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09 Mar 22. F-35 Program Stagnated in 2021 but DOD Testing Office Hiding Full Extent of Problem. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program appears to be in a state of suspended development, with little progress made in 2021 toward improving its lackluster performance. The latest report by the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) reveals stagnation and even backsliding in some fleet reliability measures.
And that’s just the public DOT&E report.
In an unprecedented move, DOT&E is concealing many of the key details of the F-35’s poor performance. For the first time ever, the testing office created a non-public “controlled unclassified information” version of its report, and although there is much overlap between the two versions, the meaningful details about the ever-troubled program are only included in the non-public one.
One thing to note about so-called controlled unclassified information: It is not classified. The label is a tool that some in the federal government misuse to conceal information that could be embarrassing to them, but because the information does not damage national security, they can’t hide it under a classification label. The Project On Government Oversight obtained a copy of the non-public report, and what it clearly shows is that the F-35 program has made few fixes to many of the reliability and performance problems that have prevented the aircraft from meeting the needs of the services. This is information the public must have in order to pressure policymakers to correct the problems that, if uncorrected, could harm U.S. service members and the U.S. national defense mission.
In an unprecedented move, DOT&E is concealing many of the key details of the F-35’s poor performance.
Despite more than 20 years and approximately $62.5 billion spent so far on research and development alone, program officials still haven’t been able to deliver an aircraft that can fly as often as needed or to demonstrate its ability to perform in combat, which places military personnel in jeopardy. Most of the important details can only be found in the non-public version of the report, but some key findings are available in the public version:
- The F-35’s availability rates “plateaued” over most of 2021 and then declined in the final months of the year.
- Program leaders abandoned the efforts to complete the troubled Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) and instead decided to build a new network called Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN). The new system, meant to anticipate maintenance problems and track parts and repair processes, runs faster and is more deployable than ALIS but is already behind schedule and has some of the same cyber vulnerabilities.
- The Joint Simulation Environment, meant to be a high-fidelity and fully validated and verified simulator to test the F-35’s high-end capabilities, is now more than four years behind schedule. A full-production decision can’t be made until the planned 64 tests in the simulation can be completed.
- The F-35 program’s modernization effort, an effort to complete the delivery of capabilities that should have been included under the original development contract, is behind schedule and has done little to reduce the high number of unresolved design flaws.
The Department of Defense awarded Lockheed Martin with the coveted Joint Strike Fighter development contract on October 26, 2001. The high expectations for an affordable futuristic fighter jet quickly crashed against reality. Despite the fact that development costs have more than doubled and delays have set the F-35 back by nearly a decade, the program has yet to deliver a fully developed aircraft.
While the F-35 program experienced a few marginal improvements in some reliability categories, the overall trend shows that the fleet’s performance remains below the Defense Department’s standards and is even getting worse in some categories.
According to the non-public version of the testing report, F-35 aircraft availability rates “plateaued” in 2021 and then declined starting in June. The services set an availability rate goal of 65%. For an aircraft fleet, 65% is a low bar since 75% to 80% is the accepted standard for other programs. The fleet-wide average availability rate for the F-35 was 61%. The services calculate an aircraft fleet’s availability rate as the percentage of aircraft that are mission capable and in the possession of its operating squadron, not in depot-level maintenance.
The testing office made no mention at all about the program’s mission capable rates or the even more relevant performance metric for a multi-role aircraft like the F-35, full mission capable rates. The mission capable rate is calculated by each military unit and is the percentage of aircraft ready to perform at least one of its assigned missions. An aircraft just able to take off is counted as being mission capable whether it can perform any of its actual combat roles or not. The services prefer to cite this measurement over full mission capable rates because the former is a much lower standard and easier to meet. A fully mission capable aircraft is one that is able to perform all of its assigned missions.
That information is vital to determine how effective the program truly is. Luckily, other federal agencies provided some of that information. The Government Accountability Office included them in a July 2021 report. The GAO found that the entire F-35 fleet averaged a full mission capable rate of 39% in 2020, which was an improvement from the 32% the year before. The Air Force’s F-35A variant performed the best with a fleet average of 54% that year, a rate of performance that is still far below the 80% mission capable rate needed for an effective aircraft fleet (and even significantly below the program’s low 65% availability standard). The Marine Corps’ fleet of short takeoff and landing F-35Bs and the Navy’s fleet of F-35Cs, which are tailored for use on aircraft carriers, lag far behind. The F-35B fleet’s full mission capable rate got worse between 2019 and 2020, dropping from 23% to 15%. The F-35C fleet showed some improvement during that period, but that is not saying much. That fleet’s rate went from 6.4% to 6.8%.
The Congressional Budget Office also provided useful information the testing office omitted from its unclassified reports this year. In January 2022, it released a report specifically about availability rates of aircraft in the Air Force and the Navy. The report concluded that the aircraft fleets of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps (part of the Department of the Navy), declined across the board but that “the decline was more marked” in the Navy.
Amazingly, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the Air Force’s own system for tracking availability figures, the Reliability and Maintainability Information System or REMIS, “does not accurately track availability or flying hours” for the conventional take off variant F-35A. The office went on to report that the data for the Marine Corps’ F-35B and the Navy’s F-35C “did not match other reports of the availability of those aircraft.” For these reasons, the Congressional Budget Office simply excluded the F-35 program, currently the highest profile aircraft program, from its analysis.
The non-public DOT&E report explains that the F-35 fleet’s availability rates increased temporarily because program officials surged spare parts to some units, and because the newest aircraft delivered from the factory had the effect of reducing the percentage of aircraft being pulled from service to send to the maintenance depots for modifications or major repairs. What that means is the F-35 did not suddenly become a more reliable aircraft in 2021. It means that it takes extraordinary effort to keep the fleet operating even close to the required levels and suggests that those availability rates are not sustainable long-term. (Source: Pogo)
09 Mar 22. Defense Official Says Indo-Pacific Is the Priority Theater; China Is DOD’s Pacing Challenge. The Indo-Pacific region remains the priority theater for the Defense Department, and China remains the pacing challenge for the U.S. military, Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs, said today.
The United States is a Pacific power and works with allies and partners throughout the Indo-Pacific to uphold the free and open regional order, he told the House Armed Services Committee. “At the same time, the region faces mounting security challenges, particularly from the People’s Republic of China, … which has adopted a more coercive and assertive approach to advancing its authoritarian interests,” he said. China is not the only adversary in the Pacific. North Korea is developing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. This constitutes a clear threat to the United States and its allies, Ratner said.
But China is the pacing threat, and Ratner said the defense budget that is scheduled to be presented to Congress later this month will reflect that reality. The budget request will be based on the needs of the new National Defense Strategy, which will be unveiled soon.
“We are prioritizing capabilities relevant to the China challenge to enable a joint force that is lethal and able to strike adversary forces and systems at range,” he said.
The force and capabilities must be resilient and able to gain information advantage and maintain command and control through cyber and kinetic attacks, Ratner said. The United States military must be able to field more lethal forces that are agile, fast and able to be sustained. “Alongside these capabilities, we’re building a combat-credible force posture in the Indo-Pacific, working toward a more distributed, lethal and resilient forward posture essential to addressing the full suite of challenges we face in the region,” he said.
At the heart of any strategy for the DOD is America’s greatest asymmetric advantage — the unparalleled network of allies and partners. “As I look across the region, I see our defense ties growing at a rapid pace with the U.S.-Japan alliance as the cornerstone of regional peace,” Ratner said. “We are deepening our defense cooperation with the Japan Self-Defense Forces, optimizing our alliance force posture, and integrating the alliance into a broader regional security network of like-minded nations.”
The U.S.-South Korean alliance remains “the linchpin of peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in the Indo Pacific region,” he said.
He said the U.S.-Australia alliance is surging forward with considerable momentum. Australia was already one of America’s closest allies, but the ties in all domains of combat have gotten closer. The announcement of the Australia, United Kingdom, United States security partnership further cements those ties, he said.
Ratner also said U.S. officials are also seeing historic progress in a major defense partnership with India. He said they continue to integrate and operationalize day-to-day defense cooperation and logistics, enhance information sharing, and increase bilateral cooperation in emerging domains such as space and cyberspace.
DOD is also working with the nations of Southeast Asia to strengthen capabilities and increase interoperability, Ratner said. These include Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Timor Leste.
Ratner also addressed China’s action regarding Taiwan. “Consistent with our commitment to our ‘One China’ policy, the Taiwan Relations Act, the three joint communiques, and the six assurances, we’re focused on maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” he said.
He noted that if China is DOD’s pacing challenge, then “Taiwan is the pacing scenario.”
“We aim to deter and deny PRC aggression through a combination of Taiwan’s own defenses, its partnership with the United States, and growing support from like-minded democracies,” he said. (Source: US DoD)
09 Mar 22. Guard, Reserve would get 20 more C-130J transport aircraft under budget deal. The proposed budget bill that would fund the U.S. government for the rest of fiscal 2022 provides funding for 20 more C-130J Super Hercules aircraft for the Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard. Sixteen of the added C-130Js would go to the Air National Guard to modernize two operational wings at an additional cost of $1.8bn, according to a summary of the omnibus spending bill released by congressional appropriators Wednesday. The remaining four, which would add $429m to the spending bill, would go to the Reserve. The increased spending for new C-130Js — now totaling nearly $2.4bn, up from almost $129 million in the administration’s budget request — would be a boon to Lockheed Martin, which makes the mobility aircraft. It also represents the bulk of the increase to the Air Force’s aircraft procurement spending lawmakers added to the administration’s FY22 budget request. The original request called for $15.7bn in aircraft procurement spending, but the omnibus bill would spend $18.4bn. The Air National Guard is now in the midst of a multiyear effort to upgrade its mobility fleet and replace its three-decade-old C-130H Hercules planes with modern C-130Js. C-130Js have improved engines with six-blade propellers that provide more thrust and efficiency than their predecessor’s four-blade propeller engines, allowing it to fly farther and faster. They also have digital avionics, upgraded displays, improved navigation and radar systems, more cargo space, a digital autopilot, and the need for a smaller aircrew.
In November 2020, the Air Force announced it had selected Air National Guard bases in Kentucky, West Virginia, Texas and Georgia to receive 24 C-130Js to replace their aging “H” models. At the time, Democrats objected to the Air Force’s surprise decision to select a fourth base — Savannah Air National Guard Base in Georgia — shortly before the runoff elections for both Senate seats there.
The Air National Guard’s director, Lt. Gen. Mike Loh, said in a roundtable with reporters last year that modernizing the force’s mobility fleet, including upgrading older C-130Hs, is crucial.
“In order to keep old aircraft around, it’s costing me a lot of money,” Loh said at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber conference in Maryland in September 2021.
The budget deal also would considerably increase spending on C-130 modifications, from the administration’s original $29m request to $272m.
This would include another $151m for upgrading older C-130s with eight-blade propellers, and another added $79m for engine enhancements.
These eight-blade composite propellers were designed to make C-130Hs more efficient as well as to provide more thrust during takeoff and while climbing. In an explanatory statement, appropriators highlighted the importance of maintaining the C-130′s production line in light of diminishing manufacturing sources. The budget agreement includes an additional $26.3m to pay for the Air Force’s C-130J diminishing manufacturing source requirements in FY22, increasing the administration’s original $113.3m request. The omnibus budget also would add four MQ-9 drones to the administration’s original request at a price tag of $92m, as well as eight additional UH-N1 helicopter replacements. (Source: Defense News)
08 Mar 22. Full rate production for F-35 is at least another year away.
“It’s not like, you know, Candy Crush Saga or Wordle, or even the video game your kids play,” Lt. Gen. Eric Fick said of the Joint Simulation Environment needed to carry out F-35 testing. “It doesn’t just have to look right, it has to be right at the digital level.”
The Pentagon has yet to approve a new schedule laying out when F-35 Joint Strike Fighter goes into full rate production, but it won’t be until after summer 2023 at the very earliest, the Pentagon’s program executive said today.
At the heart of the issue is the Joint Simulation Environment — a virtual testbed that allows the F-35 to go up against the most high-end Russian and Chinese threats. Only after the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 conducts 64 test runs in the JSE will it be allowed to proceed from operational tests to a “Milestone C” decision, where the Pentagon’s top acquisition authority declares the jet ready for full rate production.
After multiple delays due to technical problems and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pentagon is finally conducting component validation of the JSE, which should wrap up this May, F-35 program executive officer Lt. Gen. Eric Fick told reporters at a roundtable. System verification tests are slated to occur through this fall, allowing the F-35 to finally conduct its 64 JSE tests in the summer of 2023.
Fick said that the current JSE test schedule eliminates the possibility of a Milestone C declaration in fiscal 2022, which ends this September. And while he wouldn’t rule out a potential full rate production decision by the end of FY23, he acknowledged that “there’s not a lot of leeway” in the current schedule, and that if the F-35’s simulation tests “were to slip by any appreciable margin” it could lead to further delay.
The Pentagon had initially planned to approve the F-35 for full-rate production at the end of 2019, and has had to continually push out its plans. Currently, there is no date set for Milestone C.
In December, Fick said he hoped to finalize a new Milestone C date by the end of January, but he said today that the Pentagons’ acquisition and sustainment authority has not signed off on a new program baseline schedule.
The Joint Simulation Environment is conceptualized to allow fighter jets to train against high-end threats that would be impossible to simulate in live training — think large, operationally relevant numbers of advanced Chinese or Russian air defense systems or enemy stealth fighters equipped with high-end electronic warfare systems, sensors and weapons.
The environment must be able to accurately simulate not only the radar cross section, weapons and sensors of the F-35 but also all of the other aircraft and weapon systems in the environment, Fick said.
“It’s not like, you know, Candy Crush Saga or Wordle, or even the video game your kids play,” he said. “It doesn’t just have to look right, it has to be right at the digital level.”
Although the full rate production decision is a symbolically important one that signals that a program has worked through the problems of development and is ready for operations, in some respects the F-35 program, which took its first flight back in 2006, is already functioning as if Milestone C has been declared.
In 2021, Lockheed delivered 142 F-35s, and is ramping up production to hit a max of 156 jets a year by 2023. All three US services that fly the fighter — the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — have declared the F-35 ready for combat, and the jet has been periodically used to destroy weapons caches and key infrastructure held by the Islamic State terrorist group. The jets have been sold to a number of allied nations, and Israel revealed this week that a pair had downed two Iranian-made drones in 2021.
Currently, a total of six American F-35s are deployed to Estonia, Latvia and Romania, as NATO hopes to deter Russia from further aggression in Eastern Europe as its war with Ukraine rages.
If American F-35 pilots in the region were attacked by Russian jets during their deployment, Fick said that they would be well-prepared despite the F-35 not having gone through testing in the Joint Simulation Environment.
“We understand the threats that the F-35 is going up against today,” Fick said. “We understand the threats largely propagated throughout Europe, and those were the threats that the airplane was developed to counter over the course of the last 20 years or more. And so I think we’re very confident in our aircraft’s ability to fight in that [area of responsibility].” (Source: Breaking Defense.com)
08 Mar 22. Southcom Commander Says Partnerships Key to National Defense in Western Hemisphere. In just four months of leading U.S. Southern Command, there’s one thing that’s become apparent to Army Gen. Laura J. Richardson. The key to addressing security threats in South America, and by extension to the U.S. itself, doesn’t just lie with America’s own military but with the militaries of the partner nations already there.
“In my initial travels in the region, it has become obvious to me that our partners are our best defense,” Richardson told members of the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. “We must use all available levers to strengthen our partnerships with the 28 like-minded democracies in this hemisphere, who understand the power of working together to counter these shared threats.”
Threats in South America, Richardson said, include transnational criminal organization as well as the meddling of both China and Russia.
In South America, she said, China continues to expand economic, diplomatic, technological, informational and military influence, which challenges U.S. influence in those areas.
“Without U.S. leadership, negative PRC influence in this region could soon resemble the self-serving predatory influence it now holds in Africa,” she said.
Also, a threat in South America is Russia, Richardson said.
“Russia, a more immediate threat, is increasing its engagements in the hemisphere, as Putin looks to keep his options open and maintain relationships in our neighborhood,” she said.
Earlier this year, Russia’s deputy prime minister, Yury Borisov, said he could neither affirm nor exclude Russia would send military assets to Cuba or Venezuela, Richardson told lawmakers.
Then, just days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Borisov visited Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. All are nations Richardson said maintain close ties with Russia and which offer Russia a foothold in the western hemisphere.
“Finally, recent visits between the presidents of Brazil and Argentina with Putin in Russia, demonstrate and concerning potential broadening of Russian ties in the region,” she said.
Farther north, Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command said the U.S. needs to do more to be ready for operations in the Arctic.
One thing he said is needed now is presence and persistence in the Arctic, and all the infrastructure required to do that. That could include, he said, maritime infrastructure, such as ports deep enough for cruisers, destroyers or Coast Guard cutters, for instance.
Also needed are communications capabilities to operate north of the 65th parallel and infrastructure from which to operate daily air missions not only in Alaska but across Canada and into Greenland as well.
One lawmaker asked VanHerck how Northern Command plans to improve training for U.S. forces to ensure they are ready to operate in the Arctic.
Right now, VanHerck said, the U.S. doesn’t have a ready force to operate in the Arctic, but he said he hopes he’ll see efforts to fix that in the fiscal year 2023 budget.
“I’m … encouraged by the strategies — the department has a strategy and the services all have strategies,” he said. “Now the question is, are we going to fund those strategies? I look forward to seeing the FY23 budget to see if we do fund as part of the Arctic strategy, the actual capabilities that you’re talking about.” (Source: US DoD)
08 Mar 22. NORTHCOM needs better sensors to protect against Russian submarine, missile threat. The upcoming budget request could include investments in maritime domain awareness close to home, with improved sensors to detect Russian naval threats to the homeland.
Commander of U.S. Northern Command Gen. Glen VanHerck told the House Armed Services Committee the technologies the U.S. needs to bolster its homeland defense against Russian submarines and missiles are currently available and in use by other countries around the world — meaning the Defense Department could move out quickly on buying and fielding them.
“Russia is the primary military threat to the homeland,” he wrote in written testimony ahead of a March 8 hearing before the committee, adding that “Russia has fielded a new family of advanced air-, sea-, and ground-based cruise missiles to threaten critical civilian and military infrastructure.”
“The AS-23a air-launched cruise missile, for instance, features an extended range that enables Russian bombers flying well outside NORAD radar coverage — and in some cases from inside Russian airspace — to threaten targets throughout North America. This capability challenges my ability to detect an attack and mount an effective defense. In the maritime domain, Russia has fielded the first two of their nine planned Severodvinsk-class guided missile submarines, which are designed to deploy undetected within cruise missile range of our coastlines to threaten critical infrastructure during an escalating crisis. This challenge will be compounded in the next few years as the Russian Navy adds the Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile to the Severodvinsk’s arsenal,” his written testimony continues.
During the hearing, Rep. Joe Courtney, the Democrat from Connecticut who chairs HASC’s seapower and projection forces committee, asked about two solutions VanHerck mentioned in the written testimony: an Integrated Undersea Surveillance System and an Over-the-Horizon Radar system.
Courtney said the Severodvinsk submarines, also called Yasen-class attack subs, are typically thought of as a U.S. European Command problem, not a NORTHCOM one, and he wanted to know what those two sensor systems would mean for homeland defense and if they could be set up quickly.
VanHerck said modernizing and expanding the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System would be a collaboration between the U.S. Navy and partners such as Canada to “track and maintain awareness of submarine positions around the globe. [It’s] a very challenging environment in the central Atlantic, when they get on the mid-Atlantic ridge, to be able to track them — so to be able to hold them accountable, if you will, before they become a threat is important.”
The general elaborated in his written remarks that the ability to see the adversary is, itself, a form of deterrence.
“I need improved domain awareness to increase warning time and provide leaders at all levels with as many options as possible to deter or defend against an attack. Global all-domain awareness will generate a significant deterrent effect by making it clear that we can see potential aggressors wherever they are, which inherently casts doubt on their ability to achieve their objectives,” he wrote.
VanHerck told Courtney that NORTHCOM would continue to work with EUCOM on the undersea surveillance system, and that it would also need to be fielded in the Pacific as well. He expressed confidence that the fiscal 2023 budget request would show support for this initiative.
On the Over-the-Horizon Radar system, VanHerck said this system would look out about 4,000 miles in the maritime, air and space domains. Traditional radar systems are limited by the curvature of Earth, and this new system would give significantly better early warning capability compared to existing systems.
“OTHR is a proven technology that will provide persistent surveillance of the distant northern approaches to the United States and mitigate the limitations of the Cold War-era North Warning System, while contributing to broader domain awareness challenges including space domain awareness. The ability to detect air-breathing and spaceborne threats in the approaches to Canada and the United States will be significantly enhanced by fielding OTHR as soon as possible,” he wrote in his testimony.
VanHerck said the radar is “something we can move out on relatively quickly, as well as undersea surveillance,” given that the technology already exists and is in use by other nations.
The general made clear in his written testimony, though, that the quick fielding of these two systems is just a first step in protecting the homeland from increasingly sophisticated Russian submarine threats.
“Russia has the capability today to hold targets in the United States and Canada at risk with long-range air- and submarine-launched conventional cruise missiles. These highly precise and stealthy systems highlight the need for policy determinations regarding what must be defended along with continued demonstrations of resiliency and hardening,” he wrote.
In addition to fielding the sensor systems and sharing the collected data globally, to “successfully deter aggression and defend the homeland, we must be able to detect and track the submarines, aircraft, and surface ships that carry weapons systems capable of striking the homeland before they depart from their home stations. We also need to improve our capability to defeat those launch platforms before they are within range of their targets.” (Source: Defense News)
08 Mar 22. DOD Wants to Shepherd Small Business Innovators. The Defense Department needs innovation now — and too often the best new technology from America’s small business innovators dies before it can become a program of record for the military, said the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. Heidi Shyu said the DOD spends over $2bn annually on Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, in a variety of technology areas.
“I’m personally engaging with small businesses, small business roundtables to understand the impediments in doing business with them and what are the impediments that they see that we can help them out in terms of removing the roadblocks,” said Shyu said yesterday at the National Defense Industrial Association’s science and technology conference in Hawaii.
One road block the department hopes to overcome involves how some technologies that originate in small business are unable to make it to fruition due to lack of funding.
“We are submitting a legislative proposal to enable more funding of multiple tranches of Phase II funding,” she said. “Phase I funding is usually pretty small, $50 to $75k over a period of six months — basically to flesh out your concept.”
The second phase, she said, is for a small business to think about developing a prototype. She said funding there typically ranges around $1.5m dollars.
“After Phase II, SBIR ends,” she said. “Phase III is up to the program of record, the services, to fund, so they have to catch the football. The problem here is typically the technology’s not mature enough at a six to enable a successful transition into a program of record.”
What that means, she said, is that promising technology might make it through Phase II, but never make it to Phase III — adoption by a military service — because it’s not quite ready yet to make that transition. So, any hope a small business might have of putting their new technology into the hands of service members comes to an end.
“What I would like to do is have Congress approve to allow us to form multiple tranches of funding — Phase IIa, Phase IIb, Phase IIc — so we can continue to mature the technology and bridge over, I call it ‘the valley of death,’ for small companies,” she said. “This way we have a much higher probability of helping them to transition into a program of record.”
Shyu also said the office of research and engineering is redesigning its website to make it easier for small businesses with ideas to make inroads with DOD.
“We are also in the process of rebuilding the USD R&E website … to help small business, especially, to navigate the Byzantine DOD,” she said. “A lot of the small businesses, they have no idea who to even go talk to … it’s this giant wall in front of them. And, hopefully, once we get our website up and running, they can be able to Google and input whatever product that they have to help them figure out who to go talk to.” (Source: US DoD)
07 Mar 22. New Pentagon strategy to bring in small businesses coming soon. A new Pentagon strategy to maximize small business participation in defense contracting is in the works for this spring, defense officials told Defense News. The Pentagon’s first small business strategy since 2019 would come amid a decline in the number of contracts awarded to small businesses and as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has acknowledged the barriers to work with his department are too steep. The strategy would guide efforts to attract more non-traditional companies, new entrants and innovators, according to the director of DoD’s Office of Small Business Programs, Farooq Mitha.
“It’s going to be: How do we all work towards increasing small business participation, because we’ve seen a decline over the past decade in our prime contractors that are small ― a pretty significant decline,” Mitha said. “The bulk of it is how to do make things easier from a structure, engagement and a policy perspective.”
The strategy comes after Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks pledged to create more opportunities for small businesses. She’s acknowledged the U.S. defense industrial base shrank by over 40% over the past decade and warned that if the trend continues, the country could lose an additional 15,000 suppliers over the next 10 years.
The National Defense Industrial Association, which has noticed the shrinking pool for years, warned in a recent report of headwinds for the industrial base that could lead to production or innovation shortages, or further discourage potential new vendors from competing.
The strategy is likely to make recommendations around long-term planning for initiatives like the Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, and Small Business Technology Transfer, or STTR, programs ― both considered important vehicles for the military to bring in new vendors and disruptive technologies.
Without congressional action, the latest reauthorization for the government-wide SBIR program expires at the end of the current fiscal year.
“If we want to increase the [defense industrial] base, if we want to bring in new entrants, if we want to transition new technologies [into the military], we’ve got to have stability in the programs that are meant to do these things. I think that’s been something that we’ve been laser focused on, and we’ve gotten some feedback from industry on that as well,” Mitha said.
“It’s a national security benefit to the nation and it’s creating new industries and technologies. I don’t think anyone will tell you that it’s not vital, and I think we need to work collectively to make sure that these programs have long-term legs.”
DoD’s report last month on competition within the defense industrial base said a top priority for the department is accelerating contract award timelines for SBIR and STTR programs, which fall under Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu. Those programs achieved a 22-to-1 return on investment on investment in and generated $347m in economic output, the report said.
The nascent strategy will offer further steps to address one of small businesses’ chief complaints, that they have been locked out by “category management,” the name for the government’s efficiency-seeking emphasis on large contract vehicles for common products and services.
Mitha acknowledged category management inadvertently hindered small business participation, but said recent changes at DoD “have helped to get us back on a path of bringing some of these companies in.”
In drafting the strategy, Mitha said his office is also looking at protecting small businesses from investment risk, providing training and information and doing market research on behalf of the acquisition workforce to find small business set-aside contract opportunities.
The strategy is expected to be informed in part by feedback from small businesses themselves after DoD’s Office of Small Business Programs published a solicitation in the Federal Register last fall.
Overall, the effort dovetails with a White House directive last year for federal agencies to increase government contracts to small and disadvantaged businesses, which acknowledges small businesses as major job creators.
“You’ll see a big equity push on how do we leverage the purchasing power of the federal government to bring in and provide more opportunities to underserved communities, and you’ll see more small business enablers to strengthen our supply chains,” Mitha said.
Mitha, who served as a defense industrial policy official in the Obama administration, said there was an emphasis then too, but the accent in the Biden administration is on supply chain and industrial base resilience as well.
“That emphasis makes a really big difference, and I see it in the department now where ― from the secretary, the deputy secretary to other leaders ― small businesses is part of this vernacular, which is really, really important to driving the change that we want to see,” he said.
(Source: Defense News)
02 Mar 22. USMC launches new littoral unit that US adversaries reportedly hate. On Thursday the Marine Corps launched its first ever Marine littoral regiment ― a new unit that already may have the U.S.’s near-peer militaries worried.
“Adversaries do not like this concept at all,” Gen. Eric Smith, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, told reporters at a briefing on Monday. “They don’t like the fact that units are highly mobile, that they have a low signature, and that the adversary doesn’t know where these things are.”
The new 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment will be headquartered out of Marine Corps Base Hawaii and is based around the current 3rd Marine Regiment.
Designed based on potentially thousands of hours of war games, the new unit is set to the be the flagship formation seeing the Corps enter the post Global War on Terror era.
But not everyone is sold on the new concept or buys the Marine Corps’ total confidence of the fear these units may strike in potential enemies.
“It was as if they had entered the mind of our opponents,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and current senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Marine Corps Times.
“I think it would be more accurate to say, ‘In our war games the Chinese player finds it very difficult to track down these platoons,” Cancian said.
Staying undetected
The new littoral regiment will be made up of three elements: a littoral combat team ― consisting of one infantry battalion and one missile battery potentially capable of sinking ships, a littoral anti-air battalion and a combat logistics battalion.
The littoral combat team will be capable of deploying in plus-sized platoon elements ranging from 75 to more than 100 Marines depending on the mission, Smith told reporters.
The Marine Corps envisions using those teams to create and occupy expeditionary advanced bases widely dispersed across the littorals of any future fight.
Those Marines will be able to launch cyberattacks, spot targets and possibly even sink or destroy large enemy ships.
Despite the firepower, the Corps hopes the small size and the dispersed nature of the unit will keep it undetected from enemy sensors for an extended period of time, while the unit’s mobility will allow it to run away unscathed once the enemy does stumble upon it.
Eventually the Corps will have three littoral regiments, all stationed within III Marine Expeditionary Force, Smith said on Monday.
The Marine Corps has been experimenting with the formations and tactics the regiment will implore since the 2020 release of Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger’s Force Design 2030.
Smith said it was those tests that have shown how worried the enemy is about the new Marine Corps formation.
“We’re talking about an organization of 75 Marines … that are inherently mobile and have capabilities to shut down a network to strike an enemy capital warship and then fade away and move again,” Smith said. “Adversaries hate that because they don’t have effective control over the adversary’s plan.”
Smith said he could not give details on how that information was gathered or assessed because it was classified.
‘It’s all very sensible’
The Marine Corps’ hesitancy to publicly provide data about Force Design 2030 tests has caused some to be skeptical of the Corps’ assertion that potential adversaries are shaking in their boots.
“The Marine Corps states that the war games support their concept and maybe they do, but it is not evident,” Cancian said.
But not all are as pessimistic.
Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and current senior research fellow for the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, told Marine Corps Times, “It’s not 100% guaranteed, but I think there’s been a lot of intellectual effort put into it.”
“I think these newly derived solutions will be applicable against a range of tactical scenarios,” Wood said.
Cancian agrees that the Marine Corps needs to modernize and shift its focus toward near-peer threats like China.
But the retired Marine pointed out that this was the first major introduction in Marine Corps war fighting concepts during peace since helicopters were introduced between World War II and the Korean War.
While the Corps has gone through significant changes since the late 1940s, most of those changes came out of weaknesses exposed on battlefields and almost immediately were tested in the fires of war.
By contrast, Force Design 2030 has been developed and tested through simulations and field exercises that allow the Marine Corps to make its own assumptions about the enemy’s capabilities.
“It’s very good that the Marine Corps is conducting them,” Cancian said. “It’s all very sensible, but nobody on the outside has any visibility into them.”
Wood acknowledged it is possible for confirmation bias to make its way into the Marine Corps analysis process.
He noted that it is important for the Marine Corps and outside observers to constantly question these studies and experiments to ensure they hold up. But from his vantage point, the Marine Corps seems to be heading in the right direction.
Though he did not provide many details, Smith said the Corps is constantly listening to small unit leaders running Marines through these exercises to figure out what is working and what is not.
“We are constantly adjusting the exact size of an infantry battalion, the exact number of missiles a unit needs to carry so that it matches our logistics capability, the exact signature that they will put out,” Smith said.
“Those things are constantly in motion, but our cardinal direction has not changed at all and every piece of analysis that we have comes back and says, ‘The adversaries do not like what you’re doing at all,’” Smith said. (Source: glstrade.com/Defense News)
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