Earlier this summer, the Air Force fought to scrap the A-10 this year claiming it couldn’t afford the low and slow flying plane that provides Close Air Support for the boots on the ground. This week, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, was awarded a $25.4 million full-production contract from Lockheed Martin to support the U.S. Air Force Global Positioning System (GPS) III Network Communications Element (NCE) for space vehicles.
The majority of the work under contract will be performed at the General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems facilities in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Bloomington, Minn. And for that, the hard strapped residents of Arizona are rightfully grateful, even if it is their tax dollars that are funneling back to them.
The Air Force’s next-generation GPS III satellites will “improve position, navigation and timing services and provide advanced anti-jam capabilities yielding superior system security, accuracy and reliability.”
“For more than 50 years, we have been a premier provider of spacecraft communications and navigation equipment for the nation’s military and government agencies,” said Carlo Zaffanella, vice president and general manager of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. “Our continued close work with Lockheed Martin on the GPS III program, coupled with our in-depth mission understanding, allows us to provide the Air Force with the next-generation of reliable and affordable solutions to replace the aging constellation of GPS satellites currently in orbit.”
General Dynamics’ NCE components provide the communications functions for the GPS III satellites, including the ground-to-space command and control channel, the space-to-space inter-satellite channel and the command and telemetry communications channels within each satellite. General Dynamics is now under contract with Lockheed Martin for GPS III SV 01-08. Delivery of the NCE components for SV03 and SV04 are scheduled for this summer.
According to Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, a part of the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., “the House Appropriations Committee has added as much as $18.6 billion to the Obama administration’s military spending request in the Committee’s 2015 Department of Defense appropriations bill, HR 4870. According to the committee’s official report, this amount consists mostly of added hardware items in multiple accounts within the bill.”