Signature Management News

Aligned with its Campaign Plan 2030 strategic themes, “relevant, ready and responsive,” Marine Forces Reserve (MFR) is pursuing the rapid acquisition of small expeditionary watercraft to provide capacity and platforms in support of Service-level Force Design 2030 experimentation efforts.By partnering with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and leveraging their Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) solicitation process, which is an iterative and competitive phased approach that includes vendor presentations and extensive review of materials…

Early in the coming year, the U.S. export control regime governing the shipbuilding supply chain will undergo a sea change with the implementation of export reform in the naval and marine categories of the U.S. Munitions List (USML) and the Commerce Control List (CCL). Reforms affecting the aerospace industry(1)  were published April 16, 2013(2)  and took effect October 15 of this year, and the final rules published on July 8, 2013 for the naval and marine categories will take effect on January 6, 2014. As previously reported,(3)  one of the goals of the export reform initiative is to protect the nation’s “crown jewels” with higher export control walls while removing restrictions on less important items and technologies in order to promote, among other things, interoperability of U.S.

Northrop Grumman Corporation, leader of the DD(X) Gold Team, and Raytheon company said today that they were delighted by the decision of the General Accounting Office (GAO), which validates that an appropriate evaluation process was used when the U.S. Navy selected the Gold Team to complete the system design for the Navy's 21st century surface combatant, DD(X). "Now that this issue is behind us, we can move ahead on this transformational ship program, which is so critical to the Navy, the DoD and the nation," said Kent Kresa, Northrop Grumman chairman and chief executive officer. "We were confident in the Navy's selection process, and are grateful that the GAO so expeditiously acted in validating that the Gold Team's proposal provided the best value for the customer.

The DD(X) system design team led by Northrop Grumman Corporation has executed a major risk reduction test on its peripheral vertical launching system (PVLS) magazine within three months after work began on the contract. DD(X) is the U.S. destroyer, DD(X). costs. The PVLS test article is a full-scale assembly that was fabricated at Northrop Grumman's Ship Systems' facility in Pascagoula, Miss. Once built, the article was transported to a facility in Aberdeen, Md., to be staged, instrumented and loaded with representative ordnance. Ship Systems proposed a PVLS alternative to the traditional VLS configuration of centralized missile magazines.