US Navy's UCLASS Delayed due to Budget, Direction Clashes

The US Department of Defense (DoD) is carefully considering how much funding it will allocate to the US Navy's (USN's) Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system before it publicly opens a competition for the new programme, the department's acquisition chief said in early September.

Asked why the department has delayed release of a UCLASS Request for Proposal (RfP), Frank Kendall, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said cost concerns are responsible for the planning slowdown.

"It's driven by the uncertainty about our future budget and about affordability concerns," Kendall said at a defence conference in Washington. "We're looking at all the things the [navy] may not have made provisions for. Affordability is a major concern for us right now, and any new start is going to be done very carefully, the UCLASS is a new start."

Kendall added that officials: "want to be reasonably confident that we are going to be able to actually do that programme, and afford it" before soliciting bids from industry.

NAVAIR did release a series of RfPs directly to the four competitors for the programme: Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. The details of those documents are not publicly known.

The USN has reportedly been studying two UCLASS plans - a lightly armed surveillance aircraft and a larger, stealthy and well-armed vehicle capable of navigating through contested environments.

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