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Archive for October 16th, 2008

DEVELOPING: Army Abandons Flexible Armor Search — For Now

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

dragon-skin-plate.jpg

The Army has post­poned its attempt to find a flex­i­ble body armor sys­tem sim­i­lar to Dragon Skin after deter­min­ing that the tech­nol­ogy hasn’t matured enough to be fielded to troops.

While work­ing on a story that will be the lead head­line on tomor­row morning’s Military​.com home­page, I queried PEO Soldier about the progress of bal­lis­tic tests on X-​​SAPI and F-​​SAPI armor sub­mit­ted by man­u­fac­tur­ers after the June 2007 solic­i­ta­tion ask­ing for new armor con­cepts. As you all might remem­ber, the Army post­poned tests after I spoke with BGN Brown because man­u­fac­tur­ers were short on mate­ri­als (prob­a­bly Dyneema/​Spectra and B4C) and needed to do more test­ing of their own.

I then spoke with Murray Neal at an indus­try event sev­eral months later and he won­dered where the test­ing stood as well, say­ing he’d sub­mit­ted sam­ples but heard noth­ing in reply. Brown had told me tests were sup­posed to start in March 2008.

Remember, the Army solic­i­ta­tion (which has been removed from their server but was described in a June 2007 post­ing) called for X-​​SAPI to defeat “future” AP threats — namely the M993 — and also asked for sub­mis­sion of “flex­i­ble” sys­tems to be des­ig­nated “F-​​SAPI?” This, in part, answered the mail after hear­ings in the House regard­ing the Dragon Skin tests by Army offi­cials and the NBC pro­gram that broke it all wide open. These were sup­posed to be the “head-​​to-​​head” tests — or some­thing loosely approx­i­mat­ing that — Neal was ask­ing for and law­mak­ers acqui­esced to.

Well, the Army has deemed the tech­nol­ogy too imma­ture, telling me only E-​​SAPI and X-​​SAPI ven­dors qual­i­fied, includ­ing Ceradyne, BAE, Protective Group and Armacel, for the tests.

“An F-​​SAPI capa­bil­ity has not reached the level [of] tech­ni­cal matu­rity to pro­tect Soldiers in com­bat,” PEO Soldier said.

Ooooh, really!? Wonder if Mr. Neal has any­thing to say about that? (And we’ll show you some­one else who’d like to debate that point in our story tomor­row AM)…

– Christian

Posted in Body Armor Blues | 12 Comments »

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

This arti­cle first appeared in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.

Delays con­tinue for the U.S. Air Force’s $15 bil­lion com­bat, search and res­cue (CSAR-​​X) heli­copter replace­ment pro­gram.

Contractors con­firm that Air Force brief­ings sched­uled for early October have been post­poned as the ser­vice focuses more intently on its inter­nal review of the trou­bled acqui­si­tion, which was slapped down twice by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and is now the sub­ject of a Pentagon Inspector General (IG) inves­ti­ga­tion.

GAO sus­tained two protests by CSAR-​​X com­peti­tors Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky against the Air Force’s orig­i­nal award to Boeing, say­ing the ser­vice failed to con­sider cer­tain life­cy­cle costs in its deci­sion.

In response, the Air Force appar­ently has sought input from pro­fes­sional logis­tic man­agers to review the CSAR-​​X life­cy­cle cost com­po­nent, con­trac­tors have con­firmed.

Just what the extra inter­nal review will do to the CSAR-​​X con­tract award sched­ule is unclear. The pro­gram is sched­uled for a Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) meet­ing in early December and the Air Force has main­tained it hopes to make an award this fall.

“We do believe the CSAR-​​X con­tract will be awarded this year and our HH-​​47 pro­posal stands ready to meet the require­ments,” Boeing spokes­woman Jenna McMullin said.

But the brief­ing post­pone­ments, added Air Force scrutiny and more intense focus on life­cy­cle costs have ana­lysts and oth­ers famil­iar with the pro­gram doubt­ing that any award can be made by year’s end.

Then there’s the IG report. Investigators are review­ing how and when the Air Force changed some CSAR-​​X require­ments.

The Air Force had said it had to receive some­thing from those inves­ti­ga­tors by mid-​​September. But sources say there’s likely to be no word for at least another month. And a scathing report, Air Force lead­ers acknowl­edge, could add even more delay.

In a July memo, Pentagon acqui­si­tion chief John Young empha­sized the impor­tance of con­sid­er­ing pro­gram life­cy­cle costs when mak­ing acqui­si­tion decisions.

Read the rest of this story, get info on the Brits’ lat­est deploy­ment to The Stan, see the war from Petraeus’s per­spec­tive and lis­ten to the bark heard ’round the world with our friends from Aviation Week exclu­sively on Military​.com.

– Christian

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »