A confluence of technology and collaborative forces is enabling Lockheed Martin to advance its Aegis Combat System programme. While in one case the company is seeing its return on investment from advancing the Aegis common source library (CSL) Baseline 9 and 10, “we’ve also been investing ourselves to transition the common source library into the DevSecOps Continuous Integration-Continuous Delivery Pipeline. What that has enabled us to do is where we were pulling from the CSL or inputting into it once a quarter, we’re able to do it once every three to four weeks,” Joe DePietro, Vice President and General Manager, Naval Combatant & Missile Defense Programs at Lockheed Martin, told MilTech. A resulting major milestone on the programme’s roadmap will occur later this summer, when the company concurrently completes CP 22-1 (a Baseline 9 load) and Baseline 10 for DDG-125. “The goodness of what is happening is we are converging. So, while we talk of baselines, we’re really not going to have to do that anymore. In reality, the only difference is one ship will have a [legacy] SPY-1 and one will have a [Raytheon] SPY-6. All the interfacing, all the planning for the BMD mission, all the things will be common because of the way we have been approaching this development – we’re really taking the CSL discussion to the next level.” DePietro paused to put in a pitch for the huge returns on investment the Aegis team is gaining from the Virtualized Aegis Weapon System, which has most recently helped advance Baseline 10. “We have been able to go to PMRF [Pacific Missile Range Facility] to get more air time with the SPY-6 array out there. We’ve been able to give it to Raytheon to allow them to do testing at their facility, and we’ve been put a version this at Ingalls [Shipbuilding, Pascagoula, Mississippi] for the build of DDG-125. Within one hour or two, we can shift from Morristown [New Jersey] to the virtualized Aegis a full combat system load that we can then take to the ship and load as opposed to people building hard drives in Morristown and transferring by internet to Pascagoula or shipping them to Dahlgren [Virginia].” Lockheed is also expanding the technology envelope through collaboration in its increasing involvement in the Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) Software Factory-Forge, a Navy software factory aiming to establish the infrastructure necessary to bring updates to the fleet in as quickly as a single day. Of added significance, Lockheed Martin is concurrently working on Ship Self Defense System (SSDS) Baseline 12, bringing to bear Aegis’s operational readiness testing system (ORTS) to permit software-driven testing to look at system health. In yet another related, internal R&D effort, the community expert reported work on a common weapons controller, that allows Lockheed Martin to look at self defence up through IAMD (Integrated Air and Missile Defence) out of that one common weapons controller. “When you think about it that’s already moving in a direction toward the integrated combat system (ICS). The whole idea is with the software factories and the development, and systems engineering and software integration, as they look at the ICS of the future, we’re showing the ability and are able to say, ‘We can do a single software development that will support weapons control for self defence, all the way to IAMD. That’s part of that moving forward evolution,” he reflected. International Lockheed Martin remains engaged in expanding Aegis programme capabilities in non-US navies. In one instance, the Lockheed Martin executive said his offices are working with SCOMBA, a Navantia combat management system for Spanish warships, to develop an interface for Aegis to work with the system to do all the radar control and AAW mission sets, for example. “This further shows the flexibility of containerizing and componentizing the design of the CSL. We can now take segments and put them together and interface those to even host-nation combat systems to be able to expand into domains where they may not be able to have that capability today.” Further, Lockheed Martin also remains in discussion for a possible mid-life upgrade for Spain’s Álvaro de Bazán-class F-100 frigate programme. Work would certainly take advantage of onboard systems in the new Bonifaz-class F-110 Aegis frigate programme, with the prospect of affordably translating that capability back to legacy F-100 vessels. The build of the F-110 force is on contract to Navantia. The company is also in discussions with the Hellenic Navy about the possibility of a mid-life upgrade for the four Hydra-class frigates of the MEKO 200HN design. “This would use a CSL-based combat system as part of that upgrade and it would bring integrating some common systems of what the US has, whether it be on LCS or others, and also use some of the existing systems, ASW for example, on that ship,” DePietro concluded. 6 · MT 5/2022 Inteview Interview conducted by North American Bureau Chief Marty Kauchak. Taking the CSL Discussion to the Next Level – and Beyond Exclusive Insights from Joe DePietro, VP/GM, Naval Combatant & Missile Defense Programs at Lockheed Martin f Spain’s F-100 Álvaro de Bazán-class frigates are prime candidates for a potential mid-life upgrade that could leverage ongoing work on the Aegis system, according to Lockheed Martin. (Photo: Lockheed Martin)
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