasingly becom-ing a zero-sum game to procure these

minerals as demand soars and the United States’ access to these resources is put in jeopardy. According to a recent report by Brig. Gen. John Adams for the Alli-

ance for American Manufacturing, “The increased demand for minerals has encour-aged resource nationalism, where coun-tries seek to exert greater control over the extraction and processing of key elements … exposing the United States to potential supply disruptions and other risks.” Top mineral producers like Indonesia, China, and South Africa have all recently moved to limit foreign mineral exports in order to bolster their own industry and econo-mies. Demand and competition for these vital minerals will continue to rise as the world’s population surges and millions join the middle class in fast-rising econo-mies around the world.

The United States is particularly threat-ened by this growing global trend, as the nation remains 100 percent import depen-dent on foreign sources for 19 key miner-als and metals, and more than 50 percent reliant for another 22. Many of these same minerals were flagged in the DoD’s 2013 “Strategic and Critical Materials Report,” which documented shortages of 23 miner-als crucial to national security.

Our growing reliance on foreign minerals is particularly disappointing as the United States is home to a rich $6.2 trillion min-eral reserves base — a tremendous resource kept at arm’s length due to a duplicative and outdated permitting process for new mineral mines. With this process — con-gested by unnecessary delays and redun-dancies at the local, state and federal levels — it can take up to 10 years to secure approval to mine for minerals. Large min-ing countries such as Australia and Canada, with comparably stringent environmental standards, approve mine permits in just two years. No wonder private consultants rank

the United States dead last — tied with Papua New Guinea — for permit efficiency. The result drives mining investment over-seas, dropping the U.S. share of global met-als mining investments by 13 percent over the past decade and triggering increased reliance on mineral imports.

Fortunately, policymakers are catching up to their colleagues in the Pentagon and have begun to realize the threat of min-eral supply constraints. Last year, the House passed the “Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2013,” which would streamline the mineral permitting process and help establish a secure domestic min-eral supply chain for manufacturers and our military. This bill upholds strict envi-ronmental protections and helps prepare our national defense for a changing world.

For the United States, a stable and robust mineral supply is, and will continue to be, a strong pillar supporting our national defense and domestic industries. Allies and competitors alike have enacted policies to address mineral security, and it’s time for the United States to do the same. A reformed permitting process for mineral mines is a long-overdue first step.

Hal Quinn President and CEO,

National Mining Association

How to Fix Defense Acquisition■ The Armed Services Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives asked industry for input on the Defense Depart-ment acquisition system. Three areas need to change: The acquisition process, the acquisition organization and the require-ments generation process.

Any honest analysis of DoD acquisition over the last 20 years can only conclude that successful programs are rare, if you define success as meeting the war fighter’s needs on time and within budget. The reality is the acquisition system is failing the war fighter while simultaneously cheat-ing taxpayers out of their investment in national security.

There will be failures in acquisition regardless of the legislative framework, management controls or oversight meth-odology constructed. Development at the edge of technology is inherently risky. Fail-ure in acquisition is not necessarily bad. Taking a long time to fail is definitely bad. This is what the acquisition system is deliv-ering today, long lead time failure.

The acquisition system has become a

Readers’ Forum

U.S. mined copper wikimedia commons

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J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 5

Gordian knot, lacking any logic or sensible construct. If programs are successful today, they are successful in spite of the current acquisition process, not because of it. Why has this happened? Large organizations tend to solve problems by adding complexity — complexity to the process, complexity to the organization, and complexity to reporting. This is rarely the right solution.

The goal of the acquisition process can-not be the elimination of failure. That has been the goal in the past, which has resulted in constant fiddling with the sys-tem, the net result being a process which is overwhelming, complex and difficult to understand; full of caveats, exemptions and waivers; made up of users which immedi-ately and universally try to subvert it; and a huge burden of reports, plans and analysis — most never read.

The advice on reforming this process is do not to attempt to reform it. Start over from a clean sheet of paper and create a radically simplified system.

The acquisition process is defined by DODD 5000.01 “The Defense Acquisition System” and DODI 5000.02, “Operation of the Defense Acquisition System.” Some of the requirements in these documents are driven by legislation, some by policy. DODD 5000.01 is good as is. DODI 5000.02 needs to be radically simplified and rewritten from a clean start. Some principles to follow in rewriting this new process are to keep it simple and easy to understand, and to make it gener-ally applicable, regard-less of program size or type.

It should be an overarching frame-work, not the dicta-tion of every step in a developmental pro-gram. It should ensure ruthless, honest and inde-pendent oversight. And over-sight means oversight. Don’t micromanage.

The reporting burden should be small, but extremely important. The process can not be a substitute for good judgment, good training and common sense.

Lastly, hire good program managers, train them effectively and then rely on their judgment.

A simplified acquisition process should be five phases, seven technical reviews, three decision points and one independent operational test. This process should apply to all programs regardless of type or size. The only variation from program to pro-gram is the level of approval and oversight,

and the point at which they enter the lifecycle.

Next, the current acquisition organiza-tion is a confusing mass of duplication, parallel management structures and dot-ted line relationships lacking clear chains of command and responsibility. This “organizational spaghetti” isn’t conducive to providing cutting edge products on time and within budget. Our war fighters deserve an acquisition organization back-ing them up that looks like it was designed on purpose.

The acquisition organization needs to be radically simplified with clear lines of authority and accountability. Disband the disparate service-specific acquisition orga-nizations and reorganize them under a single Defense Department organization.

As for the requirements process, the Defense Department relies almost exclu-sively on a “requirements pull” methodol-ogy which works like this: War-fighters identify a capability gap and propose a system to correct this gap — a new heavy bomber, a new armored vehicle, a new IT system, whatever. They create a bullet list of design requirements for this new system, which the acquisition process attempts to deliver. Failure to deliver even a single requirement may result in the failure of the

program. The problem with the

“requirements pull” meth-odology is that it doesn’t

work. Look to any sector — consumer product, automo-tive, aerospace, IT, medical, etc. — and you will rarely find innovative products resulting from a bulleted list

of customer require-ments. The Model T,

the SR-71, the iPhone, Google, the M16 rifle

— only one of these trans-formational products was devel-

oped from a focus group or bulleted list of requirements.

The reason innovative products don’t come from a requirements pull methodol-ogy is twofold. First, end users can only describe what they need in terms of what they already know. They can explain how to improve an existing product or describe existing problems or deficiencies, but they cannot, as a group, conceive of innovative solutions to those problems.

We remember the names of innova-tors like Henry Ford, Kelly Johnson, Steve Jobs and Gene Stoner because they are so

exceptional. Second, product development is a series

of many-dimensional tradeoffs. Add armor to increase survivability, and you increase weight, reduce speed and reduce maneu-verability. Add vertical take-off to a fighter, you increase weight and complexity and reduce reliability. Every additional require-ment adds capability, but it also causes a subtraction in capability somewhere else. There is no free lunch, only a series of tradeoffs.

The subtractions are usually unseen during requirements generation and only obvious during product design, develop-ment and use. These tradeoffs easily run into thousands of connections which can-not be easily understood with a bulleted list of requirements. Therefore we typi-cally end up with a long complex list of requirements which cannot be resolved. The goal should be only to add require-ments that add significantly more than they subtract. This is why a small simple set of requirements is usually more suc-cessful than a long complex list of require-ments; the tradeoffs are easier to assess and deal with when there are a few simple requirements.

There are two independent variables with respect to increased requirements: time and money. You can always add more require-ments if you are willing to add time and cost. Hence, this is why most DoD projects are over cost and schedule because of an ill-fated attempt to trade these variables for more capability.

The bottom line, requirements must be restrained. This restraint can’t be invoked legislatively or with policy. You must elimi-nate time and cost as an independent vari-able.

Every project which is 15 percent over budget, or 15 percent past schedule should be automatically canceled. This can’t be an idle threat; this must be adhered to vigor-ously. Once project managers know this is a hard rule and will be enforced, discipline in requirements generation will occur organi-cally. As a side benefit, programs will more realistically estimate true time and cost.

Systems are effective based on the totali-ty of what they bring to the mission. There-fore no single requirement ought to be sacrosanct. If a program is unable to deliver 100 percent of every requirement that alone should not result in failure. The war fighter must assess the total capability and determine if the system can fulfill his needs.

Jeff Windham Bettendorf, Iowa

Email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 5

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6 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

The United States military lays out a strategic plan every four years in the Quadrennial Defense Review. The latest

QDR was shaped by the administration’s 2012 strategic guidance that calls for a pivot, or rebalance, to Asia-Pacific and a gradual disengagement from the still-volatile Middle East and South Asia.

China has argued that the pivot is intended to counter its influ-ence. The United States disagrees. However, China’s muscle flexing — and push for turf in disputed islands and economic zones — has sparked calls for increased U.S. engagement as a stabilizing influence.

How quickly things can change. Events in Africa — Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Mali, Chad, Nigeria

— and the Middle East — Iraq and Syria — have undercut many of the U.S. strategic assumptions. The reality on the ground has trumped the validity of declarations such as, “al-Qaida has been decimated,” and “al-Qaida is on the run.”

The fact is that radical offshoots of al-Qaida, whatever one elects to call them, are on the rise. Governments are finding themselves unable to cope or, at best, can cope only marginally. Only recently, U.S. officials declared Iraq to be a stable, democratic entity and a partner. Months later, the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant — also known as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — has captured Tikrit (the hometown of Saddam Hussein) and Mosul (the second largest city in Iraq), and is now marching to Baghdad.

No one knows how this will play out, but this surprising turn must certainly pose anew the questions and assumptions we have about an Afghan National Security force assuming responsibility to defend that troubled nation after U.S. forces leave in December. It also must cause the United States to reexamine its postulated force level of less than 10,000 troops to be left behind — primarily trainers — post 2014, and the zero number (like Iraq) post 2015.

The assumptions of relative stability in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East in general that underlie the pivot-to-the-Pacific strategy are at this point questionable, if not invalid. And if the Pacific rebalance remains a priority, who specifically is the primary threat in the region and how does the U.S. military posture to coun-ter or deal with that threat?

The U.S. search for a strategic focus after the end of the Cold War has still not been resolved.

The Cold War was certainly challenging, but developing a stra-tegic framework and force posture was straightforward. We knew clearly who the enemy was, what the enemy capabilities were, and the likely avenues of approach and places of conflict. We under-stood the enemy’s capabilities and the likely indicators of imminent war. It was a potential conflict that was endlessly war-gamed. We knew much about it and how it might unfold.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, we began a search for a stra-tegic framework to replace the familiar paradigm, one that would allow the military to posture forces and maintain the relevancy of key alliances, especially with NATO, Japan and South Korea.

One framework we adopted was a shift from threat-based to

capability-based planning as a method to size forces and competen-cies. This search was interrupted by conflict in the Middle East (the first Gulf War), the Balkans (Bosnia and Kosovo), the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The wars of choice of the past 13 years have now been “wished away” by declarations of victory as we shift our focus to the Pacific. The instability in Africa and the Middle East plus the recent Taliban surge in Pakistan — witness the Karachi airport attacks — remind us that while we may get a vote on starting something, ours is not the only vote in ending it.

Against this backdrop, the question is what strategic focus the United States should adopt and how the military should posture for it. Recent events have put everything in play. We have in effect a “jump ball.”

Domestic politics here are complicating matters. Recall last year’s government shutdown and endless squabbling over govern-ment spending and taxes that led to the Budget Control Act and

sequestration. The Defense Department base budget was $496.5 billion in fis-cal year 2013, $496 billion in 2014 and the president requested $495.6 billion for fiscal year 2015. The House Appropria-tions Committee approved $491 billion in Defense Department discretionary funding for 2015. The committee also added $79 billion for overseas contingency operations.

Recall that the budgets for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 benefitted from a par-tial relaxation of the sequestration caps, but 2016 holds no such promise. With the upcoming retirements of Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who

lost in the recent primaries, the House will have two fewer defense advocates. And the outlay effects of reduced budget authorities are now beginning to bite harder, and will bite harder still in the coming years.

All this comes at a time of needed reset and modernization for U.S. forces. We have an Army that is downsizing from 570,000 to 450,000 troops, an Air Force postured to reduce force structure, unresolved force structure adjustments among active, reserve and National Guard forces and postponed modernization programs in the Army (Ground Combat Vehicle) and the Marine Corps (replacement for the Amphibious Assault Vehicle). One bright spot is House Appropriations Committee support for 11 carrier battle groups (funding to support refueling of the USS George Wash-ington). Still unresolved is the requisite funding to support both procurement and training.

We may have thought that we had a strategic framework nailed. But the recent turn of events has, at the very least, caused us to reconsider previous assumptions. And we always knew that bud-get and outlay resources were insufficient for previous strategic assumptions. These resources must seem even more inadequate in light of what is happening in the world.

President’s Perspective by lawrence p. farrell jr.

Email your comments to lfarrell@ndia.org

What a Difference World Events Make

“The assumptions that underlie the pivot-to-the-

Pacific strategy — of relative stability in Iraq and

Afghanistan and the Middle East in general — are at this point questionable,

if not invalid.”

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8 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

A group of Pentagon and contractor executives gathered recently to tackle a perennial problem: the Defense Depart-

ment’s procurement system.It’s crunch time for acquisition reformers as they face a July

deadline to submit recommendations to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Lawmakers decided they will take another shot at fixing the seemingly unfixable Pentagon procure-ment system, and have asked industry groups to submit sugges-tions. They will consider proposals for the fiscal year 2016 defense authorization bill.

Several executives stepped up to the microphone to share their views from the trenches.

Everyone in the so-called acquisition community appreciates the latest congressional effort, but wonders how a new round of reforms will be more productive than past attempts. They have seen piles of band-aids put on the system with negligible results.

“I’ve been a contractor for 30 years, and I’ve seen things get worse and worse,” said one participant.

The lengthy list of grievances is all too familiar to those in the business: Pentagon programs fail and nobody is held accountable, there are too many layers of supervisors that bog down the system, innovation is squelched rather than rewarded, and there is little to no incentive to cut costs.

Three decades of procurement reforms have had no noticeable effect on the performance of Pentagon weapon programs, but they surely have fueled industry cynicism.

“We are always on a 12-step program to reform. And we never reform,” said another participant.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, who is overseeing the HASC review of defense procurement, said he is acutely aware of the skep-ticism about acquisition reforms. The committees are not interested in piling on new rules, he said, and are investigating why current laws and regulations have not worked as intended.

This congressional probe comes at a time when lawmakers worry that the Pentagon is not getting a good return on its acqui-sition dollars.

When Congress last passed sweeping procurement reform legislation — the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 — the Pentagon’s budget had reached record levels and the mood at the time was to crack down on procurement fraud and abuse. Military spending has since plummeted, although the cost of major weapon systems has continued to rise.

The Government Accountability Office credited the Pentagon for slight improvements in the performance of major weapon systems, but cautioned that trouble still lies ahead. “While many of the recent efficiencies achieved by programs decreased their costs without reducing quantities, it is unclear how much more savings can be obtained in this manner,” said Gene L. Dodaro, comptroller general of the United States. The Defense Department and Con-gress have taken “meaningful steps to improve the acquisition of major weapon systems, yet many programs are still falling short of cost and schedule estimates,” GAO said.

The projected cost of 80 programs that GAO studied has increased by $14.1 billion, although 50 of the 80 have seen some cost reduction. The Pentagon will need about $682 billion to com-plete these programs, of which 45 percent have seen cost growth from initial estimates. GAO called this a “clear indicator” that the

Defense Department needs to control cost in order to save these programs from the ax.

Industry insiders doubt that the Pentagon can turn this around until it can figure out how to estimate the “real” cost of a weapon system. Current models are based on the history of failed acqui-sition programs that were way over budget. “We don’t have a way to separate that bad history from what things will cost in the future,” said an industry official. The Pentagon’s new policy demands that program managers estimate what a system “should” cost, but that is hard to do, he said. “‘Should cost’ is the right approach. But it should be based on the new paradigm you’re trying to shift to.”

A former Pentagon official said it might be time to take a zero-based approach and start with a clean slate. The current system is grossly inefficient and wasteful, he said, because it is designed that way. “Too many cooks and too many layers” hold programs hostage, he said. “They prevent things from going forward by exercising a veto.” Managers are evaluated based on whether they “checked” all the boxes, rather than on the value they add to the program. “We need more doers, less checkers.”

An industry representative spoke about a “culture of fear and loathing” in the acquisition world. Many contractors, she said, resent that waste in government is conveniently blamed on the private sector. Although that is politically expedient, faulting contractors for all government waste has long-term detrimental effects, and drives “good” contractors out of the business, she said. “It creates a race to the bottom, you get the worst possible contractors, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.”

Besides the need to save money, another motivation to change the status quo is that U.S. adversaries are modernizing at a rapid rate. “It’s beyond me that we are nibbling around the edges,” anoth-er executive said. “We can spend a lifetime trying to fix what exists today: one regulation piled on top of another.” While the Defense Department’s acquisition system plods along, other nations are buying commercial technology from the open market. “Why are we emphasizing that we have to have a separate system that requires so many reviews, has to go through so many decision makers, that has grown into a behemoth of red tape?”

Alas, the Pentagon operating like a commercial enterprise is a utopia. As one defense official noted, “Attacking the bureaucracy is a bit naïve. The bureaucracy is not going away.” The problem is the individuals in charge who provide bad leadership, he said. “There are no rules that say, ‘Don’t be innovative.’ What this comes down to is leaders who are not innovative, not moving programs forward, relying on written policy as an excuse for not being innovative.”

Congress might have to accept the reality that, other than “blowing up” the current system — as some have suggested — there is not much it can do. “How do we change a system that doesn’t want to be changed?” asked one executive. “Every time we try to change the system, it reverts back to its natural equi-librium.”

Widespread disappointment about what goes on in the bowels of the bureaucracy leads to the conclusion that it will take much more than legislation to change the current dysfunction.

Defense Watch by sandra i. erwin

Email your comments to serwin@ndia.org

Hope and Despair in Government Procurement

When the warfighter is injured, the family is injured.Families are just as central to the recovery, which can last for years, putting their lives on hold to provide support. To do it well, they need support, too. But there aren’t enough official resources. So the Yellow Ribbon Fund fills the gaps. Learn the practical ways we’ve been assisting injured service members and their families since 2005, and how you can help:

www.yellowribbonfund.orgwww.facebook.com/YellowRibbonFund

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10 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

From the National Defense Blog

Aerospace and defense firms have cheered the Obama admin-istration’s five-year effort to

overhaul the U.S. export licensing sys-tem at a time when American manu-facturers seek international growth.

But industry groups of late are voic-ing displeasure with the pace and sub-stance of the reforms. They also fear that the administration is weighing new export controls over increasingly sought-after technologies such as cloud computing, cyber security and encryp-tion.

Over the past 18 months, the admin-istration has acted to remove civilian,

or “dual use” technologies like aircraft components and communications satel-

lites from the U.S. munitions list — managed by the State Department — to the less restric-tive controls of the Commerce Department.

While these changes have been welcome by the private sector, they do not go far enough, a coalition of 18 industry groups argued. Exporters are frustrated by the heavy administrative bur-den and by a lack of transparency in the export licensing process, said The Coalition for Security and Competitiveness.

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/TTVcxN

NationalDefenseMagazine.org/blog

Uncertain Future for Army’s Future Helicopter■ The Pentagon’s plan to acquire a new family of helicop-ters once again is up in the air. The military intends to con-tinue to fund rotary-wing research and testing programs, officials said, but it cannot yet predict if or when it will have funds to buy new aircraft to replace the current fleet.

Like every other modernization program in the Defense Department, new helicopters have to compete for funding within a pool of shrinking dollars. Offi-cials said the military services are having to trade off new weapon systems to fund their payroll.

“The budget environment is very difficult,” said Jose M. Gonzalez, deputy director of land warfare, munitions and tactical warfare systems at the Defense Department.

The helicopter modernization effort known as “future vertical lift” got under way in 2009. The goal is to design and build a family of helicopters that would replace the current fleet of Black Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks by 2030. Analysts have estimated the program could be worth up to $100 billion.

Helicopter manufacturers have regarded the future vertical lift project, or FVL, as one of the few remaining opportunities in the military rotorcraft market. But the reality for contractors is that while FVL appears to have heavy backing from the Pentagon leadership, it does not have much money in the Defense Department’s five-year spending plan.

Gonzalez said the military services are fighting to protect the research dollars in their budgets for the “joint multirole rotorcraft” technology demonstration, which is the first phase of FVL. READ MORE: http://bit.ly/1mb8YCv

Military Vehicles Sales Plummet■ At the height of war spending, the Pentagon bought nearly $5 billion worth of trucks in just one year. Orders are expected to plummet to under $400 million in 2015.

It is indeed a depressing outlook for military vehicle manufacturers that rely predominantly on Defense Department business, analysts said. Many companies might not survive this downturn unless they figure out how to wean themselves off government sales.

“There are very few opportunities on the horizon in the tactical wheeled vehicles market,” noted James Tinsley, managing director

at the consulting firm Avas-cent.

The only new truck the Army and Marine Corps still plan to buy is the joint light tactical vehicle, or JLTV, to replace old Humvees. But one program alone cannot sustain the current supplier base, he said. Three com-panies — Oshkosh Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and AM General — are compet-ing for a future production contract.

The next several years are going to be a “very quiet time from an engineering

perspective,” Tinsley said. He has advised companies to shift gears and become less dependent on U.S. military contracts. In the truck market, that means courting commercial and non-U.S. government buyers, and investing significantly more money in research and development rather than wait for government funded R&D.

“Some companies might first introduce international variants of a vehicle. Since tactical wheeled vehicle price points are much lower globally than in the U.S., starting with a low-cost vehicle may broaden the addressable market,” suggested an Avascent white paper.

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/1kk3JnA

Discontent in Defense Sector Over Export Controls

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Defense Logistics Agency Begins Massive Downsizing� The agency in charge of providing the military with everything from rifles to eggs is preparing to significantly downsize its operations.

Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek, director of the Defense Logistics Agency, said the demand for much of the commodities DLA purchases is declining in tandem with the U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan. The trend mirrors the reeling in of logistics supply chains in the wake of every major U.S. war.

“In terms of the history of the military, this is really no different than what you see at the end of every conflict,” he said. “We’re going to be a lot smaller in terms of our people, our infrastructure, our inventory and our financial footprint. We have to be ready to significantly improve support at a whole lot less cost.”

DLA is the contracting agency for all the military’s basic supplies, from weap-ons to fuel, and everyday items such as silverware and sandbags. Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the agency sold $18 bil-

lion to $20 billion worth of supplies to the military services. Sales peaked around fiscal year 2011 at $46 billion, Harnitchek said. That figure slid to around $40 billion in fis-cal 2014 and will likely fall to around $35 billion for the current fiscal year, he said.

“The strategy is constantly evolving and we need to evolve with that,” he said.

Harnitchek has pledged to find anoth-er $13 billion in savings by 2019. DLA

spends about $40 billion per year, most of which is the cost of the materiel it buys to sell the services. Operations costs will also fall, which for DLA is about $5 billion annually.

“There is a big effort here to right-size our inventory and then right-size the infra-structure that supports all those distribu-tion chains,” he said.

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/1qBkuv7

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 11

NationalDefenseMagazine.org/blog� The U.S. military’s hidebound culture and outdated procurement system are slowing down efforts to improve cyber defenses against increas-ingly sophisticated network attacks, said Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers, director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Com-mand.

The Pentagon created the cyber command four years ago to prepare to wage war against hackers and foreign spies. It has a $500 million annual budget and a sprawling campus on Fort Meade, Maryland. Its ability to protect Defense Department networks is limited, however, by the military’s disjointed organization and outdated attitudes about information technology, Rogers said June 12.

“Our greater challenge is not technology but organization,” he told a conference of the Association of the U.S. Army, in Arlington, Virginia.

The Pentagon by some estimates operates 15,000 networks across the Defense Depart-ment and the military services. Each branch of the military buys and manages its own systems. Of most concern to Rogers is that cyber security tends to be put on the back burner.

“Military commanders must ‘own’ cyber,” said Rogers. “Networks and cyber [should be] the commanders’ business.”

In his previous job as head of the Navy’s cyber fleet, Rogers was frustrated by a culture where information networks are relegated to the tech-nical support staff, rather than viewed as a com-mand priority. As cyber attacks become more pervasive and intractable, “our ability to integrate cyber into a broader operational concept is going

to be key,” he said. Now, “we treat cyber as something so special-ized, so different, so unique, that resides outside the operational framework.” READ MORE: http://bit.ly/1jmZweq

CYBERCOM Chief Adm. Rogers Criticizes Military Culture

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12 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

The Army wants to retrofit a portion of its tactical wheeled vehicle fleet with robotic brains so that unmanned trucks, not

troops, are put in harm’s way during resupply and route clearance missions.

Removing drivers from truck cabs also frees up soldiers to per-form more complex tasks at a time when declining budgets are putting a premium on manpower.

The Marine Corps has been testing autonomous resupply and casualty evacuation by ground and by air at its Warfighting Labora-tory and in field tests at various installations. Unmanned helicopters that fly pre-planned routes to forward operating bases in Afghani-stan have already proven their worth in combat.

William Moore, deputy to the commanding general of the Army Sustainment Center of Excellence, recently described “autonomous ground mobility” as the service’s number-one desired next-genera-tion truck technology.

“Taking drivers out of trucks and repurposing them even within the cab, there is a lot of potential there,” he said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual Tactical Wheeled Vehicles conference. “That is probably our number-one low-hanging fruit.”

Officials at the center, based at Fort Lee, Virginia, are working with counterparts at Research, Development and Engineering Command to help technologies bridge the valley of death between the lab and the battlefield, Moore said.

“We have briefed Chief [of Staff Gen. Raymond] Odierno and leadership on the potential to get them through to the appropriate technology readiness level to where we can actually look at options to take it to … procurement and fielding,” he said. “We are trying to automate tasks so that we can repurpose [soldiers] to other functions.”

Outfitting trucks that haul water and food with sensor packages, allowing them to navigate to and from forward battlefield positions, has the most immediate potential to remove troops from convoys. The basic technological capability has been proven, though some functions like sense-and-avoid systems are not yet up to snuff, Moore said.

A joint technology concept demonstration of autonomous truck convoys involving both the Army and Marine Corps is ongoing. The system will undergo a military utility assessment this summer, Moore said.

Autonomous robots that remove humans from immediate con-trol of vehicles and aircraft are not yet sophisticated enough for complex tasks like navigating cluttered terrain or choosing friend from foe. The prospect of arming robots has been met with stiff resistance if a human is not included in the decision-making loop. Moore said those issues would not likely interfere with route clear-ance, combat resupply and similar transportation missions.

“Are these technologies realizable in the near future?” Moore asked. “There are some folks who say we’ll never be able to get through the legal and policy constraints of autonomous ground resupply, but yet I see cars parking themselves in the parking lot. It seems like we’re getting there a lot faster than some of us can even realize.”

Oshkosh Defense already has outfitted the Marine Corps medi-um tactical vehicle with the TerraMax autonomy retrofit kit that allows a convoy of several trucks to be driven by a single person. The cargo unmanned ground vehicle project began in 2010 to find out how Marines might use driverless trucks to reduce vulnerable

resupply convoys and streamline battlefield logistics.The TerraMax kit has now been installed aboard Oshkosh’s off

road version of the mine-resistant, ambush protected vehicle, the M-ATV. The unmanned armored truck would push roadside bomb-detecting equipment ahead of several unmanned UGVs, followed by a manned truck overseeing the route clearance operation.

Oshkosh and the National Robotics Engineering Center have partnered with the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Surface Warfare Center to integrate counter-IED technologies onto the cargo-UGV and M-ATV.

TerraMax can be outfitted with ground-penetrating radar and mine rollers to find and destroy IEDs without exposing manned vehicles to blasts. The system’s operator control unit also can pro-vide over-the-horizon situational awareness, according to company information.

“Government evaluations revealed that the state-of-the-art autonomous capability offered practical utility in a variety of opera-tional situations,” according to a statement from Oshkosh. “Live force experiments in which combat-veteran Marines were trained to operate the UGVs in concert with manned vehicles furthered the development of concepts of operation for robotic systems in combat environments.”

The Army has an interest in that and similar technologies in its effort to “reduce the number of personnel on the battlefield with-out sacrificing capability to achieve reductions in force structure,” Moore said. On route-clearance missions, fewer drivers means those personnel can be repurposed to perform other tasks, he said.

“The clearance of threats like IEDs, mines and unexploded muni-tions pose challenges that global military forces have faced since World War II and are expected to continue long after Afghanistan,” said John Urias, president of Oshkosh Defense. “Our TerraMax UGV technology can bring autonomous capabilities to existing manned vehicle platforms, like the M-ATV, to remove troops from targeted routes and provide greater standoff distance from explosive threats.”

Navy engineers have developed a similar sensor package that can turn any helicopter with a digital flight control system into an autonomous cargo delivery robot.

The system, called the autonomous aerial cargo/utility system, or AACUS, was twice tested successfully in March at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia.

Using electro-optical, forward-looking infrared and light-detection and ranging sensors, the AACUS allows the aircraft flight computers to continuously scan the surrounding environment, Brig. Gen. Kevin Killea, commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, said.

The system weighs about 100 pounds and is designed to be plat-form agnostic. It is envisioned as an affordable retrofit kit that can be added to any helicopter in the Marine Corps inventory. Killea said the goal was to develop a kit that cost less than $25,000 per unit.

AACUS was tested aboard Lockheed Martin’s K-MAX and Boe-ing’s unmanned Little Bird helicopter.

Recognizing K-MAX’s success in autonomously delivering mil-lions of pounds of supplies to Marines at forward operating bases in Afghanistan, Sikorsky in May announced development of an unmanned version of its Black Hawk utility helicopter, which will reuse retired UH-60A airframes.

Inside Science + Technology by dan parsons

Email your comments to dparsons@ndia.org

Army Wants Trucks to Drive Without Troops

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 13

One of the more startling trends in defense contracting is the recent rise in payments made by industry to government agen-

cies and whistleblowers under the False Claims Act. The Department of Justice recorded $890 million in 2013 based on procurement fraud claims under the FCA — primarily involving defense contractors.

Out-of-court payments typically ranged from $1 million to $5 million, and contractors often paid the settlements even though the government could not demonstrate a specific intent to defraud the government.

Why would contractors pay seven-figure settlements instead of fighting the FCA claims in court? The answer may be fear of what could happen in court. Last year, a federal judge ordered a contractor to pay a record $664 million after finding the contractor had violated the FCA in bidding and performing on an Air Force contract.

What is the FCA, and how can defense contractors mitigate its risks? The act imposes civil liability for using false information to seek payment from the government. This means that agencies can file a lawsuit and seek monetary damages from private parties who violate the act.

To find liability, a court must determine that the violator knew that the claim was false, maintained deliberate ignorance of the fal-sity or demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth. Thus, courts have considerable latitude to find a party liable even if a contractor’s principals had no actual knowledge of the false claim.

If a court finds FCA violations, the penalties can be severe. The government may recover damages three times as great as its actual loss, plus civil penalties of up to $11,000 per claim. Between 1987 and 2012, it recovered nearly $35 billion under the FCA.

One unique feature of the FCA is the empowering of non-government actors to file complaints on the government’s behalf. It rewards private whistleblowers up to 30 percent of damages the government recovers, if the whistleblower files a complaint alleging violations not previously made public. These private whistleblower actions, brought for the government’s benefit, are known as qui tam cases — which in Latin refers to English monarchs who rewarded private citizens for enforcing the king’s laws.

More than 70 percent of all federal government FCA actions are qui tam cases. Given that successful whistleblower actions entitle the whistleblower to a sizable percentage of the govern-ment’s recovery, the FCA incentivizes contractor employees to file lawsuits instead of reporting problems directly to their employer. But whether motivated by personal financial gain, by anger against their employer or by a sincere sense of duty to taxpayers, whistle-blowers have filed a record number of FCA complaints in federal court over the past year. Many plaintiffs’ attorneys have seized the opportunity, eagerly representing whistleblowers in exchange for a percentage of their client’s financial award.

These whistleblowers typically file the initial complaint with a federal court under seal, thereby concealing their filings from the public. This allows the government time to conduct its own inves-tigation and determine whether it wishes to participate in the FCA action. Meanwhile, the contractor may not even know that it stands accused of fraud.

After its initial investigation, the government may choose to participate in the whistleblower’s complaint — meaning that the whistleblower stands to gain between 15 to 25 percent of the final recovery. If the government declines to participate, the whistle-

blower still may pursue the claim alone. In acting without govern-ment assistance, the whistleblower may recover up to 30 percent of any award to the government.

Defense contractors typically run afoul of the FCA through sub-mission of invoices and certifications to their government customer. For example, recent violations stemmed from submission of costs, billing of contractor labor hours, certification of disadvantaged sta-tus, pre-sale testing of products and employee resumes submitted in proposals.

The resulting financial losses suffered by contractors oftentimes are compounded by government administrative actions such as termination of contracts for default and debarment.

The good news is that effective compliance and monitoring can significantly reduce the likelihood of FCA claims, as well as decrease the loss to the contractor if such claims do arise.

Defense contractors must include FCA risk mitigation as part of their operational processes and procedures. Fortunately, this over-laps with other compliance risks, such that it should be integrated into the contractor’s larger compliance with export controls, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Federal Acquisition Regula-tion’s ethics plan requirement.

At a minimum, any compliance program should include regular employee training, a code of conduct, emergency response plans for any suspected violations and mandatory reporting requirements for employees who observe potential violations. Effective compli-ance programs should also include an employee reporting system that allows for anonymity, as well as defined metrics for measuring compliance.

As contractors grow, compliance audits help analyze risk relative to the company’s government contracting activity. Like the compli-ance program, audits not only help to prevent violations but also demonstrate the contractor’s ongoing commitment to ethical busi-ness practices. This can go a long way in protecting the company from more severe scrutiny and penalties in the event of a govern-ment investigation.

If contractors suspect potential FCA liability, they should consid-er an internal investigation. This allows the company’s executives to review all relevant facts, analyze risk exposure and evaluate further courses of action. Using outside counsel for an internal investiga-tion adds objectivity, legal expertise and oftentimes can prevent the investigation documents from being turned over to the government or whistleblower in a later lawsuit.

Finally, defense contractors who receive formal notice of a gov-ernment investigation should contact outside counsel immediately. The initial communication with the government can help shape the substance and timing of the investigation, as well as influence the government’s decision on whether to intervene on behalf of the whistleblower.

With a record number of complaints filed and major awards annually to the government and whistleblowers, the FCA repre-sents an increasingly potent weapon. Strong leadership, simple, executable compliance procedures, and constant vigilance all are required in order to counter risk exposure.

Ethics Corner By Chris Nagel

Whistleblowers Cash In On False Claims Act

Chris Nagel is senior counsel in McGuireWoods’ government contracts litigation practice. The views expressed are solely the author’s.

14 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

As commercial demand for unmanned aircraft grows, manufacturers and

universities are increasingly joining forces on efforts to train pilots and develop new technologies.

During the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International confer-ence in May, Northrop Grumman and the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks announced a cooperative agreement in which the school will use SandShark unmanned aerial systems for training and research.

Northrop Grumman will provide the university with two aircraft and a ground station under the three-year agreement, said Ken Kilmurray, the company’s program manager.

The SandShark was designed to improve pilot proficiency, particularly difficult maneuvers such as takeoffs and landings, he said. “It can also be used to determine the aptitude of potential pilots, a screening tool, and decrease the failure rate in train-ing. Those combined save a lot of money across the life of the program.”

The university has yet to decide how SandShark will initially be deployed, but it is considering using it in two programs, said Al Palmer, director of the university’s center for unmanned aerial systems train-ing, research and education and a retired Air Force brigadier general. The first, the limited deployment of cooperative aircraft project, is a research effort to create a sense-and-avoid system that incorporates auto-matic dependent surveillance broadcast, or ADS-B, transceivers.

“We’ve had that program going for almost three years now, but we plan on doing a second phase of that. If it’s approved, we will use this airplane in some form or fash-ion,” he said.

The university is also considering outfit-ting the SandShark with advanced avionics that are closer to that of manned airplanes, Palmer said.

In order to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national airspace, “we have to make them look like an airplane, act like an airplane, fly like any other aircraft. So

a more up-to-date avionics that has been miniaturized and can fit on an aircraft this size would make it easier,” he explained.

North Dakota in 2013 was selected as one of the UAS test sites that will help the Federal Aviation Administration determine rules for allowing unmanned aircraft to fly in national airspace.

“Even if it’s [only] pilot training, some-times helping to identify what the pilot standards are … is a next step to help the FAA,” said Mike Corcoran, deputy director of the university’s UAS center of excel-lence. Using the SandShark will help tackle such issues, he said. “There’s a pretty good

mix of projects that are right on top of our desks now that will slowly be integrated and implemented in the field.”

The University of North Dakota is not the only academic institution partnering with industry. Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, recently teamed up with Altavian Inc., a Gainesville, Florida-based UAS company. The entities developed a curriculum based on Altavian’s Nova Block III system, including training on how to operate the UAS and education on FAA regulations. Officials at the AUVSI con-ference announced that the first batch of students completed the course.

By Valerie insinnaBusiness + Industry News

Cooperative agreements

■ Developing a sense-and-avoid system for any unmanned aircraft is a challenging task, but it’s even more difficult to build one for small vehicles that can’t hold heavy sensor payloads.

Panoptes UAV, a Cambridge, Massachu-setts-based start-up, has created a system that uses echolocation to help small quad-copters avoid collisions. The product, the eBumper, contains acoustic sensors that work outdoors, indoors and in all weather conditions, said Terrence McKenna, chief executive officer.

Currently, the system is only available for the DJI Phantom, he said. The eBum-

per is sold as a hard shell with integrated sensors that replaces the top half of the Phantom’s airframe and can easily be plugged into its electronics.

The company plans to manufacture shells for other UAS, McKenna said. The avionics systems are vehicle-agnostic.

“Any kind of quadrotor that’s out there, you can just plug it into the autopilot, and it will work out of the box,” he said.

Acoustic sensors are a good fit for small UAVs because they are inexpensive and work in most environments, McKenna said. Panoptes views the eBumper as a “foundational technology” that will allow an aircraft to sense an obstacle within 10 feet. The company is working on oth-er sense-and-avoid technologies, such as microradar, that will have a longer range.

As the Federal Aviation Administration considers rules to incorporate UAVs in the civilian airspace, safety remains the num-

Unmanned airCraft

partnerships on rise Between drone makers and Universities

start-Up debuts sense-and-avoid system for Quadcopters

sandshark northrop grumman

Business + Industry News

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 15

■ Sergei Sikorsky, the son of rotorcraft pioneer Igor Sikorsky, has witnessed more than 70 years of helicopter development and has been involved in many programs at his father’s company, Sikorsky Aircraft. But he is skeptical that tiltrotor aircraft will take the place of conventional helicopters, he told reporters in May.

“Being a very conser-vative character, I think you’re going to see pure helicopters around for a long, long time. I don’t see any of these tiltrotors or any of these combina-tions of lifting fans” gaining traction, he said. “First of all, lifting fans are going to fry a lot of people on the ground if you want to, say, make a rescue of some-one. You start hovering over him, and he’s being toasted in 600 degree [Fahrenheit] downwash.”

Like other industry analysts, Sikor-sky believes military procurement and research-and-development funding is likely to decrease in the next decade, and at least one helicopter manufacturer is likely to go out of business as a result. However, it is not all bad news for the rotorcraft industry,

he said.“I think the encour-

aging thing here, is an awful lot of that tech-nology we’re develop-ing right now for the

military will eventually end up in civil machines

as well,” he said. Even small civil helicopters will

begin incorporating fly-by-wire systems, for instance.

Helicopters will become faster, with the ability to travel longer ranges without need-ing to be refueled. Materials and manu-facturing techniques will also continue to progress, he said. Advanced composites have the potential to cut down a heli-copter’s weight, and can be used to build an airframe without the need for heavy machinery.

“Also, I personally am very much

intrigued by this additive manufacturing technology and the fact that you may eventually be able to build gear boxes and transmissions” using it, he said. “I personally think it will revolutionize manufacturing in about another 30 years.”

While manned aircraft will continue to dominate sales, unmanned full-size helicop-ters will increasingly be used to transport cargo in and out of isolated areas, thus reducing danger to pilots, he said.

Sikorsky Aircraft announced later that month that it would produce an unmanned version of is UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.

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tiltrotor Sales Unlikely to take off, Industry Veteran Says

ber one concern, said Jim Williams, man-ager of its UAS integration office. During a speech in May, Williams played footage of an incident in Virginia where an operator lost control of a drone used to film a bull run. The system toppled into the crowd, injuring several spectators.

McKenna said the eBumper could improve the safety of small quadcopters,

which in turn would help enable com-mercial and civil use.

“We’re working very hard to fill that [need] because there are a lot of people flying UAVs around trying to do commer-cial applications, but they’re not done very safely and very robustly,” he said.

The eBumper goes on sale this summer. Customers can preorder it online.

UH-60 Black Hawk sikorsky

V-22 osprey marine corps

DJI Phantom with eBumper panoptes UaV

The southwest border in Texas will start to receive some of the new sen-

sor technologies that have heretofore been deployed solely in Arizona.

“They ask me all the time. When are we going to get our stuff?” Michael J. Fisher, chief of the Border Patrol, said of the agency’s officers in Texas.

The initiative to field new fixed and mobile sensor platforms, called the Ari-zona surveillance technology plan, is — as the name suggests — reserved for that state. That followed the now canceled SBI-net program, which set up high-tech cam-eras and radars in two areas of Arizona.

The reason why Arizona has been the

focus of all these technology programs over the last decade is simple, Fisher said at the Border Technology Expo in Phoenix. It was the most vulnerable area with the most illegal traffic.

“Arizona, for a number of years, probably 10 to 12 years, was the area that was the most exploited along the southwest border. That only changed about the middle of last year in terms of activity,” he said.

The Tucson sector is no longer the most active region, he said.

Mark Borkowski, assistant Customs and Border Protection commissioner at the office of technology, innovation and acqui-sition, said one item that will be headed to Texas next year is the mobile surveillance system capa-bility, a suite of sensors mounted on a vehicle that can be quickly deployed, and then driven to a new location.

Thirty-three of the vehicles have been sent to the field so far, with an additional 16 scheduled for delivery by the end of calendar year 2015. When those are deliv-ered, it will free some of them up to be sent to Texas, he said.

“They are going to Arizona because they work really great in Arizona. Arizona has some sys-tems that will be really useful in Texas,” Borkowski said.

A new mobile video surveil-lance system, which relies on day/night cameras rather than radar, is also slated for Texas. The con-tract award has been slow in com-ing because requirements were rewritten with the Lone Star state in mind, he said. Cameras work better in urban environments, which have too much clutter for radars. Radars are more suitable in remote, desert areas where any

kind of movement may mean an incursion. Fisher said it would be a mistake to

apply a one-size-fits-all model and simply transfer a technology from one region to another.

“One camera may be great in a place like Nogales, Arizona. It may be worthless in a place like the Rio Grande Valley because the terrain really dictates the type of tech-

16 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • J U LY 2 0 1 4 16 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • J U LY 2 0 1 4

BY STEW MAGNUSONHomeland Security News

A mobile surveillance system STEW MAGNUSON

South Texas in Line for Border Patrol Technology

nology to do that mission,” Fisher said.Borkowski noted that the Rio Grande Valley was also the tes-

tbed for three aerostats on loan from the Defense Department. Originally designed for perimeter defense in the Southwest Asia wars, they have been used to monitor the border.

The Border Patrol used them in Texas until April. A decision was pending on whether the program would continue.

“DoD systems are very expensive. So even if I get them for free

in terms of acquisition costs, which is buying the hardware itself, they tend not to be free to operate,” Borkowski said.

They cost about $1 million per month to deploy, he said.He has told Defense Department officials that if any of the

aerostats are declared surplus, he might be interested, but the operational costs are a factor.

“We have to think about under what circumstances is that investment worthwhile,” he said.

� A decade ago, the Coast Guard had a vision for its fleets of national security and offshore patrol cutters: Vertical-take-off-and-landing unmanned aerial vehicles would greatly expand the number of square miles the service could conduct searches beyond a ship’s line of sight, while improving the loiter time by orders of magnitude over manned helicopters.

Once a key part of the now defunct Deepwater Integrated Systems, the VTOL unmanned aircraft called Eagle-Eye was initially going to look a lot like a miniature V-22 Osprey, which features tilt-rotors. Hangar space on the national security cutters could have accommodat-ed up to two of them.

Once that effort came to a halt for cost and technical reasons, the Coast Guard put that plan on ice. It kept tabs on the

Navy’s Fire Scout, another helicopter drone, but didn’t have any funds to pursue its own program.

The service over the years became the only one that wasn’t taking advantage of

the unmanned aerial vehicles revolu-tion, and all the benefits they had to

offer.Since then, in a joint program with Cus-

toms and Border Protection, the Coast Guard has deployed a land-based mari-time Predator UAV that flies from Cor-

Coast Guard Closer to Acquiring Ship-Based Drones

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18 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

■ Spies, disgruntled workers and intellec-tual property thieves have always been a problem in both government and private sector organizations.

The Edward Snowden scandal and Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization have

brought to the fore the problem of “insider threats” as never before.

Congressional hearings, conferences and newspaper articles have all raised aware-ness, but a recent survey found that despite the hand-wringing, organizations are not putting resources toward the problem.

“People are now trying to get a better understanding of the insider threat prob-lem, but one thing that is not happening yet, and it’s the case for government and commercial [sectors] alike, is that the budgets seem to be lagging,” said Michael Crouse, director of insider threat strategies

at Raytheon Co. Raytheon commissioned the sur-

vey to gain a better understanding about industry’s awareness of the problem, he said. The survey report, “Privileged User Abuse and the Insider Threat,” was derived from the polling of 693 info-tech managers and was conducted by the Ponemon Insti-tute, a research and consultancy firm.

Respondents said they were aware of the problem and that they want to be more proactive when it comes to insider threats, but the survey indicated that this is mostly talk, Crouse said.

“The budgets haven’t caught up to that awareness and thinking yet,” he said.

Funding Not Following Concerns About Insider Threats

pus Christi, Texas, and patrols the Caribbean. However, a ship-based drone is still not officially part of any cutter program.

The service has completed mission needs statements and developed concepts of operations, according to a service fact sheet.

At a joint House Transportation and Foreign Affairs Committee hearing looking at maritime drug interdiction efforts, Adm. Robert Papp, commandant of the Coast Guard prior to his retirement in May, said the service is continuing to test ScanEagles, which are now used by the Navy and Marine Corps.

The Coast Guard will pursue an acquisition program, he confirmed. “During a recent patrol aboard one of our new national security

cutters, the Coast Guard tested the ScanEagle UAS, which proved to be a superb force multiplier in two separate law enforcement cases, resulting in the removal of 570 kilograms of cocaine and the detention of six suspected smugglers,” he said.

The Boeing Insitu ScanEagle is lofted with a pneumatic launcher and requires no runway. It can fly for about 24 hours.

The combination of cutters and surface combatants, and armed he-licopters supported by long range search aircraft “have continuously proven to be an incredibly effective interdiction system when em-ployed in the Western Hemisphere Transit Zone,” Papp said.

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“People are really fighting for every dol-lar. And when they are fighting for every dollar, they really have to fight for new requirements, and they have to … be able to show the return on investment,” he added.

It is easier to show that return on invest-ment when it comes to thwarting external threats such as foreign hackers, he said.

The high profile WikiLeaks and Snowden cases are prompting some companies and agencies to put together insider threat pro-grams, he said.

Insider threats generally come in three categories. Data gathered by the Carn-egie Mellon computer emergency response team show that the most common is infor-mation technology sabotage at 41 percent of incidents. That is followed by fraud for personal financial gain at 26 percent and theft of intellectual property at 20 percent. The remaining 14 percent are miscella-neous.

One example of a miscellaneous threat would be the case of an info-tech employee who was paying someone overseas to do his work for him.

“That is an insider threat. Giving some-one access to a company’s information,” he said.

It is difficult to quantify how preva-lent insider incidents are because exposing them can have an impact on an organiza-tion’s morale and reputation, and compa-nies may lose business and profits, he said.

The recent case of a Microsoft employee who was caught allegedly selling informa-tion to a competitor is rare because it actu-ally made it into the press, he said.

Almost 70 percent of respondents said they do not have enough contextual infor-mation from the tools they are using today, he said. And 56 percent said there were too many false positives from the ones that they do have.

Traditional informational assurance tools don’t provide the intent of what the indi-vidual is trying to do, Crouse said. An employee might be moving data to a non-corporate USB thumb drive maliciously or simply by mistake.

Network sensors can see that someone pulled down a file of proprietary informa-tion. Is he renaming it so it can be attached to a Gmail account, or cutting and past-ing the information so it can be sent via instant messaging to someone outside the organization?

Knowing these answers can indicate the behavior and intent, not just the act. “There are tools today that can do that, but you have to be willing to invest and deploy such products,” he said.

The report recommends a nine-step pro-

gram to tackle insider threat programs.

One is increased train-ing, which goes both ways, he said. It involves teaching investigators to identify bad behavior but also educating the workforce.

There are techniques that a spy could use to trick a fellow employee into handing over sensi-tive materials, he said. Work-ers should know how to recognize these tactics.

The risk is out there for all organi-zations, no matter what their sector or size, Crouse said. Managers don’t want to believe that employees that they trust,

and may have directly hired, can carry out these kinds of

acts. But more of them are taking a “trust and verify” approach. They audit their employees when it comes to accessing sen-sitive information.

“We know this is a difficult problem

because you are talking about human behavior, but

it’s not impossible. But if companies are willing to take

it seriously and invest in the proper way, in processes, procedures and technolo-gies, they can have an effective program,” Crouse said.

Email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 19

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20 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • J U LY 2 0 1 4

BY DAN PARSONSFor 13 years, the Army has binged

on billion-dollar procurement budgets and assembled the largest and newest wheeled vehicle fleet in its history.

Now military commanders and the com-panies that built thousands of vehicles in support of two wars are preparing for the inevitable withdrawal symptoms resulting from reduced budgets and requirements after more than a decade of combat.

The Army and industry must find a path of transition from a wartime footing where funding for vehicles was almost unlimited, to one based on sustaining those vehicles over the remainder of their service lives, said Gen. Dennis Via, chief of Army Mate-riel Command.

“It goes without saying that we have a challenging fiscal environment going for-ward,” Via said. “I think why it is so chal-lenging for us this time is because we’ve been at war for so long. We’ve become accustomed to multi-billion dollar budgets and acquisitions. We’re drawing down on that.”

Somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of a platform’s lifecycle cost is in sustain-ment, he said. With nearly 300,000 tactical wheeled vehicles — some of which are still being reset from the now-ended Iraq War — the task of bringing those trucks home and fixing them up is no small task, he said.

“It’s going to become complex, because … as I talk to lieutenant colonels, they don’t remember the Army that I came into. They only know this Army where we’ve been primarily at war and have been resourced adequately to support our missions and rightfully so. But now we have this transi-tion to sustain our equipment for the out years,” he said at the National Defense Industrial Association Tactical Wheeled Vehicle conference.

The Army has more than the 240,000 vehicles its published requirements pre-scribe for fiscal year 2014, said Don Tison, assistant deputy chief of staff for Army G-8. The service’s truck fleet is both large enough and new enough to sustain the Army for the foreseeable future, especially with the joint light tactical vehicle, which will replace the Humvee after 2015, fund-ed and on schedule, he said.

JLTV will begin low-rate initial produc-tion in 2015. Still, Humvees will be a part of the Army inventory for several years, Tison said. A sustainment plan should be in

place by 2018 that includes integrating up-to-date communications equipment and modular armor packages.

The Army’s truck fleets number about 278,000 total vehicles, and now average just two to three years old — the youngest fleet in modern Army history.

“From a numbers standpoint, we’re fine,” he said. “These years of large procure-ment accounts have helped us fill out the fleet. Modernization and obsolescence are another matter.”

Now the fleets need to be progressively updated, Tison said.

When the Army went to war in 2001, 85 percent of its vehicles needed depot main-tenance, said Lt. Gen. Raymond Mason, deputy chief of staff, Army G-4. After 13 years of war, the equation is reversed and only 15 percent of the fleet requires main-tenance thanks to billions of dollars invest-ed in reset and recapitalization, Mason said.

The main challenge is bringing existing vehicles up to the technological standards that troops became accustomed to during recent operations. Many front-line trucks like Humvees and MRAPs were retrofit-ted with state-of-the-art communications and command-and-control systems and are heavily armored.

“In 1999, a company commander might have a radio in his Humvee,” but “that’s the vehicle we’ve been fighting in for the last

decade, with all that stuff in it,” Mason said, pointing to a picture of a Humvee cabin populated with all manner of electronic communications gear.

“Can we afford for every vehicle in the Army to look like that? The answer is obvi-ously right in front of us: ‘No.’ So … which ones should have this and which ones shouldn’t? There’s a leadership challenge because once these soldiers have seen the lights of Paris, how do you get them back on the farm?”

The Army plans to keep around 11,100 MAXX-Pro, M-ATV and route-clearance vehicles of the 16,000 total it has now, Tison said.

“They are all relatively new. They’re not

in bad shape,” Tison said. “The trick will be … to get them out of theater, do whatever upgrades we need to them and then have a sustainment conversation.”

The Army’s fleets of medium and heavy tactical vehicles also are in good shape, Tison said.

“We need to be able to recapitalize,” Tison said. “We need to look at service-life extension wherever possible. … From an equipping standpoint, I would argue we’re not in too bad of shape. From a moderniza-tion standpoint, it’s going to get each year more and more challenging.”

“Over the last 10 years, we were helped a lot with procurement,” he added. “A lot of the conversation we’re going to have to do is for sustainment, some recap[italization] with the depots and industry.”

Much of the needed recapitalization will take place in the Army’s depots and other maintenance facilities, Via said.

As the Army transitions from a procure-ment footing to a sustainment footing, it will increasingly rely on its “organic indus-trial base” for maintenance and sustain-ment, Via said. The effort to preserve that subset of the commercial tactical wheeled vehicle-manufacturing sector is guided by the Army’s organic industrial base stra-tegic plan, which promotes partnerships between the government and industry.

While commercial industry is a larger component of the overall defense industrial base, the Army is most concerned with pre-serving the production capacity and skills of the companies that perform work at its maintenance depots, manufacturing arse-nals and ammunition plants, the plan states.

The Army’s six depots and three arse-nals dramatically ramped up production of vehicles and munitions during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manufacturers doubled and, in some cases, tripled produc-tion and labor hours at those facilities since 2003, the document says.

The strategic framework ensures that “capacity and workforces are sized to meet core capability requirements plus preserve the ability to meet future surge requirements,” and that “capital investment requirements to preserve needed capability are identified and prioritized appropriately.”

The plan also prioritizes maintaining a basic readiness within the organic industrial base so that both workforce and capacity can be ramped up in response to future threats and contingencies.

Public-private partnerships will be a “tre-mendous opportunity for industry,” Via said. AMC has invested billions in the infrastructure and equipment at its various

Army Switches From Vehicle Procurement to Sustainment Mode

278,000Number of Army’s total truck fleet

facilities nationwide.“Our task now at hand is post-combat,”

Via said. “There will still be opportuni-ties” for industry even though the flow of vehicle procurement funding likely will dramatically weaken, he added.

Col. Doyle Lassitter, commander of Red River Army Depot, said the depots were actively seeking business opportunities with industry to ensure that both Army maintainers and the tactical truck industrial base are supported through the impending peacetime lull in vehicle procurement.

“The purpose of the depots is to ensure that the war fighter has the capability to go to war now and be supported through sustainment and maintenance,” Lassitter said. “It works hand-in-glove with the commercial industry whose job is to come alongside of us. We buy you the time so you can ramp up the industrial might of this country to support any long-duration war.”

Brian Butler, executive director of the Army Life Cycle Management Command’s integrated logistics support center, said organic manufacturers cover for the less flexible corps of uniformed maintainers and engineers stationed at the arsenals and depots.

The command surged its personnel and production capacity during the wars, peak-ing around 2008 to 2009, Butler said. Since then, the operational requirements of the Army have declined and TACOM has had to shed excess personnel and capacity.

“We don’t have the ability — like indus-try does — to rapidly contract based on market conditions,” Butler said. “The trick is

to make sure you are not giving up a critical skill set. … We’re trying to make sure we’re at least postured, so we don’t do something that we can’t reverse if we need to.”

During the wars of the past decade, industry housed at Army facilities was able to surge production to sustain military equipment deployed overseas, a critical capability that resulted in high vehicle operational rates, the plan states.

The Army’s strategic plan aims to find a balance between dialing down production capacity and preserving critical manufac-turing skills within that organic industrial workforce.

“It is critical that the Army organic industrial base manage the transition from wartime production levels to peacetime requirements in such a manner that [it] remains effective, efficient and capable of meeting future Army contingency require-ments,” the plan states. “This entails the retention of the critical maintenance and manufacturing skills, and capabilities neces-sary to meet Army unique needs relating to enduring and future requirements.”

Industry officials were open to the pros-pect of partnering with the Army to sustain its fleet, recognizing that other than the JLTV, the Defense Department will have little funding to buy new vehicles in the near term.

“We have to be really realistic on what is possible now so that we can be successful in the future,” said Clint Herrick, director of global integrated product support for Osh-kosh Defense. “With our common interest

in preserving the tactical wheeled vehicle industry base … we need to keep our smart people engaged and working.”

Butler said both government and indus-try must communicate better for such partnerships to work.

“We’ve got to open ourselves up a little bit more, both on the government side and on the industry side in order to form a more collaborative-type relationship,” Butler said. “If we can’t accurately communicate our requirements to industry and you can’t communicate back to us where the short-falls are, then we’re just never going to get there.”

Scott Greene, vice president of ground vehicles for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, agreed, saying a lack of trans-parency was one of the tallest hurdles that must be cleared before partnering with government depots makes sound business sense.

James Grooms, vice president of logis-tics and sustainment for Navistar Defense, said truck manufacturers that have had to shutter production facilities because of the downturn in government orders must find business elsewhere if they are to retain their ability to ramp up production in wartime.

“When we draw down capacity, as an industry partner, there has to be something that replaces that,” Grooms said. “When we think about total performance sustainment … there obviously are things that the gov-ernment is going to win on, but there have to be things that industry wins on.” ND

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 21

Email your comments to DParsons@ndia.org

U.S. soldiers preparing to tow a M-ATV army

22 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

By VALERIE INSINNAThe Air Force has ignited an effort to replace its sur-veillance and targeting aircraft system with modern airframes outfitted with new radar, sensors and com-

munications equipment.No requirements are on the books yet for a recapitalized version

of the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System — more com-monly known as JSTARS — but that hasn’t stopped industry from jumping into the competitive fray.

The current E-8C aircraft, based on a Boeing 707 airplane and developed by Northrop Grumman, allows the Air Force to conduct long-endurance surveillance on moving and stationary targets. Its radar can collect information on ground and maritime targets, as well as detecting slow-moving, rotary and fixed-wing aircraft.

The Air Force considers JSTARS a vital part of its fleet, but the E-8C airframes are aging — contributing to high operations and maintenance costs.

“With the completion of the 2011 JSTARS mission area analysis of alternatives study and the onset of Budget Control Act-directed budget levels, it became clear that the future of the JSTARS weapons system lay in a more cost-effective platform as compared to extending the lifecycle of the current 707 airframes,” said Lt. Col. Michael Harm, JSTARS recapitalization branch chief.

The combination of new airframes and sensors “will inherently bring improvements in areas such as radar and onboard data processing speed, fuel efficiency and maximum cruising altitude across the range of expect-ed military operations,” he told National Defense in an email.

The Air Force is currently drafting requirements for the program, which will be finalized by early 2015, Harm said. In order to keep the system affordable, it plans on using commercial, off-the-shelf equipment and minimizing new technology development.

The Air Force requested $100 million for the pro-gram in fiscal year 2015, with $2.4 billion in spending planned over the next five years.

Although the service will try to push the plan, Congress is unlikely to be enthusiastic about another large, expensive program, said C. Zachary Hofer, Fore-cast International’s defense electronics analyst. Past efforts to develop a JSTARS replacement have been unsuccessful. The service selected Northrop Grum-man’s E-10 platform as a successor, but the program was terminated in fiscal year 2007 because of a lack of funding.

The Air Force “got very far along in the process with the E-10 ... only to see that canceled. That’s not something they’re going to want to see again,” he said. “Really the task of keeping the current E-8C JSTARS in the air is just unmanageable. They can’t afford it, and it will increasingly become dangerous. The costs will just grow exponentially, and the platform will be

canceled without there being a successor in place.”The recapitalized JSTARS will be able to work with the entire

theater air control system, which includes the legacy system, air-borne warning and control system, control and reporting center, and air operations centers, the Air Force solicitation states.

The service is planning on downsizing from an 18-person crew to 13 or less, according to notional documents presented during an April industry week at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts.

Industry Ready to Compete for JSTARS Recapitalization Program

The aircraft should be able to reach altitudes of at least 38,000 feet and remain on station for eight hours. It could also include a 13 to 20 foot radar array.

Program managers are also interested in integrating an FAA-certified flight deck and aerial refueling capability. Other potential new features include full motion video and the joint range exten-sion applications protocol — which would allow JSTARS to trans-mit data to joint agencies at farther distances — currently being tested by the Air Force.

The service could also focus on expanding beyond-the-line-of-sight communications and its interactions with unmanned aerial vehicles, Hofer said. The current system in 2013 exchanged radar data with a Global Hawk. “That’s certainly something that we can see developed in the future — JSTARS acting as headquarters and communicating in a creative way with UAVs.”

“What the Air Force is really looking for is interaction between

ground forces, between air forces,” he added. “All of the systems have to speak to each other, and data that’s created in the air needs to be available on the ground. Data created in the air needs to be available to other platforms also in the air, and it may need to be available to mission control in a remote location.”

The service expects to release a request for proposals in the first months of fiscal year 2016 with a contract decision by the end of that year, Harm said. “We are exploring options to accelerate the start of the program due to the maturity of available technology.”

Four new JSTARS airframes are planned to reach initial operat-ing capability as early as fiscal 2022, he said.

Northrop Grumman, prime contractor for the current system, is closely watching the recap program but has not announced its course of action.

“Northrop Grumman continuously assesses a variety of busi-ness opportunities where we feel our products and capabilities

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 23

E-8C Joint STARS northrop grumman

24 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

match our customers’ requirements. We will continue to monitor the Joint STARS recapitalization opportunity as details emerge,” spokesman Bryce McDevitt said in an emailed statement.

The Air Force is currently working out its acquisition strategy, but Northrop will likely compete and be awarded a position as the prime contractor responsible for integrating mission systems with another company providing the airframe, Hofer said.

Harris Corp., Rockwell Collins, Lockheed Martin, L-3 Commu-nications, Raytheon, DRS Technologies and BAE Systems attended the industry week in April and are contenders for providing elec-tronic systems, he said.

Industry week attendees Boeing, Bombardier and Gulfstream are likely to put forward airframes for the JSTARS recap, he said. Representatives from each of the companies confirmed their inter-est in the program.

Gulfstream will propose either the G550 or G650 to the Air Force, said Steve Cass, the company’s vice president of communi-cations. It plans on partnering with a defense contractor who could integrate mission systems on the platform.

“The G650, with its bigger size, longer range and higher speeds would offer greater capability for the Air Force to address the JSTARS mission,” he said.

The G550 and G650 are smaller than the E-8Cs, which would cut operating costs and allow the new aircraft to operate in “thou-sands” more airfields than the current system, Cass explained. The aircraft would be able to fly orbits at an average of 45,000 feet. Even at its maximum weight, the G550 and G650 would be able to fly to heights above 41,000 feet.

Both the G550 and G650 can accommodate a 10- to 13-person crew and contain an FAA-certified flight deck, he said in an email. Gulfstream has offered aerial refueling on both aircraft before, but no customers elected to build in that capability.

“We have done the necessary engineering studies to confirm that air refueling … is executable on the Gulfstream aircraft. The engi-neering involved is pretty simple,” he said. “The design of all our aircraft, with the fuel located in the wings near the natural center of gravity and a simplified fuel management system, lends itself to an effective implementation of air refueling.”

Bombardier is considering offering its Global 6000 business jet, said Krystyna Hranek, manager of marketing and communications for specialized and amphibious aircraft. That aircraft has been modified for military operations as the Raytheon Sentinel flown by the British Royal Air Force. It was also the basis for the E-11A used by the U.S. Air Force for airborne communications relay.

The Global 6000 typically can accommodate eight passengers and four crewmembers, although it could fit as many as 19 passen-gers depending on configuration and mission needs, according to

company material. It can fly about 580 miles per hour and has a range of about 6,000 nautical miles.

Because the aircraft is currently in production, the Air Force would glean savings from leveraging an active supply chain and customer service line, Hranek said.

“We’re hoping our aircraft will satisfy the Air Force needs, but at the moment we’re not into the ins and outs of the actual requirements,” she said.

Boeing intends to compete in the recapitalization program, but the company will not announce its bid until the Air Force formalizes its requirements, said spokeswoman Nanette Feeney.

“When the U.S. Air Force completes the require-ments for a JSTARS replacement and in turn shares it with industry, we will assess our family of integrated aircraft and battle management, command-and-control configurations to offer an affordable best value solu-

tion.”Boeing will likely propose a version of its next-generation 737

jets, Hofer said. One of the aircraft from that family, the extended range 737-800, was used as the basis for the P-8 Poseidon. The P-8 will replace the Navy’s P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft, and take over missions including anti-submarine warfare and elec-tronic signals intelligence.

The Boeing 737-800 has a 174,200 pound maximum takeoff weight and a range of 3,115 nautical miles, company information states. At altitudes of 35,000 feet, the 129-foot long airplane will cruise at speeds of about 533 miles per hour.

Who wins the competition will depend on whether the Air Force wants to field a larger aircraft that can carry heavier payloads or a smaller, more nimble aircraft that would be able to operate on shorter runways, Hofer said. In the size category, the Boeing 737 is the airframe to beat, “but they could easily look to scale down the platform as much as possible,” resulting in a Global 6000 or G650 selection.

Hofer believes the Air Force will gravitate toward a U.S. manu-facturer. That could be bad news for Canadian company Bombar-dier, but if it involves its Wichita, Kansas-based Learjet subsidiary in the JSTARS program, the company could remain competitive, he said.

European manufacturers Airbus and Dassault Aircraft did not attend the industry week but could emerge as competitors, Hofer said. They would likely propose the A320neo or Dassault Falcon 7X, respectively.

In the meantime, Northrop Grumman is upgrading the comput-ing hardware on the E-8Cs, said Bryan Lima, the company’s direc-tor of manned C2ISR programs. Computers will migrate to the Linux operating system, and work stations will be replaced with more modern versions. The company is also upgrading JSTARS’s radar signal processor, he said.

The first aircraft will begin retrofits in July, with modifications taking about a month to complete, he said. The entire process will be finished by the end of 2016.

Hofer said such upgrades will create more of an open architec-ture environment, allowing the Air Force to more easily plug new equipment into the JSTARS system.

Lima indicated that the company would be able to sustain the airframe “well beyond 2025.”

“As the Air Force makes its decision going forward, we’re fully supportive of whatever they do. We think we can play regardless of how they decide — keep the current platform relevant, if that’s what’s necessary. We’ll continue their vision,” he said. ND

Email your comments to VInsinna@ndia.org

Dassult Falcon 7Xandrew dyubin

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 25

possible Air FrAme CompetitorsThe Air Force is looking for a business jet to replace its current E-8Cs. Bombardier stat-ed that it would likely propose the Global 6000. Gulfstream has offered the Air Force information on the G650 and the smaller G550, a spokesman said. Representatives from Boeing and Northrop Grumman declined to say whether they would put forward an aircraft for consideration.

During a past competition to replace JSTARS, the Air Force selected the Northrop Grumman E-10, which was derived from the Boeing 767-400 ER. That program was ultimately cancelled in fiscal year 2007. Years later, Boeing pitched a version of its 737-800-based P-8 Poseidon maritime multi-mission aircraft to fulfill the JSTARS role.

■ bombardier Global 6000length: 99 feet Wingspan: 94 feetCapacity: 12 (8 passengers, 4 crew)Cruise speed: 560 mphmaximum takeoff weight: 99,500 lbsrange: 6,000 nautical miles

■ Gulfstream 650length: 100 feet Wingspan: 100 feet Capacity: 12 (8 passengers, 4 crew)Cruise speed: 562 mphmaximum takeoff weight: 99,600 lbs range: 7,000 nautical miles

■ boeing 737-800length: 130 feet Wingspan: 117 feet Cruise speed: 514 mphmaximum takeoff weight: 174,200 lbsrange: 3,115 nautical miles

■ Northrop Grumman e-10 mC2Alength: 201 feet Wingspan: 170 feet Cruise speed: 529 mphmaximum takeoff weight: 449,999 lbsrange: 5,599 nautical miles

the CurreNt system

■ e-8C Joint stArslength: 153 feet Wingspan: 146 feet Capacity: 22 (18 specialists and 4 flight crew)Cruise speed: 449 mphmaximum takeoff weight: 336,000 lbsendurance: 9 hours

eleCtroNiCs CompetitorsRecapitalizing JSTARS involves more than simply buying a new air-

frame. The Air Force will have to procure

radar, sensor and communications and computing equipment, as well as rely on contractors to integrate and support those systems. The Air Force has said it will likely purchase commercial, off-the-shelf products. Possible competitors for integrating mission systems and provid-ing electronics are:

■ Northrop Grumman (the current prime contractor)

■ harris Corp.

■ rockwell Collins

■ lockheed martin

■ l-3 Communications

■ raytheon

■ Drs technologies

■ bAe systems

Major Players on the JSTARS Recapitalization Program

source: air force, BoeiNg, gulfstream, BomBarDier, Northrop grummaN

By VALERIE INSINNA The U.S. military is preparing to scale down operations in Afghanistan in 2016, but it will continue operating in areas filled with civil unrest where it may be difficult

to tell friend from foe. Analysts and industry officials say the services’ need for non-

lethal technologies will only continue to grow, with weapons becoming lighter and more portable, having greater range and the capability to send and receive information.

The worldwide nonlethal weapons market is expected to double by 2020, according to a 2014 report by Dan Inbar, chairman and chief technology officer of Homeland Security Research Corp. He predicts a compound annual growth rate of 11 percent from 2014 to 2020.

The U.S. market is expected to follow that trend, increasing from $500 million in 2013 to about $930 million in 2020, he said.

“When, by mistake, you fire on what you think is your enemy and you kill bystanders, you generate new enemies and you gen-erate opposition from the media,” Inbar told National Defense. That’s a lesson the U.S. military had to learn the hard way in battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Defense Department spends about $140 million annually on research, development, procurement and maintenance of non-lethal weapons, according to the department’s 2013 annual review of the program.

In the coming years, it will invest in area denial systems such as anti-vehicle nonlethal weapons that use electrical pulses to disable

engines, he said. It will also focus on further developing standoff microwave systems and millimeter wave systems that can incapaci-tate enemies without causing permanent damage.

The military has spent millions of dollars to develop sophisti-cated, technologically advanced nonlethal equipment such as the active denial system, which repels targets by shooting millimeter frequency waves at them, causing pain but no lasting damage. However, it continues to reach out to industry and academic insti-tutions asking them to propose their own solutions.

Special Operations Command noted in a 2014 broad area announcement that it is on the lookout for “technologies that can stop/disable individuals for an extended duration, remain less lethal and be useable on combatant and noncombatant individuals. The effect must immediately prohibit the individual’s ability to perform a useful function at ranges greater than 6 feet.”

It is also seeking “technologies that use less lethal payloads to prevent combatant and noncombatant individuals from entering a specific area for a specified period of time.”

SOCOM announced in May that it had assembled a classified wish list of 100 technology needs, including nonlethal capabilities. A capabilities and technology expo was scheduled for June 10.

“The world is a changing place. It’s evolving quickly,” said Braidy Parker, spokesman for Lamperd Less Lethal Inc., a Canadian company that provides technologies to the Canadian and U.S. militaries. “We’re fighting in built-up areas. Crowd management and crowd control are becoming more necessary as people in those areas are protesting, and you don’t want to be shooting innocent

civilians, but you do have to practice crowd management.”

Expanding the range of weapons while cutting down weight will be important for companies to set themselves apart in the market, Parker said. The development of new materials will result in lighter, more effective weaponry.

For example, Lamperd produces a 40 mm casing that contains 14 rubber bullets made from a patented composite, he said. Not only does this allow a user to hit more

than one target with a single round, but also the bullets themselves are more potent.

“It’s not just, let’s grab a piece of rubber, put it into a gre-nade launcher and fire at somebody,” he said “The rubber that we’ve developed … doesn’t bounce, which means that it transfers all of its energy to the target, which means that you need less of the munitions ... to get your point across.”

The company also uses new materials to help decrease the weight of its weaponry. Its 40 mm grenade launcher is about seven pounds lighter than other ones on the market, Parker said. He would not disclose the name of the mate-rial for competitive reasons.

The military is looking for weapons that can be used both at stand off distances and in close quarters, industry officials agree. Increasing the range of systems will be vital so that troops can disperse crowds without putting them-selves in danger.

26 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

Nonlethal Technologies Become Lighter, More Potent

• Lamperd 40 mm launching system Lamperd Less LethaL

General Dynamics is devel-oping a nonlethal 66 mm gre-nade system called the Medusa. Other 66 mm systems have a maximum range of 30 meters, while the Medusa can fire gre-nades more than 200 meters, said Joseph Buzzett, director of technology programs. The company received a two-year development contract from the Marine Corps earlier this year under the mission payload module program.

“They want to be able to put this nonlethal capability out there much farther from the vehicle, so that you can start to engage people hundreds of meters away before they get so close that they could become a potential threat,” he said.

Along with the system itself, General Dynamics is develop-ing flashbang grenades that last longer and can affect adversar-ies with more intense light, sound and pressure, according to information provided by the company.

The Army and Marine Corps regularly mount 66 mm grenade launchers on vehicles such as Humvees and Abrams tanks, Buzzett said. Troops have experience using such weapons and munitions, which makes it easier to train them to use the nonlethal versions. Grenades filled with payloads ranging from malodorants to daz-zling lights can be fired for varied effects.

“We’ve been talking to our customers to see what are the most important [capabilities] for them,” he said. “We’re having that

dialogue with them now so that we can start to develop the next generation of munitions that they need.” Future munitions could include nonlethal grenades that could jam electronics or mark people with substances that make them easy to track. Smoke gre-nades with visual or infrared effects that would temporarily blind those who are not wearing special goggles are another possibility.

As the military seeks to increase the range of nonlethal weapons that can be fired on land, it also is looking for ways to fire such pay-loads from underwater. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has partnered with industry to develop nonlethal weapons

Nonlethal Technologies Become Lighter, More Potent

J U L Y 2 0 1 4 • N A T I O N A L D E F E N S E 27

• Medusa nonlethal 66 mm grenade system GENERAL DYNAMICS

28 N AT I O N A L D E F E N S E • J U LY 2 0 1 4

systems that would sit on the floor of the ocean, but could be recalled to the surface when needed. These “upward falling pay-loads” could include effects ranging from laser strobes to jamming equipment.

DARPA in March announced it was moving to the second phase of the pro-gram, where companies would develop prototype systems. The agency is look-ing for innovative technologies for “small sensors, expendable and small unmanned systems, distributed communications and navigation technology, novel long-range underwater communications, and long-endurance mechanical and electrical sys-tems that can survive for years in dormant states.”

Future nonlethal technologies could incorporate communication equipment that allows users to broadcast their loca-tion and alert other troops to changing battlefield conditions.

Lamperd demonstrated in January the ability to mount camera systems on the bottom of its less-lethal weapons, permit-ting troops to send a real-time video stream back to commanders who can give feed-back, Parker said.

The data is transferred via satellite and Wi-Fi, and there is no special equipment needed, he said. “You can pull up your

iPhone and look at the stuff.”Lamperd has not sold its mobile surveil-

lance system so far, but Parker believes that customers will become more interested in the capability. “To be honest, we haven’t really pushed it as much as we should be pushing it,” he said.

TigerLight Inc. — which manufactures a product of the same name that combines a flashlight and pepper spray — developed a high-tech version of the device that would integrate streaming video, infrared imagery, and various communication methods, said Mike Teig, the company’s president and CEO. The idea was that if a soldier used his TigerLight, it would send out an alert to other troops containing GPS information or other data. Company officials hoped to get a rapid innovation fund grant from the Defense Department, but were ultimately unsuccessful.

The development team was able to transfer some of that technology into a civilian product called the Peacekeeper Mini, he said. That small, 4-inch long device dispenses pepper spray and has a bright flashlight that can distract an attacker. It can also be programmed to send a message via Bluetooth to a user’s friends and family if the product has been deployed, alerting them to the location of the incident and the need for help.

The company is currently assembling the

final prototype of the Peacekeeper Mini and recently completed an Indiegogo cam-paign that brought in more than $60,000 in funding for the project, Teig said.

Most vendors indicated that Defense Department interest in nonlethal weap-ons is growing, but breaking through the bureaucracy of the acquisitions process is long and arduous.

TigerLight went through years of test-ing to make its product available to the military, Teig said. In 2011, the company landed a contract with the Defense Logis-tics Agency, but it has not received any awards since then because of budget issues.

“We were very excited to do business with the military, and we thought when we got the DLA contract ... that sales were going to explode,” he said. “That has been frustrating, because we put hundreds of thousands of dollars into [testing] over many years.”

TigerLight still plans on marketing its products to the Defense Department, but it won’t be relying on the military to make up the bulk of its revenue, he said.

Even established defense contractors sometimes never see their nonlethal weap-ons fielded. General Dynamics developed and demonstrated a 155 mm artillery round for the Army that could release vari-ous nonlethal payloads, but the require-ment was canceled in 2006, Buzzett said. The services know they need nonlethal technologies, but sometimes those require-ments fall lower on the priority list, he explained. Additionally, “they’re still trying to determine the [concept of operations] ... of how and when to use nonlethal.”

While the military wants to use existing systems as platforms for nonlethal weap-ons, it is still evaluating how to integrate lethal and nonlethal capabilities to best deter enemies, he said.

For instance, “if you bring an Abrams tank into an area but then you shoot non-lethal munitions, are you sending kind of a mixed signal?” If people believe the tank is not firing lethal munitions, adversaries could try to get even closer, he said.

Buzzett pointed to a 2013 directive by the Defense Department executive agent for nonlethal weapons and nonlethal weapons policy, which urges the services to include such capabilities in military plan-ning and doctrine.

As the military finds solutions to those challenges, Buzzett expects the military will release more requirements, which will lead to more products being fielded, he said. “It’s definitely, we see, a growing mar-ket. But it’s still evolving.” ND

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U.S. NONLETHAL MARKET PROJECTION

2013 $500 million

2020 $930 million

• Peacekeeper Mini TIGERLIGHT INC.

By DAN PARSONSMARINE CORPS BASE QUANTI-

CO, Va. — Filipino and U.S. Marines fought side by side 70 years ago against Japanese forces in some of the most murderous com-bat of World War II.

In May, about 6,000 men from both forces reunited at Crow Valley in the Phil-ippines where they practiced not killing potential enemies.

During Operation Balikatan, the two countries’ Marines learned the ins and outs of deploying with nonlethal weapons, a set of devices that are gaining traction.

When soldiers and Marines get their hands on nonlethal weapons, as in the Balikatan exercises, they gladly employ them in place of slinging lead, said Col. Michael Coolican, whose job as head of the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate is to evangelize for the technologies.

“What we’re finding from the services — when they do get to use what we have and get to see what they are, at least in these controlled environments — is tremendous

buy-in to these weapons systems,” he said. Soldiers can easily learn to operate the

arsenal of nonlethal weapons currently fielded, Coolican said. More difficult is teaching troops when and how to deploy them within their standard mission sets and how to conduct that training when time and funding are at a premium, he said.

Once the Marines wrap up their com-bat role in Afghanistan, they will tran-sition back to their traditional mission of responding to global crises. Nonlethal weapons are tailor-made for many of the potential scenarios they will encounter in unsettled regions of the world where fir-ing live rounds could spark major conflict, said Kelley Hughes, a spokeswoman for the directorate.

“Appreciation for nonlethal weapons’ utility within today’s complex environ-ments … is growing, as is recognition that nonlethals can help achieve national strategic objectives by minimizing civil-ian casualties and property destruction,”

she said. “Continued advocacy and education about nonlethal capabili-ties have seen a recent uptick in the demand signal.”

The directorate’s job is not to train soldiers or purchase weapons,

but to identify and develop nonlethal tech-nologies that are useful to the services and help combatant commanders figure out where and when to deploy them. Coolican said his priority during his two-year tenure was to spread the word that nonlethal technologies are just as effective — or more so — than bullets and hand grenades in certain situations.

“One of our biggest problems is not so much our image, but explaining to people why we exist, why the Marine Corps picks up this mission,” Coolican said.

Batons, pepper spray and Tasers — typi-cally associated with law enforcement — are currently used by military police and Air Force security troops on a daily basis. The perpetual challenge for the directorate has been developing weapons suited for combat infantrymen, to convince them the devices are worth carrying and prove to the leadership they are worth the expense.

“The other side of the story is … your standard infantry or artillery, the types of troops that are going to go out there and

Nonlethal Weapons Could Gain Ground in Future Missions

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 29

Philippine Armed Forces service members observe a demonstration of the pre-emplaced electric vehicle stopper during Balikatan 2014. marines

30 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

do the missions,” Coolican said. “How do they use them and what types of nonlethal weapons do they need to make them more effective in their standard military jobs?”

To spread his message, he enlisted Army and Marine Corps units to participate in three military utility assessments of various nonlethal technologies at bases throughout the United States. A fourth is planned for this summer at Fort Eustis in Virginia. The Marine Corps Forces Pacific Experimen-tation Center has served as an unbiased “referee” of the exercises to gauge their usefulness in a host of possible scenarios, he said.

During the MUAs, soldiers or Marines perform scenarios like a vehicle checkpoint stop without any nonlethal weapons at their disposal. Then they run through the same scenario — a vehicle refusing to stop when hailed, for instance — again, but with access to nonlethal alternatives to fir-ing live rounds.

“We do want to do controlled experi-ments like the MUAs. What we also want to do is find where [combatant command-ers] and services are doing their regular training or events and try to fit in and show … some of the things we have and how we can help them,” Coolican said.

During the Balikatan exercise, officials from the directorate and Marine Corps Forces Pacific and engineers from the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren demonstrated and rated responses from Marines on several prominent nonlethal technologies.

They included the distributed sound and light array, a nonlethal acoustical and optical device that can warn and deliver instructions to an approaching subject at distance without permanent harm. The DSLA’s light array attracts the attention of the target, while the sound array conveys specific instructions to the target.

“The DSLA is especially well-suited for hailing and warning vehicle and ves-sel operators,” Hughes said. “The DSLA can provide additional escalation-of-force options by assisting in clearing individuals from a given area, managing crowds and providing area denial.”

Marines also practiced the use of a pre-emplaced vehicle stopper, which fires an electrical pulse that fries an engine’s electrical components without harming the occupants.

Marines also were equipped with the LA-9/P and GLARE MOUT 532P-M opti-cal distracters. The “dazzling” lasers are used at checkpoints, which Marines man every day in conflict.

Instead of a rifle, a Marine points the LA-9/P onto an approaching vehicle’s

windshield, or directly into the eyes of a subject, bathing them with a dazzling green light that is temporarily and harm-lessly blinding. The GLARE MOUT is a smaller version that can be handheld or attached to a rifle. The idea is for the laser to stop approaching vehicles so troops can gauge their intentions at a standoff distance.

“The various nonlethal capabilities deployed in support of the exercise were successfully used in a series of training events,” said Brian D. Long, the directorate’s nonlethal capabilities demonstration and assessment project officer.

Feedback on the utility of the various technologies gathered from participating Marines is being evaluated and will be used to inform fielding decisions for future mis-sions, Long said.

Efforts to field nonlethal weapons with combat troops began in the 1990s in response to the U.S. military’s experience operating in unstable environments — like Africa and South America — where kill-ing the wrong person could compromise trust among local populations. The Marine Corps officially took over development of nonlethal weapons for all the services in 1996 by order of the Defense Department.

Like his predecessors, Coolican is pushing for industry to make military-appropriate versions of existing technologies. Persistent needs include increased range and duration

of suppressive effects and modular weap-ons whose potency can be dialed up or down to suit a particular scenario — there is no need to temporarily blind or stun a bystander when shooing the person away would suffice, for example.

“We’ve figured out how to get to rock-throwers,” he said. “We got that — sting-ball grenades, blunt-impact munitions. Now, how do we push that further out? To me, it’s a decision-space weapon. How do you give the commander, or whoever is the person on-scene making decisions, time to make those decisions without having to apply lethal force?”

Coolican wants weapons with longer-lasting effects, as well. The standard flash-bang grenades currently issued, for instance, explode, emit disorienting sound and light, but do it only once.

“It’s disorienting for some period of time, but can we develop ones that [cause] mul-tiple bangs, multiple flashes in one grenade? You toss one in and it has some sort of longer-term effect so that forces can deal with whatever problem they went in there to deal with.”

The directorate is working with industry to create more military-appropriate ver-sions of current nonlethal technologies. (See story on p. 26)

Within the next five years or so, the directorate plans to field the mission pay-load module nonlethal weapons system,

• Glare LA-9/P BE MEYERS

• Distributed sound and light array DEfEnSE DEpt.

• Active denial systemDEfEnSE DEpt.

or MPM. The counter-personnel system consists of an advanced, suppressive 66 mm munition, launcher and laser sighting sys-tem. The munition can be fired up to 300 meters with effects ranging from warning to suppression. Because the flashbang-like round’s range can be precisely dialed in, the effects can be delivered over a crowd’s head, or in their midst, for a range of effects, Coolican said.

“The mission payload module’s unique capabilities are ideally suited for missions such as stability operations, humanitar-ian assistance and disaster relief, embassy/consulate security augmentation and a host of other direct operations in which Marine forces must escalate and de-escalate responses during complex and changing scenarios,” Hughes said.

Ultimately, “there’s really no ‘if we could just do this, it is going to be the best thing ever,’” Coolican said. The closest the direc-torate and its engineering partners have come to a nonlethal Holy Grail is the promise of directed energy weapons, he said.

The most promising existing directed-energy technology is the active denial sys-tem, a long-range, counter-personnel device that uses millimeter-wave energy to provide a “repel” effect against human targets with minimal risk of injury.

“It’s the perfect weapons system, because when you are engaged by it, all you want to do is not be where you are,” Coolican said. “It’s hard to explain because it really doesn’t hurt. You just don’t want to be feeling that right there. … Instinctually you want to move.”

ADS currently is about the size of a semi-trailer because it requires a huge amount of energy to operate. For that reason, Coolican is less worried about advancing the system’s capability than shrinking the batteries and generators needed to power it.

“We can get the effects now, but we can’t get it in a militarily-packaged device yet,” he said.

ADS was deployed to, but not used in Afghanistan in 2010. Hughes said the com-mander on the ground decided the system was not necessary for the current mission, but did not elaborate.

“There continues to be interest in opera-tionally using the capability worldwide,” she said.

High power microwaves also are show-ing promise as a means to stop vehicle and boat engines at long range without harming the occupants. The multi-frequency radio-frequency vehicle stopper is in concept development. For it to be useful on the battlefield it must be able to stop a variety of engine makes and models on land and at

sea, Coolican said. As with ADS, consistent research and development are needed to bring the vehicle stopper and other tech-nologies to the battlefield, he said.

“Science and technology is like the run-ning game in football,” Coolican said. “You line up and you go and you get two yards, then you line up and do it again. Eventually you get a first down, and then at the end you get a touchdown. But it’s hard work to get there.”

But the directorate’s budget — which covers analysis of nonlethal weapons for each military service including Special Operations Command — has shrunk in recent years from $120 million in fiscal year 2010. Responsibility for buying and fielding the devices falls to the services.

Program funding has been cut by more than half in the ensuing four years. It net-ted $67 million in fiscal year 2014 and just $58 million in the request being parsed by Congress for fiscal 2015.

“The most important thing we can do to get to that future is stay focused on how we’re spending our science-and-technology dollars,” he added. “Especially with the budgets the way they are, we really need to focus on getting one or two yards down the field and not losing five yards.” ND

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By STEW MAGNUSONA long-simmering dispute between rocket-builder SpaceX and the Air Force over launch contracts came to the fore when the company’s

founder, CEO and chief designer Elon Musk announced a lawsuit directed at the service at the National Press Club in April.

At issue was a sole source, no-compete contract awarded to United Launch Alliance to provide government custom-ers 36 rocket cores over five years.

“Essentially what we feel is that this is not right. That the national security launches should be put up for competition and they should not be awarded on a sole source, uncompeted basis,” Musk said. SpaceX is asking that the contract be canceled and not awarded until its Falcon 9 rocket is certified by the Air Force and has a chance to grab some of the business.

In the press conference, Musk accused the Air Force of moving the “goal posts” back when it comes to certifying its rockets and wasting tax-payer dollars by choosing more expensive launch services over his.

“This contract is costing U.S. taxpayers bil-lions of dollars more for no reason,” Musk said.

The last decade has seen many changes in the U.S. launch industry.

It began in the 1990s as the Air Force created the evolved expendable launch vehicle (EELV) program, and awarded contracts to two of the major defense firms, McDonnell Douglas — later acquired by Boeing — and Lockheed Martin.

The long-term goal was to reduce the high cost of send-ing payloads into orbit, and, more importantly, to create more dependable rockets after a string of high-profile failures.

The service wanted two competitors in hopes that they would bid against each other and reduce costs. The result was Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V family of rockets and Boe-ing’s Delta IV.

These new rockets had their inaugural launches in 2002.The same year, Musk, who had recently sold his first

company PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion at age 30, announced in June at a lightly attended panel discussion on space entrepreneurship in Palo Alto, California, that he was going to jump into the space business. His start up Space

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Launch Contract Dispute Pits SpaceX Against Air Force, ULA

Falcon 9 rocket spacex

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Atlas V rocket united launch alliance

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Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) intended to compete with Boe-ing and Lockheed Martin on launch vehicles and spacecraft, he told a reporter for industry publication Space News.

Less than four years later, Musk launched his first Falcon 1 rocket. It crashed into the ocean after less than a minute. On the fourth try, the rocket succeeded in placing a payload into orbit in 2008.

The company moved on to its Falcon 9 rocket in 2010 and began to sign up government and commercial customers, which included Air Force and NASA payloads. Today, SpaceX has more than 40 launches on its manifest, 3,000 employees at its Hawthorne, Cali-fornia, plant, and is developing a “heavy” version of the Falcon 9. It has had nine successful launches and no accidents over the past four years.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin at the same time began a long streak of successful launches beginning in 2002. To date, the Atlas and Delta rockets have strung together 68 consecutive missions with no major failures.

The Air Force, National Reconnaissance Office and NASA place a high premium on dependability. The loss of one satellite can cost billions and put vital programs back by years.

The Air Force’s plan to pit Boeing and Lockheed Martin against each other to foster competition came to naught, when the two companies were permitted to form a joint venture, United Launch Alliance, in 2006. SpaceX filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the plan, which was dismissed.

Companies such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences could compete for smaller payloads, but for the heavy national security satellites, ULA had a monopoly.

Orbital Science’s Antares rocket is lifting medium-sized payloads of around 11,000 pounds into low-Earth orbit. It has had three suc-cessful missions so far. Falcon 9 can send about 29,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit, and 10,600 pounds to geostationary orbit.

As per-launch prices grew, ULA and some officials in the government began advocating for block buys of engine cores. The company said contracting for several launches in advance would allow it to purchase long-lead items in bulk, and cut down on contracting expenses, which would in turn reduce costs.

The Air Force and NRO would join to purchase a certain number of rocket cores in a block buy. The cores are sometimes combined for heavier payloads or to send them higher into space, so one core does not necessarily equal one launch.

As SpaceX became a more formidable com-petitor, those agencies plus NASA in 2011 released specifications for certifying new rockets, so new entrants would not have to be qualified individually by all three.

A March 5 Senate Appropriations Committee defense subcommittee hearing titled National Security Launch Space Pro-grams took a look at the current state of the heated debate, and put Musk in the same room as ULA Chief Executive Officer Michael C. Gass.

The ULA executive touted the company’s perfect record, and said competition would not necessarily be good for the nation.

“Over the past 17 years the [EELV] program has continued to deliver. Meeting the needs of our nation effectively and efficiently — delivering capabilities on time, on budget and while delivering on all of the programs original requirements,” he said.

“I believe there are substantive questions about how EELV competitions will be structured to ensure the competition is fair and open and whether it will actually deliver savings to our nation. Ultimately, the central question is whether savings from competi-

tion will be sufficient to offset the cost of duplicating existing capabilities,” Gass testified.

“We went from two competing teams with redundant and unde-rutilized infrastructure to one team that has delivered the expected savings of this consolidation,” he continued.

Musk countered that the Air Force and other agencies are paying too high a price for launches.

“The impacts of relying on a monopoly provider since 2006 were predictable, and they have been borne out. Space launch innovation has stagnated. Competition has been stifled,” he said. He asserted that had SpaceX been awarded the missions ULA received under its recent non-competed 36 rocket core block buy, it would have saved taxpayers $11.6 billion.

Gass said: “We are investing in new technology and concepts to make our products better and more affordable. We are investing internal funds to develop a capability to launch two GPS satellites at a time, which will cut launch costs almost in half. ULA, along with our government customers, is reviewing every requirement and every process to eliminate any unnecessary or inefficient elements.”

Musk noted at the hearing that SpaceX had to meet a number of requirements that were never demanded of ULA’s rockets. It was required to successfully launch three Falcon 9 flights, which was achieved with consecutive successful flights in September, Decem-ber and January without any government support. Under the certification agreement, SpaceX had delivered more than 30,000 data items to the Air Force and provided total access to its internal systems to more than 300 government officials.

“We are hopeful that the Air Force will work expeditiously so that we can compete this calendar year,” Musk said at the hearing.

By the April press conference, that hope had evaporated.The lawsuit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, argued that

SpaceX had met the requirements when it turned over the data to the Air Force on March 22.

The Falcon 9 had supported NASA and the space station, science satellites [and] complex commer-

cial launches into geostationary orbit, which is some 22,000 miles above the Earth’s equator, Musk said.

“It should be qualified to launch something quite simple like a GPS satellite. This really doesn’t seem right to us. We have tried every avenue to figure out why this is case,” he said.

Furthermore, the lawsuit questioned the legality of using the RD-180 first stage rocket

engine, which is produced by NPO Energomash of Russia. Recent sanctions against Russian leaders

over the Ukraine crisis would make the Atlas V engine on which it is used illegal, he said.“Atlas V cannot possibly be described as providing ‘assured

access to space’ for our nation when supply of the main engine depends on President Putin’s permission,” Musk said.

The court dismissed this part of the lawsuit on the grounds that there was no proof that money was going to those on the sanctions list. A ruling on other parts of the lawsuit is pending.

ULA during the Space Symposium held in Colorado Springs in May pushed back at Musk and other critics’ assertions that its rockets were too expensive.

It distributed a fact sheet to reporters, “Dispelling Myths About the Cost of EELV & United Launch Alliance.”

It cited a 2014 Department of Defense selective acquisition report that stated the block buy will save the government $4 billion over the next five years.

Musk at the press conference said ULA’s rockets are “insanely expensive.”

Elon Muskthinkstock

SpaceX launches commercial satellites for $60 million. Air Force mission assurance requirements add another $30 million to that cost, he said.

ULA per-launch costs have been cited as high as $460 million, but that figure is misleading, the fact sheet said. On average, ULA launch costs are approximately $225 million, with the lower capa-bility version costing $164 million and the most capable — three times the performance — are $350 million.

The $460 million was cited by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in an April 25 letter to the Defense Department inspector general asking him to investigate the block buy contract.

ULA said the $460 million per launch figure was arrived at by dividing the 2015 budget request by three launch vehicles sched-uled for procurement, when the overall budget figure supports 12 launches and long-lead purchases of hardware for future missions.

McCain’s letter also referred to the Air Force apparently sliding back on a plan to leave 14 launches to be opened for competi-tion through fiscal year 2017. That plan had been endorsed by Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logis-tics Frank Kendall, who has stated that launch contracts must be competed.

The block buy contract stated that if there weren’t enough demand for 36 launches, the Air Force could dip into the 14 that had been reserved for competition and award them to ULA. The Obama administration budget request also reduced their numbers from 14 to seven.

McCain referred to testimony before the Senate Armed Service Committee by Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, who said demand for rocket cores may be reduced because GPS satellites are lasting longer than expected. McCain said that was well known before the Air Force signed the contract for the block buy in December, so he wants the inspector general to investigate why the service proceeded with the contract.

The ULA fact sheet repeated Gass’ remark at the hearing that

there isn’t enough business to support another entrant in the launch market.

“The reintroduction of competitors to the current marketplace, coupled with the requirement to maintain multiple launch systems to ensure ‘assured access to space,’ may be more costly than simply maintaining a single launch provider. Competition may return the launch industry to the same market dynamics that led to ULA’s creation eight years ago,” it said.

Gen. William Shelton, Air Force Space Command commander, said the service is working as fast as it can to certify SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for launch. It was spending $60 million and devoting 100 person-nel to the effort, he told reporters at the Space Symposium.

He reiterated his belief that competition would be beneficial.“Our overriding objective here is to get national security payloads

to space reliably. So that has to be front and center of anything we do. But by the same token we know it’s costing a lot to get assets to space and we need to drive the price down,” he said.

He said he was surprised by the SpaceX lawsuit. “They can’t compete, cannot compete, will not compete, until

they are certified. And the fact that they have, that SpaceX has completed three certification launches, that’s just openers,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of analysis that needs to be com-pleted and it’s in cooperation with SpaceX. This is a certification process that they willingly signed up to, and we will continue to work that certification process.”

The first of the three Falcon 9 launches has been deemed accept-able, but the Air Force is still working its way through the data on the following two. There are other factors, including ensuring that the manufacturing and engineering processes are done correctly, as well as confirming that SpaceX has an auditable financial system.

“It’s very difficult to pick up the pace on [all] that,” Shelton said. ND

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 35

Email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org

Delta IV rocket united launch alliance

36 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

By STEW MAGNUSONThe U.S. national security space

community was left wondering this spring whether a Russian company would con-tinue to supply it with engines needed to launch heavy payloads on its Atlas rockets.

At issue was the RD-180, a first-stage engine needed to power the Atlas V. The crisis in Ukraine sparked a series of tit-for-tat sanctions between Russia and the United States. A statement from senior Russian leadership that the nation would stop supplying the Russian-built engine to the United States for military purposes highlighted U.S. dependence on the engine for Atlas V launches.

“Relying on Russian engines to launch satellites for our national security missions has always been bad policy,” Rep. C. A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, D-Md., and ranking member of the House Intelligence Commit-tee, said in a statement.

Language in the fiscal year 2015 defense authorization bill would provide $220 mil-lion to kickstart domestic production of a new first-stage rocket engine, which would replace the RD-180.

That would only be a small down pay-ment in an effort that would take several years and about $1.5 billion, experts inter-viewed said.

“An engine as powerful as that is a fairly complex undertaking and there would be a lot of work involved,” said Jeff Foust, senior analyst at Futron Corp., a Bethesda, Maryland-based consultancy firm, which specializes in space business.

Concerns about the RD-180 supply prior to the Ukraine crisis sparked the Pentagon to form the RD-180 study group to look at the options. Chaired by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. H. J. “Mitch” Mitchell, now head of the Aerospace Corp., and co-chaired by former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, the board members concluded that “impacts of an RD-180 loss are significant, and near term (fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2017) options to mitigate them are significant.”

The report has not been released to the public, but a PowerPoint with its key con-clusions was posted on the Scribd website.

The document goes into the history of how the U.S. space agencies found them-selves in their current predicament. It goes back to the beginnings of the evolved expendable launch vehicle (EELV) pro-gram in the 1990s when the Air Force was

funding Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas — which later merged with Boeing — to produce a new generation of rockets. The Defense Department wanted competi-tion for launch contracts and to produce more reliable rockets.

Lockheed Martin for its Atlas III and V rockets chose the RD-180, built by NPO Energomash, as its first-stage engine.

The reason was simple, said Foust. The engine was simply the best in the world. “There is nothing like the RD-180 available from U.S. or other western companies. It really is a very high quality engine,” he said.

There have been 50 consecutive success-ful launches since the RD-180 has been adopted through April 2014, the so-called Mitchell report noted. When an unsuccess-ful launch can mean losing a multi-billion dollar satellite and putting national security space programs back several years, the U.S. agencies place a high premium on reliability, Foust noted.

There was an added incentive to keep Russian engineers employed building these rockets for the U.S. market, and not sup-plying their know-how to North Korean or Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile programs, Foust said.

Meanwhile, United Launch Alliance, which offers Atlas V rockets for Air Force, National Reconnaissance Office and NASA payloads, has about two years of RD-180 engines in its stockpile.

The current launch manifest and way of procuring rockets from Russia is the “best value,” the Mitchell report said. Any changes will cost taxpayers more money, it said.

The Atlas V comprises 56 percent of the launch manifest through fiscal year 2020, it noted.

Foust said there will have to be a lot of rejiggering of the manifest if Russia were to cut off sales and the stockpile ran out. The Delta IV, which was produced for the EELV program by McDonnell Douglas/Boeing, can loft heavy payloads to orbit. It is even capable of launching heavier payloads than the Atlas. It is not as reliable as the Atlas V, and costs more, he added.

“The question is: What would they do if the RD-180 supply is interrupted?” Foust asked. Who would have priority and for what missions?

The deal to buy RD-180 rockets included a license to co-produce them domestically, Foust noted. But that never happened.

The Mitchell report details a series of

waivers and policy changes that resulted in the domestic version of the engine being pushed back indefinitely.

“The high cost and time involved in doing it, and the fact that the engines were readily available and relatively inexpensive, kept pushing back those plans,” Foust said.

One option is to go through with co-production. The license is valid until 2022, he noted.

Todd Harrison, senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assess-ments, said that isn’t a viable alternative.

“That option may be kind of dead because we would spend five years using the license learning how to make the engines. So that would be 2019 at the earliest, and it would likely take a little longer,” he said in an inter-view. After the license expired, “we would be at the mercy of the Russians again.”

The next option is to ramp up the devel-opment and production of a completely new engine, a proposal that has some sup-port in Congress, despite the time and money it would entail.

Ruppersberger said: “Congress must act immediately to fund a plan that encourages American innovation to finally break us of our reliance on Russian engines.”

The House Armed Services Committee in early May amended the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act with language that would start some kind of replacement program.

“The Secretary of Defense shall develop a next-generation liquid rocket engine that enables the effective, efficient and expedient transition from the use of non-allied space launch engines to a domestic alternative for national security space launches,” the bill stated. It has not gone to appropriators, nor has similar language been introduced in the Senate.

Lawmakers and experts interviewed are confident that U.S. industry could produce its own engine. How long it would take, and how much money would be needed is up for debate.

Gen. William Shelton, Air Force Space Command commander, told reporters at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in May that “there have been several esti-mates on that. One has been that it would take five years; one that it would take as much as eight years. I think we don’t really know that until we get into the work to see how much of a technological challenge it will be.”

Costs, Benefits of RD-180 Rocket Engine Replacement Program Debated

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 37

As for NASA, all of ULA’s efforts to certify a rocket for human spaceflight has centered on the Atlas V. The agency would have to start all over again with the Delta IV, which would involve “a fair amount of engineering work,” Foust said.

Harrison said there are three options: use the license to produce a domestic co-pro-duced RD-180, begin work on a new rocket or let the situation play itself out.

“We could take the risk of still relying on the Russian engine and maybe they sell it to us and maybe they don’t. … That doesn’t cost anything extra except risk,” he added.

Both co-production and new-start options are costly. Numbers being bandied about say five years and $1.2 billion, Foust said.

Harrison said it wouldn’t be all that much more to choose the new start option over using the license. “There is risk in trying to replicate and build the same engine. We might not be able to do it.”

As for a new start, it might only be another $300 million, he said. “And then we would have use of that new motor indefinitely.”

Shelton said he brought up the funding issue to lawmakers.

“When I expressed that reservation to Congress they said, ‘You don’t worry about that. You tell us what you need and we’ll worry about the money,’ So my response to that was, ‘Yes, sir.’”

Julie Van Kleeck, vice president of advanced space and launch propul-sion at rocket manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne, said her company has studied the issue extensively and con-cluded that it could begin producing an RD-180 replacement in less than four years and for about $1 billion.

“There are other people with other opinions,” she told National Defense. “Our numbers are based on a very sound database of both historical data as well as analytical models that help us predict what these things will cost.”

It’s important to remember that the development wouldn’t start from a clean sheet, she noted. The Air Force and NASA over the past decade have funded research-and-development looking at new rocket engine processes and technologies. The two companies, which merged last year, have also spent their own internal R&D funding over the years.

“The technology, I think for the most part, is on hand. There aren’t technological breakthroughs required. From our perspec-tive, it’s an engineering problem,” she said.

Those numbers would depend on a steady stream of funding from Congress. “Funding constraints may force a different

length of time,” she noted.The trickiest part will be combustion,

where the liquid fuel is transformed into hot gas, she said. There will have to be robust designs in place before the program gets started, she said.

It would also have to be decided how much new emerging processes, such as additive manufacturing, will be a part of the program. Those can make the engine more affordable, but there is some risk integrating them into a new program, she added.

Foust said estimates of how long the program will take and how much it will cost must be taken with a grain of salt. “As is often the case with aerospace programs in general, you may have an initial schedule

and budget estimate, but you may exceed both during the course of the program itself.”

Harrison agreed: the first cost and sched-ule estimates are routinely exceeded.

“It will almost always cost more and take longer,” he said.

“Realistically, a new engine may take six to seven years and cost around $2 billion,” he said.

The Mitchell report said a new launch vehicle could be certified by 2023.

These are long-term solutions to a near- and medium-term problem the Mitchell report said. The Delta program cannot ramp

up production in time to take up the slack, it said. Using up the RD-180 stockpile with no replacement will result in nine missions being delayed at an average of two years. There would have to be discussions on how to prioritize missions among the Defense Department, the NRO, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and ULA’s commercial customers.

“Major perturbations require interagency discussions,” the report said.

The Delta backlog would not be cleared up until fiscal year 2019, the report said.

Another factor is the rise of billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is seeking to certify its new Falcon 9 rocket and then its Falcon Heavy version. (See story page 32).

Harrison said the Air Force could try to speed up qualification of SpaceX’s vehicle and maybe other launch vehi-cles they would like to get into the market.

The report, which identifies SpaceX as the “new entrant,” said it did not expect it to be certified until 2017. The current schedule to do so by 2015 is “aggressive,” it said.

The study group made several rec-ommendations to mitigate the rocket engine shortfalls, but ultimately sug-gested that it move forward with a new engine.

“Regardless of RD-180 viability, [the] U.S. needs to develop a domestic engine,” the PowerPoint stated.

Harrison said the industrial capacity and capability to make an engine as reliable as the RD-180 exists in the United States. He didn’t think SpaceX would want to jump in. It would pre-fer to compete for the entire launch contract rather than one component, he said.

Van Kleeck said a new program would come at a perfect time. Baby boomer engineers are retiring, and a new generation is replacing them. This would be a good opportunity for them to pass on their knowledge to a new

generation.“To actually go through a rocket engine

development is a different set of process-es and experience,” she said. A new-start engine would accelerate the learning and development of the next generation, she added.

Shelton said: “Personal opinion. I would love to see us produce an engine. If you look at our history, when is the last time we produced an engine? It has been a long time. So our industrial base has kind of withered a bit.” ND

Email your comments to SMagnuson@ndia.org

An Aerojet Rocketdyne technician inspects an RL10 rocket engine. AEROJET ROCKETDYNE

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38 n at i o n a l D e f e n s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

By yasmin TadjdehLast year, China launched a mys-

terious missile from its southwest region. While Chinese news sources said it was a scientific experiment, there is widespread speculation that the payload was a more advanced anti-satellite test.

Satellites are vulnerable to an array of weapons and disruptive technologies like anti-satellite missiles and sophisticated cyber attacks that can have potentially dev-astating results from degrading capabilities to complete annihilation, experts said.

There is strong evidence that the anti-satellite weapon China tested in May 2013 went higher than low-Earth orbit, said Charles Miller, president of NextGen Space LLC, a space and public policy consulting group. If China continues to make strides and develops weapons that reach farther, it could one day threaten key satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

The damage caused by an anti-satellite missile is two-fold: Not only does it destroy its target, but it also causes a massive ripple affect with debris from the collision striking other satellites. China’s 2007 test created a large debris field, which could damage other spacecraft, said Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command.

The Air Force in June took new steps to better track and observe man-made debris in space. The service awarded Lockheed Martin a $915 million contract to develop the Space Fence, which has been in the works for years and is now entering final system development with the delivery of increment 1 and an operations center. The system will track objects in low-Earth orbit and some in higher orbits. The Air Force plans to have the system operational by 2019, and the contract leaves open the pos-sibility for a second radar site.

In February, Director of National Intel-ligence James R. Clapper said potential adversaries are hard at work developing weapons that could degrade or destroy some of the United States’ key satellites that provide essential communication to the military, the government and U.S. citi-zens.

“Threats to U.S. space services will increase during 2014 and beyond, as potential adversaries pursue disruptive and destructive counter-space capabilities,” Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Chinese and Russian military leaders understand the unique information

advantages afforded by space systems and are developing capabilities to disrupt the United States’ use of space in a conflict.”

In the months since his testimony, top U.S. military officials and policy analysts have echoed the same concern. As U.S. dependence on satellites grows, so does the vulnerability of its space assets.

Satellites beam essential information down to Earth. From mapping services to phone calls to Internet access, both the military and civilian world rely on timely and secure connections. The armed ser-vices use GPS satellites to guide unmanned aerial vehicles, missiles and other weap-ons. Reconnaissance satellites track enemy movements.

The military utility of satellite technol-ogy cannot be understated, said Shelton. Capabilities provided by satellites help the military conduct humanitarian, disaster relief and combat operations, he said.

“In space, our sustained mission success integrating these [satellite] capabilities into our military operations has encouraged potential adversaries to further develop counterspace technologies and attempt to exploit our systems and information. Therefore, I believe we are at a strategic crossroad in space,” Shelton said before the SASC in March.

“We are so dependent on space these days. We plug into it like a utility. It is always there. Nobody worries about it,” Shelton said. “You do not even know some-times that you are touching space. So [to lose our space capabilities] it would be almost a reversion back to … industrial-based warfare.”

Bill Ostrove, a space systems analyst at Forecast International, a Newtown, Con-necticut-based marketing and consulting firm, agreed that the military stands to lose much in the event of an attack on satellite systems.

“If satellites are knocked out, even tem-porarily, it could have serious consequences on the military’s ability to operate effec-tively,” Ostrove said.

Anti-satellite missiles are one of the most serious threats to space assets, he said.

“There are a few different ways that a satellite could be disabled that the United States is afraid of. The most obvious way is to launch a missile into space that tar-gets a satellite,” Ostrove said. “The United States has a legitimate fear of anti-satellite weapons.”

In 2007, China successfully launched an anti-satellite missile into low-Earth orbit and destroyed one of its aging weather satellites.

The test is concerning because it means China could potentially target a U.S. satel-lite in low-Earth orbit. The U.S. military is monitoring China’s development of the weapons, Shelton said.

“We are concerned about low-Earth orbit because we saw the 2007 Chinese ASAT test, which was a success,” Shelton said. “We are concerned about work that we have seen since then that includes all the way up to geosynchronous orbit. Some of our most precious assets fly in geosynchronous orbit.”

Low-earth orbit is defined as 160 to 2,000 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Most spacecraft fly in it, as does the Inter-national Space Station. Satellites in geosyn-chronous orbit fly about 36,000 kilometers above the Earth’s equator.

As for the 2013 test, it was likely dis-guised as a research experiment, Miller said, citing a study by the Secure World Foundation, a Broomfield, Colorado-based private foundation that works to keep space sustainable. The rocket reached more than 10,000 kilometers in altitude and then released a canister of barium powder, the report found.

The test is alarming because satellites in geosynchronous orbit are vulnerable, Miller said in May during a panel discussion on space threats at the American Security Proj-ect, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

“Most of the United States’ assets in space for national security are in geosyn-chronous orbit. They are completely frag-ile,” Miller said.

The advanced extremely high frequency system, which provides the U.S. and allied militaries with secure communications, is one example of a key satellite that flies in the orbit and could one day be targeted by adversaries.

Xinhua, China’s state-run news service, said the May 2013 rocket was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China and meant to “inves-tigate energetic particles and magnetic fields in the ionized stratum and near-Earth space.”

A U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission paper titled, “China Missile Launch May Have Tested Part of a New Anti-Satellite Capability,” said if the launch was indeed an anti-satellite test and not a research experiment, it would show that China is not being transparent about its space objectives. It may also signal that China is attempting to develop weapons that could destroy crucial U.S. satellites, it said.

New Chinese Threats to U.S. Space Systems Worry Officials

“Such a test would signal China’s intent to develop an ASAT capability to target satellites in an altitude range that includes U.S. GPS and many U.S. military and intel-ligence satellites,” the report said. “In a con-flict, this could allow China to threaten the U.S. military’s ability to detect foreign mis-siles and provide secure communications, navigation and precision missile guidance.”

China’s 2007 test created 3,000 new pieces of debris, according to the Nation-al Security Space Strategy of 2011, the Defense Department’s most recent guid-ance on space issues. Another 1,500 pieces of debris were created when a Russian and U.S. satellite collided in 2009.

The military tracks about 23,000 objects in orbit, Shelton said. About 1,000 of them are active payloads, and the rest include defunct satellites, pieces of debris and other items, he said.

Military sensors generally can track objects that are larger than 10 centimeters across, Shelton said. However, there could be 500,000 man-made objects in orbit that are smaller than that and can cause signifi-cant damage to satellites, he said.

The military is also working to ensure that adversaries do not attack satellites through cyber intrusions, Shelton said.

“We are going system by system looking at our cyber vulnerabilities, and we have a large information assurance program that

gets into those vulnerabilities and patches them and tries to prevent access,” he said. “In many cases, these are closed systems. That does not mean there are not vulner-abilities, but they are … not accessible through the Internet. So it would take insider — special access — those kinds of things to get to these closed networks.”

Some countries, such as China, are also developing technologies that use lasers to “dazzle” a satellite, said Micah Walter-Range, director of research and analysis at the Space Foundation, a Colorado Springs-based advocacy group. By shining lasers at the craft, adversaries overload the satellite’s sensors and can temporarily blind or per-manently damage it, he said.

While a degradation of the capabilities provided by the nation’s space assets would hurt the military, it would also be detri-mental for the general public, said Mariel Borowitz, an assistant professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who stud-ies space issues. Television, Internet access, radio and telephone service could go dark, she said.

“The threat to satellite technology is seri-ous. The United States has more satellites than any other country in the world, and satellite technologies are critical to both our economic system and our military,” Borowitz said.

Economically, the country relies on GPS for logistical, agricultural and safety applications. Boaters and pilots also rely heavily on weather satellites, Borowitz said.

The U.S. government is looking at numerous ways to prevent and miti-gate attacks or vulnerabilities.

Disaggregation, which takes one large satellite and splits it into smaller spacecraft is one way to protect satel-lite capabilities, Shelton said. If an enemy attacks the system and takes out a few satellites, there will still be some functionality left, he said.

“By separating payloads on differ-ent satellites we will complicate a potential adversary’s targeting calcu-lus, decrease size and system com-plexity and enable use of smaller boosters — with the goal of simulta-neously driving down cost,” Shelton said.

Satellites should be built with greater resiliency before they are launched, said Peter Wegner, director of advanced concepts at Utah State University Space Dynamics Labora-tory.

Systems must be hardened so in the event of an attack they can return

to their original state and continue provid-ing necessary capabilities, he said.

International treaties are another way the United States could mitigate a future attack, said Douglas Loverro, deputy assis-tant secretary of defense for space policy, during his testimony before the SASC in March.

The Defense Department is working with the State Department to establish an international code of conduct for respon-sible space use, he said. It would include standards for “debris limitation, launch notification, on-orbit monitoring and colli-sion avoidance.”

While a set of standards will not neces-sarily deter all space-faring countries from irresponsible actions, it will help keep space sustainable, he said.

“I am not so naïve as to believe that a simple set of rules will solve all of the major issues we face — they will not; nor would I expect that they will inhibit those who would try to threaten our use of space,” Loverro said. “But common sense rules that can be embraced by a majority of space-faring nations will help stem the rise of uncontrollable debris, add demonstrably to spaceflight safety and clearly differentiate those who use space responsibly from those who do not.” ND

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 39

Email your comments to YTadjdeh@ndia.org

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40 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

JulyLegislative Information Division Breakfasts – Army-Navy Club, Washington, DC

9 - Adm. Jonathan Greenert #4LX4

16 - Rep. Peter Visclosky #4LX8

23 - Rep. Frank LoBiondo #4LX7

www.ndia.org/meetings

9NMSC Annual MeetingArlington, VAwww.trainingsystems.org

10Capitol Hill M&S Expo

Washington, DC

16Webinar: Export Control Reform Update• Commerce Under Secretary for In-dustry and Security Eric Hirschhorn spoke to NDIA members about ECR in 2012, and will provide an update on recent regulatory changes, includ-ing final rules covering 12 categories on the CCL and USML.www.ndia.org/meetings/447H

21-2329th Annual National Test & Evaluation Conference Washington, DCwww.ndia.org/meetings/4910See our ad on p. 42

How Washington Works®July 23 - Huntsville, ALwww.ndia.org/meetings/443C

23-24NDIA’s Annual Missile Defense Small Business Programs ConferenceHuntsville, AL www.ndia.org/meetings/4160See our ad on p. 42

29-3157th Annual Fuze Conference Newark, NJwww.ndia.org/meetings/4560See our ad on p. 42

August4-7Warheads and Ballistics Classified SymposiumMonterey, CAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4480See our ad on p. 43

How Washington Works®August 6-7 - Reston, VAwww.ndia.org

7C4ISR BreakfastArlington, VA

• Bi-monthly series focusing on OSD and defense intelligence at the operational and tactical levels.www.ndia.org/meetings/492F

11-13NDIA San Diego Chapter Navy Gold Coast ConferenceSan Diego, CAwww.ndia-sd.org

11-14NDIA Tennessee Valley Chapter Annual Space & Missile Defense SymposiumHuntsville, ALwww.ndiatvc.org

12-14NDIA Michigan Chapter Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering & Technology SymposiumNovi, MIwww.ndia-mich.org

13-14Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference & ExhibitionHyattsville, MDwww.ndia.org/meetings/4380See our ad on p. 42

14DoD Adoption of the National Information Exchange Model Webinarwww.afei.org/events/4A12

21SO/LIC Division SocialArlington, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/488G

21Trusted Microelectronics MeetingWashington, DC• Attend this event to continue the dialogue between government and industry on the challenges for comprehensive supply chain risk management and program protection.www.ndia.org/meetings/487E

26-29Pacific Operational Science & Technology ConferenceHonolulu, HIwww.ndia.org/meetings/4540See our ad on p. 43

For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464.

NDIA Calendar

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 41

September3-4Mastering Business Development WorkshopSan Diego, CAwww.ndia.org/meetings/407E

8-12Defense Systems Acquisition Management CourseDallas, TXwww.ndia.org/meetings/402D

8TRIADSpringfield, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/414S

9-1011th National Small Business ConferenceSpringfield, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4140See our ad on p. 43

10MOAA/NDIA 2014 Warrior-Family SymposiumWashington, DCwww.warriorfamilysymposium.org

14NDIA Rocky Mountain Annual Space BallColorado Springs, COwww.ndiarmc.org

22-24Joint Undersea Warfare Technology Fall ConferenceGroton, CTwww.ndia.org/meetings/4240

22-2628th International Symposium on BallisticsAtlanta, GAwww.ndia.org/meetings/4210See our ad on p. 43

October1-2AIA/NDIA Ohio STEM Call-To-Action ForumCleveland, OHwww.ndia.org/meetings/571A

2C4ISR BreakfastArlington, VA

• Bi-monthly series focusing on OSD and defense intelligence at the operational and tactical levels.www.ndia.org/meetings/592A

21-232014 Precision Strike Technology Symposium (PSTS-14)Laurel, MDhttp://www.precisionstrike.org/Events/5PST/5PST.html

21-2319th Annual Expeditionary Warfare ConferenceNorfolk, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/5700

27-3017th Annual Systems Engineering ConferenceSpringfield, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/5870

November3-526th Annual International Integrated Program Management ConferenceBethesda, MDwww.mycpm.org

4-5NDIA Gulf Coast Chapter 40th Air Armament Symposium Fort Walton Beach, FLwww.ndiagulfcoast.com

6NDIA Picatinny Chapter Annual Firepower Awards LunchRandolph, NJwww.ndiapicatinny.com

12-14Aircraft Survivability Technical Forum 2014 Laurel, MDwww.ndia.org/meetings/5940

December1-4I/ITSECOrlando, FLwww.iitsec.org

2-3Mastering Business Development WorkshopSpringfield, VAwww.ndia.org/meetings/507A

Mastering Business Development®

Sept. 3-4, 2014 San Diego, CADec. 2-3, 2014 Springfield, VA

A two-day workshop focusing on the thinking, process, discipline and

core competencies required for winning business.

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“This course changed the total way I approach new prospects.” Dr. Lynn Snyder, Rolls Royce North America

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“The MBD training workshop I at-tended brought together everything it took me one painful decade to learn

and laid it all out clearly and efficiently in two days.” Manager, Ball Aerospace

& Technologies Corp.

For more information and online registration, visit our website: www.ndia.org or contact our Operations Department at (703) 247-9464

42 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

N D I A F E A T U R E D E V E N T S

“More Efficient and Effective T&E

in the Era of Declining Budgets”

• New location in downtown Washington, DC• Confirmed speakers include

the Hon. Frank Kendall & the Hon. J. Michael Gilmore

• Features the Hollis Award Luncheon (July 22) and the Testers of the Year Award

Luncheon (July 23)

29th AnnuAl nAtionAl test & evAluAtion ConferenCe

Washington, DC • July 21-23, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4910

“Collaboration for Fuzing Challenges”

The NDIA Fuze Conference welcomes the participation of domestic and inter-national fuze designers, manufacturers, component suppliers, and both government and industry research organizations and their science and engineering professionals. Presentation and discussion of over 70 technical papers, as well as Army, Air Force and Navy S&T strategy discussions will enable fuze scientists, engineers and designers to better meet the current and future needs of the warfighter.

Newark, NJ • July 29-31, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4560

57th AnnuAl fuze ConferenCe

“What Does the Next Era of Ground Robotics Hold?”

Join over 300 senior defense professionals from government, industry and the military, including: tactical users, concept developers, trainers, logisticians and government labs to discuss emerging trends and new, efficient and effective ground robotic technologies.

Panels and keynote addresses will cover:• open architecture• enhancing mission effectiveness through teaming• test and evaluation• service-specific research and development• lethal autonomous weapons• synergy with parallel markets, and • user experiences from war fighters

Hyattsville, MD • August 13-14, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4380

Ground robotiCs CApAbilities ConferenCe & exhibition

MDA’s Office of Small Business Pro-grams has joined forces with National Defense Industry Association to bring you the NDIA Annual Missile Defense Small Business Conference. This year’s conference will highlight:

• Information relevant to MDA’s program requirements• An overview of MDA’s upcoming procurements• A successful proposal response boot camp and• Provide opportunities for matchmaking with MDA program offices, the MDA Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP), MDA prime contractors and other agencies located on Redstone Arsenal

ndiA’s AnnuAl Missile defense sMAll business proGrAMs ConferenCe

Huntsville, AL • July 23-24, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4160

J u l y 2 0 1 4 • N a t i o N a l D e f e N s e 43

Small Business & Leveling the Competitive Field for Government Contracts

Legislative experts, program managers, PEO’s, and customers from across the military ser-vices, DHS, and other federal agencies will

address actual, upcoming acquisition require-ments for FY15 and beyond, focusing on small

business opportunities, and the timing for release of solicitations.

11th NatioNal Small BuSiNeSS CoNfereNCe

Springfield, VA • September 9-10, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4140

N D I A F E A T U R E D E V E N T S

• Get exposure to the most current state-of-the-art technology in ballistics. Interact with some

of the world’s leading experts in the field of ballistics technology.

• Meet other professionals with similar interests and experiences. Opportunity to meet and

discuss technology with other professionals in your field of expertise. Cultivate communication, business interests and cooperative development.

• Have an opportunity to present, exhibit, and share your scientific research and development

with an international group of professionals. Receive individual feedback and

interaction on your work.

This jointly sponsored symposium provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of classified, export-controlled,

and limited distribution technical papers in the areas of ballistics, weapons effectiveness, and bomb and warhead

technology. Due to the SECRET/NOFORN classified level and nature of material to be discussed, participation is limited to appropriately cleared US citizens occupying positions within

DoD, DoD Contractors, DoE, FBI, CIA, and DHS.

WarheadS aNd BalliStiCS ClaSSified SympoSium

Atlanta, GA • September 22-26, 2014• www.ndia.org/meetings/4210

28th iNterNatioNal SympoSium oN BalliStiCS

Monterey, CA • August 4-7, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4480

S&T Opportunities to Strengthen Relationships in the Asia-Pacific Region

Past iterations of POST have experienced participation from fourteen partner nations and a wide variety of representatives from Industry, Academia and DOD/DOE/Interagency labs and activities. The 2014 POST will provide a unique opportunity to establish relationships with a large variety of government, industry and academia counterparts with the common goal of seeking S&T opportunities in the Pacific AoR.

paCifiC operatioNal SCieNCe & teChNology CoNfereNCe

Honolulu, HI • August 26-29, 2014 • www.ndia.org/meetings/4540

Battelle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .battelle .org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

FLIR Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .flir .com/380HDc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Fuel Safe ARM-USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .arm-usa .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The Harmon Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . usafa .org/AreasOfGiving/Corporate_Giving . . . . . . . . . . . .31

Propricer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .propricer .com/ndm07 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

RP Advanced Mobile Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .RPAMS .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 2

Sierra Nevada Corp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .sncorp .com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4

SKB Corporation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .skbcases .com/military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Triple Canopy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .triplecanopy .com/SOF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Cover 3

Virginia Economic Development Partnership . . . . . . www .ExportVirginia .org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Yellow Ribbon Fund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www .yellowribbonfund .org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

44 N at i o N a l D e f e N s e • J u ly 2 0 1 4

For information on advertising in National Defense, contact the International Advertising Headquarters or your regional advertising office.

Vice President, AdVertising Dino K. Pignotti(703) 247–2541 Fax: (703) 522-4602dpignotti@ndia.org

cOOrdinAtOr, AdVertising Mike Harrell(703) 247–2576 Fax: (703) 522-4602mharrell@ndia.org

Advertising Headquarters is located at:2111 Wilson Blvd., Suite 400Arlington, VA 22201Advertising Fax: (703) 522-4602

AdVertising regiOnAl Offices

• northeastern United states & canada (CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT)

Jo B. Lievsay, Partner(256) 233–6925Fax: (703) 522–4602Natl_Def_Lievsay@att.net

Lievsay Associates25433 Queensbury Dr., Athens, AL 35613

• southeastern United states and Metro dc Area (AL, FL, GA, KY, MD, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV & DC)

Jim Barros (805) 584-2130Fax: (805) 584-3796jim@barrossales.com

6480 Katherine Road # 72 Simi Valley, CA 93063

• south central United states(AR, KS, LA, MO, OK, TX)

Bill Powell(281) 251–0565Fax: (281) 251–8555citadel62@aol.com

J/J/H/S Inc.18103 Mahogany Forest Drive Spring (Houston), TX 77379

• Western and north central United states(AK, AZ, CA, CO, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, MI, MN, MT, ND, NE, NM, NV, OH, OR, SD, UT, WA, WI, WY)

Jim Barros (805) 584-2130Fax: (805) 584-3796jim@barrossales.com

6480 Katherine Road # 72 Simi Valley, CA 93063

international Advertising Headquarters

littoral combat ship■ The Navy’s newest ship class has been cut nearly in half from more than 50 to just 32 ships, but could be cut further if the Navy remains unhappy with its survivability and lethality. What will be the outcome of an ongoing analysis of alternatives that has brought dozens of shipyards back into the competition to build some version of a ship that can perform in global littoral seas?

laser Weapons■ The Navy has deployed its first solid-state laser weapon aboard the afloat forward staging base USS Ponce and is testing its effectiveness against various aerial and sea-borne threats. National Defense investigates the future of directed-energy weapons and their promise to reduce cost and logistics associated with maritime munitions.

cyber Warfare■ Attracting cyber security professionals into the government has always been a difficult task. A ponderous hiring system, the need for security clearances and higher wages in the private sector are three of the main reasons why federal agencies have a hard time attracting talent. There are new programs that are trying to circumvent some of these problems in order to bring the next generation of cyber warriors into the fold. tactical communications■ Communicating over long distances over the vast expanses of oceans has always been a challenge for the Navy, but most of those

problems have been ironed out over the years. As the Arctic becomes an increasingly important strategic region, communicating beyond the line of sight will be a challenge because the infrastructure is not in place. New satellite systems hold the most prom-ise to fill this gap. Unmanned systems■ Buoyed by the success of the K-MAX helicopter, which conducted unmanned cargo operations in Afghanistan, companies are pouring money into autonomy technol-ogies that will give aircraft, ground vehicles and ships the ability to transport equip-ment without having an operator onboard. The Army and Marine Corps are assessing autonomous truck convoys this summer. In recent months, companies such as Rolls-Royce and Sikorsky have announced plans to build unmanned ships and helicopters, respectively. Could unmanned systems rev-olutionize the way the military transports supplies?

Amphibious ships■ The Marine Corps relies on its amphibi-ous ships to move Marines and equipment all over the world, but officials are worried that their current 29-vessel fleet will not be enough to meet requirements. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert has said it could make do with 38 ships, but the service can only afford to grow its fleet to 33 ships over the next decade. National Defense explores how the Marine Corps could solve this problem.

JULy 2014 Index of AdvertisersInteract with the companies whose products and services are advertised in National Defense.

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