Navy Hits Gas On Flying Gas Truck, CBARS: Will It Be Armed?

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/03/navy-hits-gas-on-flying-gas-truck-cbars-will-it-be-armed/



The Navy’s UCAS demonstrator made history as the first drone to take off and land from an aircraft carrier. Its proposed successor was called UCLASS.

Navy Hits Gas On Flying Gas Truck, CBARS: Will It Be Armed?
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 11, 2016 at 3:49 PM

WASHINGTON: More gas. Less stealth. Maybe weapons. New name. Same money. Tighter schedule. That, in a dozen words, is how the Navy is evolving its program for carrier-launched drones.

Since the cancellation of the original UCLASS drone– Unmanned Carrier-Launched Aerial Surveillance & Strike — Navy leaders have insisted they would get the simplified successor in service swiftly. That successor is the flying fuel truck now being called the MQ-25 Stingray, a sexier designation for an unsexy aircraft than the bland Pentagon descriptor CBARS, Carrier-Based Aerial Refueling System.

Despite the two drones’ very different missions, it’s now clear that the performance requirements for the CBARS scout/tanker are basically a subset, a dumbed-down version, of what was envisaged for the UCLASS scout/bomber. That should allow the Navy to take the acquisition paperwork already approved for UCLASS, revise it lightly, and resubmit it for CBARS, speeding through the normal ponderous process to approve a “new start” program.

Navy programs must normally pass through six gates, for example, though some of these six steps can be combined. For CBARS, the Navy plans to compress the first five into a single meeting, after which it will issue a formal Request For Proposals to industry and an acquisition strategy sometime this summer.

Ka Ching!