MANAGEMENT ON THE MOVE
LOCATIONS
07 Jan 09. HMS BROCKLESBY: Joining NATO Group. MoD (Navy) announced the departure of the minehunter HMS BROCKLESBY from Portsmouth on 7 Jan 09. The Hunt Class vessel is to form part of a NATO Group, working with a Danish frigate and mine countermeasures ships from Belgium, Germany, Latvia and The Netherlands. HMS BROCKLESBY’s first call will be Copenhagen, where she is to attend a ceremony marking Danish command of the NATO group. A month of Exercises in the Mediterranean is due to be followed by the clearance of live ordnance from the English Channel, the North Sea and the Baltic. The ship is due to return to Portsmouth in July 2009.
Comment: HMS BROCKLESBY is to employ her recently installed Seafox mine warfare system for the second part of her deployment. Seafox is replacing the 25-year old Remote Controlled Mine Disposal System and uses small, underwater drones for the direct disposal of ground and floating mines. Seafox completed live trials with the RN off Gibraltar in February 2008. (Source: DNA DEFENCE NEWS ANALYSIS, Issue 09/03, 12 Jan 09)
08 Jan 09. Type 42 Destroyers: Final Journies. Portsmouth newspapers reported the departure of the former HMS GLASGOW on 8 Jan 09 for a scrapyard in Turkey. Sister-ships CARDIFF and NEWCASTLE had made the journey a month earlier.
Comment: GLASGOW has been described as “one of the world’s luckiest ships”, having survived the Falklands Campaign without casualties after being struck by a bomb which failed to explode. On 21 Jul 04 the then Defence Secretary announced that the three destroyers were to be paid off early and they were decommissioned in 2005. Efforts to effect a commercial sale for at least one of the vessels were unsuccessful.
09 Jan 09. General Dynamics NASSCO today delivered the first ship of its new line of product carriers to U.S. Shipping Partners. The ship will be christened and named the Golden State in a 6 p.m. ceremony tomorrow at theNASSCO shipyard.
06 Jan 09. Technologists, Inc., Rosslyn, Va., was awarded on Jan. 5, 2009, a $96,090,519 firm fixed price contract for the construction of an Afghanistan National Police National Training Center. Work will be performed in Maydan Wardak, Afghanistan, and is expected to be completed by Mar. 31, 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Web bids were solicited on Oct. 1, 2008, and 13 bids were received. U.S. Army Engineer District, Afghanistan, is the contracting activity (W917PM-09-C-0005).
14 Jan 09. Savi, a Lockheed Martin company, has gone live with an automated asset and inventory tracking system at the Sierra Army Depot in northern California. The depot is a 59-square-mile complex encompassing about 1,200 buildings that serves as an Expeditionary Logistics Center for the storage, maintenance, assembly and containerization of operational stocks and other items – from depot to foxhole. The Depot Total Asset Visibility and Inventory Management System cuts operational costs and improves efficiency by enabling personnel to reduce hours spent searching for containers, major supplies and asset inventory as they move on, through, and off the facilities. Savi’s total asset management solution also improves asset inventory utilization, and – via automated alerts – speed the monitoring of environmental conditions of medical supplies in the DEPMED area of a major depot. The fully integrated solution leverages the Savi SmartChain® Enterprise Platform and Savi Asset Management Application, which manage real-time information of supplies affixed with active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The Savi solution at the depot is designed to enhance the visibility and management of assets such as containers, trailers, generators and water purification units. In addition, the solution utilizes sensors that monitor the environmental conditions of DEPMEDS, which are “hospitals in a container” and include necessary medical supplies and e