ALTAIR: In August and September, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems will deploy its Altair unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with the Canadian military to perform littoral and maritime surveillance off Canada's east coast. After being launched from a main operating base at Goose Bay, Newfoundland, and flown on an instrument flight plan, control of the aircraft and payload will be passed to an Ottawa-based remote operations center for beyond-line-of-sight operations via satellite.
DIRECTED ENERGY: The U.S. Army is eyeing mid-March as the likely time for a summit on directed energy weapons. Brig. Gen. Robert Lennox, deputy commanding general for operations at Army Space and Missile Defense Command, has been trying to organize the event to coordinate the service's formulation of requirements for directed energy systems (DAILY, Dec. 12, 2003).
NUKE APPOINTMENT: President Bush plans to nominate Jerald Paul, a Florida state lawmaker and former nuclear engineer, to be principal deputy administrator of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). NNSA's duties include exploring the potential for new nuclear weapons.
EXPERIMENT: The U.S. Defense Department's Joint Forces Command has an experimental initiative underway that would give combat commanders rapidly deployable command-and-control teams and supporting information systems. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the units would help the military respond to regional conflicts with smaller and more effective joint operational headquarters. Myers described the initiative in testimony submitted to the House Armed Services Committee. The prototype for the unit will be established this year.
SAMPLE RETURN: NASA's fiscal year 2005 budget request includes a funding wedge that will allow the agency to invest in long-lead technologies for a Mars sample return mission that could take place as early as 2013. A sample return mission actually is three missions in one, according to Orlando Figueroa, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program Office. The first mission is landing on Mars and obtaining the samples, the second mission is getting the samples into Mars orbit, and the third mission is getting the samples back to Earth, he says.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is expected in two weeks to send the final criteria for base realignment closure and (BRAC) recommendations to congressional defense committees, marking the beginning of a process that analysts say can have mixed impact on defense contractors. Congress has a month to approve the final selection criteria after Rumsfeld delivers them on Feb. 16. In March, President Bush is scheduled to nominate his choices for the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission, an independent panel.
PANTERA TESTS: Norway's air force is Lockheed Martin's first international customer to flight test the Precision Attack Navigation and Targeting pod (PANTERA), the company said Feb. 6. All the features were exercised in the December tests and "performed accurately," the company said.
Lockheed Martin expects to decide by April whether to use a continuously moving assembly line to produce the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a company official said Feb. 5. Current-generation fighters are built on pulsed or bay-build assembly lines, meaning an aircraft stays in one place for a long time while it is worked on. The downside to that approach is that a problem can quietly fester because it is isolated from the rest of the assembly line, said Edward Linhart, vice president for JSF production operations at Lockheed Martin.
Although Northrop Grumman's sales for the fourth quarter of 2003 increased to $7.1 billion from $4.8 billion, the net income of $224 million was the same for both reporting periods, the company said Feb. 4.
Negotiations between the U.S. Air Force and the Boeing Co. over a KC-767 lease-purchase deal are suspended until at least May, when the results of four Defense Department reviews are due, a defense official told The DAILY. A Pentagon source said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will wait for reports from the Defense Policy and Science Board, the National Defense University and the DOD inspector general and general counsel before proceeding with the controversial plan.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The U.S. and Canada could reach an agreement within the next month on a famework for cooperation on missile defense, according to Lt. Gen. E.A. "Rick" Findley, deputy commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). David Pratt, Canada's minister of defense, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their staffs "have all really accelerated the framework for an amendment to the NORAD agreement [between the two countries] within the next four weeks," Findley said Jan. 29 at a conference here.
SAN DIEGO - The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy are creating a "maritime NORAD" to monitor ship movements and identify terrorist threats, according to Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of Naval operations. The idea is in the concept development stage, Clark said Feb. 4 at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and U.S. Naval Institute West 2004 conference here.
The U.S. Air Force plans to start taking a serious look at potential replacements for several C-130 variants used by its special operations forces, a service representative said Feb. 5. Maj. Gen. John Dorris said the Bush Administration's fiscal 2005 budget request, submitted to Congress Feb. 2, contains "seed money" to develop concepts for an "MX" aircraft, which would replace the MC-130E/H airdrop/transport aircraft, and an "AX" which would replace the AC-130 gunship. The analysis could take about two years.
Senior leaders at Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Marine Corps will meet at Camp Lejeune, N.C., next month to discuss ways of making the two organizations more interoperable, according to Brig. Gen. Robert Neller, director of the operations division at Marine Corps headquarters.
SAN DIEGO - A major multinational initiative aimed at thwarting terrorist attacks on the United States and other nations with shipborne weapons of mass destruction is underway, according to Adm. Walter F. Doran, Pacific Fleet Commander. "We need to gain visibility of what travels via the sea throughout the region - we need the same situational awareness of what is on our oceans and waterways that we have about what is traveling through the skies," Doran said.
LAUNCHERS: Lockheed Martin has received a $3.2 million Army contract to supply an additional 92 M299 helicopter-mounted missile launchers for U.S. and international forces, the company announced Feb. 5. The order includes 34 launcher units for the U.S. Army and 58 units for Israel and Kuwait. Deliveries are scheduled to run through the third quarter of 2005.
The U.S. Army has awarded Northrop Grumman Corporation's Information Technology (IT) sector a $10 million task order contract over three years to provide support to the Army's newly created Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM), the company announced Feb. 5. Northrop Grumman estimates this contract will bring approximately 10 new jobs to Northrop Grumman IT. Work on the contract will be conducted at the Northrop Grumman IT site in Aberdeen, Md.
SECURE COMMUNICATIONS: Palomar Products will supply the secure communications capability for the US101 medium-lift helicopter, US101 team member Lockheed Martin said Feb. 5. Lockheed Martin, AgustaWestland and Bell Helicopter Textron are pitting the US101, a variant of AgustaWestland's EH101, against Sikorsky's VH-92 for the VXX competition to replace the presidential helicopter fleet. Their proposals were submitted to the Navy earlier this week (DAILY, Feb. 4).
Australia soon may request additional information from Northrop Grumman on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, a company official said Feb. 5. Australia's defense minister, Robert Hill, spelled out a need for a squadron of long-endurance UAVs for land and maritime surveillance on Feb. 4, saying the requirement was spurred by the Global Hawk's performance in Afghanistan and Iraq. He made the comments as he released Australia's new defense budget (DAILY, Feb. 5).
Australia's defense department is requesting up to A$1 billion ($770 million) in its new budget plan to establish a squadron of long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles for land and sea surveillance. Although no contractor was named, Defence Minister Robert Hill mentioned the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk as he announced the 2004-2014 budget plan in Sydney on Feb. 4.
