By Geoff Fein
While there is considerable public awareness concerning the Air Force’s new KC(X) tanker program, especially after yesterday’s decision by DoD to recompete the program, what is not as prominent, yet quite a story in its own right, is how Northrop Grumman [NOC] prevailed in recent years to win three major military aircraft competitions–KC(X), the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) system, and the Navy’s Unmanned Combat Aerial System-Demonstrator (UCAS-D) program.
This journey for Northrop Grumman was one fraught with challenges and a few disappointments that company officials used as learning tools to strengthen the competitive posture of the organization. Even though the company won the three hard-fought competitions, it’s unclear if the results will stand. KC(X) is now going to be officially recompeted and BAMS is under a protest likely to be resolved later in the summer.
Nevertheless, one needs to go back to the late 1990s, after the failed merger with Lockheed Martin [LMT], to understand how the company captured the programs in the first place, Scott Seymour, former president of Northrop Grumman’s Integrated Systems sector, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
It was at that time Northrop Grumman reorganized itself and one of the emerging sectors that came out was Integrated Systems.
Gary Ervin is current sector president for integrated systems, succeeding Seymour.
Integrated systems was comprised of the aerospace components of three former companies: Northrop, Grumman and Ryan Aeronautical.
“At that time, the business basically…the aerospace side of the company in the late 90s…was in a heavy downsizing mode,.” Seymour said.
The B-2 was going out of production, the F-18 was a very mature program, out on the East Coast the company had the F-14 Tomcat, E-2 Hawkeye, the EA-6B Prowler and the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS).
“So you had a mature aerospace business, but it was mainly oriented toward programs that were in the late stages of their life cycle,” he added. “That’s when we put in our strategy of perform, position and grow, which has been the framework we built around since the turn of the century.”
Around 2000, Northrop Grumman acquired some new development programs at each of the four major development sites the company has in New York, Florida, and two in California.
“We won the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter) program, which was a major capture for us as a member of the Lockheed Martin team. This enabled the El Segundo site, the former Northrop Aircraft portion of Integrated Systems, to sustain a lot of experience and begin bringing in new college graduates for the first time in years,” Seymour said.
The acquisition of Ryan brought with it the Global Hawk development program at the company’s San Diego unmanned systems site, he added.
At its Bethpage site, Northrop Grumman got the Advanced Hawkeye development program. The company also began the ICAP (improved capability) III modification for the EA-6B Prowler. That effort led to work on Boeing‘s [BA] EA-18G. And in Melbourne, Florida, work was initiated on the E-10A development program.
The mix of development programs together with the ongoing sustainment of legacy systems enabled Northrop Grumman to sustain the core of its knowledge base in light of the attrition the defense industry was going through at the time.
“You took some great systems work, complex systems engineering experience that had been gained on the B-2, Hawkeye, JSTARS and Global Hawk, and all of that now had an opportunity to move forward,” Seymour said.
Company officials knew Northrop Grumman had to perform on these programs if they were ever going to grow out into the future, he added.
“The ‘perform’ part of perform, position and grow was certainly our focus. We initiated major efforts to strengthen the disciplines of program management, systems engineering, and major subcontract management, which had seen a loss of knowledge during the downturn,” Seymour said. “We also knew we had to address a number of areas across the business to ‘position’ ourselves to become more competitive going forward, in addition to being able to perform the business we had. Toward this end we launched initiatives focused on our people, processes, tools and technology.”
The third part of the company’s strategy was to grow by anticipating where the customers’ emerging needs were headed.
“We began some research and development efforts pointing toward future concepts that would help address capabilities required for the Global War on Terror, as well as the recapitalization needs our customers were facing. That’s basically the strategy we put in place,” Seymour explained.
“We saw some opportunities likely to emerge over the next five to 10 years which would leverage our core competencies which are systems integration, innovative aircraft design and manufacture–both manned and unmanned, aircraft modification, and support,” he added.
The thinking was there were going to be some opportunities to move beyond the niche market segments Northrop Grumman had traditionally been in, Seymour said. This would allow the company to further diversify our business.
“As we dealt with downsizing, selling off facilities and getting our manufacturing capacity right, we began to look toward the strategy of eventually starting to grow again,” Seymour said. “With this in mind we had to make sure we maintained a viable ‘front end.’ So it was about 2000 where we made the decision to go ahead and build Pegasus, which became the X-47A.”
X-47A was Northrop Grumman’s prototype–a tailless unmanned aircraft.
“We decided to demonstrate that an unmanned aircraft could be integrated into carrier operations,” he added.
The project was company funded and the system was successfully flown at China Lake, Calif.
The X-47A eventually led to the UCAS-D program. Northrop Grumman was awarded the contract to build two prototypes in 2007.
What was key to winning the demonstrator contract was the company’s focus on a Navy aircraft carrier compatible design from day one, Seymour noted.
“UCAS-D was a major, major win for the company. When you really think about it, since the B-2 program, some 20 odd years [ago], we really hadn’t won a competitive military program and UCAS sort of broke the ice,” he said.
“When you look at this period in our history, a lot of our work was sole source. One of the big challenges the company faced as it unfolded the strategy of perform, position and grow, was to reconstitute the competencies required to win a competitive procurement,” Seymour added.
The company had some bumps along the way in doing that but certainly a lot of the positioning tactics that it had employed were geared towards improving the ability to write a winning proposal, Seymour said.
“We had to develop our operations analysis competency, our ability to think through requirements and get out and listen and understand what the customers’ real needs are to get that deep understanding inside the customer community of what it is they really need and are asking for,” he said. “There was a lot of work that went on along the way as we were getting better at that.”
Initially the company had some successes. For example, they won a program called Battle Management Command and Control. “That gave us a bit of a lift.”
But right after that, the company entered into competitions for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and then the Air Operations Center (AOC). Northrop Grumman lost both efforts.
“We gained a lot of experience in competing for some of these early programs that we were not successful on,” Seymour said.
The company immediately put forth a big activity at its development centers to go through the lessons learned from CEV and AOC.
“We had to really work this hard because we were launching the UCAS proposal out of the unmanned center in Rancho Bernardo [Calif.]; the BAMS proposal was out in Bethpage, N.Y.; and the tanker proposal was in Melbourne, Fla. So, in three different parts of the country, we were simultaneously writing these proposals, basically six months after we had lost two key programs,” Seymour said. “So we had a lot to do to capture the learning and make the improvements in our processes that would be required to succeed in any future competitions.”
The company stuck to its strategy of “perform, position and grow,” Seymour added. “The opportunities we pursued were driven by emerging customer needs, including recapitalization.”
Northrop Grumman saw the opportunity to compete in some new mission areas and felt they could really provide value to the warfighters tasked with these missions, he said.
“We saw the recapitalization of the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance (MPR) fleet coming and had targeted that as an opportunity out in the future, so BAMS got on our radar screen early,” Seymour said.
“The tanker….we also saw that recapitalization need coming and based on our competencies in system engineering and aircraft modification (for example, integrating the radar on the 707 commercial aircraft), again we saw an opportunity to compete in a new area,” he added.
Northrop Grumman has certainly come a long way, and no matter how current events eventually play out, Seymour believes the nation’s defense will be stronger as a result of the “fierce competitions that results from the presence of several strong competitors pursuing these programs.”