Why Northrop Won the LRS-B Contract

Over at Aviation Week, Bill Sweetman has a very good analysis as to why Northrop-Grumman beat the joint Lockheed-Martin Boeing bid for the LRS-B bomber program. (Paid subscription required)

When one considers the relative sizes of the competitors, Boeing and LM both dwarf Northrop, it was a surprise when won:

Northrop Grumman won the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest on cost; the question is whether it also beat its rivals on technology and risk. The immediate response from Lockheed Martin and Boeing was to query the cost and risk assessment behind the decision; Loren Thompson, a consultant to both companies, confirmed that they knew from the numbers announced on Oct. 21 that they had been underbid, quite unexpectedly and by a decisive margin, pointing to fatal flaws in their strategy.

Thompson’s later column in Forbes, focusing on Northrop Grumman’s ability to execute the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract, suggests that the winner undercut its rival on EMD. “I’d say Wes [Northrop CEO Wes Bush] bet the company,” Thompson said. One Wall Street analyst who had predicted a Boeing team win said: “I have an impossible time believing that this will be a financially attractive proposition if he underbid the only defense contractor who understands lean manufacturing.”

But Northrop Grumman did precisely that—relying on its operational experience with wideband, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle. Also, the winning formula was not just a question of delivering more stealth or greater range, but of meeting a complex set of requirements that stressed risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and new manufacturing technology.

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Northrop Grumman won the Long-Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) contest on cost; the question is whether it also beat its rivals on technology and risk. The immediate response from Lockheed Martin and Boeing was to query the cost and risk assessment behind the decision; Loren Thompson, a consultant to both companies, confirmed that they knew from the numbers announced on Oct. 21 that they had been underbid, quite unexpectedly and by a decisive margin, pointing to fatal flaws in their strategy.

Thompson’s later column in Forbes, focusing on Northrop Grumman’s ability to execute the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract, suggests that the winner undercut its rival on EMD. “I’d say Wes [Northrop CEO Wes Bush] bet the company,” Thompson said. One Wall Street analyst who had predicted a Boeing team win said: “I have an impossible time believing that this will be a financially attractive proposition if he underbid the only defense contractor who understands lean manufacturing.”

But Northrop Grumman did precisely that—relying on its operational experience with wideband, all-aspect stealth technology on the B-2 bomber and the still-secret RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) unmanned air vehicle. Also, the winning formula was not just a question of delivering more stealth or greater range, but of meeting a complex set of requirements that stressed risk reduction, an open systems architecture, agile management and new manufacturing technology.

The conventional wisdom is that Northrop significantly underbid LM and Boeing, and that they will unable to execute their extremely aggressive bid.

Sweetman notes looks toward Northrop's experience with the RQ-180, which seems to imply that they may have made a breakthrough in incorporating aerodynamic efficiency and broadband stealth.

I think that it is something else, and I think that Sweetman buried the lede here, because the following requirements should have whoever made the decision fleeing from LM like Laurie Strode did from Michael Meyers:

LRS-B, too, is planned to be upgraded easily and competitively, “with space and weight provision for things we can’t imagine today,” LaPlante said. Open architecture, he noted, could allow the Pentagon to procure a new or upgraded subsystem competitively, “provide it to the prime and say, ‘integrate this.’” Along with the cost of maintaining the bomber’s low-observable systems, upgrades will account for a large proportion of the bomber’s life-cycle cost—which will be much greater than its procurement bill.

………

Lockheed Martin brought its experience with stealth systems integration to the party. But the history of the F-22—where upgrades have been constrained by a tightly integrated architecture, so that every change requires painstaking regression testing to ensure that other functions are not affected—was exactly what the LRS-B program’s open architecture is designed to avoid.

(emphasis mine)

Lockheed-Martin has been doing tightly integrated monolithic systems for years, which runs counter to just about every rule of both software and weapons development, where critical functions should be segregated from everything else.

L-M's model, as shown in the F-22 and the F-35 is put everything in one box that no one can look into except for Lockheed Martin.

They make their money by placing a toll on access.

It's great for Lockheed Martin, but it's technically stupid, and bad for the end user and the taxpayer, and it appears that someone in the Pentagon has finally recognized this.