Defence Business: Industry, R&D players seek future JSF opportunities

1 September 2007

By Gregor Ferguson

The window of opportunity for Australian companies seeking work on the Joint Strike Fighter program doesn’t close when the current Systems Development and Demonstration (SDD) Phase ends in 2013. There’s another 30 years-worth of opportunities still to come, says Defence.

Australia’s R&D and defence industry communities have been asked to rise to the challenge of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) block upgrade program.

This will see continued investment in capability enhancements and operating and manufacturing cost reductions over the 30-year life of the F-35 Lightning II family of fighters.

The development road map for the three variants of the F-35 JSF includes block upgrades every two years to enhance combat capability and improve supportability and reduce costs.

The first of these, Block 4, is scheduled for implementation in 2015, according to Air Vice Marshal John Harvey, Head of the DMO’s New Air Combat Capability (NACC) program office.

“The work on that will start now – SDD doesn’t finish until 2013 but we’re starting to look at Block 4 already,” he told ADM at the Australian JSF Advanced Technology and Innovation Conference 2007 in Melbourne, back in July.

Opening the conference, the Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence, Mr Bruce Billson, said, “For the production phase, the JSF Industrial Participation (IP) Plans negotiated for Australian industry with Lockheed Martin and the two JSF engine manufacturers, identify production opportunities valued at more than $9 billion.

“I stress these are ‘opportunities’ – a lot of work remains to be done to convert them into long term contracts. Government is working with Lockheed, its JSF partners and their subcontractors, to develop long-term partner relationships with Australian companies so that Australian industry has the confidence to make the necessary investments to win this work. And there will be major additional opportunities through the follow-on development and sustainment phases of the Program,” Billson added.

Australian industry will need a solid national R&D base to take advantage of future JSF development opportunities, he said.

“Currently, the major element of this R&D base resides within research and development organisations, particularly universities,” Billson told attendees.

DSTO, Australian R&D organisations and universities must collaborate to adequately position Australian developed technologies for future promotion into the JSF Program.

“Hence this conference,” Billson said. “In focusing Australia’s R&D, the Australian JSF Industry & Technology Facilitation Program, which is still in its formative stages, has already identified some 150 proposals from Australian R&D organisations that have the potential to contribute to JSF follow-on development or improve JSF manufacturing processes.

“The proposals are currently being evaluated and prioritised.”

There are two important points to bear in mind at this stage, Billson said.

“First, JSF is a long term project: forty years at least. Specific opportunities in the follow-on development phase are not yet identified in Lockheed’s Industry Plan.

In fact, recognising the priority to maintain air superiority of the JSF over its life of type, hypothetically, the only limitations to future development will be ingenuity and technological capability.

“Second, whilst JSF is a long-term project, the baseline design is now essentially complete. Therefore, to inject Australian technology and innovation we need to be looking at future development opportunities for the leveraging of Australian technology and innovation.

Defence and industry need jointly to seize the initiative – we have the opportunity to work together now to influence development of the opportunities for the future.”

The scale of future opportunities is very significant by Australian standards. According to AVM Harvey, “From experience on previous projects they’re looking in the order of some hundreds of millions of US dollars a year to keep the aircraft up to date and to address any issues that come up, or future threats.”

That’s hundreds of millions of dollars a year just for the development work, he added – modifying the aircraft will cost extra.

The JSF Team Australia approach seems to be unique among the international JSF partners; nobody else appears to have attempted to broker relationships between industry and R&D centres the way Australia has, he told ADM.

But this is part of Australia’s plan for the JSF: “The original exchange of letters [on the JSF] between the secretary of defense and our minister for defence identified a role for Australian R&D capabilities within the life of the JSF program, and this is part of that overall continuum throughout its life. For us this is part of ‘JSF Team Australia’, all of government, all of industry and in this case all of the research organisations working together as well.”

The JSF Science and Technology Advisory Board in the USA is looking into the future at what science and technology (S&T) the aircraft will need, Harvey told ADM.

Australia has been proactive and has achieved some early successes, he said: “From all partner countries there have been over three hundred proposals to employ their technology on the aircraft. Of those, 26 were selected for further progression; of those ten were funded - and of those seven came from Australia.”

This year’s JSF technology and innovation conference was the third to be held in Australia, and the success of the first two means this was the first to be opened to a wider industry and R&D audience, Harvey said.

“We had good experiences in those previous two conferences – we found there is good technology out there. That’s why we’ve tried to marry together what’s in the research organisations with industry. There’s a lot of good ideas out there but the issue is really about getting them to the production phase.”

Australia’s approach has been welcomed by the JSF Joint Program Office in the Pentagon and by prime contractor Lockheed Martin, Harvey added. “They’re supportive – we’ve got representatives from Lockheed Martin and the JPO here. The whole idea of the JSF program, of the partnership, is to get the best from all the countries to make the aircraft better and keep the price down as well.”

Harvey used the opportunity to repeat a core message to his industry audience: JSF is the world’s largest defence project, worth over US$300 billion. It’s Australia’s largest defence project at between $11.5 and $15.4 billion.

To put things in perspective, Australia’s US$150 million contribution to the SDD phase represents about 0.4 per cent of the SDD budget; if Australia buys 100 F-35As that will represent about 3 per cent of the global fleet (on current figures); if Australia wins just 2 per cent of the work on JSF that will be worth more than US$6 billion.

Those figures relate just to the baseline JSF program – SDD, Low-Rate Initial Production (LRIP) and Full-Rate Production (FRP) of aircraft with Block 3 avionics. Estimates of the economic benefits of the JSF program haven’t taken into account the significant amounts of work associated with follow-on development of the JSF.

Looking beyond the 3,000 or so Block 3 aircraft likely to be ordered in the first instance by the US, UK and seven international partners, there should be important opportunities for companies with the right ideas at the right price and the right level of risk.

For the future the NACC program office is trying to maximise the use of Australian technology developed in universities and other research organisations to make the JSF even more capable and affordable says Harvey.

At any one time there will be a range of technologies at various stages of maturity with varying relevance to JSF requirements. Ideally the technologies will mature in line with Australia’s need for them.

“The aim of our technology facilitation program is to identify technologies that aren’t yet mature but address an identified JSF need, and we will try to fast-track them to get on to the JSF,” Harvey told attendees at the Conference. “We see this as the ‘requirements pull’ side of the technology initiative.”

“There are also technologies that are relatively mature but for which there is currently no identified need on the JSF. This is what we call ‘technology push’ and with these we will work with the JPO and Lockheed Martin to identify opportunities they present for the program.”

Two of the key speakers at the Conference were Dr Jim Alpers of the JSF program Office and David Jeffreys of Lockheed Martin, who delivered back to back presentations during the opening plenary session on ‘F-35 Lightning II – planning beyond SDD’.

Their message was fairly simple: post-SDD JSF capability goals will be set, and constantly updated, based on after continuous interaction with stakeholders.

This in turn will inform the JSF Product Roadmap, which sets out the follow-on development program and goals, and the supporting JSF R&D Roadmap.

According to Dr Alpers, the S&T opportunities include both the requirements push – other people’s good ideas which the JSTAB and warfighters hadn’t thought about; and the requirements pull, with potential themes for future upgrades including mission effectiveness, emerging threats, basic capabilities, net centric capabilities, sustainment and enduring themes such as weight and manufacturing challenges.

But they told Australian researchers and companies, to get a piece of the action in the follow-on phase of the JSF project, they must satisfy certain core criteria:
• The technology must satisfy a valid requirement
• It must have a high Benefit to Cost ratio
• Projects must have a feasible Business Plan
• Development Funding Sponsorship must be identified
• A Technology Transition Agreement / Plan must be written this must identify and clearly define success criteria, alternatives and offramps, and necessary transition funding
• It is Essential to maintain close communication, both formal and informal, between technologists, IPTs, management, the requirements community and the acquisition funding community

Ultimately, it will be down to the JSF Science and Technology Board (JSTAB) to endorse new technologies for application to the F-35, they told delegates.

The JSF Team Australia approach is designed to help deliver the best possible outcome for Australian industry, but it’s still up to the researchers and companies to undertake the commercialization of the new ideas disclosed in Melbourne, and many more which weren’t. For them the hard yards begin here.