By Geoff Fein
With its recent release of the Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System (STUAS)/Tier II request for proposal (RFP), the Navy is hoping to find a mature capability that could possibly be deployed earlier than a normal development program, according to a service official.
“We don’t expect to be starting from a clean sheet of paper…from scratch. We expect industry has a fairly mature system,” Rear Adm. Bill Shannon, program executive officer for unmanned aviation and strike weapons, told Defense Daily last week.
On April 21, STUAS program office officials will meet with potential offerors for a pre-proposal conference, Shannon said. The idea is to get them all into one room so they can all hear the same questions and answers at the same time.
Then in May, following a site survey and discussion about the flight demonstrations, the program office will hold the event.
“It’s a robust demonstration–two flights, and within those flights there are a total of 21 events that the air vehicle and the system as a whole have to go through,” Capt. J.R. Brown, program manager for PMA-263, Navy and Marine Corps unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV), told Defense Daily during the same interview.
For example, the program is going to take a look at the basic operation of the electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) payloads, Brown said. “We are going to see it get classified for performance and see it go through a classification process also.”
One of the other things the program office is going to take a look at that’s part of the payload is the ability for the platform to stream video, Brown added.
“We want to make sure it can interoperate with a remote video terminal (RVT). That’s what the forward deployed warfighters are using today,” he said. “[It] is pretty important that we see how that works.”
Additionally, Brown’s team is also going to look at the sensor’s ability to look at a point of interest and work at that. But the most important payload, he noted, is going to be the EOIR. “That’s the eyes for the warfighter. There are other payloads–communications relay payload, the video downlink, and…AIS (Automatic Identification System) used in the maritime environment.”
The Navy will also be looking at the launch and recovery mechanisms, Shannon added.
Shannon said he expects about six to eight potential offerors to respond to the RFP. “I think it’s a pretty good competitive field.”
Companies expected to bid on the STUAS RFP include: Boeing [BA], the team of General Dynamics [GD] and Israel’s Elbit Systems [ESLT], Northrop Grumman [NOC], and Raytheon [RTN] (Defense Daily, April 8).
Although initial operational capability is planned for fourth quarter FY ’12, there is the possibility the winning bid could end up in the field much sooner, Shannon noted.
After the Navy selects a winning bid, that particular system will go through an operational assessment with the operational test force supported by the end users, Shannon said. “Then the warfighters will get a chance to see how mature the system is. And they can make a decision for an early operational capability (EOC) if they think what they see is mature enough to be deployed.”
Shannon acknowledges that this process is a little different.
“We built that into this program. In the RFP we ask for a priced option for that EOC, so when we award this development contract, embedded in that will be the pricing and an option for EOC,” he said. “If the warfighter early on thinks that the system is mature enough to get a decent capability, we have already in place a contract to execute that option instead of having to start a whole new negotiation process.”
That’s why the Navy is looking for a mature system up front, Shannon added.
“That’s based on our understanding of the marketplace for this type of system. We spent the last year surveying the market. We’ve had some industry days…we have a fairly good appreciation for the maturity of the market in this area,” he said.
When each company makes its EOC proposal, they will have to spell out the configuration of what that EOC system will look like, Gary Kessler, deputy PEO for unmanned aviation, told Defense Daily in the same interview.
“We will be able to compare that to what they showed up at the demonstration with to see if there are any changes in configuration there,” he said.
Brown said the STUAS/TIER II RFP is unique for a couple of reasons. “Early Operational Capability is an option, the demonstration flights are unusual, and it has performance based specifications instead of typical system specifications.”
Shannon noted the effort isn’t without risk. “Yes, this is compressed, and yes it is aggressive.”
“The major risk is that the offerors don’t have a system as mature as their published literature says they have,” Shannon said. “So the risk is we’ve structured a program that’s assumed there is a certain level of maturity and if when they show up nobody has that level of maturity, then we’ve got a longer program than we structured. That’s probably the most significant risk.”
But the Navy thought it necessary to take the risk because STUAS is an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance asset that the Navy, Marine Corps, special warfare, and riverine forces need.
“So we are taking the risk believing, based on our information, that we will be able to find a relatively mature product rather than go the other way which says we are going to assume nobody has anything and we are going to start from scratch. If we did it that way, we have condemned ourselves to a long program,” Shannon said. “We are trying to move through as rapidly as we can in support of the warfighter.”
The Navy’s plan calls for a total of 56 systems. Each system will come with either three or four air vehicles, depending on the user, Brown said, and one to two ground control systems per system.
Although the RFP contains every existing standard the Navy could apply that would move the offeror toward a common standard, a common ground station does not yet exist, Shannon pointed out.
“The problem is across DoD, and really across industry around the world, there is not yet a standard that if you applied it would allow your system to be interoperable with a different system’s ground station,” he said.
There is a NATO Standardization Agreement 4686 is included in the STUAS RFP.
“There are enough options built into that standard that still allows folks to kind of customize their ground station,” Shannon explained. “Across OSD we are working real hard, and Mr. Gary Kessler is very active with DoD, all the way up to Mr. [John] Young [Pentagon acquisition chief]. He has been personally involved in trying to get us to a common standard, but we are probably 12-18 months away from getting to the point where if we put this requirement in somebody’s RFP and they met it they’d be able to talk to anybody else. But we are not there yet unfortunately.”