Raytheon announced Tuesday that it has completed site acceptance testing with the Air Force of two operational distributed ground systems in the Block 10.2 configuration for processing intelligence information: DGS-2 at Beale AFB, Calif., and DGS-4 at Ramstein AB, Germany. The company has been developing these sites under its distributed common ground system contract to improve vastly the manner in which intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance data are processed, exploited, and disseminated across the Air Force enterprise. DCGS Block 10.2 capability is network-centric and allows for greater distributed collaboration worldwide. With it, the DGS “is processing ISR data faster than the original requirements and shows even more robust capabilities to fight the overseas contingency operations,” said Anthony DiFurio, director for Raytheon’s Multi-Intelligence Systems. This new capability will soon be added to the Air Force’s experimental DCS, dubbed DGS-X, at Langley AFB, Va., said Raytheon.
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.