He will also lead functions related to corporate operations, supply chain, technology and IT.

An engineer by training and practice, Baylouny has worked for DRS on various sonar, radar, electro-optical and infrared technologies since he joined the company in 1986, according to Baylouny’s LinkedIn profile.

“John’s extensive industry experience and leadership to bring innovative technology to market will serve Leonardo DRS well, now and into the future,” said the company CEO, William Lynn III.

Prior to his latest appointment, Baylouny served as vice president and general manager of DRS’ land systems and advanced ISR businesses, as well as chief technology officer.

Baylouny replaces Terry Murphy, who is retiring at the end of this year.

The Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center led the Next-Generation NATO Reference Mobility Model Development demo in early October at Michigan Technological University’s Keweenaw Research Center. The NG-NRMM program is sponsored by the NATO Science and Technology Organization. TARDEC is part of Army Materiel Command and an enterprise partner in the service’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command’s Life Cycle Management Command.

The event highlighted the difference in capability between legacy and next-generation mobility software programs. Researchers from TARDEC showcased mobility models that leverage advanced computing power to show how large military vehicles respond to different types of terrain under various environmental conditions.

Paul Rogers, director of TARDEC, stressed to NATO representatives the importance of accurately predicting how military vehicles will respond to certain terrains and soils under various climates.

“What this allows us to do now is collect a whole new data set and then use that data set to optimize our analytical tools, our computer-based models, physics-based models so that we can do predictive analysis on soils that we have not tested,” Rogers said. This sort of predictive capability is, he added, “what we owe our war fighter, and that’s what we owe our future generations of engineers and scientists.”

According to Jay Meldrum, director of the Keweenaw Research Center, vehicles on its research courses interacted with terrains involving soft soil, telephone poles, parking curbs, rocks and boulders.

“We’ve digitized every pebble in the proving ground here into a database,” Meldrum said. “So they can drive that vehicle through the terrain in the computer and try to predict the mobility, as we call it, of that vehicle going through that rough terrain.”

This research could prove relevant when it comes to “the change in the character of warfare, the kinds of operations that NATO member states have been part of, as well as due to technology developments,” said Marta Kepe, a Rand think tank analyst specializing in defense, security and infrastructure.

A myriad other complexities complicate the movement of military land platforms across Europe, including “the conditions of transport infrastructure; multinational, cross-border and national level-movement coordination, including between military users of infrastructure and the civilian managers; and national legal requirements,” Kepe added.

Governing bodies

Leadership on both sides of the Atlantic are focused on military mobility in Europe. In fact, it is a leading issue of the European Union’s nascent Permanent Structured Cooperation initiative. Due to the legislative and administrative roadblocks, some believe the nature of the EU makes the organization well-suited to address the political challenges of mobility.

“The EU has a lot of experience when it comes to infrastructure, a lot of experience when it comes to regulations,” the permanent secretary for the Estonian Defense Ministry, Jonatan Vseviov, said June 13 at the EU Security and Washington Symposium.

Jorge Domecq, head of the European Defence Agency, also shared that view at the symposium, saying that “for military mobility to work, you need a whole government approach to it, and that unfortunately you cannot do in NATO. You need to use EU to do it.”

But Thomas Goffus, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO, pointed to the importance of involving NATO: “[T]wo things together: on the front end is having NATO command-and-control capability to move the chess pieces around the board; the second is having chess pieces that are ready to be moved.”

At a NATO summit in July, the alliance released a declaration noting the importance of identifying alternative supply routes and ensuring adequate transportation capabilities.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, in speaking before the alliance’s Parliamentary Assembly on May 28, said NATO’s security “does not just depend on the forces we have deployed, but it also very much depends on our ability to move forces to reinforce quickly if needed.”

The classified Gunsmoke-L program is operated by U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command (USASMDC/ARSTRAT)Technical Center. The two-year contract, plus an additional option year, to Dynetics is valued at $8.3 million. The contract falls under the umbrella of the Army’s the Design, Development, Demonstration and Integration (D3I), Domain 1 contracting tool, which steamlines the acquisition cycle of space, high-altitude and missile defense technologies.

The Gunsmoke-L satellites will carry next generation tactical space support payloads designed to operation in low earth orbit for a minimum of two years, and could last as long as five years. Dynetics will assist with on-orbit demonstrations using the Technical Center’s ground control system at Redstone to provide command, control, and communication with the satellites. The satellites are expected to be ready for launch in less than two years. Dynetics did not provide any information about the launch of the satellite.

The Army’s Gunsmoke-J satellites, the previous iteration, are expected to be used to “demonstrate advanced information collection in direct support of the Army combat operations,” according to an Army fact sheet from September 2018. The Army discussed its Gunsmoke-G satellite experiment during a classified session of the DoD experiment review board in 2017.

Dynetics will perform hardware-in-the-loop testing and simulation at USASMDC/ARSTRAT Payload Development Laboratory at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., focusing on the 12 kilogram satellites’ performance and reliability. At the end of the period, the two Gunsmoke-L TSSVs will be qualified and ready for launch. Work on the program will predominately be done at Redstone, but some work will also occur at Dynetics own facilities in Huntsville.

“We are looking forward to taking on this challenge of creating small satellites that will meet the Department of Defense’s space support goals,” said Mike Graves, Dynetics space systems department manager and Gunsmoke-L program manager.

Dynetics has previously worked with NASA on other small satellite projects. The company helped develop NASA’s Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, or FASTSAT, launched in November 2010.

According to the Project on Government Oversight report, there were “645 instances of the top 20 defense contractors in fiscal year 2016 hiring former senior government officials, military officers, members of Congress, and senior legislative staff as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives in 2018.” Of the Defense Department officials that moved to the private sector, a quarter of them (95) went to work for the top five American defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman).

Of the defense companies on this year’s Defense News Top 100 list, the top six (Lockheed, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Northrop, Boeing and General Dynamics) have 338 instances total in which senior government officials were hired as executives, directors or lobbyists, according to POGO’s database. It’s important to note that because some lobbyists work for multiple defense contractors, there are more instances than officials.

A leading concern is that former officials who join defense contractors will use their influence to win contracts from the services or agencies they recently led.

The POGO report cites retired Maj. Gen. Mike Boera, former U.S. Air Force director of programs in the office of the deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs, as one example. Boera joined Raytheon in 2015 as the executive of its intelligence, information and services division, which covers some of Raytheon’s cyber, command and control, mission support, training and services, sensors, and imaging business. That year, the Air Force awarded Raytheon $2.9 billion in contracts. (Boera joined Leidos in June 2018 as the vice president of Air Force strategic accounts where he is “responsible for strengthening and advancing trusted relationships with the United States Air Force with the objective of increased revenue and growth in Air Force business,” according to his LinkedIn account.)

This is not to say the reason Raytheon won these contracts was because of Boera’s former position, but critics argue that being unable to confirm that as fact is a problem.

Mandy Smithberger, the director of POGO’s Center for Defense Information and author of the report, said part of the problem of defense officials moving into industry leadership positions is that “the revolving door is corrosive and breeds cynicism around the decisions made at the Pentagon. Over our history we’ve repeatedly heard from whistleblowers and members of the military who complain this breeds a culture where government officials are subservient to contractors and people who question costs or performance are told to stop rocking the boat lest they be retaliated against professionally.”

Smithberger believes the leadership and management skills former officials bring to the table are not why they are hired. “It’s for their connections and influence,” she said.

So, how can former government officials avoid conflicts of interest when joining industry?

“Start with a blanket two-year cooling off period, and simplifying the laws to really reflect how to best protect the public interest. Some of the people we reached out to for comment, but weren’t willing to go on the record, said their companies interpreted restrictions that were placed on them much more broadly than the government did because they wanted to avoid even the appearance of a conflict,” Smithberger said. “The laws also need to be updated to reflect how influence really works, and how it’s much broader than what requires one to register as a lobbyist.”

Yet, after warning of headwinds of as much as $400 million earnings stemming from pension liability, investors on Wall Street “ran for the exits,” in the words of market consultant Jim McAleese.

For the full week of Oct. 22, Northrop stock fell 13 percent to about $270 per share — even as Northrop CEO Wes Bush said the company’s “programs continue to be well-supported in the budget, and our portfolio is well-balanced between mature franchise production efforts and the development programs that will ultimately lead to the next generation of production programs.”

This is not the first time Wall Street has responded en masse to nuances in defense contracting. But what forces are causing investors to drop Northrop stock in this case?

Broadly speaking, there has been a selling off of defense stock, “if for no other reason that sentiment is shifting and there is a de-rating,” according to Jonathan Raviv, an aerospace and defense industry analyst at Citi Group.

More specifically to Northrop, despite being applauded for its acquisition of Orbital ATK earlier this year, the legacy Northrop portfolio “is growing slower right now than some of its peers because there are still some elements that are going through portfolio reshaping or programs ramping down,” Raviv said.

“Slower organic growth might be weighing on things in terms of how people are viewing the stocks,” he added. “From the earnings perspective, it has nothing to do with the cash spent on Orbital, just the accounting dynamic.”

Now that Northrop owns Orbital, investors will likely keep a watchful eye on the rate at which Northrop can amortize, or write off the initial cost.

Upcoming changes in Northrop leadership are also making investors antsy about investing in the company. According to Raviv, “any time you have some sort of change, especially from someone investors have gotten very comfortable with, that generally creates a nervousness, especially if you have big programs ramping up, like, B-21.”

“No one likes change, and the timing might have been a surprise as oppose to the actual decision,” he added.

To offset these losses, Northrop announced in October a $1 billion accelerated share repurchase with Goldman Sachs. The company later said it will receive 3 million shares on Oct. 31, 2018, approximately 80 percent of the shares it expects to buy back under the program. (Companies often engage in stock buy-back agreements when they feel their stock is undervalued.)

Northrop has engaged in repurchase agreements before, so this is “nothing particularly new for this company,” Raviv said. But “they’re certainly sending a message, putting some money where their mouth is.”

Similar to Northrop, investors chose to place their money elsewhere after Lockheed Martin confirmed during its earnings call that the company could not effectively compete with Boeing for the U.S. Air Force’s $9.2 billion T-X trainer and $2.4 billion UN-1N Huey replacement contracts, or the Navy’s $805 million MQ-25 aerial fueling drone contract.

Justifying the decision, Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson said matching the winning prices would have led to cumulative losses across all three programs in excess of $5 billion, “an outcome that we do not feel would have been in the best interest of our stockholders or our customers.”

McAleese noted that Boeing did announce $691 million of new third-quarter charges for winning the contracts.

But the stock market presumably opted to look long term, rewarding Boeing with a 3 to 4 percent bump in the stock price, at about $359 per share at close on Oct. 26.

The total Military Intelligence Program, or MIP, budget for fiscal 2018, including the base budget and Overseas Contingency Operations appropriations, was $22.1 billion. This is above the $20.7 billion the Pentagon requested for FY18 and the $21.2 billion requested for FY19.

According to a Congressional Research Service report, MIP funds “defense intelligence activities intended to support operational and tactical level intelligence priorities supporting defense operations.” Among other uses, these dollars can be spent to facilitate the dissemination of information that relates to a foreign country or political group, and covert or clandestine activities against political and military groups or individuals.

CRS also listed MIP funding going to U.S. Special Operations Command as it pursues “several current acquisition efforts focused on outfitting aircraft — both manned and unmanned, fixed and rotary wing — with advanced ISR and data storage capabilities that will work in multiple environments.”

In the early part of the decade, the MIP dropped from a high of $27 billion in FY10, hitting its low point in FY15 at $16.6 billion, according to numbers maintained by the analytics group Avascent.

Fiscal 2018′s $22.1 billion appropriation is the most MIP has been granted since fiscal 2012.

This funding is separate from the National Intelligence Program, or NIP, which funds both defense and nondefense intelligence programs. In FY18, NIP was appropriated $57.7 billion. According to CRS numbers, this is the most money the program has ever been given. The program’s previous peak was in FY11, when it was given $54.6 billion. The government has requested $59.9 billion for FY19.

On the defense side, some of the programs NIP supports include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Program, the National Reconnaissance Program, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s General Defense Intelligence Program.

On the nondefense side, these dollars fund CIA human intelligence and open-source intelligence programs, Department of Energy counterintelligence operations against nuclear-related terrorist activities, and Department of Homeland Security analysts and collection activities to combat the smuggling of weapons and drugs.

In total, intelligence programs were appropriated $78.4 billion in FY18, accounting for approximately 11 percent of the total defense budget.

The value of 2018 industry deals to date is $30.3 billion, nearly half the value at the same time last year, but still 48 percent above the $21.3 billion, 10-year annual deal average, the PwC report said.

Deal volume and average deal size are both down from this time last year, 18 and 41 percent respectively, to 290 deals, averaging $197.1 million. Some of this disparity can be accounted for by the lack of a monster, blockbuster deal like United Technologies Corporation’s acquisition of Rockwell Collins for $30 billion last September.

Unlike last year’s four “Megadeals” ($5 billion-plus), only General Dynamics’ acquisition of CSRA qualifies so far in 2018.

Despite the lack of any high-value transactions in the third quarter, one notable move is Boeing’s announced agreement to acquire 80 percent of Embraer’s commercial business for $3.8 billion, the PwC report emphasized.

The report noted that a higher focus on information technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud computing and C4ISR is pushing a number of nontraditional and financial buyers to target diversified IT service organizations.

The report attributes decreased merger and acquisition activity in the sector to “a slowdown in new orders for aerospace [original equipment manufacturers] and the absence of a significant number of large transactions.” This relatively tame level of activity may be expected to increase as industry becomes “driven by an increased focus on emerging technologies, intensified competition and [a] rise in government spending to modernize the IT infrastructure,” said Bob Long, U.S. aerospace and defense deals leader for PwC.

Regional trends remained consistent with previous years’ activity, with North America-based firms remaining the most active acquirer. In the last quarter, companies there contribute 80 percent of deal value and 31 percent of deal volume, the report said. The report also identified the Asia-Pacific region as an important area in future commercial aerospace transactions due to fleet expansion and continued capital inflows to aircraft leasing.

National security adviser John Bolton reportedly recommended to Trump that the U.S. withdraw from the treaty, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said that “Russia must return to compliance with the INF Treaty, or the U.S. will need to respond to its cavalier disregard of the treaty’s specific limits.”

If Russia is not abiding by the terms of the agreement, then it no longer is an arms control agreement, but unilateral restraint, so the argument goes. And Trump believes Russia has violated the terms of the treaty.

Richard Burt, the former U.S. chief negotiator of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, a participant in the INF Treaty negotiations and a supporter of the deal, said it’s undeniable Russia has violated the treaty since at least 2014.

“The problem we now confront is the way the Trump administration has handled this,” Burt said on the conference call. “The overwhelming view of people, not only in the United States and Russia but around the world, will be that it was the United States that killed this treaty. The handling of this decision is just simply god awful.”

Gen. Philip Breedlove, former NATO supreme allied commander Europe, expressed dissatisfaction with the seemingly lack of consultation with U.S. allies.

“We cannot have this be seen as U.S. unilateralism, that would be the very worst,” he said. “We have to take action, it needs to be in accordance and in coordination with our allies … we have to embrace Europe and move forward with Europe.”

Jim Miller, former undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama, agrees that Russia needs to face consequences for not complying with the INF treaty, but disagrees with the Trump administration’s process. “The rollout of this decision put the U.S. in the position of being the one that will have killed the treaty, and that will be detrimental to our ability to work not just with Russia or China, but our allies as well, and it will be detrimental to our ability to sustain the New START Treaty, which is even more in the U.S. interest than the INF treaty,” Miller said.

The New START Treaty, an agreement also between the U.S. and Russia, is meant to limit and reduce specific types of nuclear-armed missiles.

“Looking ahead, the New START treaty will be gone in 2021 unless it is extended,” Burt explained. “The INF failure and the failure to get into discussions about extending New START is a sign of the U.S. sleepwalking into a new nuclear arms race. This is going to have consequences for the U.S. and our allies that we haven’t thought through.”

Some proponents of an INF withdraw discount the claim that the U.S. will be seen as responsible for discarding it. Frank Miller, former senior director for defense policy and arms control on the National Security Council and one of the architects of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, said that the INF Treaty is “dead because Russia killed it, they killed it deliberately.”

“They made a decision in 2012-2013 at the highest levels to have a covert program to design, test and now deploy battalions of a prohibited system. And to argue [the treaty] still exists is to believe in unicorns,” Miller said, adding: “I would not have rolled it out this way.”

The goal of the satellite constellation is to “provide survivable, global, secure, protected and jam-resistant communications for high-priority military ground, sea and air assets,” according to an Air Force statement. Maj. Matthew Getts of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Center in Los Angeles said AEHF-4 “will complete the fully operational constellation for AEHF.”

This means the fourth AEHF satellite meets the minimum constellation requirements to bring global Extended Data Rate (XDR) connectivity online. XDR reportedly provides approximately 10 times more communications throughput than the Air Force’s legacy satellite system, known as Milstar. That difference in speed allows the transmission of real-time video, battlefield maps and targeting data to help combatant commanders and national leaders make optimal tactical and strategic decisions.

The prime contractor on the Air Force’s $15 billion program,, Lockheed Martin is under contract to deliver a total of six AEHF satellites. These satellites will be used by the United States and international partners including the United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands. The launch of the next satellite, AEHF-5, is scheduled for July 2019, Getts said.

“It’s good to return with our mission partners to see the culmination of expertise, skill and partnership that we have worked diligently toward to make this AEHF launch a success,” said Mike Cacheiro, vice president of protected communication systems at Lockheed Martin. “This is a substantial milestone for AEHF, and as we look ahead, we continue to improve and upgrade this mission to deliver these vital communications capabilities to the Air Force.”

In today’s factories, 3-D printing parts requires persistent monitoring by specialists to ensure intricate parts are produced without impurities and imperfections that can compromise the integrity of the part overall. To improve this laborious process, the Navy is tasking Lockheed Martin with developing multi-axis robots that use lasers to deposit material and oversee the printing of parts.

Lockheed Martin has multiple partners on the contract including Carnegie Mellon University, Iowa State University, Colorado School of Mines, America Makes, GKN and Wolf Robotics and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The contract covers what Glynn Adams, a senior engineer with Lockheed Martin, describes as the pre-flight model of the program’s development. Initial work will focus on developing computer models that can predict the microstructures and mechanical properties of 3-D printed materials to generate simulation data to train with. Adams said the Carnegie Mellon team will look at variables such as, “the spot size of the laser beam, the rate of feed of the titanium wire [and]the total amount energy density input into the material while it is being manufactured.” This information helps the team predict the microstructure, or organizational structure of a material on a very small scale, that influences the physical properties of the additive manufactured part.

This data will then be shared with Iowa State, who will plug the information into a model that predicts the mechanical properties of the printed component. By taking temperature and spot size measurements, the team can also ensure they are, “accurately controlling energy density, the power of both the laser and the hot wire that goes into the process,” Adams said..

“All of that is happening before you actually try to do any kind of machine learning or artificial neural networks with the robot itself. That’s just to try to train the models to the point where we have confidence in the models,” Adams said.

Sounds easy, right?

But one key problem could come in cleaning up the data and removing excess noise from the measurements.

“Thermal measurements are pretty easy and not data intensive, but when you start looking at optical measurements you can collect just an enormous amount of data that is difficult to manage,” Adams explained. Lockheed Martin wants to learn how shrink the size of that dataset without sacrificing key parameters. The Colorado School of Mines and America Makes will tackle the problem of compressing and manipulating this data to extract the key information needed to train the algorithms.

After this work has been completed, the algorithms then will be sent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where robots will begin producing 3-D titanium parts and learn how to reliably construct geometrically and structurally sound parts. This portion of the program will confront challenges from the additive manufacturing and AI components of the project.

On the additive manufacturing side, the team will work with new manufacturing process, “trying to understand exactly what the primary, secondary and tertiary interactions are between all those different process parameters,” Adams said. “If you think about it, as you are building the part depending on the geometric complexity, now those interactions change based on the path the robot has to take to manufacture that part. One of the biggest challenges is going to be to understand exactly which of those parameters are the primary, which are the tertiary and to what level of control we need to be able to manipulate or control those process parameters in order to generate the confidence in the parts that we want.”

At the same time, researchers also will tackle AI machine learning challenges. Like with other AI programs, it’s crucial the algorithm is learning the right information, the right way. The models will give the algorithms a good starting point, but Adams said this will be an iterative process that depends on the algorithm’s ability to self-correct. “At some point, there are some inaccuracies that could come into that model,” Adams explained. “So now, the system itself has to understand it may be getting into a regime that is not going to produce the mechanical properties or microstructures that you want, and be able to self-correct to make certain that instead of going into that regime it goes into a regime that produces the geometric part that you want.”

With a complete algorithm that can be trusted to produce structurally sound 3-D printed parts, time-consuming post-production inspections will become a thing of the past. Instead of nondestructive inspections and evaluations, if you “have enough control on the process, enough in situ measurements, enough models to show that that process and the robot performed exactly as you thought it would, and produced a part that you know what its capabilities are going to be, you can immediately deploy that part,” said Adams. “That’s the end game, that’s what we’re trying to get to, is to build the quality into the part instead of inspecting it in afterwards.”

Confidence in 3-D printed parts could have dramatic consequences for soldiers are across the services. As opposed to waiting for replacement parts, service members could readily search a database of components, find the part they need and have a replacement they can trust in hours rather than days or weeks. “When you can trust a robotic system to make a quality part, that opens the door to who can build usable parts and where you build them,” said Zach Loftus, Lockheed Martin Fellow for additive manufacturing. “Think about sustainment and how a maintainer can print a replacement part at sea, or a mechanic print a replacement part for a truck deep in the desert. This takes 3-D printing to the next, big step of deployment.”