Page 3 – Defense Daily

Lockheed Martin Part of ICEYE Consortium to Provide ATR for F-35

Finnish synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite provider ICEYE is teaming with a number of defense companies, including Lockheed Martin [LMT], to employ automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms to sort SAR imagery for Finnish F-35 fighters by Lockheed Martin.

“We will be developing ATR models–in fact, the specific model of globally scalable ATR–and integrating it into a mobile, intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance [ISR] cell that the Finnish Defense Forces are using,” Jonathan Brant, a Lockheed Martin technical fellow in artificial intelligence, said on Wednesday at a Lockheed Martin press forum on space in Crystal City, Va. “These sorts of capabilities are starting to get a lot of customer interest and adoption.”

SAR imagery is to move directly to mobile ground stations “in theater” where the ATR algorithms run “without any need for connectivity to other types of processing infrastructure,” he said.

ICEYE said on Tuesday that it will lead the F-35 “industrial participation program” consortium, which will also include Finnish suppliers Insta, Huld, and DA-Group, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

The work “will include the progression of disruptive capabilities such as analytics with AI, and encompass mobile ISR cell development, advanced analytics, and high-performance SAR imaging for all weather and light conditions, making it especially suitable for the demanding Arctic weather and light conditions of NATO’s Northern Flank,” ICEYE said in the consortium statement.

More than 84 years after the Winter War, Russia is knocking on Finland’s door once again, as Putin continues his aggression in Ukraine, and Pekka Laurila, chief strategy officer and co-founder of ICEYE, said in the company’s statement on Tuesday that the consortium’s work will ensure that “the Finnish Defense Forces and allies can be equipped with the vital knowledge and capabilities required to maintain the strategic advantage.”

Lockheed Martin’s AI-enabled cloud-based Global Automated Target Recognition (GATR) software “automates satellite image analysis by using deep learning algorithms and open-source libraries to quickly identify and classify objects in large areas across the world,” Lockheed Martin said in the consortium statement.

BlackSky Technology Inc. [BKSY] said in March that it had won a multi-million dollar DoD contract to collect and annotate thousands of BlackSky multi-frame burst images to train moving target artificial intelligence models for commercial motion imagery and help provide patterns of life analysis (Defense Daily, March 4).

In October last year, BlackSky said that it had won a Space Development Agency contract through the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s AFWERX innovation arm to help track forces on the move through ATR.

Cargo Delivery From Space Startup Inversion Raises $44 Million In Funding Round

A small company developing space-based vehicles that can store cargo in orbit for delivery to Earth on demand has raised $44 million in a Series A funding round that will let it further scale up operations to include additional hiring and development of its Arc reentry vehicle.

The funding raise for Inversion Space was co-led by Spark Capital and Adjacent, with participation from Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] venture arm, Kindred Ventures, and Y Combinator. The Los Angeles-based startup raised $10 million in an earlier seed round.

In the coming months, Inversion’s first-generation re-entry vehicle, Ray, will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle as part of the Transporter-12 rideshare mission. After launch, Ray will orbit for up to several weeks and then lend off the coast of California.

Ray is for testing purposes and will inform Arc, the company’s next-generation spacecraft that includes autonomous re-entry capabilities.

Arc measures about 4 feet by 8 feet and Inversion says its systems are already capable of landing in a radius less than 50 feet with an aim to improve that. The company plans to launch Arc in 2026.

Inversion says its technology will enable low-cost logistics in minutes to anywhere on Earth.

“Getting a package delivered from space anywhere in the world will fundamentally transform logistics, and autonomous re-entry vehicles are going to change the economics of delivery,” Nabeel Hyatt, general partner at Spark Capital, said in a statement. “Inversion’s progress since their seed round on both the vehicles and their customer interest is testament to what a singular company Inversion Space is turning into.”

In addition to its venture capital funding, Inversion this summer nabbed a $71 million contract from the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX innovation arm to test and refine technologies for precision, on-demand cargo delivery from space to Earth.

Inversion currently has about 30 employees and expects to roughly double that over the next year, the company said.

DIU Announces Awardees For Replicator Command And Control, And Autonomous Teaming

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) on Wednesday said it has awarded software contracts to seven companies to provide resilient command and control (C2), and autonomous teaming capabilities for the unmanned systems the Defense Department is rapidly acquiring under the Replicator initiative.

For the C2 capability, DIU selected solutions from Viasat [VSAT], Aalyria, Higher Ground, and IoT/AI for prototyping. This effort is called Opportunistic, Resilient & Innovative Expeditionary Topology (ORIENT).

The Autonomous Collaborative Teaming (ACT) software prototypes will be provided by Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies [LHX], and Swarm Aero.

DIU moved quickly in making the awards. The unit in early July released commercial solutions openings for both efforts. ORIENT sought secure and reliable communications capabilities for operators to direct and redirect various drone types in real-time through line of sight and beyond line-of-sight radio frequency and data networks in contested, disconnected, and intermittent environments with a focus on Naval operations in the Pacific (Defense Daily, July 1).

With the ACT, DoD wants software solutions that can coordinate hundreds or thousands of unmanned assets across multiple domains, particularly when navigation and communications are disrupted or denied.

DIU said that solutions provided under ORIENT and ACT “will enable so called ‘heterogenous collaboration’ between different Replicator systems fielded in the next year and lay the foundation for the department’s broader push toward collaborative autonomy.” Replicator was launched in August 2023 with an initial goal of fielding thousands of all domain attritable autonomous systems within 18 to 24 months to counter China’s military build-up (Defense Daily, Aug. 28).

The contract values for the ORIENT and ACT awardees were not disclosed. The two opportunities were very competitive, with ORIENT generating 130 proposals from 119 companies, and ACT garnering 165 submissions from 132 companies, DIU said.

Anduril said DIU selected its Lattice for Mission Autonomy artificial intelligence-based open architecture platform that the startup introduced in 2023 to enable the large-scale integration and use of autonomous systems under human supervision across the mission cycle (Defense Daily, May 3, 2023).

“Once integrated into Lattice, an operator will be able to unify a group of systems’ sensors, control systems, payloads, and weapons, enabling the operator to then task that team to conduct a variety of collaborative missions such as area search, target tracking and interception, signal relay, simultaneous arrival, strike, and more,” Anduril said on Wednesday.

L3Harris said it will provide a user interface, an open architecture collaborative autonomy capability that is currently in use for experimentation, and serve as a systems integrator for the autonomy architecture.

“We are delivering a multi-domain and multi-mission autonomous ecosystem that can be trusted to operate in contested environments,” Toby Magsig, vice president and general manager of Enterprise Autonomous Solutions for L3Harris, said in a statement.

Except for L3Harris, a legacy defense contractor that bills itself as a “trusted disruptor,” and satellite communications company ViaSat, the other five awardees are all startups. Anduril a year ago partnered with Aalyria, which is developing technology for mesh networking in space, to integrated their respective autonomous technologies (Defense Daily, May 9, 2023).

IoT/AI says its technology enables connectivity, collaboration, sensing, and data analysis in extreme environments. Swarm Aero makes large unmanned aircraft systems for military use. The company also has drone swarming technology based on AI and autonomy.

Replicator is initially focused on the Indo-Pacific region but the ultimate goal is to scale solutions across the joint force.

LM 400 Satellite To Fly By Middle of 2025 on Firefly Alpha Rocket, Lockheed Martin Says

Lockheed Martin [LMT] said on Tuesday that its LM 400 satellite is to launch in the first six months of next year on a Firefly Aerospace

Alpha rocket.

The refrigerator-sized LM 400 “is a bit of a Goldilocks approach” between the traditional, large, “monolithic” satellites and newer, small satellites for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency, Jeff Schrader, vice president of strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colo., told reporters during a space forum in Crystal City, Va.

“LM 400 is kind of that middle ground,” he said. “LM 400 allows a mid-class bus that has more payload and more power than small sats and much less expensive and much more agile and can be built quicker than those larger systems.”

LM 400 is one of three tech demonstrations that Lockheed Martin’s space business segment is pursuing to provide technology upgrades in two years or less to aid the U.S. military in countering China–the other two demos being the Tactical Satellite Communications (TacSat) 5G payload and Pony Express 2 for advanced battle command and control and communications.

Common components on LM 400 will allow it to adapt it to a variety of orbits and missions, including missile tracking, remoting sensing, and communications, Schrader said.

Lockheed Martin said in April last year that it has had several contracts for the LM 400, including one as part of RTX‘s [RTX] work for the Space Force Space Systems Command’s Missile Warning/Missile Tracking for Medium Earth Orbit (MEO)–also known as Missile Track Custody. Yet, SSC ended its contract with RTX in May for Epoch 1 Missile Track Custody because the “RTX Epoch 1 development effort was facing significant cost growth from the original agreement baseline, projecting slips to the launch schedule, and had unresolved design challenges” (Defense Daily, Sept. 13).

There is no “specific mission” for the LM 400 launch next year, but the “initial intent is to show that we’ve built a system, the TRL [technology readiness level] has been burned down and how long we can plan to build those in the future to offer to our customers,” Schrader said on Wednesday.

Under development for three years, LM 400 has gone through a Critical Design Review “on a government program and has been bid on several customer programs,” he said.

Lockheed Martin finished building the LM 400 satellite in December 2022, and the company said in April last year that the LM 400 had completed electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility testing and was headed to thermal vacuum testing.

“Why we plan to launch LM 400 in the first half of 2025 is effectively looking at where we need to position it in proposals to get at fielding dates that the customer has outlined,” Schrader said. “We’re through development at this point and ready to bid. Effectively, this will be ready as soon as we can get contracts for it for fielding. Missile track custody is one, but there are others that may be even in front of it. We are building this on some classified programs for the IC [intelligence community] and for DoD and also for our international customers.”

“This is gonna be a common bus that we can utilize across multiple areas so that if one person in the government pays for it, the others can take what we’ve learned from it and continue to iterate,” he said. “What we’re not gonna do is have a significant amount of NRE [non-recurring engineering] that will go with it. That’s why we wanted to do it on our own dime to get ahead of that.”

Nuke Agency Refutes Anti’s Court Claims, Says Feds Looked at Environmental Effect of Making Warhead Cores in New Mexico

The National Nuclear Security Administration, in asking a court to deny an activist’s amicus brief in an ongoing lawsuit, said it conducted a review of producing warhead cores in New Mexico.

At the end of October, Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque, N.M., filed a proposed amicus brief saying that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should “revert to the single-site production strategy,” with the single site being Savannah River Site, to satisfy a federal judge’s order that the agency and another group of environmentalists find a way to analyze the effects of a two state plutonium pit complex without stopping progress of a planned pit plant in South Carolina.

Mello wrote that NNSA’s various reviews of pit production under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews did not support plans to build pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“The Proposed Amicus attempts to introduce a new NEPA claim by arguing that NNSA lacks preexisting, independent NEPA coverage for Los Alamos to produce 30 pits per year,” the federal government wrote in the court document published Nov. 13. The defendants added that these “factual and legal assertions” by the third party are “simply wrong.”

The defendants also said that NNSA is bound by law, the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization for Fiscal Year 2019, to produce 30 pits yearly at Los Alamos. “And even if there was no statute mandating annual pit production at Los Alamos, there is, contrary to the Proposed Amicus’ assertion, preexisting NEPA coverage authorizing pit production at that single site,” defendants said.

In September, NNSA lost a lawsuit against a group of five environmentalist plaintiffs, who argued that the agency had not properly studied the environmental effects of building pits in both New Mexico and South Carolina.

After several extensions, the U.S. District Court of South Carolina has now given the parties until just before Christmas to find a “middle ground,” wherein the NNSA can complete the review without halting design or construction of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which is supposed to make at least 50 pits a year.

Federal law requires NNSA to make 80 pts annually.

A version of this story first appeared in Defense Daily’s affiliate publication Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.

Tournear: ‘Majority’ of DoD Systems Could Use SDA Acquisition Approach

The commercial sector’s employment of firm, fixed price contracts–notably the approach of SpaceX founder and Trump insider Elon Musk–looks to upset the apple cart of DoD acquisition come January, and Space Development Agency (SDA) Director Derek Tournear suggested on Tuesday that most Pentagon systems could employ the firm, fixed price contracts approach that SDA has.

The rapid timeline of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, first launched in 2010, helped spur lawmakers, led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), to revamp DoD acquisition in 2015–reforms which led to Middle Tier of Acquisition and Other Transaction Authority for rapid prototyping and fielding. A longtime military advocate and gadfly of top DoD weapons officials, McCain chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2015 until his death in 2018.

“I don’t think that everything in the Department of Defense should be acquired on this [SDA] model–using firm, fixed price contracts which allow us to move at scale as rapidly as possible and proliferation of hundreds and hundreds [of systems],” Tournear told a Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies’ virtual forum on Tuesday.

“There is a timeframe, just like in World War II where you had the Liberty ships–the proliferated model–to get the capabilities out as rapidly as possible, and you had the Manhattan Project that took the time, did things properly, pushed the edge to get the best technology available at the time fielded,” he said. “You’re gonna have those two models now, even in space. You’re gonna have models that have to be very exquisite capabilities to give you that edge on the enemy that you need, but then our model–which I think the majority of the Department of Defense capabilities could be employed by proliferation and getting things out at scale.”

SDA’s firm, fixed price acquisition strategy includes fielding optically-linked satellites in two-year “tranches,” as opposed to the 10-15 year cost-plus DoD contract development timelines.

The Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs took less than three years to develop, build, and use from June 1942 until August 1945, while the U.S.’ 2,710 World War II Liberty cargo ships sometimes took just days to build.

DoD’s “R-1 [research and development portfolio] and fixed price issues are linked,” said one analyst. “It is all about commercial R&D dominating R&D since the 1980s and the way commercial conducts their R&D. The result of that vast amount of private investment has left DoD behind, but the Pentagon hasn’t internalized what happened and continues with processes that assume it and the Big 5 [defense contractors] are still leading the world. They are not. The cost plus contracting, PPBE/JCIDS model that takes 8 years to start anything and 10-15 years in development is dead everywhere in the world except at DoD and some of our allies where they have emulated our broken system.”

“The private sector has done R&D on a time-based fixed price basis or in the venture market on a fixed series of incremental funding raises,” the analyst said. “Successfully meeting milestones and objectives means more money. Missing your target means going out of business and the failure of the startup. DoD can’t figure out or leverage that market yet or emulate its processes, but if they don’t soon the billions of dollars in VC [venture capital] investment in defense will come crashing down…There still will be some R-1 that DoD will need to invest in where the private sector will not put money in due to the risks but that probably is less than we think.”

During Tuesday’s virtual Mitchell forum, Tournear also said that SDA plans to launch its first Tranche 1 satellites over 10 months beginning next March or April–about six months behind schedule. Tranche 1 is to feature the first operational military satellites in the SDA Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture effort.

Communications satellite contractors for the SDA Tranche 1, Transport Layer are York Space Systems, Lockheed Martin [LMT], and Northrop Grumman [NOC], while L3Harris Technologies [LHX] is developing missile tracking satellites for the SDA Tranche 1, Tracking Layer.

SDA wanted to begin Tranche 1 launches in September, but launch provider delays, vendor problems with building the satellites’ optical communication terminals, and production and National Security Agency certification issues with encryption devices led to the schedule slippage (Defense Daily, Sept. 4).

SDA has been testing space-based Link 16 to ground and aircraft radios to extend the range of Link 16–a range which is now about 300 miles.

Such testing has occurred in Australia, as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still has not approved transmission of space-based Link 16 to the U.S.

“We are making some progress [with the FAA],” Tournear said on Tuesday. “The DoD CIO’s office is leading the charge to work these things through, and we’re starting to get agreements with the FAA on how we can get temporary frequency authorization with guardrails in place to be able to do some national airspace testing without full EMCF [electromagnetic compatibility features] testing certified before that. We hopefully will have abilities to do testing over the national airspace in summer of next year for Tranche 1.”

Startup Developing Optical Gyro On A Chip For GPS-Denied Ops Gets Funding With Lockheed’s Help

ANELLO Photonics this week said it has closed a Series B funding round to accelerate the development of its chip-based optical gyroscope technology that allows autonomous systems to operate in GPS-contested and denied environments.

The funding raise was co-led by Lockheed Martin

[LMT], a returning investor, Catapult Investors, and One Madison Group. ANELLO, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., did not disclose the amount of the latest raise.

In October 2021, the company completed a $28 million Series A round to further develop its Silicon Photonic Optical Gyroscope (SiPhOG).

ANELLO says that SiPhOG brings the precision of a fiber optic gyro into an integrated photonic chip, resulting in a package the size of a golf ball versus the coffee-can size FOG, lowering costs, weight, and power, without suffering problems from temperature, shock, and vibration.

The company’s X3 three-axis optical gyro inertial measurement unit provides minimal drift for whatever platform it is operating on. The accuracy is a half-degree an hour of bias stability, Gerhard Boiciuc, ANELLO’s vice president for business development and marketing, told Defense Daily on Tuesday.

ANELLO has demonstrated that platforms using its technology can drive or fly for an hour with an error of less than 100 meters, keeping a drone or vehicle from going way off course even if GPS is being spoofed or jammed, he said.

The company’s roots are in land applications but the technology has found significant interest from defense customers as well, Boiciuc said. ANELLO is also pursuing maritime uses of its SiPhOG technology at the request of Navy and NavalX partners, he said.

ANELLO has more than 30 employees. The new funding will help with ramping up manufacturing and accelerate product development.

Additional Series B investors include New Legacy, Build Collective, Trousdale Ventures, In-Q-Tel, K2 Access Fund, Purdue Strategic Ventures, Santuri Ventures, Handshake Ventures, Irongate Capital, and Mana Ventures.

Ukraine Fires U.S.-Made ATACMS Long-Range Missiles Into Russia For First Time

Ukraine on Tuesday fired U.S.-made ATACMS long-range missiles into Russian territory for the time, Moscow’s Defense Ministry confirmed.

The use of the Locked Martin

[LMT]-built ATACMS on the 1,000th day of the conflict follows the Biden administration’s reported lifting of some restrictions on Kyiv’s use of long-range weapons to hit targets inside Russia, while the Pentagon declined to confirm details of the missile attack.

Lockheed Martin’s ATACMS

“If we have more to share publicly, we will. But at this time, I just don’t have anything more to share,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement that Ukraine shot six ATACMS into the Bryansk region, claiming to have intercepted several of them with air defense systems.

A group of senior House Republicans in September urged the Biden administration to remove restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-provided long-range weapons, specifically ATACMS missiles, to strike such targets in Russia, stating it has “hampered Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia’s war of aggression” (Defense Daily, Sept. 10).

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who’s set to lead the Armed Services Committee in the next Congress, urged Biden to “more aggressively” support Ukraine in the final months of his presidency, offering recommendation to provide more ATACMS and to allow greater flexibility on the use of U.S.-provided munitions, arguing that limitations should be placed on the types of target Ukraine can go after in Russia rather than base restrictions on distance from the border (Defense Daily, Oct. 18).

Singh, during an off-camera press briefing on Monday, noted the U.S. has donated ATACMS to Ukraine “over the course of different presidential drawdown [authority] (PDA) packages,” with the missiles able to shoot out to ranges of 300 kilometers, while declining to offer a specific number provided to Kyiv due to “operational security reasons.”

“We would certainly not get into specific numbers in our stockpiles, as you can appreciate. The secretary, and I think you’ve heard us talk about it, [has said] that there are only so many of these capabilities that different nations can produce. They are incredibly costly for that reason, you know, [so] they are in limited supply,” Singh said. “So we’re not going to dip below our own readiness levels, but of course we have agreed to support Ukraine through different PDAs and [have given] them ATACMS over the course of this administration.”

During her briefing on Tuesday, Singh said Russia’s decision to deploy North Korean forces to support its operations has contributed to escalating the conflict (Defense Daily, Nov. 1).

The Pentagon assess there are over 11,000 North Korean troops in the Kursk region now which has “put more pressure on Ukrainians troops further up in the north,” Singh said, adding there’s “certainly a possibility” that Pyongyang will send more forces to support Russia.

Singh on Tuesday was also asked about reports the department is preparing a new $275 million weapons aid package for Ukraine, with the Pentagon having previously said its committed to providing Ukraine the remaining billions of dollars in authorized security assistance over the last couple months of the Biden administration (Defense Daily, Nov. 8).

“You’ve heard it from here and from the White House that we are committed to using that full authority that Congress has allotted to us. The only way we can do that also is to make sure that our shelves are fully backfilled and stocked. So as our shelves continue to get stocked with equipment and capabilities that are needed, we draw down from those and send those to Ukraine. The president has committed to ensuring that every dollar that Congress has allocated will be spent,” Singh said, while not confirming plans for the new weapons aid package.

President-elect Trump has selected Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) has his national security adviser, with Waltz having written in a recent op-ed in The Economist that the next administration should “act urgently” to bring the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East to “a swift conclusion” (Defense Daily, Nov. 12).

While Waltz has been a staunch supporter of assisting Ukraine, he has more recently aligned with Trump’s view on questioning the level of continued weapons aid to Kyiv and voted against the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act in April.

Navy Investigates More Frigate Design And Construction Sources Amid Major Delays

The Navy recently issued a Request For Information (RFI) seeking more sources able to support Constellation-class frigate design and follow-on construction amid significant delays in the program’s schedule.

The notice, posted Nov. 15, said the FFG-62 Constellation-class frigate program office (PMS 515) is conducting market research to identify “potential ship construction sources that possess the capability to accomplish future program requirements.”

They are specifically looking to find qualified U.S. surface combatant shipbuilders that can be sources for future design or follow-on construction of the frigates.

The Navy said activities they are contemplating to ultimately award to these kinds of sources include necessary engineering, technical, material procurement and production support; configuration management; Class Standard Equipment (CSE) support class flight and baseline upgrades and new technology support; data and logistics management; lessons learned analysis; testing and acceptance trials; post-delivery test and trials; and post shakedown availability support.

Other activities could include achieving reliability and maintainability requirements; system safety program support; material and fleet turnover support; shipyard engineering team; turnkey support; crew indoctrination; design tool/design standardization; detail design development; and other technical and engineering analyses to support the frigate.

Fincantieri Marinette Marine won the original frigate contract in April 2020 for up to 10 ships. At the time, the Navy boasted thanks to a competition focused on using a parent design the cost and timeline issues should be minimized, with Fincantieri using a modified version of its European FREMM frigate (Defense Daily, April 30, 2020).

Figure 1: Selected FFG-62 Mission Systems from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report “Navy Frigate: Unstable Design Has Stalled Construction and Compromised Delivery Schedules,” released May 2024. (Image: GAO)

However, by this year the Navy has had significant delays in frigate production. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro’s 45-day shipbuilding review found the lead frigate is running three years late, with the design work not complete by then (Defense Daily, April 3).

A May Government Accountability Office (GAO) report argued the Navy’s significant design changes from the parent design as well as inadequate functional design review practices and botched metrics obscured actual design progress and led to construction starting prematurely, before the design was stable enough (Defense Daily, May 29).

The notice said PMS 515 “invites all U.S. surface combatant shipbuilding sources who are interested in the FFG 62 Class ships” to submit information to demonstrate their ability to fulfill the requirements.

Over a year ago, an HII executive confirmed the company was still interested in potentially becoming the second shipbuilder for the frigate (Defense Daily, June 28, 2023).

While the Navy awarded Fincantieri for the first 10 hulls, it previously indicated the government was open to adding a second shipbuilder to increase production rates. The government included a Technical Data Package in the original contract such that another manufacturer could get the information needed to build more frigates.

Last year, former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday told a Senate panel it was important to eventually add a second frigate shipbuilder to eventually boost production to the preferred rate of two to three ships per year (Defense Daily, April 19, 2023).

This latest notice instructed respondents to contact the Navy within three days to receive the full details of the market research requested and initial responses are due by Nov. 22.

U.S., Australia And Japan To Increase Trilateral Aerospace And Autonomous R&D

The defense leaders of the U.S., Australia and Japan this week said they are working on plans to jointly develop aerospace materials and autonomous systems alongside other trilateral efforts.

During a press conference following a Trilateral Defense Ministers Meeting on Nov, 18, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the countries are moving forward with a “Trilateral Research Development Test and Evaluation Projects Arrangement, focusing on composite aerospace materials and autonomous systems.”

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, and Japan’s Minister of Defense Gen Nakatani participate in the 14th Trilateral Defense Ministers meetings in Darwin, Australia on Nov. 17, 2024. (Photo: DoD by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jack Sanders)

A joint statement issued by all three countries noted they intend to continue to strengthen regional deterrence, “including through cooperating on a networked air and missile defense architecture to counter the growing range of threats throughout the Indo-Pacific. We continue to make progress on our regional architecture through deepened information sharing to improve each country’s ability to respond to threats.”

Austin said they are also “deepening our discussions” on cooperative combat aircraft (CCA) and autonomy as well as opportunities to boost cooperation with Japan on AUKUS Pillar II projects.”

AUKUS Pillar 1 focuses on helping Australia field nuclear-powered attack submarines but Pillar II focuses on the U.S., U.K. and Australia cooperating on sharing other defense technologies like autonomy and hypersonic capabilities.

While the ministers did not announce anything specific on regional hypersonics work, Austin said AUKUS Pillar II is about “working together to leverage technology to provide real capability to the war fighter as quickly as we possibly can. And we’re making progress in that area. And we expect that Japan will join AUKUS Pillar II at some point in the not too distant future, to work on specific projects that have yet to be made.”

The joint statement said the initial consultations between Japan and the AUKUS partners will be improving interoperability on Japan’s maritime autonomous systems.

An April AUKUS defense ministers joint statement said they were considering inviting Japan into at least some elements of Pillar II work, even if not making them a full member (Defense Daily, April 9).

“There are just so many things that that we can work together on and are working to be together on, whether it’s you know, quantum capability, CCA, or what you would describe as man-unmanned teaming aircraft, and just a number of other things that include long range strike and so many other things that I believe we’re going to – that our work is going to pay significant dividends to the warfighter here going forward,” Austin continued.

Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Richard Marles underscored Australia shares the most strategic alignment with Japan, partially since they are both allies and partners of the U.S.

“That means that there actually has been a real history and record of us working closely together. But what we are announcing today gives expression to the fact that as three countries, we now seek to do this in a more and increasingly coordinated way.”

The joint statement also said they agree to continue further collaboration through vehicles like the multilateral Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience (PIPIR). The partnership is a forum for partners to strengthen their defense industrial resilience in the Indo-Pacific region.

Marles also announced there will be regular deployments of Japan’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade to Australia to focus on cooperating with the Australian Defense Force and the United States Marines when they are there as part of the Marine rotation.

“This is going to build interoperability between our…three countries., But it is a very important statement to the region and to the world about the commitment that our three countries have in working with each other. Today, we are also announcing that our three countries will commit to consulting with each other in respect of regional security issues and contingencies,” he said.

The joint statement noted there will be annual trilateral amphibious training among the Australian, Japanese and U.S. forces in Northern Australia and the region, starting with the Talisman Sabre 2025 exercise.

Marles underscored this gives a “substance and a structure” to the trilateral meeting and “it represents the ambition that all of us have about taking this architecture of our three countries even further.”