Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
5/22/2015
The contract for the Long-Range Strike Bomber should be awarded this summer, the Air Force’s top acquisition official said late last week. “It’ll be done when it’s done, but I’m expecting the next one to two months,” Bill LaPlante, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Acquisition), said during an Air Force Association breakfast speech. Northrop Grumman is competing against a Lockheed Martin-Boeing team for the contract. LaPlante said that source selection is going well, and noted a typical uncertainty about source selection timelines. “It’s hard to predict how a source selection will last,” he said. “Because really what happens is you have to get the proposals in, you have to, and there’s always questions on the proposals you have to put back to the industry teams, then they come back with the next version, then you tee up the questions, then you check each phase. … What I care about, what everybody cares about is it’s done right. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s done June 1, July 1 or August 1.”
The LRSB contract will be a fixed-price-type for the first five production lots, which is one-fifth of the fleet and the most expensive aircraft in the production phase, Air Force spokesperson Ed Gulick said in a written response. At the conclusion of that phase, the LRSB will be procured through a cost-plus model with objective incentives for development, and no other contract types are being considered at this time, according to Gulick.
‘Take My Word For It’ on Costs, Official Says
As some analysts and pundits have expressed skepticism that the Air Force can stick to its expected procurement flyaway cost of $550 million a plane for 80-100 LRSBs, LaPlante defended the ongoing work on the program. The service acquired its last bomber, the B-2, at a cost of $737 million per plane in 1997 dollars. “You’ll have to take my word for it, unfortunately, but when you look at the work that these guys are doing [on LRSB], people will say, ‘You know what? We can still do this stuff. We still have the talent in this country to pull this stuff off,’” LaPlante said about the largely classified program. “Now everybody is very cynical on size and very suspicious, but we’ll just have to prove them wrong, and they’ll be proven wrong. They will be proven wrong. It’s really remarkable the work these guys are doing.”
While LaPlante touted ongoing work on the LRSB, he said that Congress and the Air Force and Defense secretaries in about 2022 would control the final timeline and number of LRSBs procured. The Air Force plans to roll out the LRSB in the mid-2020s.
‘Government Can Only Set the Stage’
Analysts have hypothesized that a loss on the LRSB contract could cause a major downsizing of the losing bidder’s defense business. LaPlante said the industrial base has been “deliberately set up” to account for certain contract losses, and added that industrial base considerations are “a much bigger issue than any one program.” Air Force-owned technical baselines help to ensure that companies do not lock up a certain business for an extended period, he said. But that might not guarantee stability. “Government can only set the stage for market the government cannot control the behavior of companies,” LaPlante said. “They have their investors, they have their stocks, they have their CEOs that make decisions. All we can do is make sure we don’t inadvertently, by something we can control, all the sudden push somebody completely out of the market.”
Upgrades Could be Made to B-2s, F-35s
Frank Kendall, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, recently said more upgrades for the LRSB could be more available than for previous acquisitions. Like the LRSB, LaPlante said modular upgrades could be available for the B-2 and the F-35’s Block 4, which includes the fighter’s planned nuclear capacity. “I think what we’ll do on Block 4 is … look at how much would it take to make it an open architecture—what’s the cost, and what’s the gain in the cost, how long are we going to have Block 4 around,” LaPlante said. So it’s not been decided that we will do it or won’t do it, but it has been decided we’re going to try; we’re going to explore it.” During the second increment of Block 4, by 2024, the Air Force plans to build a capacity for the F-35 to carry two B61 gravity bombs.
Although it is difficult to carve legacy systems into modular upgrades, the service is considering parsing out the B-2 into modular upgrades, LaPlante said. “Aircraft are hard because the avionics are integrated with the mission systems,” he said. “That’s why you have to build it in, usually, at the beginning.” The Air Force is developing software that would indicate failing parts before they go bad, Lt. Gen. Mike Holmes, Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategic Plans and Requirements, told members of the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee in March.