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26 Feb 16. Jacobs contracted to support Australian military combat bridge project. Jacobs Engineering Group has secured a contract from the Australian Department of Defence (DoD) to procure and sustain off-the-shelf military combat bridges.
Awarded by Land Systems Division within DoD’s Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG), the $10.7m contract is to provide support for the Australian military’s Project Land 155.
The company will provide project management, budgeting, logistic support analysis and management to support the project for a three-year period.
The combat bridges will enable land forces to cross a range of wet and dry gaps during combat operations.
Jacobs Senior Aerospace and Technology vice-president Darren Kraabel said: “We have seen first-hand the benefits of this approach through our extensive experience in implementing similar managing contractor models for the US DoD to help procure and sustain everything from aircraft and air operations centres to individual soldier protective equipment.
“We recognise a key factor in the successful delivery of Project Land 155 is to continually seek ways to reduce costs throughout the project delivery lifecycle.
“The documented savings we have helped achieve in the US using similar procurement models is indicative of the kind of savings we expect the model to deliver for CASG.”
Earlier this month, the company secured a $436m contract from the US DoD to provide test support services for its Aberdeen Test Center (ATC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland.
Jacobs had already been contracted twice by the US DoD to support the ATC through two predecessor contracts and one bridge contract. (Source: army-technology.com)
25 Feb 16. Krauss-Maffei Wegmann has acquired Battle Tank Dismantling GmbH Koch, based in Rockensussra, Germany. The company was formerly owned by the Scholz Group, a world leader in steel and scrap recycling. Battle Tank Dismantling and its predecessors have been demilitarizing, dismantling and scrapping weapons of war since 1991. It is the only company in Germany possessing all respective licenses, and it runs Europe’s only NATOcertified tank dismantling plant. So far it has destroyed and disposed of some 16,000 military vehicles, including more than 1,800 main battle tanks and roughly 6,000 wheeled and tracked armored vehicles.
24 Feb 16. The $2.6bn Overrun That Never Was: A DC Cautionary Tale. This morning, Sen. Dick Durbin set off heart attacks across the Army when he said the service’s $13.8bn Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle program was a whopping $2.6bn over budget. AMPV is the last survivor of 14 years of cancelled major programsand deliberately designed to be modest, achievable, and affordable, so the previously unheard-of overrun shocked everyone at the hearing. Reporters and Army officials scrambled as the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, promised to look into the problem.
Except, well, there wasn’t one. The entire contretemps traces to a single passage in an October report by the normally authoritative Congressional Research Service, which in turn cited a single news article from our colleagues at Inside Defense, which had, unfortunately, compared fiscal apples and oranges. The article, run February 17th, was corrected the next day — but CRS apparently missed that. The $2.6bn overrun? Never existed. AMPV is on budget and, if anything, a little under.
So as far as the Army leadership and its procurement is concerned, this is a non-story. As far as Washington is concerned, however, it’s a cautionary tale. One overworked staffer — and they’re all overworked — can pick a false statistic, feed it to his or her boss, and create all sorts of uproar.
The good news here is how quickly the mistake was caught. There are other unfounded figures that get repeated so