H-60 Mission Avionics Technology Insertion

The DOD's inordinately long acquisition cycles, the decade-long reduction in defense spending and the resultant dependence on service life extensions have left countless military systems highly susceptible to obsolescence. On average, it takes mostmilitary programs five years just to get through the initial design phase. Given the nature of the DOD's long acquisition process and long weapons systems service lives, it has become impossible to keep pace with the speed of technology advancement andeven new weapons systems such as the MH-60R have become susceptible to obsolescence. Even if the MH-60R's procurement ramp is accelerated, it will not be fully fielded until after the middle of the next decade. However, DOD needs are dwarfed by anenormous consumer market. Outright necessity pushed all of the services toward the use of commercial-standard parts. As a result, the services now lie at the mercy of market forces which, like clockwork, make electronic systems obsolete every 18 months.Progeny Systems proposes an approach to address both problems: a new, commodity COTS-based solution for MH-60R data processing as well as the software and technology refresh approach that will allow the program to keep pace with technology withoutincreasing the total Cost of Ownership. This approach can be applied not only to other areas of the NAVAIR acquisition process, but also to commercial Enterprise systems, where obsolescence is still a problem, but is not being managed as efficiently as itcould be. Using the technology refresh planning guidance produced by this effort, as well as the tools and software that this effort will produce to help isolate applications from their dependencies on specific hardware platforms, commercial businessescan migrate their system software through several generations of updated server hardware without requiring software changes.