Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ January 2011 memo on DoD budget cuts gave a good idea of what to expect in the coming years: a big shift from weapons platform spending to intelligence platform spending. In this memo, he put the Marine Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program on two-year probation and said the DoD will revise and refresh existing ground vehicles such as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. So, there will not be any major ground vehicle programs in the near future. Also, Gates reduces the number of F-22 and F-35 fighter purchases. For now, the DoD will purchase more F-18s and refresh the older F-15s.
Spending on UAVs
Spending on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) platforms will definitely increase for many years to come. The Global Hawk platforms have been refreshed several times since their debut, and the new high-altitude, long-endurance, hydrogen-powered AeroVironment Global Observer UAV embarked on test flights in January. The Gorgon Stare ISR system flew missions for the first time last December in Afghanistan, attached to the underside of a Predator UAV.
Several things are clear here. We are beginning to field new ISR modules on older, first-generation, propeller-driven UAVs such as the Global Hawk, Predator, and Reaper. Also in the test phase are second-generation, jet-powered UAVs like Boeing’s Phantom Ray and Northrop Grumman’s X-47B UAV platform. The first-generation UAVs will be refreshed with new ISR capabilities for a while, and more of these platforms will be put into service as the testing and refinement of the next jet-powered UAVs continue. Then, focus will shift to deploying second-generation, jet-powered UAV platforms.
Refreshes with VME
If there are VME card cages in older mil/aero and ground vehicle systems, they will remain VME. They will be continually refreshed for many years to come with newer VME boards (faster processors, faster A/D boards, and so on). My best estimate indicates that in 2010 there was more than $600 million in VME boards sold to refresh programs. The Gates memo suggests that VME sales to refresh programs will probably increase in the next few years because the purchase of new ground vehicles and weapons systems is unfunded in the new DoD budgets. That means that VME will remain the top COTS technology (based on sales) for military applications for several years to come.
New platforms and VPX
The shift to additional spending on ISR platforms suggests that VPX (VITA 46) will be the primary technology used. VPX contains the trusted supply chain, processing power, ruggedness, and bandwidth to handle the massive amounts of data these new ISR systems will produce. Preliminary reports on the Gorgon Stare platform operation in Afghanistan last December showed that the amount of data produced overwhelmed the intelligence analysts. More supercomputer processing power will be needed on the ground to run algorithms against all the data coming from ISR systems in the air, and to refine and filter data that analysts must view and analyze. Those systems will also be VPX-based, possibly using General Purpose Graphics Processor Units (GPGPUs) such as the CUDA architectures from NVIDIA.
Small form factors
VITA 73/74/75 Small Form Factor (SFF) products will find their way into these new ISR systems where Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) consumption are critical: in UAVs (both refreshes to the older platforms and the new jet-powered vehicles), upgrades to existing ground vehicles, and perhaps in upgrades to F-18s and F-15s. At some point, SFF cubes can be used to terminate the old copper wire 1553 bus and translate that into a high-speed fiber-optic network on the aircraft.
We all feared that the DoD budget cuts would dampen our opportunities, but that is not the case. As it turns out, they just shift spending from big weapons system platforms to new, more sophisticated ISR platforms. That is good news.
For more information, contact Ray at [email protected].