ARLINGTON, Va. — President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s Jr. twin goals of rebuilding America’s infrastructure, while protecting the environment, could bolster support for maintaining the 100-year-old law that protects the U.S. maritime industry, according to a Washington think tank analyst.

The Biden campaign “had expressed interest in new infrastructure, in new green initiatives, and the maritime industry is actually a pretty good confluence of the two,” Tim Walton, a fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, told a Navy League webinar marking the 100^th anniversary of the Jones Act.

Also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act bars foreign-built, foreign-owned or foreign-flagged vessels from conducting coastal and inland waterway trade within the United States and between the United States and its non-contiguous states and territories such as Alaska and Puerto Rico.

The long-standing legislation could figure in plans “where we’re talking about building maritime infrastructure, building low carbon emitting transportation mechanisms, green industries that support our economy in the oceans as we build a blue economy,” Walton added. A “Blue Economy,” according to the World Bank, is built on sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs and ocean ecosystem health.

Critics say the aged Jones Act has led to higher shipping costs, which are passed along as higher prices to vendors, retailers and consumers. They also maintain higher costs have driven the commercial shipbuilding industry overseas, leading to a smaller pool of qualified U.S. merchant mariners.

Without the law, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard officials have argued there would be no pool of U.S. noncombat ships — or trained American seafarers to man them — in a war or other national emergency. During the Nov. 12 webinar, former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft (retired) called for “a coherent maritime national strategy that connects with a national security strategy. That’s where the Jones Act needs to be woven into our national security strategies.”

Former U.S. Rep. Ernest Istook, an Oklahoma Republican, said the need for such a strategy is evident, in a world where 90% of trade is moved by ship, and Great Power competitor China is the world’s biggest shipbuilder, by some measures has the world’s largest navy, and is expanding its commercial ports and naval bases around the world.

Walton’s comment about Biden came after a webinar viewer asked where the Democrat stood on the Jones Act. Both Biden and President Donald Trump support the law, although Trump considered, but later rejected, an extended waiver for foreign carriers to deliver liquid natural gas to hurricane wracked-Puerto Rico and LNG-dependent New England States. Biden incorporated Jones Act support in his campaign’s Buy American/Ship American strategy.

“Historically, the U.S. maritime industry has been a leader in technology,” Walton said, “but now in the 21^st century, the Biden administration, as it appears it’s going to be, will have an opportunity, I think, to take some leadership and, as Adm. Zukunft said, actually craft an integrated national strategy for the maritime industry, and then implement it.”

To read the new Navy League special report on the Jones Act and its impact, go here.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy has ordered a second lot of Leonardo TH-73A training helicopters from the company’s U.S. operation, AgustaWestland. 

The Naval Air Systems Command has awarded AgustaWestland a $171.0 million firm-fixed-price contract modification to exercise an option for 36 TH-73As as part of the Advanced Helicopter Training System Program, according to a Nov. 12 Defense Department contract announcement. Fiscal 2021 funds were allocated for the contract modification. 

The first production lot of 32 TH-73As was ordered in January 2020 with a contract award for $176.5 million, which included initial spare parts, dedicated equipment and specific pilot and maintenance training services. 

The TH-73A will replace the Bell TH-57B/C SeaRanger helicopter in Training Air Wing Five at Naval Air Station Whiting Field, Florida, in training rotary-wing pilots for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. 

The TH-73A is a variant of the commercial Leonardo TH-119 helicopter. 

ARLINGTON, Va. — The secretary of the Navy and chief of naval operations announced on Nov. 13 the following flag assignments: 

Rear Adm. Alvin Holsey will be assigned as commander, Navy Personnel Command; and deputy chief of naval personnel, Millington, Tennessee.  Holsey is currently serving as special assistant to commander, Naval Air Forces/commander, Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, with additional duty as director, Task Force One Navy, Washington, D.C. 

Rear Adm. (lower half) Richard J. Cheeseman Jr. will be assigned as commander, Carrier Strike Group Ten, Norfolk, Virginia.  Cheeseman is currently serving as commander, Carrier Strike Group Two, Norfolk, Virginia.  

Rear Adm. (lower half) Brendan R. McLane will be assigned as commander, Navy Warfare Development Command, Norfolk, Virginia.  McLane is currently serving as commander, Carrier Strike Group Ten, Norfolk, Virginia.  

Rear Adm. (lower half) Scott F. Robertson will be assigned as commander, Carrier Strike Group Two, Norfolk, Virginia.  Robertson is currently serving as commander, Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center, San Diego, California.  

NATO now has all five NATO RQ-4D Phoenix unmanned Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) aircraft at the Main Operating Base at Sigonella, Sicily.

AGS is based on the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk wide-area surveillance drone and the MQ-4C Triton maritime surveillance platform. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for AGS and leads an industry team comprised of Leonardo, Airbus, and Kongsberg and other defense companies from all of the procuring nations participating in the AGS program.

The first AGS arrived a year ago.  The first test and training flight of the unmanned aircraft by NATO AGS Force pilots was conducted on 4 June 2020.  The final AGS landed at Sigonella yesterday (Nov. 12, 2020).

Northrop Grumman ferried the aircraft to Sigonella via a non-stop transatlantic flight. The aircraft departed on Wednesday, Nov. 11 from Palmdale, California and landed nearly 20 hours later on Nov. 12 at Sigonella, near the Italian city of Catania on the island of Sicily.

According to a NATO statement, “The five drones will support NATO operations by monitoring the ground and providing situational awareness, also known as Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, or JISR. This gives decision makers an increased tactical awareness of what’s happening on the ground, in the air and at sea, allowing accurate decision making based on real time-shared information.”

The AGS RQ-4D Phoenix is a remotely piloted surveillance aircraft developed with contributions from 15 NATO Allies: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States. Intelligence data gathered by the AGS system – which also includes associated command and control ground stations – will be available to all NATO Allies.

The 30 NATO nations have ships, battalions and aircraft, funded and maintained by the nations themselves.  But there are some capabilities that are owned by NATO, itself.  It amounts to less than 1% in investment money, and includes programs like the NATO  AWACs (Airborne Warning and Control System) and AGS, which are owned by NATO itself.

According to a statement from Northrop Grumman, NATO AGS is a system of systems comprised of aircraft, ground and support segments. Work remains to complete handover of the AGS System to the NATO AGS Force (NAGSF), the statement said.

“Once the NATO AGS system achieves handover, NATO commanders will have greater flexibility and redundancy to support the mission of protecting ground troops, civilian populations and international borders in peacetime and times of conflict as well as humanitarian missions during natural disasters,” said Jane Bishop, vice president and general manager, autonomous systems, Northrop Grumman.

ARLINGTON, Va. — As the Navy pushes the efforts to reduce the days of maintenance delays to ships in maintenance, the achievement of on-time delivery of ships from their maintenance availabilities in itself will help alleviate shortages in shipyard capacity, said the commander of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). 

Vice Adm. William Galinis, the NAVSEA commander, speaking to the Defense Writers Group during a Nov. 12 webinar, listed as his No. 1 priority the on-time delivery of ships, submarines and systems, including new construction vessels and those going through maintenance and modernization availabilities. 

Galinis said, “getting after the planning piece” right and ensuring that long-lead materials are ordered and received on time goes a long way to being ready to execute construction or maintenance when a ship comes in the yard for an availability. 

“We’ve got maintenance issues within some of our repair yards and in some phases of our new-construction yards that we have to get after,” Galinis said. “We’re working with industry on how we get after that. If you get ships through the shipyards on the plan that you initially envisioned, that in itself will free up capacity.” 

The admiral said, “there are shipyards out there that we have not fully tapped into. There’s an opportunity to bring other shipyards into the mix on the maintenance side.” 

He said his command is looking at the maintenance capacity “inside the public yards and how much of that work do we really need to push out to the private sector. Our private-sector submarine yards are interested in that type of work. Whet we need to do is show a good requirement and what the workload would look like.” 

The Navy improved its ship maintenance backlog in fiscal 2020 over 2019, reducing days of maintenance delay lost ship days from more than 7,000 to about 1,000, Galinis said, an 80% improvement, though because of some re-baselining the percentage “is closer to 40% with the original baseline,” he said. 

“We’re not going to get to zero in 2021,” he said, but noted the improvement in performance was positive and that “60% to 70% of availabilities were tracking to on-time delivery.” 

He said there was a handful of ships — including four Ticonderoga-class cruisers in the Cruiser Modernization Program and the fire-damaged Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Oscar Austin — that were delayed significantly and skewing the days of maintenance delays metric. He said the Navy is going to re-baseline the Cruiser Modernization program.     

WASHINGTON — As unmanned systems (UxS) continue to develop and be used by military services and federal agencies, the U.S. Coast Guard should proceed more aggressively and deliberately in taking advantage of UxS advancements, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  

The Coast Guard should also produce a high-level strategy with critical goals and actionable steps toward fully utilizing UxS technology, the report says. UxS technologies include aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles with no human occupants; vehicles that may have a crew but with some level of remote control; and systems that are not vehicles. 

As one of the country’s six military services, the Coast Guard also serves as a first responder, law enforcement agency, maritime regulator, and member of the intelligence community. Despite multiple initiatives to explore and assess the applicability of UxS to these areas, the Coast Guard lacks a formal means for identifying, investigating, and integrating systems. Meanwhile, UxS technological advancements continue to accelerate, driven by both commercial and military demands.  

“A major realignment of the Coast Guard’s UxS approach is needed,” said Heidi C. Perry, assistant head of the Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “As other military services integrate UxS into their force structure, the Coast Guard will be impelled to do the same.” 

The new strategy must come from the top, the report says, and therefore, the commandant should issue a high-level strategy that lays out a compelling rationale for UxS, sets forth critical goals for the systems, and outlines the Coast Guard’s approach for achieving them. The Coast Guard has issued high-level strategies in the past, which are intended to convey urgency to senior leadership and spur changes needed across the organization, from setting strategic goals and objectives for achieving the new vision to establishing appropriate organizational structures and lines of authority. 

One of the reasons for not fully exploiting the advances in UxS technology is the Coast Guard’s limited budget, including its modest research and development funding compared with other military services and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies. Furthermore, it is unlikely the funding needs for UxS will be met by simply reallocating traditional Coast Guard appropriations, the report stresses. The support of Congress and DHS will be vital for the Coast Guard to fully realize the potential of UxS technology. To properly assess the Coast Guard’s UxS funding needs, the commandant should commission an internal study of the multiyear spending that will be required for research, assets, integration, and personnel to fully implement the UxS strategy. 

Organizational changes to the Coast Guard may be necessary to most effectively execute a new high-level UxS strategy. The commandant should designate a top Coast Guard official, at the flag officer or senior executive service level, to advocate for and advance the UxS strategy, the report recommends. This official would be responsible for identifying, promoting, coordinating, and facilitating the changes that will be needed across the organization to further the commandant’s strategic goals and objectives for UxS. Additionally, the commandant should establish an UxS program office that will work with the top official to plan out, coordinate, assess, and promote UxS activities across the Coast Guard. One of the first initiatives of this program office should be to develop an UxS “road map” that translates the strategic goals into an actionable plan. 

“A dedicated program office could play a vital leadership and coordinating role in expanding the use of UxS across the Coast Guard,” said retired Coast Guard Vice Admiral Fred M. Midgette, a committee member. “It would foster an organizational environment in which the Coast Guard is better able to leverage UxS technologies.” 

In order to accelerate the introduction of UxS into the force structure, the report recommends that the Coast Guard expand its efforts to carry out operations-related experimentation with low-cost UxS. This would include potentially designating field units specifically for experimentation and rapid transitioning of systems into operations. Encouraging experimentation with low-cost UxS technologies will lead to the identification of beneficial uses and would nurture a more technologically proficient workforce. 

The study — undertaken by the Coast Guard Maritime Domain Awareness Committee — was sponsored by the U.S. Coast Guard. The National Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln. 

PLANO, Texas — Martin UAV successfully demonstrated the shipboard integration of its V-BAT as well as its impressive maritime capabilities in support of U.S. Southern Command’s (USSOUTHCOM) counter-narcotics operations in the Eastern Pacific from Oct. 6, 2019, to July 31, 2020, the company said in a Nov. 10 release. 

Support for the mission included the highly visible Enhanced Counter Narcotics Operations that began April 1 and was kicked off by the President of the United States. 

The 10-month mission started with a demonstration of the V-BAT’s small footprint, quick set-up, rapid deployment and true vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. Upon successful completion, a technology assessment to support the USSOUTHCOM Exercises and Coalition Affairs Directorate, Long Duration, Long Dwell (LD2) started upon successful completion of the shakedown. 

By leveraging commercial off-the-shelf technologies, LD2’s goal is to enhance the execution of the Department of Defense’s strategic objectives. Over the course of the demonstration, the V-BAT flew an unprecedented 273 sorties for a total of 1340.7 flight hours. 

“This mission helped catapult Martin UAV’s V-BAT into the maritime environment, showcasing its ability to withstand and perform in tropical conditions, including: strong crosswinds and unexpected storms with rain exceeding 10mm per hour,” said Heath Niemi, vice president of Global Sales & Development. 

MCLEAN, Va. — BAE Systems has been awarded contracts worth more than $30 million to produce and integrate a mission-critical information warfare platform for U.S Navy vessels to help Sailors execute their missions and remain connected while at sea, the company said in a Nov. 11 release.  

The U.S Navy has issued two task orders for Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise Services (CANES) for two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, a Virginia-class submarine, and two Blue Ridge-class command ships.  

“These two task orders permit us to continue our high-quality, high volume production and integration service, assembling and delivering CANES to the Navy safely and affordably,” said Mark Keeler, vice president and general manager of BAE Systems’ Integrated Defense Solutions business. “CANES takes advantage of commercial-off-the-shelf insertion, which brings operational agility to the warfighter and savings to the U.S. Navy.” 

Under the first task order from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) San Diego, BAE Systems will produce fully integrated CANES racks for two command ships, which are expected to be completed by February 2022. Under the second task order, the company will produce fully integrated CANES racks for two destroyers and a submarine, which are expected to be completed by March 2022. Work will be performed at BAE Systems’ 281,000 square-foot state-of-the-art production facility in Summerville, South Carolina.   

CANES consolidates and enhances five existing legacy network programs and it serves as a single support framework for all command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) applications that require dedicated infrastructure to operate.  

PASCAGOULA, Miss. — Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Ingalls Shipbuilding division has delivered National Security Cutter (NSC) Stone (WMSL 758) to the U.S. Coast Guard, the company said in a Nov. 10 release. 

Documents signed Nov. 9 mark the official transfer of custody of the ship from HII to the Coast Guard. Stone is scheduled to sail away from the shipyard at the end of this year to its homeport in Charleston, South Carolina. 

“We could not be prouder to deliver our ninth national security cutter to the Coast Guard,” Ingalls Shipbuilding President Brian Cuccias said. “Ending the year with this significant achievement is a true testament to the perseverance of our shipbuilders. Stone is a powerful ship that will have great opportunities to demonstrate the value of its multi-mission capabilities for many years to come.”  

NSC 9 is named to honor Coast Guard Commander Elmer “Archie” Fowler Stone, Coast Guard aviator number one, who made history in 1919 for being one of two Coast Guard pilots in the four-man air crew who completed the first trans-Atlantic flight in a Navy seaplane.  

The Legend-class NSC is the most technologically advanced ship in the Coast Guard’s fleet, which enables it to meet the high demands required for maritime and homeland security, law enforcement, marine safety, environmental protection and national defense missions. NSCs are 418 feet long with a top speed of 28 knots, a range of 12,000 miles, an endurance of 60 days and a crew of 120. 

MCLEAN, Va. — BAE Systems has been awarded a five-year, $94 million single-award indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract to deliver advanced technology capability to the U.S. Navy.  

Building on 40 years of support to the U.S. Navy, this award from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division’s (NAWCAD) Webster Outlying Field (WOLF) enables the company to provide engineering, test, and evaluation support for sensors as well as communication, control, and weapons systems for various manned and unmanned airborne platforms.  

“We are bringing new advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and autonomy to the Airborne Systems Integration Division,” said Mark Keeler, vice president and general manager of BAE Systems’ Integrated Defense Solutions business. “Our state-of-the-art digital engineering capabilities, and extensive experience in integrating airborne systems are further strengthening the warfighter’s ability to meet mission requirements and ensuring combat readiness in the field.”  

The award recognizes BAE Systems’ investments in the development of model-based systems engineering capabilities. The company’s ADAMS architecture provides a digital environment for systems engineering across multidisciplinary, multi-organization teams and stakeholders. On this contract, the company will use its innovative tools and methods such as digital engineering to create the digital thread that provides full design traceability to requirements, improved collaboration, and a digital repository for the Airborne Systems Integration Division.