A third key feature of the LRS-B is that its management has been assigned to the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office (RCO), which, Air Force acquisition chief William LaPlante said Oct. 21, has “an incredible track record of delivering eye-watering capabilities—not just one-offs, but things going into production.”
Significantly, LaPlante describes the 80-strong LRS-B project office within the RCO as like the team that produced the Lockheed F-117 stealth fighter 35 years ago: “A small empowered group of warfighters, acquisition people and maintainers.” Although the RCO’s only acknowledged aerospace platform is the Boeing X-37B spaceplane, its technical focus can be gauged by the fact that a 2012 recruitment notice for its deputy director identified only three mandatory areas of “significant experience . . . low-observables, counter low-observables and electronic warfare.” Like the F-117, the LRS-B is apparently designed to meet its goals with mature subsystems in a new platform.
However, LaPlante added, the RCO team has substantial oversight from the Pentagon, Congress and
, and the program incorporates red team/blue team exercises to validate it against possible threats.
The LRS-B contest set an average procurement unit cost of $550 million—in fiscal 2010 dollars based on building 100 aircraft—as a KPP. “The risk is that you pick the wrong number. If you have firm requirements and do the analytics, you have a shot at pulling that off,” LaPlante says.
Some of the key technologies in the LRS-B are both secret and mature. “Not only have some technologies been wind-tunnel-tested, prototyped or flown—some of them have been used operationally,” LaPlante said Oct. 21.
However, LaPlante also emphasized that delays and overruns cannot be eliminated. “Integration is always a risk,” he said, “and we have put together a schedule with the right margins to accommodate delays.”
LRS-B, too, is planned to be upgraded easily and competitively, “with space and weight provision for things we can’t imagine today,” LaPlante said. Open architecture, he said, could allow the Pentagon to procure a new or upgraded subsystem competitively, “provide it to the prime and say, integrate this.” Along with the cost of maintaining the bomber’s low-observable systems, upgrades will account for a large proportion of the bomber’s life-cycle cost—which will be much greater than its procurement bill.
There is one other way in which LRS-B will differ from other programs: its production rate. The number is based on a “fundable profile, without the big ramp-up you see on
,” LaPlante said. “We have set it up to be resilient,” with affordable annual funding. “That would be $550 million times your production rate, which might be seven or eight per year,” he said. The rate is much lower than recent combat aircraft programs but also means the line will be moving until almost 2040. Many bomber advocates quietly argue that if LRS-B delivers, and Asia-Pacific operations remain important, the Air Force will need more than 100 of the bombers.
Northrop Grumman is less than one-sixth the size of the Boeing, Lockheed Martin and
team, with total revenues of $160 billion. Boeing and Lockheed Martin agreed to team on NGB in early 2007 and revealed that arrangement in January 2008. The team re-formed for LRS-B, adding Raytheon. Together, Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been prime contractors on almost every combat aircraft in U.S. service today, while Lockheed Martin has been the prime contractor on four out of five production stealth programs.
But the fact that they were allowed to team for NGB and then re-form the team for LRS-B indicated that the Pentagon leadership did not see this as an impediment to a fair fight. Rules have changed, too. Briefing reporters Oct. 21, LaPlante emphasized the importance of independent cost estimates—produced by the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) directorate—under the 2009 Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act. “All programs have an independent estimate, and we are funded to that level,” LaPlante said. Nor is the estimate a single review process: The program office has been briefing CAPE estimators from the outset.
The development cost quoted today is the independent cost estimate, not the winner’s or program office’s estimate. The goal is to make underbidding less likely and less effective.
Not only did Boeing and Lockheed Martin outgun their rival fiscally, but they were also teamed on a government-funded demonstrator aircraft, identified as the Next-Generation Long-Ranger Strike Demonstrator, under an effort that started in the early days of NGB and continued after the ambitious bomber was canceled. The stealth-technology group within Boeing’s Phantom Works, headed by Alan Wiechman, led the low-observables side of the program, although Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works built the airframe.
Alongside stealth, Phantom Works pioneered the use of new manufacturing technology. This has led to the closely held Boeing-wide initiative known as Black Diamond, which was identified this summer as a possible major competitive advantage in LRS-B.
Lockheed Martin brought its experience with stealth systems integration to the party. But the history of the
—where upgrades have been constrained by a tightly integrated architecture, so that every change requires painstaking regression testing to ensure that other functions are not affected—was exactly what the LRS-B program’s open architecture is designed to avoid.
While Northrop Grumman may have shared some NGLRS-D technology, the most important experience that company brought to the table may well have been the RQ-180. From conversations with industry sources, it appears that one of the major breakthroughs in the design of this very stealthy, high-altitude UAV was its combination of stealth with aerodynamic and propulsive efficiency, largely the result of better computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational electromagnetics (CEM).
The B-2 had achieved a high level of stealth, but the design was a difficult compromise between stealth and aerodynamics, and the complex shape of the center body and wing section, with strongly three-dimensional stream and shock patterns, pushed the state of the art in both computer modeling and testing. Given its high fuel fraction, its 6,000-nm unrefueled range showed that, at best, its efficiency was no better than that of the B-52.
In sharp contrast, some early-2000s Northrop Grumman designs were described by one engineer as having “sailplane-like” efficiency. While the RQ-180 will almost certainly be shown to be a much lighter aircraft than the LRS-B, its wingspan is likely quite close to that of the bomber, and its development will have validated the CFD and CEM codes used in the design, along with radar-absorbent materials and coatings. The UAV will also be providing operational experience with new stealth technologies, underpinning Northrop Grumman estimates of the LRS-B’s operating cost.
While Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 UAV is widely considered to have been an RCO program, meaning that all three aircraft companies in the LRS-B competition have worked with RCO, the RQ-180 experience would be most relevant.
Despite the B-2’s reputation for high cost, Northrop Grumman says its experience with the program was a plus. “It is behaving like a legacy aircraft now,” says one company executive, with flight-hour costs that are not out of line with other small-volume fleets of large aircraft in the Air Force. Operating costs for such aircraft, the company says, seem to be driven by fixed costs and by the inevitably slow learning curve for depot-maintenance visits. Each B-2 today goes into depot for 12 months every nine years. At the same time, the B-2’s signatures “have improved significantly” through the use of new materials.
Northrop Grumman has also made a radical move to contain its costs, although its impact on the LRS-B bid is uncertain: Under the codename Project Magellan, it has established a manned-aircraft center of excellence in Melbourne, Florida. Across the U.S. combat-aircraft business, this represents a reversal of a decades-long consolidation that has seen major engineering locations dwindle to three centers: Los Angeles/Palmdale, St. Louis and Fort Worth. The company has already opened a new 220,000-sq.-ft. building in Melbourne and has plans for another new 500,000-sq.-ft., 1,500-person facility by 2019.
