Tom Arnsmeyer has been appointed vice president of the Homeland Security Solutions product line for Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC, Reston, Va.
Kristen Giddens Pinto-Coelho has been named communications manager. Alison Morgan has been appointed vice president of business development and marketing.
The U.S. Navy's Mobile User Objective system (MUOS) completed its critical design review on schedule last month, prime contractor Lockheed Martin announced April 4. The CDR for the next-generation narrowband tactical satellite communications system was held at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, Calif., March 13-15 and was attended by more than 250 representatives from the U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force, and Strategic Command.
Avio and European Space Agency (ESA) technicians continue investigating the reasons for the anomalous behavior of an Avio Zefiro 9 solid-fuel rocket motor during its second hot-fire test, carried out March 28 at the Italian joint military firing range in Salto di Quirra, Sardinia.
The U.S. Navy has decided to forego funding the procurement of the planned Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) for fiscal year 2007, said Allison Stiller, deputy assistant secretary for shipbuilding. The service had planned to provide funding to build two LCS ships. Instead, money from those planned FY '07 LCS builds will go to cover higher costs for other initial ships, Stiller said April 4 at the Navy League Sea Air Space 2007 conference. Stiller spoke during the panel discussion "The Future of U.S. Shipbuilding."
The Pentagon's ongoing efforts to replace its tactical fighter aircraft could prove especially problematic, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). "After procuring large numbers of fighter and attack aircraft in the 1970s and 1980s, DOD shifted its emphasis to procuring bombers, airlifters, and other systems," GAO said in a recent report.
G/ATOR: The U.S. Marine Corps has awarded Northrop Grumman $256.6 million to develop the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar (G/ATOR), which consolidates the missions of five Marine Corps radars into a single multirole system, the company announced April 4. Northrop Grumman will produce two low-rate initial production systems and 15 full-rate production systems in the current program phase. The Marine Corps' ultimate objective is 63 G/ATOR systems, the company said.
Alliant Techsystems (ATK) will spend about $100 million to buy employee-owned Swales Aerospace of Beltsville, Md., in a move designed to enhance the Minneapolis-based company's capabilities in the small satellite and operationally responsive space arenas.
The final of five core U.S. Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) sites will incorporate the DCGS Integrated Backbone (DIB) in May, bringing on the DIB deployment one full year ahead of schedule, the service announced April 2. DCGS consists of global sites capable of receiving, processing, storing, correlating, exploiting and disseminating intelligence feeds from multiple sources. Those sources can be based on the ground, in the air or at sea.
Orbital Sciences Corp. will build a third small geostationary communications satellite for Australia's Optus Networks, which has picked Arianespace to launch the spacecraft in 2009 on an Ariane or Soyuz vehicle flying from Kourou, French Guiana. Designated Optus D3, the satellite will be based on the Orbital Star spacecraft bus, as were the other two the Australian firm purchased from the company. It will carry 32 Ku-band transponders at 156 deg. E. Long. to provide direct television broadcasting service across Australia and New Zealand.
Exostar's Export Control Working Group is attempting to infuse greater automation into its customers' collaborative business tools to help them avoid export control violations. Exostar hosts a number of secure collaborative computer applications through which its 34,000 aerospace and defense clients do business and share information, much of which is subject to U.S. State Department restrictions.
U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and Northrop Grumman have made a three-year cooperative research agreement aimed at identifying ways of shortening the time it takes to collect and distribute intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) information. Northrop Grumman will offer up its Cyber Warfare Integration Network (CWIN), which can generate a virtual battlefield for running simulations.
Despite spending tens of billions of dollars on wartime expenses such as fuel, logistics and new or upgraded trucks, the Pentagon still is investing heavily in operating and upgrading its aircraft fleet and is likely to continue doing so well into this century, defense and military budget analysts say. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) agrees -- but in a report released this month GAO says the Pentagon needs to change the way it spends its aircraft funds to keep from wasting money (DAILY, April 4).
The Pentagon needs to take decisive actions to shorten cycle times in developing and delivering new weapon systems in general, and specifically to develop an integrated and affordable enterprise-level investment strategy for tactical air forces, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has recommended.
Input, the Reston, Va., based market analysis company, expects federal government spending on information technology (IT) contracts to rise at 5.5 percent annually through 2012, in part because the Defense Department IT budget is forecast to grow again after taking a hit this fiscal year. Congressional scrutiny Input's five-year Federal IT market forecast calls for federal spending on IT contracts to rise from $65.5 billion a year now to more than $80 billion in 2012 (see charts p. 5).
KILLER BEE: Northrop Grumman has quietly ended the Killer Bee unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program. The effort was terminated about six months ago, company officials revealed during a briefing in Washington April 2. The company was developing the Killer Bee as a multimission, joint-service family of scalable UAVs for surveillance and force protection.
MIXED RESULTS: The U.K. Ministry of Defense has received a mixed review from the government. While generally positive in tone, there were some key criticisms, though couched in diplomatic language. Certain aspects of leadership within the Defense Ministry need to be urgently addressed, while the ministry should also be proactive in engaging with other government departments, the review said.
