Northrop Grumman and EADS prep the battlefield

February 21, 2008 by Dagpotter
Filed under: Airbus, Boeing, EADS, Military Aviation, Northrop Grumman Corp., Proposal, Protest, U.S. Air Force, commercial aviation, logistics, production program 

In this press release, Northrop Grumman and EADS make it clear they are ready to fight for the KC-X contract. It states simply that the KC-30 meets or exceeds all of the Key Performance Parameters (KPP) contained in the requirements document for this platform. The Joint Capability Integration Development System (JCIDS) is the process by which the US military develops their requirements for a system. It is an evolution of the requirements system introduced by Secretary of Defense McNamara back in the Kennedy administration. It is a evolutionary system where a series of requirements documents are developed and staffed through the system until they are reviewed and approved by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) which is made up of various Vice Chiefs of Staff for the Joint Chiefs, the Services and DoD organizations. There are three such documents, the Initial Capabilities Document which supports concept exploration and work prior to Milestone B; the Capabilities Development Document which is for the System Design and Development (SDD) phase; and the final Capability Production Document (CPD) which is supposed to reflect what the service is buying. The KPP are the few must have capabilities for the system. Obviously if not selected it will have to be for a reason not related to capabilities, and then the Air Force’s selection board better have a good reason. Unfortunately recently they haven’t done well. See this post for more.

Tags: , , ,

Comments

Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!

You must be logged in to post a comment.