Military buyers want to move quickly, which can mean companies need to add new tech to vehicles after they’re built. Now, Oshkosh Defense is building a dedicated center to test those modifications.
“We call it the Vehicle Integration Center. It allows us to prove out and test conformance in the real world. So that’s work that we’ll be doing in ‘27,” Logan Jones, Oshkosh Defense’s chief growth officer, told Defense One.
“The question of ‘does it work?’ is still left way too late in the process,” Jones said. “We want to shorten that from like a year and a half to weeks.”
While the focus is on their own offerings, Jones said the integration center could help other combat vehicle makers test their products.
“The primes are going to be interested,” he said. “The signal in the market that we’ve seen is we would be taking risk out of their program—and that’s what they want. They want speed, and they want low risk, so they can predict when it’ll be available.”
The aim, at least in part, is to make the process easier on engineers. For example: Let’s say you’re an engineer doing the counter-UAS solution. You said ‘I’m going to bolt it on.’ You need to know where the mounting locations are,” Jones said, noting that information is usually in an interface control document, or ICD. “We don’t make that easy today…But in the future, it should be a turnkey system” where the ICDs are easy to access.
Oshkosh is cleaning up ICDs and aims to start work at the center early next year.
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How the Dutch are rethinking weapons buying. The U.S. isn’t the only nation with procurement woes. The Netherlands has spent recent years trying to revamp its acquisition system, and there’s a push to incentivize manufacturers to stay ready, Derk Boswijk, the minister for arms procurement and personnel, told reporters.
- “We can buy 1 million drones, but I know one thing for sure: that weeks from now they are outdated. So we have to come up with a new model, and we are already working on it,” Boswijk said.
- That model would have the government pay commercial companies to be on-call, in a way, to produce certain military products during a conflict.
- For example, the government could pay an automaker to make drones. “In the meantime, you do the research, you build prototypes,” and order supplies, he said. But when a conflict “breaks loose, they put everything aside and…produce the drones instead of the automobiles.”
- Boswijk spoke with a sense of urgency to try something different: “The most dangerous thing we can do is play [it] safe …I have to take [risks] because otherwise, when I want to have 100 percent certainty, then I know for sure…it will be too late.”
- A bit more: Two U.S. companies inked deals during last week’s annual Netherlands-U.S. defense industry event: Bell Textron and Lockheed Martin.
- Bell had two memorandums of understanding: one with PhotonFirst to explore the use of fiber optic sensing to monitor aircrafts’ structural health and another with the Netherlands Industries for Defense & Securities.
- The latter agreement is “really to facilitate relationships on how they can help us and find other partners in the Netherlands,” Robbie Yarbrough, director of international industrial cooperation at Bell Textron, told Defense One. “And next month, we’ll be signing a few more MOUs, and we’re really looking for research and technology.”
- Lockheed Martin Skunk Works signed an agreement with the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Center in support of the Dutch air force. The deal expands an existing agreement and broadens industrial base access.
MQ-25 Stingray progress report. The Navy successfully synced the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to an unmanned tanker located more than 2,100 miles away via satellite as part of a series of preliminary sea-trial tests “to validate procedures, networks and interfaces,” the service said in a news release.
- “Once the satellite link was up, air vehicle pilots aboard USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) connected to the MQ-25A air vehicle on the ground in Mascoutah, Illinois,” the Navy told Defense One via email. “Using the MD-5C [unmanned air command and control station] aboard the ship, the AVPs gave the air vehicle multiple commands to exercise various subsystems of the aircraft and verify an established connection.”
- Context: The Navy has made several strides with its drone tanker program this year. The program is considered to be a “pathfinder” effort designed to relieve F/A-18E/F aircraft from their refueling duties to focus more on strike missions.
- Related: The Navy awarded Applied Intuition a contract for AI data infrastructure “across the manned and unmanned fleet,” the company announced. The service previously awarded the company a contract for its data engine solution and will build on that.
- “Its Intelligent Perception System will be the first fleet-scale capability deployed, starting with five Arleigh Burke-class destroyers under the Portfolio Acquisition Executive Robotic and Autonomous Systems and PAE Mission Systems initiative,” the company said in a news release.
Making moves + other news
- BAE Systems bought about 13 acres in Weld County, Colorado, to expand manufacturing related to space-based hardware and sensor systems.
- The Army expanded its enterprise contract with Striverworks tenfold to $700 million for fullstack AI solutions. The company also has a separate $200 million Army contract for the service’s Next Generation Command and Control program.
- Electra plans to demonstrate its hybrid-electric Ultra Short aircraft in Lower Manhattan on Friday. The event is expected to be the “first-ever landing at the heliport by a fixed-wing aircraft without vertical takeoff capability,” the company said in a news release.
- The National Armaments Consortium added new members and elected James Miller of the Practical Energetics Research as its executive chairman.
- The Pentagon awarded Nikon Advanced Manufacturing a contract with an unspecified amount for “customized additive manufacturing systems targeted for production of Tomahawk Land Attack Missile mid-bodies, and other similar potential applications,” the company said in a news release. The award is part of the Defense Department’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program.
- Defense tech firms like Palantir are getting more attention—from Wikipedia editors, the Guardian reported. Fun fact: Once upon a time, I wrote “a long article” about that very unique world.
