Page 134 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2021

134 AIRPOWER
NOVEMBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
RIGHT: Lockheed Martin’s demonstration centre at the Endeavour Centre in Canberra.
Pacific last year, Zeitz undertook an internal restructure to bring project execution expertise, as well as profit and loss accountability, into the local company.
“It makes no sense to me as to how you can effectively manage a program from the United States,” Zeitz explained. “My American colleagues are very good at managing US programs for the US customer, but we have particular re- quirements here that Australians understand deeply.
“So when I was appointed last July I came with a delega- tion of profit and loss, and with the authority to manage the programs from Australia.”
“There’s something different between IP and integration data; they’re two different things,” Zeitz explains. “To inte- grate across two platforms or our system into a platform, as we’re talking with Raytheon, you work on the interface control documents as government furnished equipment (GFE). When we do work directly with Boeing and Ray- theon, sometimes we’ll work as GFE through the Com- monwealth and sometimes we’ll work directly.”
“In the US we talk about an A-kit and a B-kit,” Harbison adds. “We’ve integrated into capabilities that haven’t typi- cally been open. The Patriot missile is a perfect example – we don’t know the guts of that.”
And in NGA’s view, what are the top three risks facing the successful delivery of Air 6500?
“One of the risks could be that the Commonwealth don’t look forward enough to growth in the environment, but this risk plays into our solution through the modular ar- chitecture it has,” Zeitz says. “Also, we want to ensure the importance of this program to Australia’s future Force Pos- ture is continually reinforced, as it is a systems of systems solution rather than an air, sea or land platform, it is less visible to key stakeholders.”
LOCKHEED MARTIN AUSTRALIA
“Lockheed Martin have been a part of this Air 6500 journey for six years,” Steve Froelich, LMA program executive for Air 6500, said. “It was something that we took seriously from the beginning and so we started making investments in 2016.”
According to Froelich, LMA began organising for Air 6500 by looking at SMEs active in the Australian market- place and with DST Group. As momentum grew the com- pany built a demonstration centre at the Endeavour Centre in Canberra and teams in Adelaide and the US.
“We started small and looked at some of the promising SMEs that were actively doing work with DST and in the marketplace,” Froelich said. “We’ve continued to mature
“YOU NEED PROFIT AND LOSS AND YOU NEED AUSTRALIANS THAT KNOW HOW TO DELIVER AUSTRALIAN PROJECTS”
This, in her view, is at the foundation of successful pro- gram bids in Australia.
“The program management office, program management scheduling, risk management, most importantly SIET (Sys- tems Integration Engineering and Test): when those aren’t managed from Australia, I
think you’ll find a direct correlation to programs that get off course and go red,” Zeitz said.
“You need profit and loss and you need Australians that know how to deliver Australian projects.”
When asked how NGA intends to handle the maxim that no one company can deliver the entirety of Air 6500 alone, Zeitz explains that conversations are already underway.
“No one company can provide the full capability by themselves,” Zeitz said. “The US trials show how easy it is to integrate to different effectors and sensors. That’s a real strength of how we’re going to approach this.”
On the surface, the proposed acquisition model for Air 6500 – which is likely to see one company appointed as a prime systems integrator – could run into issues about sharing IP. But Zeitz is optimistic.
LMA