Brian Bradley
NS&D Monitor
1/16/2015
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James on Jan. 14 said the Long Range Stand-Off Weapon (LRSO) will be analyzed under a new set of acquisition criteria which will assess the relationship between costs and capability requirements. Officials to achieve a lower cost estimate by slightly relaxing capability requirements. The future of the LRSO now appears safe after Andrew Weber, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical & Biological Defense Programs, in October said the Obama Administration was considering tradeoffs associated with replacement of the air-launched cruise missile (ALCM). During a Wednesday speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington, James launched the “Cost Capability Analysis” (CCA) program, which partly aims to enhance government-industry interaction. For the LRSO and three other programs, the CCA will evaluate cost-capability tradeoffs.
“We believe that by gathering data from a range of sources, it should be possible…to identify instances where perhaps small changes in capability could have a very large impact on cost,” James said. “And this, in turn, if we would choose to exercise such an option, could mean that the Air Force could develop much more affordable weapon systems.” CCA will consider tweaks to planned programs’ performance metrics and tie the analyzed changes to cost estimates. James cited a 500-mile-an-hour jet as a hypothetical example. “If we discover through this process that we could achieve significant cost saving by amending this requirement to 450 miles per hour, meaning trade off that little itty bitty capability, then perhaps we could use that knowledge to make tradeoffs in how we develop our RFP and our evaluation factors and maybe we might even choose to modify that requirement.”
‘Reliability’ Key for LRSO
In an effort to buck the trend of unreliability among most cruise missiles, the CCA team is working reliability into the initial LRSO acquisition strategy, and Dr. William LaPlante, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, thinks the process for the LRSO will go smoother than the original ALCM acquisition. “I think the big thing with LRSO that’s going to be different is that we’ve learned with ALCM and with other cruise missile programs [that] reliability is pretty tough. It’s pretty hard stuff,” he told reporters after the Atlantic Council event.
LaPlante compared LRSO plans to acquisition of the 30-year-old, outdated ALCM he cited, which the service plans to sustain for 10 to 15 years. “So the big thing on LRSO we’ve challenged the team to do is, ‘OK. Let’s design in at the very beginning, reliability in the initial acquisition strategy,’” he said. “We’ve had a series of gray beards come in who have learned from the lessons of all these other cruise missiles, and I think we’ve got a really good program.” LRSO component alignment is presenting acquisition personnel with a common cruise missile challenge, LaPlante said. “[T]he hard part of LRSO and these others is the linkage between the platform it’s aimed at – the weapon and the warhead – synching that all up.”
Bomber Force Won’t Lose Cruise Missile Capability
James’ cost-versus-capability tradeoff paralleled a sentiment expressed by Lt. Gen. Stephen Wilson, commander of Global Strike Command, during an October speech in Arlington, Va. Wilson had said he would support production of a conventional split-off of the nuclear-armed LRSO, much like the conventional variant of the nuclear-equipped ALCM. “[T]hat, to me…makes a lot of sense because I’m able to buy in scale and quantity and able to drive costs down,” he said. An absence of an ALCM or its LRSO replacement could’ve led the bomber force to preserving itself with just the B61 gravity bomb, as Weber three months ago suggested the Administration was considering.
Wilson cited the need to replace the ALCM, which is operating 19 years past its service life. “Our ALCMs, fielded in the mid-‘80s, designed to last for 10 years, were supposed to be replaced in 1996, and here we are in 2015 with still having ALCM, and it needs to last another 15 years until we get the replacement on board,” he said. “So we’re working hard on that.” Congress last month authorized $8.23 million for a Fiscal Year 2015 feasibility study for refurbishing the cruise missile warhead, with a First Production Unit of the warhead planned for 2025. The LRSO is estimated to cost a total of $10-20 billion.
