SMITHS DEALS: Smiths Group PLC has agreed to sell its Smiths Aerospace division to General Electric Co. for $4.8 billion, the companies announced recently. Smiths also will bring its Detection activities into a joint venture with GE and is expected to control 64 percent of the new entity.
IRAQ WARNING: Senate Armed Services Committee members of all political persuasions say letting Iraq collapse into sectarian violence would be a "disaster" - or worse - for the U.S. "It would be a disaster if we allowed Iraq to implode," says Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), a Democrat who lost his party's nomination because of his pro-war stance, says it would be "a disaster to fail in Iraq." And Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the panel's senior Republican, says failure in Iraq could have "potentially catastrophic consequences."
SLOW RELIEF: Even when a 547,000-soldier active-duty Army and 202,000-member active-duty Marine Corps is put into place, getting those new troops trained and ready for deployment won't happen right away, new Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledges. But getting the effort started will offer reassurance to troops serving today. "While it may take some time for these troops to become available for deployment, it is important for our men and women in uniform to know that additional manpower and resources are on the way," he says.
The U.S. Secretary of State is now authorized to "secure, remove or eliminate" man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), small arms and light weapons outside the United States that pose a proliferation threat, according to a bill signed into law by President Bush Jan. 11. Other targeted weapons entail stockpiled munitions, abandoned ordnance and various conventional weapons, including tactical missile systems, as well as related equipment and facilities.
GRAVY TRAIN: The Air Force may not like being in a sole-source arrangement with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems for Predator UAVs, but it isn't willing to cut the contractor off. During a recent budget drill at the Pentagon, senior civilian leaders sliced as much as $500 million from the 2008-13 Predator account. Pentagon sources suggest the Air Force quickly found more money and refunded the program. What remains to be seen is whether this effort was simply a drill or whether the new Predator funds were extracted from one or more Air Force intelligence programs.
FUEL STUDY: The Navy will soon release its study on fuel-saving alternatives. Among the possibilities being reviewed is integrated electric drive, ethanol and nuclear - although conventional fuel costs would have to rise a great deal more to make nuclear power a viable option, Navy officials say. The Navy is concerned not only about rising fuel costs, but also the greater energy needs of the next generation radars. But there's little sway the Navy could have on how the nation faces the fuel cost problems.
ANTI-SUB WEAPONS: The Navy is conducting exercises off the U.S. Southeast Coast to test new weapons that could have widespread impact on anti-submarine or mine warfare, says Rear Adm. Barry J. McCullough III, Navy program executive officer for ships. One weapon uses airborne laser detection, he said at the Surface Navy Association symposium in Alexandria, Va. "You can make the ocean transparent to certain depth levels," he said.
TRIDENT CONTRACT: The U.S. Navy is awarding Lockheed Martin Corp. a $654.9 million contract for fiscal 2007 production and deployed system support for the Trident II D5 Fleet Ballistic Missile program, the company said Jan. 10. "Our work in the coming years will span research and development, design, production, testing, operations and maintenance on this important Navy program," said Tory Bruno, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. vice president of Strategic Missile Programs.
Astronomers have more work to do, but a new map of "dark matter" dating halfway back to the Big Bang lends weight to the theory that the mysterious phenomenon holds the visible universe like lights on a Christmas tree.
FFG 7 ENGINES: The U.S. Navy has awarded Caterpillar Inc.'s Defense and Federal Products a $23.7 million contract for FFG 7-class service diesel engines, training, spare parts and related technical and logistics data. The ship's service diesel engines will replace existing engines on FFG 7s and provide increased performance over existing engines, the Defense Department said Jan. 10. Work will be performed in East Lafayette, Ind., and is expected to be completed by January 2012. The contract was competitively procured, but only one proposal was received.
OPBAT HELOS: The Pentagon will maintain Army air support of a U.S.-Bahamas anti-drug effort, according to Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.). Nelson, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sought last fall to find alternatives to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plan to withdraw all seven Army Black Hawk helicopters from Operation Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, known as OPBAT. The Drug Enforcement Agency currently has one helicopter in the Bahamas, while the Coast Guard has three Jayhawks. Nelson said Jan.
LONDON - Britain faces fundamental choices in its defense policy and must decide whether to retain the ability to act militarily on the world stage, British Prime Minister Tony Blair says. In a major policy speech on Jan.12, Blair suggested that the U.K. is confronted by stark alternatives: to retreat from sustaining warfighting capabilities or to retain them, with all that this implies.
MARITIME STRATEGY: The U.S. Navy wants a "competition of ideas" from a variety of sources as it develops its new maritime strategy in conjunction with the Coast Guard and Marine Corps, according to Vice Adm. John Morgan, Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for information, plans and strategy. The services are six months into the development of the strategy and hope to formally roll it out in October at the International Seapower Symposium. Industry is invited to participate in a series of workshops to contribute their thoughts.
GREAT INTEREST: More than nine suitors are said to be lining up to acquire troubled Mexican satellite operator Satmex, which emerged from Chapter 11 on Nov. 30. According to local sources, the interested companies include Echostar, Eutelsat, Intelsat and Loral, which already has a 2 percent stake in Satmex, as well as Grupo Medcom, a partner in SES Global's Mexican affiliate Quetzsat, and SES Global itself. Private equity firms like KKR were also named. Satmex officials estimate the sale, to begin in late January or early February, could fetch up to $500 million.
'EFFICIENT' EXPLORATION: NASA is trying to be more efficient in space exploration spending, but taxpayers shouldn't expect the agency to match industry's productivity. Administrator Michael Griffin tells the Space Transportation Association that the time is ripe for "nontraditional" procurements like the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) effort to buy rides to the International Space Station.
NASA's top leaders are sponsoring an internal mission oversight group that will go over the agency's work with a "fine-toothed comb" to ensure all activities support NASA's overall mission goals, according to Administrator Michael Griffin.
After adjusting to a five-year, $3 billion cut, NASA's Mars exploration program is "stabilizing" and mission plans are firming up, but there is very little program reserve for dealing with delays or overruns, according to Doug McCuistion, the agency's head of Mars exploration.
Following missile tests by North Korea last July, Japan is looking to significantly boost its investment in missile defense, said U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA). "They see the threat and they want to do something about it," Obering said Jan. 11 during a briefing at the Surface Navy Association Nineteenth National Symposium in Alexandria, Va. The Japanese will be spending another estimated $1.5 billion a year, he said.
LCS WORK STOPPED: The Navy issued a stop work order to Lockheed Martin Corp. Jan. 12 over the third Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). The stop work order took effect immediately and is for a period of 90 days. The contractor is building the first and third LCS seaframes - splitting the program with General Dynamics. "The stop work order was issued because of significant cost increases," the Pentagon said late Jan. 12.
Hisdesat says Belgium, Germany and another undisclosed country have signed up to utilize Spain's XTAR-EUR and Spainsat military communications spacecraft. Belgium will use a fixed portion of the satellites' X-band capacity for an unspecified period, with a right to use additional "on-call" capacity at an agreed price. Germany is thought to have contracted for bandwidth to supply interim milsatcom needs, notably in Afghanistan, until the country's own Satcom Bw 2 system is ready in 2009.
Raytheon Co. said Jan. 11 that it has won a $9.7 million contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to design and develop the next-generation wideband common data link for active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar systems. The five-year goal is to enable tactical weaponry such as combat aircraft to quickly pass on nontraditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data to users in the military and intelligence communities - a long-running and often elusive objective for the U.S. military on post-Sept. 11, 2001, operations.
Unmanned space missions to be launched from Cape Canaveral this year will more than double the unmanned rate for 2006 as major new science and advanced operational and military space technology flights are carried out. When the unmanned Cape and manned Kennedy Space Center totals are combined, the overall Cape/KSC spaceport will this year see a launch increase of 70 percent involving hardware worth tens of billions of dollars.
JLENS AWARD: The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command has awarded Raytheon Co. a $144.3 million tranche under a $1.43 billion contract for the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System's system development and demonstration. The new work, announced Jan. 11, will be completed by March 31, 2012. The system is comprised of aerostats loaded with sensor systems to provide battlefield commanders with greater over-the-horizon detection and tracking capability of cruise missiles and related threats.
