The Defense Department and its various services are working with BAE Systems’ United States wing on ways to preserve key skills from Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) production in case they are needed again in the future.
“There is now recognition that there are selected skills, capabilities and design engineering…that involve armored steel and titanium that are not reconsitutable in any way,” BAE Systems Inc. CEO Linda Hudson said yesterday at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington. BAE Systems Inc. is the United States arm of Britain’s BAE Systems plc.
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| BAE Systems Inc. CEO Linda Hudson. Photo: BAE Systems Inc. |
Hudson, in her prepared remarks, said specialized design skills that yield safe, survivable vehicles have no equivalent commercial application. Production tradecraft like blast-resistant welding of armored steel or titanium isn’t in strong demand in general industry, but try building a combat vehicle or ship without them, she said.
BAE was at the forefront of responding to the need for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, Hudson said following her remarks, delivering its first vehicle in weeks. If another requirement ever came up again and the company didn’t have the ballistics capabilities to build armor, assemble vehicles and deliver them, Hudson said, “many, many” people would die.
Hudson said the Navy is also dealing with preserving key GCV production skills as the Marine Corps has its AAV-7 Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV), GCV-like vehicles designed to assault any shoreline from the well decks of Navy assault ships. One way to preserve those key skills, Hudson said, could be to take planned spending levels and moderate them in such a way over a long period of time, in case need arises like the buildup in Iraq.
The Army is due by Dec. 15 to submit a report to Congress on M1 Abrams tank upgrades and Bradley fighting vehicle industrial base concerns. The preliminary document said capacity exceeds demand for newly-built heavy manufacturing for Abrams and Bradley vehicles and that demand wouldn’t move back up until late in the decade. That would also be predicated on whether more modern vehicles, like the GCV, survive sequestration and other budget cuts (Defense Daily, Oct. 1).
Hudson said she hasn’t seen the report yet, but she disputed notions raised in news reports that OEMs are fine and all the problems are with Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers. OEMs are commonly large companies like BAE while Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers supply the parts.
“I disagree vehemently that there are not OEM issues,” Hudson said. “You can have all the Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers you want, but if someone doesn’t know how to integrate the system and doesn’t know how to bring all the supplier pieces together and turn something out that satisfies the mission, then those Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers are not necessarily helpful in the end.”
Industrial base issues aren’t just tooling and production, Hudson said. They also include attracting talent, of which she said the defense base is struggling. Perceived as “uncool” to work at compared with Silicon Valley-type companies, Hudson said some of those flaws are inherent in an industry that involves the words “sequester” and “furlough.” Hudson also said rich benefits packages like pensions and stability that used to attract high-qualify candidates are not in the industry’s toolbox anymore.
She said Google [GOOG] has a playground slide to move from floor-to-floor and though employees might not use it, it’s the message the slide sends that matters most.
“Fun, creativity, motion, flexibility, youth,” Hudson said. “Google is a ‘cool’ place to work. At BAE Systems, we’ve set (ranking in Forbes’ Top 100 Best Places To Work) as an aspirational goal. We’re working hard to build the type of culture where people want to work.”
Hudson also called for immigration reform because she said 75 percent of people receiving engineering doctorates in the U.S. are not citizens and thus can’t be hired to work on classified programs.
“We are rapidly losing our technological superiority in America and immigration can be an important tool to fill the gap,” Hudson said. “In the national security space, those immigrants need a path to citizenship to help keep our nation safe.”
Hudson is scheduled to retire in 2014 (Defense Daily, Aug. 21).