Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have reached an out-of-court settlement over the two contractors’ pursuit of a critical Air Force program—the Distributed Common Ground System. The DCGS is designed to enable direct data transfer from intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance aircraft to warfighters on the ground. According to Raytheon, agreement details are confidential. However, officials said that both companies would be able “to pursue future DCGS efforts together or with other industry partners and respect the proprietary information agreements between the two companies.” Lockheed Martin recently fielded an interim common imagery element for the two existing DCGS stations. (DR, 10/05/05) The Air Force expects to begin development efforts—probably a new competition—for the next version of DCGS in 2007.
The Space Force on April 15 released two highly anticipated future-casting documents that describe what the service expects the space environment will look like in the year 2040 and lay out the force structure it thinks it will need to operate in that environment.