GLENN COPELAND, General Manager, Lockheed Martin Canada Rotary & Mission Systems
BY JOETEY ATTARIWALA
CDR: Mr. Copeland, thank you for speaking with me. You are a former naval officer that served with the Royal Canadian Navy, and you then transitioned to Lockheed Martin and various roles at the Rotary and Mission Systems (RMS) division — what made you pick industry after your time in uniform?
Copeland: It’s great to connect with you again, Joetey. I had been over 20 years in uniform at that point, and it was just one of those things that was happenstance because I had no intention to look at industry. I was aware that Lockheed Martin had won the Halifax Class Modernization (HMC) program, and I had known a few people in the company, and they shared that they were looking to build up their capability, so they asked if I was interested. That happened to be near the end of my career in uniform, which I loved, so the timing was perfect and the opportunity aligned with a lot of the stuff I had done and put in place.
I’d spent a lot of time in the training realm — training operations room officers responsible for the tactics and team training division. Then I was at Sea Training for a couple of years. Then I was executive officer of a ship, and then executive officer at Sea Training again — so fleet readiness and availability. The way the CMS [Combat Management System] command system was being structured for HCM, it was done as an operational platform which was being done out of Montreal, and then there was a whole training systems capability being done in parallel in Halifax. So, I interviewed for a role and got the job as one of the program managers to help design and implement the current training system that the Navy uses. It was a natural fit, and I’m now coming up on 16 years with Lockheed Martin in July.
NATIONAL SHIPBUILDING STRATEGY
CDR: Can you outline Lockheed Martin Canada’s involvement in the National Shipbuilding Strategy and how you’re collaborating with the other companies involved in NSS?
Copeland: We work with a number of companies as we’re supporting NSS. I’ll talk to the River Class for one second here where we’re supporting Canada in selecting the major subsystems providers, and we’re working with those to deliver the best solutions. That program is providing a massive financial deliverable to second and third tier businesses in all regions of Canada.
READ: NSS Update – National Shipbuilding Strategy
In all of the other programs we have worked with multiple suppliers in Canada growing those subcontractor relationships beginning with HCM up through today and well into the future. We’ve executed billions of dollars in subcontracts to suppliers from coast-to-coast-to-coast. I think right now, we’ve got over 500 suppliers in our system. That’s everything from major Tier 1s like L3Harris, CAE, Ultra, MDA and the like. And then, of course, there’s the value chain where we try and provide what could be made in Canada, solutioned in Canada, and can be provided to achieve the necessary offsets that Canada rightly expects we execute on their behalf. At the supporting level, we are a major subcontractor to the shipyards including Irving Shipbuilding and Vancouver Shipyards.
For the River Class, Lockheed Martin Canada won the program as the Combat Systems Integrator and is largely supported by Lockheed Martin US under our parent, Integrated Warfare Systems and Sensors, as they provide the highly advanced US Navy Aegis Anti-Air Warfare system. LM Canada’s systems delivery role for the River Class is to provide a derivative of the CMS 330, known as the Canadian Tactical Interface (CTI), which will manage the underwater solution and threat domain and fuse sensor data to provide the overall picture for the Operations teams.
We’re also responsible for integrating the entire system where we have about 400 staff and engineers identified to bring the Combat System solution together, in which we will provide all of the test and trials data associated with it, including developmental support and integration of the Land Based Test Site in Hartlen Point, Nova Scotia. So our team is here to deliver the combat system and the integrated solution for the government and RCN through ISI in their role as the Prime.
CDR: The CSC will be fitted with Lockheed’s Aegis weapon system which will be integrated, with a derivative of the CMS 330. Talk to me about what those pieces are and what they collectively mean for the River Class destroyers.
Copeland: As I mentioned, the Aegis Weapons system is what the US Navy uses right now on all their Arleigh Burke Class and Ticonderoga Class ships, among other classes and it’s going to be part of the Constellation Class. It forms the backbone of the weapons defence system, and Canada has chosen to stay in lockstep with the US Navy on a similar construct and similar baseline to be able to provide a long-range air picture, long-range anti-surface picture, and missile defence picture.
That Aegis solution is an extremely smart, extremely powerful, world leading capability. It works in its own domain with a Fire Control Loop that is developed by Lockheed Martin and provided through the Foreign Military Sales program. The Aegis system itself is integrated into a system of sensors and effectors including the Raytheon family of missiles, a 5-inch gun system, a secondary gun system and a Point defence weapon system. The remainder of the ship, including the underwater detection and countermeasures systems, will be fused under the CTI to present the Operations team a clear, unambiguous threat picture with a series of automated responses dependent upon the threat. So, depending on your discipline, you’ll be looking at whatever picture it is that matters to you — if you’re an above water or surface warfare operator you’ll be looking at the Aegis picture, and if you’re an underwater operator you’ll be looking at the Lockheed Martin CTI solution.
CDR: The River Class will be fitted with the Lockheed Martin SPY-7 radar. How will the SPY-7 be a game changer for the Navy, and what makes it different from the SPY-6 that the US Navy uses?
Copeland: I’ve got some very good understanding of the SPY-7 solid state capability and what it brings as a solution provider, how discriminating it is in a threat environment, and how it is able to detect, track, localize, and provide the solution for the engagement using the Aegis fire control loop. I can tell you, there is no better solution, hand on heart. The Missile Defense Agency in the US is using it, and Japan and Spain are procuring it for their Navies. I can tell you, Joetey, it’s a technology capability that will continue to develop and remain the most capable radar available. It’s based on a collection of Sub-array suites that are small, modular transceivers. The brains are in the software, the algorithms that stack those together and multiply their capability to form the beams and the look zones that allow you to have a discriminating look into the atmosphere, on multiple bearings simultaneously to be able to pick up the targets that matter.
It met the extremely demanding AAW requirements for the River Class Destroyer while the scalability, and ease of maintenance of that solution stands alone. The economics of weight and space relative to power, the affordability, everything that that radar brings to the table, is unmatched. What you don’t see just yet in comparable radars is that these sub-arrays that are basically the size of a small microwave, in effect miniature radars. The design allows the customer to stack an array with as many as they need to generate the required power and range. Canada has chosen a four faced array with modular scalability. Within a four faced radar there is plenty of redundancy and if one of those array boxes starts to degrade, it doesn’t degrade the remaining capability of the radar. It’s a slow degradation if that happens, and one operator can come in and pull that out by basically two handles and diagnose it, then change a component without having to shut down the radar. It can be done by one technician, so it’s a phenomenal solution.
CDR: Is Lockheed Martin involved with the River Class land-based test facility HMCS Assiniboine?
Copeland: We are. As part of the deliverables, we have to work hand in glove with the customer to be able to say what it is we are delivering. I don’t want to get too far into it right now, but we could see ourselves managing that site for them in the future as a natural progression of the deliverables. Similar to what we do right now on the base in Halifax, they’re asking us to take a look and understand what could be our part to play in the management of the infrastructure’s systems once it’s up and running. Defence Construction Canada will actually build the building, and the customer will actually be the one responsible for outfitting it and getting it up to speed. We’ll support the initial test capacity, but the customer owns that space. It’s who maintains it, who manages it, and who’s going to look after it in the out years once it’s built that is yet to be determined.
CDR: The Lockheed Martin Mark 41 VLS will be fitted on the River Class. How many cells are going to be on the ship, and are they full depth strike cells?
Copeland: They are the deep strike cell and there will be 24 of them. There’s always been a look in the design side if there’s room for more, and I think those discussions are still underway, but right now it’s 24 cells.
CMS 330
CDR: Please share for the readers, what is the CMS 330 that Lockheed Martin Canada has designed?
Copeland: The best way to think about the Command Management System 330 is that it’s a product that’s in continual design. We realized that if we continually invest in ourselves, and we continually invest in the ways the customer wants us to, then we will always be designing a better product. We look at it as the brain of the overall platform capability and tied to the heartbeat of the network — that’s basically to say, I can take all the data from all of the other systems and all the pedigree data from the sensors, and fuse that together, and then provide the algorithms that basically say, here’s what’s going on in all of the warfare domains and environments. From an operator perspective, the picture management and what’s delivered to them in a push fashion has a lot more power associated with it when you meld it with every single data and information source available and create the myriad permutations of responses that an operator can select to defend the ship.
We built CMS 330 for Canada under some very demanding specifications. It was tough in the first few years to get it all functioning to handle the load and the responsiveness required of a NATO Large track stores C2 system that Canada was demanding. Around 2013 we realized we had a very capable product, and apparently, so did a few other folks, including the New Zealanders, who happened to be looking for something to modernize their warships at the time. From then, we started taking a look at CMS 330 in a different way and to ask ourselves how this could be exportable because there’s a lot of Canadian data inside this solution. Once we started decoupling and removing that confidential data, it’s been a continual process to redesign it for customers like New Zealand and Chile. We’re now in in-service support to maintain multiple versions for Canada and multiple versions for international customers.
CDR: Where is Lockheed Martin currently looking to compete the CMS 330?
Copeland: Our main focus right now is in Germany with their F127 program, similar to Canada’s River Class Destroyer program. We are also tracking Portugal where we have a bid proposal in with the Portuguese Navy for the Vasco da Gama Class upgrades.
CDR: Thank you, Mr. Copeland.
Joetey Attariwala is CDR’s Senior Staff Writer
