Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
3/20/2015
OGDEN, Utah —Almost two years after the Air Force began the Future ICBM Sustainment and Acquisition Construct (FISAC) and as life extension work continues on systems such as the B-52 and Trident D5, the private nuclear weapons industry is confronting issues related to parts obsolescence, supply chain, employee recruitment and retention, funding and national program visibility, industry officials said this week. “To me, it’s all about the budget, and it’s about the stability of the budget over time, and when it is unstable, it cascades to nearly every facet of what the government is able to do … in surveillance, testing and analysis, as well as what industry is able to do, as far as retaining workforce, needing to move people in and out of programs in order to [have] coverage,” Russell Anarde, Northrop Grumman Corporate Lead Executive, said March 19 at the Utah Defense Alliance and Air Force Association’s TRIAD Forum.
An industry panel gathered during the forum to discuss industry support and sustainment strategies for the nuclear triad. BAE Systems in July 2014 was awarded a $534 million contract to serve in the role of Integration Support Contractor (ISC), effectively starting the FISAC, which began the process of transferring management responsibilities for Minuteman 3 sustainment to the Air Force. Northrop Grumman is serving out the last months of its ICBM Prime Integration Contract (IPIC), which the Air Force has told industry will end Oct. 1 upon award of the FISAC Propulsion contract. Industry officials, however, have cited gaps between stated and actual contract award dates throughout the FISAC process, and some are unsure whether the Air Force will hold to that date. Orbital ATK and Northrop Grumman are competing for Propulsion after Northrop Grumman protested a planned Air Force sole-source award to ATK.
Nuclear Weapons Advocacy
Doug Graham, Vice President for Missile Systems and Advanced Programs at Lockheed Martin, urged industry officials to press Congress harder to invest in the triad. “We can’t just sit around and sort of just accept the circumstances [and say], ‘Oh, there’s not enough money’—that sort of thing. The investment has to be made.” Conversations with Congressional staffers often come down to jobs programs in the lawmakers’ districts rather than national security and strategic deterrence, another official said. “They’re most interested in how many jobs in their district, and I get it,” said Peggy Morse, Boeing Vice President for Directed Energy and Strategic Systems. “They’re elected officials and they represent the people, but it would be refreshing if there seemed to be more of a broader view, and they could come up a little to at least the 10,000-foot level and think more strategically in terms of what support for these programs means.”
DoD Visibility
In addition to Congress, the Defense Department sometimes has a short-sighted view to nuclear acquisitions, according to Ian Rankin, Vice President and General Manager for Warfare Systems at BAE Systems. “I think the DoD needs to have a clear approach and in some areas I’m not entirely sure that the DoD speaks with one voice in some of these areas,” he said. But DoD is starting to back up its words through actions, by investing more in the nuclear deterrent than previous years, Graham said.
Dr. Jamie Morin, Director of DoD’s office for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, said at the forum that DoD is investing $8 billion across the Future Years’ Defense Program in addition to already programmed funds. “We’ve seen some signs that some people are starting to get it,” Graham said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do there. Let’s be candid. There’s a couple staffers that focus on the stuff that are great. But again, the member engagement and interest, passion and commitment that I saw when I was working on [Capitol Hill] in the early 1980s [isn’t there], so we’ve got some work to do there.”
Waning Investments, Different Work Rhythms
Lisa Finneran, Vice President of Critical Mission Systems for General Dynamics Mission Systems, said the unpredictable triad investments of late engender a sporadic work rhythm and prevent corporate “buy-in.” “I’d like to see Congress pass a budget in a timely manner,” she said. “It’s just not acceptable to not do your job. And that’s what they need to do. They need to do their job, get budgets passed, and get funding and programs of record in place.”
The current and upcoming rounds of nuclear recapitalization and modernization will entail lower rates of production and smaller workforces than previous rounds, and Orbital ATK is implementing a new type of labor strategy to align with the reduced workload, according to Scott Marston, Vice President of Strategic Programs and Flight Systems for the company. “We can’t count on immediate development program coming right on a tilt,” he said. During the Cold War, employees got “salty seasoning” working intensively on solid rocket motors in a high-rate production environment, Marston added. While demand for the motors has dropped, DoD has steadily and predictably budgeted for Propulsion technologies that Orbital ATK manufactures. “As [employees] come and go, and especially in a low-rate production environment, when you have to multi-task people, maintaining that skill and that certification of production peoples is very important, and you can’t do that when you stop and start the production, so that continual drumbeat has been really helpful in maintaining that,” Marston said.
Supply Chain Issues
Tyler Evans, Vice President of Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Rocket Shop group, said most commodities are down to single-source suppliers, which usually costs the government or contractors more money. Some supply companies have moved to China, and when a supplier is tasked with manufacturing a new part, sometimes they’ll reject the project as “too hard” to make for the ICBM business, which is often the only industry that seeks out the supplier, Finneran said.
Graham cited concerns with DoD’s recent push to using commercial off-the-shelf technologies. “It sounds right, and I’m sure we’re going to hear that in connection with affordability and the nuclear enterprise,” he said. “Our experience with that is you get a fairly inexpensive part, and then a couple years later when you get a parts failure and you got to go back to the supplier and say, ‘Hey we need you guys to do some quick cost analysis on what happened here and work with us on that,’ the answer is, ‘We don’t make those anymore. We don’t want to talk to you.’ And that’s partly why they don’t have the safest capabilities that our normal DoD suppliers have. So it’s a big challenge to us, and I think it is particularly an important one for us as we go forward.”
