LOCATIONS
LAND
13 Dec 12. TenCate Advanced Armour announces the opening of a permanent sales office in the Middle East. Mr Yohann Barnaud, who has been managing TenCate Advanced Armour sales in the Gulf Cooperation Council region and Eastern Europe, has been appointed director. It is part of the TenCate Advanced Armour worldwide growth strategy to expand its local footprint in major markets for armour materials in order to support major defense programs and enhance business sustainability.
13 Dec 12. Raytheon Company has renewed its Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) Level 3 certification rating for Development at the company’s Intelligence and Information Systems (IIS) business. This CMMI Level 3 certification enables IIS to further drive customer success across all sites through efficient program execution built on integrated common processes. IIS first attained CMMI Level 3 for Systems and Software Engineering for all sites in 2006. The business expanded on this achievement by attaining CMMI Level 3 for Development and Integrated Product and Process Development in 2009. This achievement was recertified in October 2012 using CMMI-Development v1.3. In 2012, IIS reached a CMMI Level 3 benchmark that only 52 percent of all U.S. appraisals recorded by the CMMI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University meet. IIS is a leading provider of intelligence and information solutions to the government.
MARITIME
09 Dec 12. The UK Ministry of Defence has awarded BAE Systems a contract worth £1.2bn for Audacious, the fourth submarine in the Astute class. The full contract covers the design, build, test and commissioning programme. First steel was cut in 2007 and Audacious is at an advanced stage of construction at BAE Systems’ site in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The MoD also confirmed that a further £1.5bn has been committed to the Astute programme for the remaining three submarines in the class, which includes early build work on boat 5, Anson, whose keel was laid in October, 2011. Audacious will include a number of design changes to the first three submarines in the Astute class. Most relate to the submarine’s combat system – primarily its command, navigation and sonar systems. For the first time on a Royal Navy submarine this will use a shared computer environment for the different systems, common consoles and cabinets, and “commercial off-the-shelf” hard and software. They will make the system more cost effective and easier to maintain and update. These changes are due to be implemented on the remaining submarines in the class, and have been back-fitted to Boat 3, Artful. The eventual aim is to back-fit the ‘Common Combat System’ to HMS Astute and Ambush, and progressively to the rest of the Royal Navy submarine fleet. Audacious, the fourth of a planned class of seven submarines, is nearly half way through its build programme with all of its pressure hull units now assembled in BAE Systems’ main construction hall, awaiting full combination. The 97m-long Astute class submarines boast a range of world class capabilities. Powered by a sophisticated nuclear propulsion system, the reactor never needs refuelling. The sonar system has the processing power of 2,000 laptops and can track ships 3,000 miles away. Armed with both Tomahawk land attack missiles and Spearfish torpedoes, its missiles have a target range of 1,200 miles with accuracy measured in metres.
09 Dec 12. Funding Spat Could Sink USN Virginia-Class Sub. The U.S. Navy wants it. Industry wants it. Democrats and Republicans want it. Appropriators and authorizers want it. Everybody, it seems, wants to put a second Virginia-class nuclear submarine back in the fiscal 2014 budget, keeping the service and its industrial suppliers on a two-boats-per-year building schedule. But if an agreement isn’t reached before too long, a wonky, inside-the-Beltway disagreement on the kind of money used to pay for the sub could kill it, scuttled by an impasse over funding m