General Atomics has received a $36.2 million contract for production of Predator unmanned aerial vehicle systems beyond the 10 used during a Pentagon Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration. The San Diego company got the contract on Friday. It marks the beginning of a program to buy 16 systems. Work is expected to conclude next March. The basic contract, worth about $23 million, includes five air vehicles, each with an electro-optical/infrared payload, two ground control stations, support equipment and two payload spares.
Congress and the Administration agree that the existing export policy on encryption compromises U.S. national security, but they disagree on how best to improve it.
July 25, 1996 BEI Defense Systems Company BEI Defense Systems Company*, Euless, Texas, is being awarded a $5,693,282 firm fixed price contract for various spare parts for the AH-1 Cobra Helicopter. Work will be performed in Euless, Texas, and is expected to be completed by September 15, 1997. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This is a sole source contract initiated on March 20, 1996. The contracting activity is the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive&Armaments Command, Warren, Michigan (DAAE20-96-C-0309).
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee and therefore head of the Senate defense spending bill conferees, says "we ought to take a look at the payments that were made" to contractors under the law that permits the Defense Dept. to pay restructuring costs of industry mergers and acquisitions.
The air forces of Jordan and the U.S. yesterday signed an agreement under which Jordan will lease 16 F-16A/B fighters, a development that is raising Amman's hopes of soon buying the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air- to-Air Missile.
The Defense Dept., fighting moves by both the House and Senate to shift management of unmanned aerial vehicles and reconnaissance programs out of the Pentagon and back to the services, has warned that such a change would "severely limit" its ability to field an integrated airborne reconnaissance force and maximize its return on investments. DOD spelled out its resistance to the recommendations in the House and Senate fiscal 1997 defense appropriations reports in an appeals package dated July 23.
The Senate and House defense authorization conferees have decided to add six F-16C/D fighters to the Administration's budget in the fiscal year 1997 defense authorization bill, congressional sources told the DAILY Friday. The Administration had requested only four of the planes at a price of $247 million. The House, in its version of the bill, provided $307 million for the Air Force to buy six F-16s. The Senate, in its version, provided $368 million for eight of the aircraft.
Information Warfare will be a player for the first time when the Pentagon undergoes its next major force review, as recommended by the Commission on Roles and Missions. But the IW world is still trying to develop the metrics that can prove its worth, says Barry Horton, the Pentagon's principal deputy assistant for command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I). "We're working on having those metrics," he told the National Computer Security Association Friday in Washington, indicating "there's some good stuff beginning to appear."
The House last week passed a fiscal year 1997 Commerce State and Justice Appropriations bill that contains a provision which could prevent the Administration from implementing a tentative agreement to alter the ABM Treaty. The bill passed in a 246-179 vote on July 24. During debate, there were no moves to remove from the bill the provision added during full Appropriations Committee markup by Committee Chair Bob Livingston (R-La.) regarding ABM Treaty changes.
Pentagon Acquisition Chief Paul Kaminski concedes to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) that DOD's difficulty in meeting early deployment dates for theater missile defense systems is due to insufficient funding, not technology hurdles. Earlier last week at a breakfast with defense writers Kaminski said the complete opposite, telling the reporters that even if Congress added money "that does not allow us to achieve some of those IOCs" - the fielding dates mandated by Congress.
Russian spaceflight mangers have decided to shift the Progress cargo capsule set to resupply the Mir space station to another Soyuz booster, delaying the flight until about Aug. 1. Supplies of food, air and water on Mir, where U.S. Astronaut Shannon Lucid is stranded while NASA mounts new solid rocket boosters on the Space Shuttle Atlantis, are sufficient to sustain Lucid and her two Russian crewmates for another month, Russian space officials said yesterday.
British manufacturer GKN Aerospace and Special Vehicles and Hughes, its U.S. team member on the Kuwait Desert Warrior light armored vehicle program, hope to capitalize on their investment through additional international sales in the Middle East and Far East. "We are talking to a number of other customers around the world," David Wright, Managing Director, GKN Aerospace and Special Vehicles, told reporters Wednesday during a telephone interview.
Stealing trade secrets will become a federal crime under legislation approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday. The bill provides for fines and prison terms to individuals and for fines for corporations of up to $10 million or twice the value of the information upon conviction of stealing or attempting to steal proprietary economic information.
The U.S. Air Force is moving forward with the development a fiber- optic towed decoy for the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft that would bolster its electronic self-protection capability. The decoy is being developed by Lockheed Martin's Sanders Div. of Nashua, N.H., as part of the joint services Integrated Defensive Electronic Countermeasures suite. The Navy is in charge of overall IDECM integration and the radio-frequency IDECM subsystem that includes the decoy.
The U.S. Special Operations Command is boosting the self-protection capability of its AC-130H gunships with the addition of ITT's ALQ-172 (V)3 jammer. ITT Avionics, Clifton, N.J., last week won a $23.4 million contract for three ship-sets of the RF-countermeasure system, the Pentagon announced Thursday. ITT is expected to deliver the jammers, support equipment and technical data by November 1998.
NASA's DC-XA prototype reusable launch vehicle is set to fly again on Wednesday, pending the results of a hot-fire engine test scheduled over the past weekend. Although a fifth and final flight is scheduled after that, NASA is looking for a way to keep the vertical takeoff and landing testbed flying longer. DC-XA contractor McDonnell Douglas has agreed to a two-month, four-flight extension of the test series if NASA can find funds to pay for it.
Overwhelmed by more social issues than anticipated and a battle over maintenance work at military depots, the defense authorization conference adjourned for the weekend Friday and in effect gave up on the goal of reaching agreement on a compromise bill and have it clear Congress by the August recess. The month-long recess starts Aug. 3. To meet the original goal laid out by conference leaders two weeks ago, conferees had to agree on a report on and have it signed by everyone who participated in its drafting by Friday.
The Defense Dept. is telling the congressional defense committees that it does not need additional, unrequested funding in fiscal year 1997 to cover the costs of expanding NATO membership, aides say. The committees expect to receive precise cost breakdowns on the expansion soon. The House last week approved the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act, but some lawmakers have been concerned the U.S. would have to bear the brunt of added costs to extend membership.
NASA researchers are revising sea-level data generated by a U.S. altimeter aboard the U.S./French Topex/Poseidon spacecraft because of a data processing software error only recently discovered.
The U.S. Army is going to stick to its schedule of using the Theater High Altitude Area Defense radar in its next intercept attempt, the seventh in the THAAD test program overall, an Army spokeswoman says. The THAAD radar was operated in a track-only mode to allow the system to mature during recent, but unsuccessful, intercept attempts. Despite the test failures, the spokeswoman said confidence in the radar is high enough to "transition it into the command and control" role.
House National Security Chairman Rep. Floyd Spence (R- S.C.) notes that the House Commerce, Justice and State appropriations bill contains essentially the same amendment as in the House defense authorization requiring the president to submit "substantive" changes in the ABM Treaty to the Senate for ratification. Yet, Spence says, the Clinton Administration hasn't threatened to veto the appropriations bill, even though it has threatened a veto over the same provision in the House defense measure now in conference.
Tax benefits and settlement of a long-standing defense contract dispute helped Boeing's second-quarter net earnings bounce back to $468 million from $231 million in red ink a year ago, but spending on launching the new 777 widebody twin and developing the next-generation 737 ate into profitability, shrinking margins by nearly two percentage points.
Attitude control aboard the International Space Station may be guided by the Global Positioning System, now that prototype GPS attitude determination gear has checked out on the Space Shuttle. Researchers at the Charles Stark Draper Lab report the GPS Attitude and Navigation Experiment (GANE) that flew on STS-77 "worked exactly as expected." The system includes three GPS antennas, plus a backup, and software to translate the tiny differences in the time of arrival of signals from GPS satellites at each antenna into pitch, yaw and roll data (DAILY, May 3).
