A casual round up of interesting stuff from this week
GAO Report on the F35 (H/T Aussie Johnno)
Defence Vehicle Dynamics 2012 image gallery
LNG Powered Coast Guard Cutter
Defence Board to Approve Privatised Defence Procurement
Just in case anyone forgot, ongoing operations in Afghanistan
Marshall Land Systems at DVD 2012
Surrogate UAV Aircraft to Fly in UK Airspace and here
Thales and RAF Misssion Support contract
Cosworth Soldier Worn Electronics
Cobham, Air Tanker, Spain and the FSTA and again, here
Royal Navy Rescue a Drowning Dear and an Army Yacht
Infantry Assault Bridge in Afghanistan
ICBM Basing Options (very interesting!)
And a video of the Eurocopter X3 on tour in the USA
The £29 million contract form ISTAR MSS is extortionate considering the small number of aircraft supported (Sentinel and E3D) and with Sentinel due to be removed from service and the E3D only deploying on Ops once in the last 5 years this is a joke. Considering what MSS actually does and it’s limitations I would not even pay £1 million for it to be provided across the entire RAF.
RE the Taranis link
AS this is part of a totally fresh announcement, looks like the new French Defence Minister did not fiddle with the joint UAV programme (even though there was a press report of such intention):
“BAE is expected to receive a roughly £15 million contract around next month’s Farnborough air show to study technology requirements linked to a proposed Anglo-French future combat air system design. Its unmanned systems partner Dassault will also receive an award of similar value to conduct work under the project. The bilateral effort is expected to draw on the pair’s current experience with developing and preparing to fly their respective Taranis and Neuron UCAS demonstrators.”
- if you put photos of the two respective aircraft side by side, I doubt anyone outside the development teams could tell them apart!
- if the two designs do get merged, will be interesting to see if some of the partners from the multinational nEURON will want to come aboard (or let in, for that matter); alternatively, it will be very tempting for them to say “we have now gained enough understanding, and will buy it off-the-shelf when it is ready”
France had a plan alike the HYDRA option in this ICBM Basing Options (very interesting!)link
- the Berlin Wall came down and the siloed, land-based missiles were unceremoniously scrapped, without replacement
- the difference is that they would have been in fixed positions on the edge of the continental shelf (unmanned, so go and pinch one would have been the next thought?)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18562210
Hopefully situation being defused. Unfortunately no sign of air crew yet.
I read (but can’t now dig up the link) that the jet was shot down by AD artillery, which would appear to indicate a land-based platform, and I don’t think the ranges of those are too long. So well within Syrian airspace, if true. Of course, early reports…etc.
RT Early reports from yesterday said it was an S300 which has plenty of range.
Good article on wheeled AIFV’s over at Aviation Week;
http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/DT_06_01_2012_p36-459519.xml
A secondary link, behind the one provided by Jed, informs us what will happen with UAVs between 2015 and 2030 (the earliest ISD for UCAS):
SNIP
terms of the UOR may permit the ministry to continue operating Reaper as an ISR platform under the *post-combat* mandate *to support the Afghan security services*.
It is unlikely to be politically viable to simply dispose of the equipment, particularly as the RAF in October will stand up a second Reaper unit. Under current plans, by 2015, all U.K. Reaper missions over Afghanistan will be flown from Britain. The General Atomics airframe does, therefore, appear to have a key advantage over other systems in competing to win the Scavenger contract. General Atomics, Selex and Cobham have been working in this direction, culminating in a recent test of an “open architecture” Predator B carrying a Selex radar.
[- Hermes & Watchkeeper again; can only buy it if we get our systems onboarded... hopefully won't take as long this time]
“Our gold-plated solution…would be to make all the ground elements of Watchkeeper, Reaper and Scavenger as common as possible”
SNIP AGAIN
Wibble,
Bear in mind the E3 fleet has been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq when it mattered, and that they are routinely on ex and flying over the north sea-North Atlantic, they are far more active than you think; including the Sentinel fleet. There’s more to it than what that article lets known.
Mike,
MSS works, but it is not worth £29 million. I can not possibly see how the contract can cost that much. There are other systems that can do what MSS does and most likely cheaper too.
I am well aware of what both fleets have, are and will be doing.
May I say that I am absolutly horrified at the idea of GOCO (Government Controlled, Company Operated) being applied to your Defence Procurment Organisation. The Australian Government through its Defence Material Organisation dipped its toe into this idea a decade ago. DMO assigned two projects to contractors to project manage. The projects failed.
The first one a major upgrade to the computer system running the ADF inventory management system. More money ended up being spent on project management than on upgrades.
The second was field comms, a private prime systems integrator was contracted to select and create the system from available Military Of The Shelf(MOTS)equipment. Shall we say that the PSI’s recommendations were not acceptable.
If your government is determined to do this they would be very wise to conduct a trial first, maybe a commodity section if you are divided up that way.
Privatisation once done is very difficult to undo and one of the consequences would be a slow down on procurement initially as a contractor takes over and then if they have to be removed……..
Hi Johnno, I agree with your view.
But your examples are delicious; compare with another organisational model:
“DMO assigned two projects to contractors to project manage. The projects failed.
The first one a major upgrade to the computer system running the ADF inventory management system. More money ended up being spent on project management than on upgrades.”
- we’ve had several goes with a combined cost of £800m. Sometimes nothing got into production, sometimes parts of the targeted solution
“The second was field comms”
- we spent two decades and I forget now how much money on this
- then bought another solution, but gave it the original name to paper things over
Turkey has invoked article 4 of NATO after it says its a/c was shoot down in international airspace
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18568207
Things getting a bit edgy in Syria then.
Just reading through the links, gutted to see Cobham losing a lot of jobs to some Spanish company over conversions for the the PFI Tanker deal. I swear British defence is gradually shifting from subsidising British jobs to subsidising Spanish jobs. Ridiculous.
@ACC, it appears that we are the only ones concerned with privatisation of core rolls.
The procurement world is an easy target for public floggings but when you dig into many of these failed projects you find is that the real issue was ‘what was being asked for’.
On my side of the sea the the process of acquisition is shared between two groups, Requirements Determination(RD) branch who come up with the ‘Operational Requirement’(OR) docs and Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) which turns the OR into tender documentation and gets the budget to spend. The greatest weakness in the process is not within DMO,although they are capable of the some interesting dumb moves, it is the fact that there is very limited financial constraint on RD branches initial musings. So they come up with a requirement and then it becomes a matter of trading off to get within a budget and those capabiluity trades are always DMO’s fault.
If your system is similar, putting a contractor in to do the buying won’t fix that….unless you also put a contractor in to tell you what you want! Don’t get knocked down in the rush on that one.
What contractor are we going to hire anyway? BAE? I’m sure they’ll be impartial as an angel…
Maybe QinetiQ?
Sometimes makes me wonder what would happen if we just went back and split BAE into a myriad of its smaller chunks again, like Alvis, Hawker, Avro etc. Might reintroduce some decent UK competition.
Chris,
It appears that Cobham could not do the job in the timescales so it is right to move production to another comapny. If you read the Hadden-Cave and various other reports you will see that BAE and other companies take the absolute piss when it comes to overcharging us for a delayed product so Im glad we went somewhere else for a change. The Voyager is needed to replace the aging and increasingly expensive VC10s and Tristars and having flown in it, it is clear step up in comfort too.
UK companies need to man up and produce a product on time/budget and then they can complain if they dont get new contracts.
That doesn’t help us in the long run though if we lose out on the needed skills to keep producing things like Voyager. I agree that Voyager is needed and will be much better than that which came before it, but it’s still a dogs dinner of a procurement.
Hi Johnno,
We agree again here ” it appears that we are the only ones concerned with privatisation of core rolls.
The procurement world is an easy target for public floggings but when you dig into many of these failed projects you find is that the real issue was ‘what was being asked for’.”
In your type of RD/DMO world, I would have the RD inside the military and second seasoned project managers from DMO (even from the outside, but that might be wishful thinking because of security clearances)to anything that looks like it could become a big project.
Also, splitting up the private sector to such companies that are needed as infrastructure to underpin long-term and crisis/war time national security (cross-Nordic NAMMO an example)from companies that need to compete in the international market (sort of guarantees the quality and practicality, if you take a Nordic parallel again, could be Patria or Saab).
Splitting public private along the process chain also works: the Danish model is to have the hulls built with international tender (may or may not end up done in Denmark), but all fitting-out is done in a military fitting out yard – thereby guaranteeing that you will have one, and the expertise to assess and design upgrades
Chris,
Cobham are not producing Voyager, just helping conver it into a military AR/AT aircraft. The may still have the contract for servicing, upgrades etc so may not suffer in the long run. This element of the contract may be outside the MODs control anyway.
It is all well and good saying that we must keep skills in this country but the aerospace companies have a responsibility too, they must be competative and must deliver.
“Cobham are not producing Voyager, just helping conver it into a military AR/AT aircraft”
– I know. They’re also saying that with the loss of the work has gone a whole bunch of jobs. We could, could, be losing the ability to conduct this kind of work in the future, such as when someone decides to convert some of the new A400M’s, and the work ends up getting shipped abroad.
Could not have come in at a better time (in case of what I was saying in the post above it sounded a bit too ‘theoretical’; A case in point followed straight after)
“but [the aerospace] companies have a responsibility too, they must be competative and must deliver”
ACC, we tried the idea of seconding DMO project managers through industry as part of their skills development.
The down side was that industry hired the best on money the government couldn’t match and they turned up on the ‘óther side of the table’.
On the matter of splitting RD (Service)//Contractor (Procurement) you also have to have the capability to critically review the equipment recommendations that come out of the procuement process.
The structure you would need would actually be RD//Procurement process//Review. The question then becomes where would government find the skills necessary to staff the review process? You need to remember it is more than simply a matter of technical merit, overly generous contract conditions (warranties, liabilities, use constraints), payment terms, price variation formulae can be a great way of transferring wealth and risk between a contractor and the taxpayer.