ARLINGTON,
Va. — The U.S. State Department has approved the possible sale of MH-60R
helicopters to the Hellenic navy at the request of the Greek government, the
Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said in a July 12 release. The sale,
if ultimately approved, would be made through the Foreign Military Sales
program and could total $600 million.

“The government
of Greece has requested to buy up to seven MH-60Rs Multi-Mission Helicopters,”
the release said.

The sale also
would include aircraft systems and spares, including T700 GE-401 C Engines; APS-l
53(V) radars; Airborne Low Frequency Sonar systems; AAS-44C(V) Multi-Spectral
Targeting Systems; and Embedded Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation
Systems with Selective Availability/Anti-Spoofing Module.

Also included
in the possible sale are ARC-210 APX-1990A(C) radios; AVS-9 Night Vision
Devices; and APX-123 Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) transponders.

The deal also
would include “spare engine containers; facilities study, design, and
construction; spare and repair parts; support and test equipment; communication
equipment; ferry support; publications and technical documentation; personnel
training and training equipment; U.S. government and contractor engineering,
technical and logistics support services; and other related elements of
logistical and program support,” the release said.

Along with
the helicopters, the sale would include 1,000 SSQ-36/53/62 sonobuoys; two
AGM-114 M36-E9 Captive Air Training Missiles; four AGM-114Q Hellfire Training
Missiles; 100 Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System (APKWS) rockets; 30 Mk54
Torpedoes; 12 M-240 crew-served guns; and 12 GAU-21 crew-served guns. 

“This
proposed sale will support U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives
by helping to improve the security of a NATO ally, which is an important
partner for political stability and economic progress in Europe,” the release
said. “The MH-60R helicopters will bolster the Hellenic navy’s ability to support
NATO and remain interoperable with the U.S. and the NATO alliance.”

In addition to the U.S.
Navy, the MH-60R, built by Lockheed Martin, is operated by the Royal Australian
Navy, the Royal Danish Navy and the Royal Saudi Naval Forces. In April, the
State Department approved the possible sale of 24 MH-60Rs to the Indian navy.

WASHINGTON —
The president’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that he
supports development and deployment of a low-yield nuclear warhead as part of
the nations’ strategic deterrent.

“I think it
is an important capability to have in our arsenal in order to deal with any
potential adversaries or contingency operations,” Army Gen. Mark Milley said as
he testified June 11 on Capitol Hill at his confirmation hearing before the
Senate Armed Services Committee.

The
deployment of a low-yield warhead, the W76-2, is called for in the 2018 Nuclear
Posture Review. Production of the warhead has begun for the Trident D5LE
submarine-launched ballistic missiles to be deployed on board Ohio-class
ballistic-missile submarines.

The future of
the W76-2 is clouded because of opposition of key Democratic members of the
House of Representatives and is one of the contentious issues of the National
Defense Authorization bill currently in work.

Milley listed
the nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent as his top modernization priority, the
others being space capabilities, artificial intelligence and hypersonic
weapons.

He supports
modernization of all three legs of the U.S. strategic deterrent triad: bombers,
ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched
ballistic missiles.

“The triad has worked,”
Milley said. “There are many reasons why there hasn’t been a great power war
since 1945. Clearly one of them is nuclear deterrence and part of that is the
capability of the triad. Each leg of the triad gives you different capability.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated as of July 18, 2019, to reflect Gilday’s formal nomination.

ARLINGTON,
Va. — For the first time since the 1970s, a three-star admiral is the nominee for
chief of naval operations.

Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, who earlier this year became director of the Joint Staff, has been nominated by President Trump for promotion to admiral and to become CNO, according to a July 18 announcement from Acting Defense Secretary Richard. V. Spencer.

Gilday was selected to succeed Adm. John M.
Richardson after Adm. Bill Moran’s announcement that he would retire amid
questions about his ongoing professional relationship with a disgraced former
aide, sources confirmed.

Richardson had been scheduled to leave Aug. 1 and
retire in September but will stay on until the U.S. Senate confirmation process
for Gilday is complete.

The
nominee for the Navy’s next chief typically comes from a small pool of
four-star commanders. Gilday is the first three-star admiral to be chosen since
Vice Adm. Elmo Zumwalt was nominated by President Nixon in April 1970.

In a statement, Moran said he made the decision to retire “based on an open investigation into the nature of some of my personal email correspondence over the past couple of years and for continuing to maintain a professional relationship with a former staff officer, now retired, who had while in uniform been investigated and held accountable over allegations of inappropriate behavior.”

Press
reports identified the staff officer as Chris Servello, former public affairs
officer for Richardson.

Moran
added that he did not condone the staff officer’s conduct, but said he
understands how “toxic it can be to any team when inappropriate behavior goes
unrecognized and unchecked.”

“Every Sailor is entitled to serve in an environment free of harassment or intimidation,” Moran said. “As painful as it is to submit my request to retire, I will not be an impediment whatsoever to the important service that you and your families continue to render the nation every day.”

Spencer
said he admired Moran’s Navy service, but his decision to maintain the
relationship with the staff officer “has caused me to call his judgment into
question.”

Moran
called his 38 years of Navy service a “high honor and privilege” and said he
deeply regrets “any inconvenience” his decision causes Trump and Spencer. 

Gilday, a
native of Lowell, Massachusetts, is the son of a Navy Sailor, according to his
official biography. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds master’s
degrees from the Harvard Kennedy School and the National War College.

As a
surface warfare officer, Gilday deployed on two cruisers and a destroyer before
rising to command two more destroyers. Subsequently, he commanded Destroyer
Squadron 7, serving as sea combat commander for the Ronald Reagan Carrier
Strike Group.

As a flag
officer, he served as commander, Carrier Strike Group 8, embarked aboard USS
Dwight D. Eisenhower, and as commander, U.S. Fleet Cyber Command and U.S 10th
Fleet. Ashore, as a flag officer, he served in joint positions as director of
operations for NATO’s Joint Force Command Lisbon; as chief of staff for Naval
Striking and Support Forces NATO; director of operations for U.S. Cyber
Command; and as director of operations for the Joint Staff. 

His earlier staff assignments include the Bureau of Naval Personnel, the staff of the chief of naval operations, and the staff of the vice chief of naval operations. Joint assignments include executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and naval aide to the president.

Additional reporting by Megan Scully.

ARLINGTON,
Va. — One might be surprised that one of the most well-known companies in
defense work does not manufacture any systems or equipment, but it has a wide portfolio
of systems for which it serves as an integrator. SAIC focuses of a lot of its
Navy business on service-life extension of systems.

“We’re the second largest independent technology integrator in government services right now,” Rick Sabol, senior vice president, operations, NAVSEA and NAVAIR Operations, at SAIC, said in a July 8 interview with Seapower.

“What sets us
apart: we don’t build anything. We are always working on the government side as
an agnostic partner with them using whatever technologies they choose. We
facilitate the integration thereof, be it on platform or systems or what have
you.”

SAIC, which
is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, has 23,000 employees and an annual
revenue of $6.5 billion. Sabol oversees the company’s work for Naval Air
Systems Command and Naval Sea Systems Command.

Sabol said SAIC
has three main areas for its business: engineering and platform integration;
enterprise information technology; and logistics readiness and supply.

“We
think we are in a particular niche where we excel,” Sabol said. “We’re in that
niche in the middle where we can provide the engineering development support. We
can sustain systems and platforms throughout their life cycle for the customer.”

“We
think we are successful because some of [original equipment manufacturers] are
focused on selling the new shiny toy that costs a lot of money,” he said. “But
we know that the Navy right now with its budget constraint has issues in
service-life extension [which] we are focusing on in that middle area to help
the Navy and the warfighter extend the life of existing systems at a much more
economical cost.”

A recent
example of SAIC’s integration work is its offering in the competition for an
amphibious combat vehicle for the Marine Corps. SAIC did not build any of the proposed
vehicle or its systems and subsystems but subcontracted that work and brought
all the components and integrated them into the full-up vehicle.

SAIC also has
a role in the restart of production of the Mark 48 submarine-launched torpedo.
The company is integrating all the components of the afterbody and tailcone of the
weapon, including the propulsion system, which are being built by other
companies. The integration involves 26 major subassemblies made up of 500 piece
parts.

The
integration occurs at one of SAIC’s product support centers, in this case the
one near the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane in Bedford, Indiana. 

At Lakehurst,
New Jersey, home of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division Lakehurst,
the SAIC depot modernizes and refurbishes aircraft racks for bombs and other
stores.

The company also integrates
upgrades into surface and land-based radars for the Navy and Marine Corps; C4I
(command, control, communications, computer, and intelligence) systems. The
ground-based observation system towers built for the Army were integrated by
SAIC.

ARLINGTON,
Va. — The Navy has awarded a contract for Blackjack and ScanEagle unmanned
aerial vehicles for the Navy and Marine Corps and several foreign nations.

Insitu Inc.
of Bingen, Washington, was awarded by the Naval Air Systems Command a $390.1
million firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for
up to 63 RQ-21A [Blackjack] attrition air vehicles for the U.S. Marine Corps
and U.S. Navy,” a June 28 Defense Department announcement said. “In addition,
this contract provides for up to six RQ-21A unmanned aircraft systems and up to
17 RQ-21A air vehicles for foreign military sales customers, including the
governments of Canada, Poland and Oman.”

Insitu also will
also provide up to 93 ScanEagle UASs in various configurations, the
announcement said. “In addition, this contract provides for associated
services, including training, test and engineering, development of engineering
change proposals, operations support, organizational level maintenance, field
service representatives, land and ship surveys, hardware site activations,
hardware installs, repairs, and data.”

The RQ-21A
Blackjack has seen service as a surveillance platform with the Marine Corps in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Contractor-owned and operated ScanEagles
have operated in support of U.S. and partner nations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The ScanEagle also has be operated by U.S. Special Operations command and by
several foreign nations. 

The orders
are expected to be completed by June 2022.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy has deployed a littoral combat
ship to the Western Pacific for the first time in 18 months, the first of three
LCSs the service plans to deploy this year.

The first LCS deployment this year apparently was kept
quiet by the Navy until the service published a July 1 web article by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Greg
Johnson of commander, Logistics Force, Western Pacific/CTF 73 Public Affairs,
of the Independence-class USS Montgomery (LCS 8) making a port call in Davao,
Philippines, on June 29.

The last LCS to deploy, USS Coronado (LCS 4), returned from the
Western Pacific on Dec. 5, 2017. It had been preceded by the USS Freedom (LCS
1) and its Freedom-class sister ship, USS Fort Worth (LCS 3), in 2015 and 2016,
respectively.

The commander of Naval Surface Forces told reporters in a
Jan. 11 teleconference that LCS deployments would resume in 2019, saying that
the Independence-class LCSs USS Montgomery and USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10) would
deploy from the West Coast and that the first LCS deployments from the East
Coast, departing from Naval Station Mayport, Florida, would be undertaken by
the Freedom-variant LCS USS Detroit (LCS 7), followed by sister ship USS Little
Rock (LCS 9) in 2020.

For all of these deployments, the ships will carry the
full surface warfare mission package, Brown said.

“It’s happening,” Brown said during the teleconference,
noting that from then on “there will always be LCS forward-deployed.”

WASHINGTON —
Alaska’s junior senator, a member of the Armed Services Committee, is critical
of the Pentagon’s lack of support for a strategic Arctic port but is pleased
that the nation has a Secretary of the Navy who understands the need for the
Navy to have the infrastructure to sustain a presence in the Arctic region.

“The good
news is having a Secretary of the Navy who gets it and is an advocate,” said
Sen. Dan Sullivan, chairman of the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management
Support on the Senate Armed Services Committee, speaking June 26 on Arctic
defense issues to an audience at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a Washington think tank, noting that Congress, not the Defense
Department, is usually driving the efforts to strengthen U.S. strategic presence
in the Arctic.

Sullivan,
also a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, said he was concerned about Russian
hegemony in the Arctic, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin said that
the Arctic is “the new Suez Canal that Russia will control,” and that Russia is
devoting four of six new brigade combat teams to the Arctic region.  

He noted that
Russia fields 40 icebreakers and is building 13 more, while the Coast Guard has
only one heavy icebreaker. He is pleased that the Congress has authorized six
icebreakers, including three polar security cutters (PSCs), and has funded the
first PSC and made a down payment of a second.

Sullivan said
the Navy will be sending one or two guided-missile destroyers along with Coast
Guard assets to the Arctic this summer and in September will be conducting
exercises from the former naval air station on Adak, an Aleutian island, as
well as operating P-8 maritime patrol aircraft from Adak for part of the year.

The Arm Corps
of Engineers is studying the challenges of building a strategic port at Nome,
Alaska, he said. 

He pointed
out that the Navy currently does not have the capability to conduct freedom of
navigation operations in the Arctic, noting that submarines, being covert under
the ice, do not count as a ‘presence.’ 

Sullivan also
said the Navy needs to consider ice-hardening some future ships.  

“I’m very
supportive of a 355-ship Navy, but we need to look at the Navy and we’ve had
this in the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] for the Secretary of the
Navy to look, the ice-hardening capabilities of some of that new fleet that
we’re building, so we have a lot of work to do and we’re way behind with regard
to capabilities, particularly on the Navy side, the strategic Arctic port side,”
he said.

ARLINGTON,
Va. — The Marine Corps’ first operational squadron to fly the F-35C
carrier-capable version of the Lightning II joint strike fighter has retired
its last F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter.

In ceremonies
held June 21 at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, Marine Fighter
Attack Squadron 314 (VMFA-314) retired its last Hornet, an F/A-18A++ version.
The Black Knights, as the squadron is known, are now in transition to the F-35C
at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California, under the tutelage of the Navy’s
F-35C replacement training squadron, VFA-125.

The Marine
Corps flies both the short-takeoff/vertical landing F-35B version and the F-35C
aircraft carrier version. The Corps currently fields three operational F-35B
squadrons, VMFA-121, -211, and -122.

The Corps is
procuring 67 F-35Cs to equip squadrons that will deploy with Navy carrier air
wings. In recent years the Corps has assigned two VMFA F/A-18 squadrons to
deploy with carrier air wings.

WASHINGTON —
A disciplined set of practices by the U.S. Navy’s frigate program office
enabled the planned acquisition timeline for the new ship to be shortened by
six years over what a new warship normally might have taken.

Regan Campbell, program manager for the FFG(X) guided-missile frigate
program, speaking June 20 in Washington at the Technology, Systems and Ships
Symposium of the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE), said the practices
wouldn’t necessarily work in all acquisitions but the frigate program became a
proving ground for early engagement with industry and setting clear
requirements.

Campbell said the program office leveraged previous analyses of
alternatives to accelerate the process and set the stage for clear shipbuilder
requirements. The requirement for bidders to use a parent ship design as a
basis for their proposals greatly shortened the timeline, avoiding the need for
a “clean-sheet” design. A parallel requirements evaluation process instead of a
serial process also saved some time.

By design, the frigate will make use of command mature
government-furnished equipment (GFE), particularly weapons, sensors and combat
systems that already have been developed but will contribute to cost savings by
being common with systems on other classes of ships.

Use of GFE, Campbell said, “allows us to shorten our combat systems
integration time.”

Early engagement with industry also saved time and produced ideas for
the program. Campbell said the Frigate Affordability Board received more than
350 ideas to modify the ship specifications and the Capabilities Definition
Document.

“We accepted over 60% of the industry ideas,” Campbell said.

The Navy released the Request for Proposals for the FFG(X) on June 20.

Four companies are expected to submit bids for the FFG(X) program:
Huntington Ingalls, Fincantieri Marine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and
Austal USA. The builder of the Freedom-class littoral combat ship, Lockheed
Martin, participated in the program until recently but dropped out. The competition
is open to other bidders that can meet the requirements.

ARLINGTON,
Va. — The U.S. Marine Corps has awarded BAE Systems a contract to develop two
variants of the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) and manufacture one of them.

Marine Corps
Systems Command has awarded “a not-to-exceed [$67 million] modification for
firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the development of
engineering drawings, manufacture and test support for three [ACV] command-and-control
Mission Role Variants (MRVs) and the development of engineering drawings for
the ACV medium-caliber-cannon MRV,” according to a Defense Department release.

BAE Systems
is building the ACV for the Marine Corps as an amphibious troop carrier to
replace the four-decade-old Assault Amphibious Vehicle. The AAV7 is fielded in
several variants, and the Corps plans to field the ACV in variants as well.

The
command-and-control (C2) MRV will be the first variant of the ACV. The C2
variant will be designed for a commander and staff and equipped with computer
displays and communications systems to enable the commander to maintain
situational awareness of the battlefield.

A variant
with a medium-caliber gun atop the ACV will follow.

Work is
expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2022.