Defence`s Feeds

Americas

The US Air Force is procuring more updated Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missiles (AMRAAMs) from Raytheon. The awarded cost-plus-incentive-fee option is valued at $62 million and provides for more missiles that integrate the Form, Fit, Function Refresh (F3R) of the AMRAAM guidance section. Friday’s contract involves foreign military sales to Norway, Turkey, Japan, Romania, and Australia. The Air Force’s AMRAAM F3R project is a comprehensive effort to mitigate the effects of parts obsolescence and diminishing manufacturing sources in the missile’s guidance section to extend the missile’s lifetime well into the 2020s. The F3R effort includes the substantial redesign of subsystems that include a new ASIC design, new hardware and a new signal processor. Work will be performed at Raytheon’s factory in Tucson, Arizona, and is expected to be completed by December 2020.

Honeywell International is being tapped to support the Air Force’s fleet of C-5M Super Galaxy transport aircraft. Under this $7.8 million firm-fixed-priced order the company will be responsible to upgrade 85 Versatile Integrated Avionics/Avionics Integrated Units (VIA/AIU) to the 905 configuration. The upgrades are part of the Galaxy’s Global Air Traffic Management (GATM) avionics program. The VIA software system has six primary “partitions” or applications that include flight management, com/nav/surveillance/identification (CNSI), communication management, display services and all-weather flight control. The C-5M VIA/AIU repair and upgrade effort is a key component to the overall Core Mission Computer/Weather Radar aircraft modification/installation kit that replaces the current mission computer, and replaces the weather radar with a commercial off-the-shelf color weather radar. Work will be perfumed at Honeywell’s location in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is expected to be completed by June 14, 2020.

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp will support the Directed Energy Directorate with Solid State Laser Effects and Modeling efforts. The awarded cost-reimbursement type contract is priced at $36 million and allows the company to develop innovative diagnostic and test methods, increase the fidelity, realism and confidence of predictive models, measure and consolidate laser vulnerability data and support the general high energy laser system research environment. The Directorate focuses on four research areas: Laser Systems, High Power Electro magnetics, Weapons Modeling, Simulation and Analysis, and Directed Energy and Electro-Optics for Space Superiority. Among other things, the Directorate develops future offensive and defensive laser concepts, and models the synergy of directed energy and kinetic weapons at mission level. Work will be performed at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Work under this contract is expected to be completed by October 2022.

Canada’s Surface Combatants program is picking up pace as Lockheed emerges as the preferred bidder to design the next fleet of Royal Canadian Navy ships. This brings Lockheed one step closer to land the potential contract worth more than $45 billion. The company pitched BAE’s Type 26 design to the government of Canada and Irving Shipbuilders, a Canadian firm that would actually build the ships. BAE and Lockheed are now set to negotiate the specific terms of the deal, which would cover the construction of 15 frigates and associated equipment and services. What follows now is a due diligence process, which includes negotiations with Lockheed on intellectual property rights, an assessment of combat systems performance an assessment of the company’s financial capability to deliver the project and verification of various other administrative matters. If all goes well the Canadian government could award the contract in 2019 with construction expected to be begin by the early 2020s.

Middle East & Africa

South Africa’s Denel Vehicle Systems is adding a new version of the RG31 Mk5 to its portfolio. The baseline of the 4 by 4 MRAP is usually used as an armoured personnel carrier (APC), the new version however integrates the Tactical Remote Turret 30 (TRT-30). The remodelled vehicle’s TRT-30 armament suite consists of a Russian 30 mm 2A42 dual-feed cannon and a 7.62 mm co-axial machine gun. The gunner can remotely control the weapons via a flat-screen man machine interface (MMI) and twin control handles. The TRT is also fitted with an automatic target tracker (ATT) that gives the gunner more accuracy while the vehicle os moving. Dubbed the Ibululu, the platform is equipped with a 205 kW Cummins engine that accelerates the 16 ton vehicle to speeds of up to 62 mph, and an Axle Tech 4000 (5G) suspension that allows for cross-country mobility.

Europe

Aero Vodochody is taking first orders for its new L-39NG jet trainers. Czech Defence Minister Lubomir Metnar recently announced that the country will buy six L-39NGs to replace its outdated fleet of L-39 Albatros aircraft. “The Ministry of Defence and the military are interested in these aircraft, negotiations are, of course, already taking place and we will acquire these aircraft,” Metnar told Ceska Televize. The NG is the latest multi-role, advanced jet trainer aircraft designed by the company and is intended to provide enhanced military flight training capabilities required for fourth and fifth-generation fighters. The company hopes to export the new platform to various global customers and estimates that it could deliver more than 100 L-39NGs over the next decade.

Asia-Pacific

The Indonesian government plans to renegotiate its partnership with South Korea in the K-FX development program. The agreement between the two countries was formalised in 2014, and outlined that Indonesia will contribute about $1.9 billion to the project which has an overall value of $7.9 billion. Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs is seeking to negotiate a way for Indonesia to pay its contribution, of which about $200 million is unpaid. Reuters says that “Indonesia’s request on the financial terms of the deal comes as it is trying to support the rupiah, which is trading near a 20-year-low, and to reduce the use of foreign exchange reserves.” The KF-X program will likely be South Korea’s largest defense acquisition program, that sees for the delivery of 120 jets for its own air force, and 80 to Indonesia.

Today’s Video

Watch: AUSA 2018 Association U.S. Army defense exhibition

C-5 Galaxy
(click to view full)

When it was introduced, back in 1970, the C-5 Galaxy was the largest plane in the world. It also has the highest operating cost of any US Air Force weapon system, owing to extremely high maintenance demands as well as poor fuel economy. Worse, availability rates routinely hover near 50%. To add insult to injury, the Russians not only built a bigger plane (the AN-124), they sold it off at the end of the Cold War to semi-private operators, turning it into a commercial success whose customer list now includes… NATO.

Meanwhile, the USA still needs long-range, heavy load airlift. The AN-124’s commercial success may get its production line restarted, but the C-5 has no such hope. Boeing’s smaller C-17s cost more than $200 million per plane. That’s about the cost of a 747-8 freighter, for much higher availability rates than the C-5, and a longer lifespan.

Sunrise? Sunset?
(click to view full)

What’s the right balance between new C-17s and existing C-5s? The US Air Force believes that the right balance involves keeping some of the larger C-5s, and thought they could save money by upgrading and renewing their avionics (AMP) and engines (RERP). Their hope was that this would eliminate the problems that keep so many C-5s in the hangar, cut down on future maintenance costs, and grow airlift capacity, without adding new planes. Unfortunately, the program experienced major cost growth. In response, the C-5M program wound up being both cut in size, and cut in 2. The C-5A and C-5B/C fleets are now slated for different treatment, which will deliver fewer of the hoped-for benefits, in exchange for lower costs and lower risk.

The C-5’s AMP-RERP The Problem: Less Than Reliable

C-5 Refuels from KC-135
KC-135 = 707 airliner!
(click to view full)

From Air Force Magazine:

“The Galaxy also has major problems, as was glaringly apparent during one particular C-5’s trip from Dover to Europe. As it readied for takeoff, an engine warning light appeared in the cockpit. The flight crew taxied the airplane back to the apron, the passengers got off, and maintenance crews investigated. After the problem was fixed and the passengers had reboarded, the aircraft headed out again, but another warning light came one – this time during the takeoff run.

Five more times, the C-5 attempted to leave, and each time there was a glitch.

Airborne at last, the heavily laden giant lumbered up to cruising altitude, but, some 100 miles out over the Atlantic, yet another warning light came on – this time, a landing gear door seemed ajar. The airplane returned to Dover for yet another repair. The C-5 finally reached its destination in Europe – but more than 18 hours late.”

Stories like this also help to explain why the C-5 has the highest operating cost of any Air Force weapon system. The programs designed to address these cost & reliability problems are called AMP (Avionic Modernization Program) and RERP (Reliability Enhancement & Re-Engining Program). To keep them straight in your head, think of AMP as amping up the Galaxy’s electronics for the modern era, and RERP as putting a bit more roar in its engines.

C-5s are currently assigned to:

• Dover Air Force Base, Delaware (USAF, C-5B)
  
• Travis AFB, California (USAF)
  
• Lackland AFB, Texas (USAF)
  
• Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio (USAF)
  
• Martinsburg Air National Guard Base, West Virginia
  
• Memphis ANGB, Tennessee
  
• Stewart ANGB, New York; and
  
• Westover Air Reserve Base, Massachusetts

Changing the C-5: AMP

Before: C-5 cockpit
(click to view full)

AMP is the first step. Its main purpose is to equip the aircraft to fly in civil airspace by the most direct routes, at the most advantageous altitudes, with the most efficient fuel usage and cargo loads. The new avionics systems will allow the aircraft to comply with reduced vertical separation mandates, and also provides an architecture flexible enough to meet future communications, navigation, surveillance (CNS) and air traffic management (ATM) requirements. AMP is also trying to reduce the number of devices and wires in the planes, to reduce costs and improve reliability. All told, 12,000 wires are removed, and 4,000 are installed, during a C-5 AMP.

The program has displayed a philosophy of making its additions using as much commercial equipment as possible, rather than insisting on all-militarized systems. Riding on the development work spurred by changing commercial requirements, rather than funding development on its own, is a change for USAF procurement, but they get a very modern system that way. In addition to the substitution of digital “glass cockpit” computer screen displays, key Global Air Traffic Management avionics include:

• Future Air Navigation System (FANS) data link
  
• Aeronautical operational communications (AOC) data link
  
• VHF com, 8.33-KHz spacing
  
• Multimode receiver (MMR) with protected ILS, VOR, microwave landing system (MLS) and marker beacon
  
• Dual, embedded inertial navigation system (INS)/GPS
  
• Identification, friend or foe (IFF)/Mode S transponder
  
• Traffic alert collision avoidance system II (TCAS II), Version 7, (added earlier)
  
• Enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS)
  
• Backup air traffic control (ATC) data link printer, and
  
• Versatile Integrated Avionics (VIA) software system, with six primary “partitions” or applications, such as: flight management, com/nav/surveillance/identification (CNSI), com management, display services and all-weather flight control.

Even after all these efforts, however, the AMP’s digital avionics offer only minor reliability improvements to the aircraft as a whole. What they will do, is allow the aircraft to operate with fewer restrictions in civil airspace.

They also lay the required foundation for the major improvements expected in the follow-on Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program (RERP). Many of the RERP phase’s improvements, which will make a much bigger difference to the C-5’s reliability rates, require the rewiring and improvements made during the AMP phase, in order to work properly. As USAF Mobility Division Chief for Global Reach Programs Colonel Brunderman notes:

“AMP puts a digital backbone into the aircraft. It replaces a lot of legacy analog dial systems that are no longer supportable and are getting unreliable and puts them into a digital format. AMP also allows the aircraft to interface with the digital controls on the new engines that come in the RERP phase.”

Changing the C-5: RERP

TF39 on C-5
(click to view full)

RERP’s core improvement is the addition of modern F138-GE-100 jet engines, derived from General Electric’s CF6-80C2s that power many Boeing 747s (including the President’s Air Force One), 767s, Airbus 300 and 310s, and other commercial aircraft. The full 2-part upgrade aims to lift the C-5’s mission capability rate from the present level of 55-60% to better than 75%. Lead contractor Lockheed Martin also claims the combined AMP and RERP upgrades will reduce the Air Force’s total ownership cost fleet-wide by 34% over the C-5M’s remaining life span.

These new CF6 engines deliver more than 50,000 pounds of thrust each, allowing the C-5Ms to carry more than 270,000 pounds, and to take off and land in distances as short as 5,000 feet. In comparative terms, they deliver 22% more takeoff thrust, achieve 30% shorter takeoff distances, enable 58% faster time-to-climb to cruising altitude (an important metric in dangerous environments, where getting above 15,000 feet makes you a lot safer), and have a 99.98% departure reliability rate in commercial service, providing a 10-fold improvement in reliability and maintainability over the C-5 fleet’s existing TF39 engines.

In 2002, Lockheed Martin awarded GE a $126 million contract to provide CF6-80C2 engines for the C-5M SDD phase. Following a successful SDD phase, the production phase could have called for upwards of 500 F-138 engines, plus service support, at a potential value of $2.6 billion to GE over the life of the multi-year program. In practice, the narrowing of the RERP program to just 42 aircraft means orders for about 170-190 F138 engines.

The C-5s’ RERP phase will also install full-authority digital engine controls (FADECs) that improve their performance and fuel efficiency, updated fault monitoring and recording systems, and much else. Work will cover hydraulic, fuel, fire suppression and pressurization subsystems as well as auxiliary power units, air conditioning systems, landing gear and the airframe.

After: C-5M cockpit
(click to view full)

After completing the entire modernization program, the C-5s will be renamed the C-5M Galaxy aircraft. The 2 new configurations (C-5 AMP, C-5M) will also create follow-on contracts to modify training devices, etc. to the new standards.

The first test C-5M flew on June 19/06, and the first production C-5M flew in September 2010. The production rate goal for C-5Ms is an 8-month turnaround on the modernization, which translates into 11 converted aircraft per year at peak production.

The Air Force planned to “RERP” 2 C-5Bs and 1 C-5A to verify the hoped-for performance and reliability boost. A production decision on the re-engining program was expected in FY 2007, but did not take place until February 2008. In the end, the C-5A fleet was excluded from the RERP phase altogether. Some were even excluded from the AMP phase, which means the overall C-5 fleet will shrink.

The C-5 AMP/RERP Program

Note that figures after 2015 involve fleet sustainment and modernization, which won’t really stop until the planes are retired from service.

C-5 Upgrade Programs: Budgets

Decisions, Decisions: The C-5 Gamble

C-5 over Atlantic City
(click to view full)

The initial C-5 program delivered 80 aircraft. A 2nd construction program in 1981-1986 delivered 50 more; 4 have been lost in crashes, for a total fleet of 126. Each C-5 aircraft can carry 265,000 pounds of cargo for 4,000 miles (roughly double that of the newer C-17A), or 125,000 pounds for 8,000 miles. Its hinged nose can even be raised to make loading or unloading easier, and the Galaxy’s ability to lift even the heaviest main battle tanks into theater made it a critical part of the trans-oceanic air bridge that would reinforce Europe or Korea in the event of an enemy attack. During the 2003 run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom I, C-5s proved their worth again as they removed logistics bottlenecks in Europe.

If results and cost projections had been more positive, up to 112 total C-5A, C-5B and C-5C aircraft would have gone through the 2-phase AMP/RERP upgrade, which is currently scheduled to begin in 2008 and continue through to 2014. The C-5Ms would then be expected to serve until 2040. The key is that word “if”. As the US Air Force Association explains:

“The C-5 Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program, or RERP, has been the catch-22 of mobility for several years. If the upgrade works, USAF won’t need more new C-17s. If it waits and then the RERP doesn’t work, the C-17 line will be closed, leaving no strategic lift option.”

The twin questions facing the program remain cost, and effectiveness. USAF acquisition executive Sue Payton told a Senate committee in late 2007 that per-aircraft costs for C-5 AMP/RERP had ballooned to $146.7 million. In contrast, Lockheed Martin business ventures vice president Larry McQuien stood by the company’s $83 million price commitment, and said that even if additional Air Force costs like training, spare parts, support equipment, and unanticipated repairs were thrown in, the per-aircraft price would not exceed $118 million.

Officially, the Air Force won that argument. Per USAF estimates, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne declared the C-5 program to be in breach of Nunn-McCurdy notification provisions. That law requires the US military to notify Congress if a program is more than 15% over its baseline budget, and rejustify it if the increase is over 25%.

The USAF estimate was significantly more than a 25% increase, and some senior officials began to have second thoughts.

If RERP’s stated objective is to boost the overall reliability of about 100 C-5s by 10 percentage points, goes the thinking, that equates to adding 10 aircraft to the fleet. If the cost to complete the program is $16-17 billion, that’s over $1.6 billion per extra plane. Of course, one reply may add, the 10% readiness increase happens now – but what if the real difference is that without AMP/RERP, readiness rates continue to get worse, or sudden structural issues surface? What if half-way through their remaining airframe life, worsening issues with engines, wires, maintenance etc. mean that only 20% of the unmodified C-5s can fly? That would create a much higher future readiness gain for the modernization program, but those cost-benefit scenarios become more complex to calculate, involving probability estimates, the value of having certainty, plus capacity tradeoffs and load pattern analysis. How many replacement aircraft would be required to replace lost C-5s, and what would that cost?

Heavy Metal

In the end, the USAF and Department of Defense separated the C-5s into 62 C-5 AMP-only aircraft, and 49 C-5M AMP/RERP aircraft. Further cuts appear to have reduced the C-5A+ AMP buy to just 79 planes total, leaving 27 C-5 AMPs and 52 C-5Ms.

The estimated cost of the new program drops to just $7.5 billion, but C-5A+ aircraft would be expected to show only minor readiness improvements, and maintenance of their engines will be a growing issue as the fleet ages. Lean Six Sigma initiatives and performance-based maintenance contracts will be used to try to address the readiness gap. Whether they will be successful remains an open question.

If not, studies were undertaken to see if the C-5 has a future as a civilian cargo aircraft, after all. With that low readiness rate, however, it’s unlikely.

Contracts & Key Events

Swiftly flow
the years…
(click to view full)

Unless otherwise noted, all contracts are issued to Lockheed Martin in Marietta, GA by the USAF’s Headquarters Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH. Note that the collection of entries becomes less complete before 2006.

FY 2014-2018

IOC achieved.

C-5M
(click to view full)

October 23/18: Upgrades Honeywell International is being tapped to support the Air Force’s fleet of C-5M Super Galaxy transport aircraft. Under this $7.8 million firm-fixed-priced order the company will be responsible to upgrade 85 Versatile Integrated Avionics/Avionics Integrated Units (VIA/AIU) to the 905 configuration. The upgrades are part of the Galaxy’s Global Air Traffic Management (GATM) avionics program. The VIA software system has six primary “partitions” or applications that include flight management, com/nav/surveillance/identification (CNSI), communication management, display services and all-weather flight control. The C-5M VIA/AIU repair and upgrade effort is a key component to the overall Core Mission Computer/Weather Radar aircraft modification/installation kit that replaces the current mission computer, and replaces the weather radar with a commercial off-the-shelf color weather radar. Work will be perfumed at Honeywell’s location in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is expected to be completed by June 14, 2020.

August 7/18: Ready to Lift The Air Force is now in possession of a completely refurbished fleet of C-5M Super Galaxy transport planes. The US Air Force Air Mobility Command began a program to modernize the C-5s in 1998 after a study concluded the decades-old aircraft had 80% of their service life remaining. AMP is the first step. Its main purpose is to equip the aircraft to fly in civil airspace by the most direct routes, at the most advantageous altitudes, with the most efficient fuel usage and cargo loads. AMP is also trying to reduce the number of devices and wires in the planes, to reduce costs and improve reliability. RERP’s core improvement is the addition of modern F138-GE-100 jet engines, derived from General Electric’s CF6-80C2s that power many commercial airliners. The C-5 is capable of carrying two 78-ton M1A1 main battle tanks or helicopters and other large equipment intercontinental distances. Over the years Lockheed Martin upgraded a total of 52 C-5s with new engines, avionics and diagnostic systems, which will keep the airlifters flying until the 2040s.

October 25/17: Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $14.7 million US Air Force (USAF) contract to enhance the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast out system, among other parts of the communications system on the C-5. Work to be undertaken include C-5 communications, navigation, surveillance/air traffic management engineering and manufacturing development program and incorporates the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast out technology. Work will be completed at Marietta, Ga., and is expected to be completed by September 25, 2019. Lockheed’s C-4 Galaxy has been in service since 1970 and is one of the world’s largest transport aircraft.

July 16/14: #21 delivered. C-5M Super Galaxy #87-0044 leaves Marietta, GA as the 3rd C-5M destined for Travis AFB, CA. Sources: Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “Travis No. 3”.

June 30/14: #20 delivered. A C-5M Super Galaxy leaves Marietta, GA for Travis AFB, CA. Aircraft 85-0010 was delivered 28 days ahead of the contracted schedule. Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Another C-5M Goes West”.

June 18/14: RERP-6: Convert 11. A $222.9 million fixed-price C-5M RERP contract modification pays to modify a total of 11 C-5 aircraft, using the appropriate kits. This brings the Lot 6 total to $882.3 million for materials and installation (q.v. Oct 31/12, Oct 21/11)

All funds are committed immediately, using FY 2013 and FY 2014 USAF aircraft budgets. Work will be performed at Marietta, GA and is expected to be complete by Jan 10/17. USAF Life Cycle Management Center/WLSK at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH manages the contract (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0200).

May 8/14: RERP-7 kits. Lockheed Martin in Marietta, GA receives a $508.9 million fixed-price modification for C-5 RERP Lot 7 kits.

All funds are completed immediately, using USAF FY 2014 aircraft procurement funds. Work will be performed at Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by May 2018. The USAF Life Cycle Management Center/WLSK at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH manages the contract (FA8625-07-C-6471 P00201).

May 8/14: #19. C-5M Super Galaxy #87-0042 leaves Marietta, GA as the 1st C-5M destined for Travis AFB, CA. The C-5Ms will be flown by active duty crews from the 60th Air Mobility Wing, as well as crews from Air Force Reserve Command’s 349th AMW Associate unit at Travis AFB. Sources: Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “First Super Galaxy For Travis”.

April 26/14: Basing. The USAF announces that half of the 439th Airlift Wing’s C-5 fleet at Westover ARB, MA will be cut, with 8 of their C-5Bs transferred fto JB San Antonio-Lackland, TX beginning in 2015. Westover will receive 8 upgraded C-5M Super Galaxys, but they’ll still lose 59 full-time enlisted personnel and 275 drilling Reservists. Sources: Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “Westover Basing Decision”.

April 2/14: #18. USAF Lt. Gen. Brooks L. Bash, the vice commander of Air Mobility Command, personally flies C-5M #87-0040 from the Lockheed Martin facility in Marietta, GA, to Dover AFB, DE. It’s the last C-5M delivered to the base, which has been the type’s sole destination so far. Sources: Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “Last Super Galaxy To Dover”.

March 25/14: #17. C-5M Super Galaxy #87-0020 leaves Marietta, GA for Stewart ANGB, NY for internal paint and insulation blanket restoration. After getting the touch-up, the aircraft will be flown to Dover AFB, DE. Sources: Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “Super Galaxy Number 17”.

March 25/14: Avionics. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. in Marietta, GA receives a sole-source $84.3 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract. It funds the EMD development program for the C-5 fleet’s Core Mission Computer/Color Weather Radar program. These upgrades are envisaged as retrofits to the entire AMP/ RERP fleet.

$11.2 million in FY 2013 USAF aircraft budgets are committed immediately. Work will be performed at Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by March 31/17. The USAF Life Cycle Management Center/WLSK at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH manages the contract (FA8625-14-C-6596).

March 4-11/14: Budgets. The US military slowly files its budget documents, detailing planned spending from FY 2014 – 2019. The C-5 program gets the main C-5M budget zeroed out from FY 2016 – 2019. It’s not quite as big a change as it seemed, because some of the upgrades are being broken out as their own programs, but it’s still a total reduction of about $194.5 million from FY 2016 – 2019. See the charts above.

The C-5’s mission computer has to be replaced. It has reached capacity, and can’t even handle basic additions like the flight management system (FMS); weather radar; and basic requirements for using civil airspace past 2020: ADS-B Out, and identification, friend or foe (IFF) mode 5. The new mission computer will handle these and other upgrades.

A new color weather radar replaces the current AN/APS-133s, which have such serious problems with obsolete parts that they threaten to become unserviceable.

They also want to fix the bathrooms, but that isn’t just convenience. Not only is the current system unreliable, it leaks liquid sodium hypochlorite, causing severe corrosion and burnt wires in the landing gear control panels. Not a great outcome, so they’re going to replace them a commercial product using FY15 funding.

Feb 21/14: IOC. USAF AMC declares Initial Operational Capability for the C-5M. Lockheed Martin has delivered 16 planes, and the aircraft has passed its Qualification Test, Operational Test and Evaluation, stand-up of required spares and maintenance facilities at Dover AFB and other locations, and stand-up of enough trained aircrew and maintenance personnel.

The program is far enough along that the Pentagon’s DOT&E no longer features them in testing reports.

C-5M IOC

Dec 23/13: #16 delivered. Tail number 87-0036 is ferried to Dover Air Force Base, DE. It’s the 16th C-5M delivered, and the 6th delivered in 2013. Is it us, or did that recent set of rapid-fire deliveries seem a bit compressed? Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Sweet Sixteen”.

Dec 12/13: #15 delivered. The latest C-5M is off to Dover Air Force Base, DE. Lockheed Martin is still touting that the plane “exceeds a mission capable rate of 80 percent,” which is a big improvement if it’s true. Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Home for the Holidays”.

Dec 5/13: #14 delivered. Lockheed Martin flies its latest delivery to Stewart Air National Guard Base, NY for internal paint restoration, before C-5M #86-0017 heads to its permanent home at Dover AFB, DE. Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Another Super Galaxy Delivered” | Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “Super Galaxy Delivered”.

Nov 21/13: #13 delivered. Lockheed Martin delivers tail number 85-0004 to the 436th Airlift Wing at Dover Air Force Base, DE. Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Baker’s Dozen!”.

FY 2013

 

Lt. Col. Mike Semo,
C-5M Pilot
click to play video

Sept 19/13: #12 delivered. Lockheed Martin delivers C-5M #85-0003 to the USAF at its Marietta, GA plant. Maj. Gen. Wayne Schatz Jr., Director of Strategic Plans, Requirements, and Programs at Air Mobility Command headquarters, flies the aircraft to Stewart ANGB, New York, where it will undergo internal paint restoration before returning to its permanent home at Dover AFB, DE. This aircraft has recorded more than 19,000 flight hours.

Lockheed Martin says that they’re on track to deliver 52 C-5Ms by 2017. Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Make it a Dozen!” | Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine, “Super Galaxy No. 12”.

Sept 5/13: Training. A $21.3 million contract modification for a C-5M RERP aircraft maintenance system trainer and a flight control system trainer at Travis AFB, CA, plus associated spares. All funds are committed immediately, using FY 2012 procurement funds. The buy seems minor, but the 2012 report from the Pentagon’s testing department (q.v. Jan 17/13) cited a lack of dedicated training systems as a problem for the fleet.

Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, with an expected completion date of Aug 31/16. Fiscal 2012 aircraft procurement funds in the amount of $21,318,495 are being obligated at time of award. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright Patterson AFB, OH manages the contract (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0224).

June 21/13: #11 delivered. The eleventh C-5M Super Galaxy leave Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, GA facility for Dover AFB, DE. Sources: Lockheed Martin, June 21/13 release.

June 18/13: Software. A $27.9 million indefinite-delivery /indefinite-quantity contract with cost-plus-fixed-fee, firm-fixed-price, and cost-reimbursement-no-fee portions. Lockheed Martin will support C-5 software and the software integration laboratory, offer engineering support, and provide an emergency operational flight plan.

$21 million in FY 2013-2016 Operations and Maintenance DPEM Software funds in the amount are committed for Task Orders 0001 and 0002. Work will be performed at Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by by June 20/16. This award is a result of an electronic solicitation with 1 bidder, from the USAF Life Cycle Management Center/C-5 Galaxy Center at Robins AFB, GA (FA8525-13-D-0004).

April 28/13: Waste. Congressionally-mandated waste continues. USAF training hours are cut and squadrons stop flying, in order to maintain aircraft that cannot fly and pay people in Congressional districts to do meaningless work. The USAF isn’t the only service with this problem, but it’s a sharp one for the C-5 fleet. From the New Hampshire Foster’s Daily Democrat:

“Parked around the airstrip at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland are more than a dozen massive C-5A Galaxy transport planes. There is no money to fly them, repair them or put pilots in the cockpits, but Congress rejected the Air Force’s bid to retire them…. crews will tow the planes around the Texas tarmac a bit to make sure the tires don’t rot, then send them back into exile until they can finally get permission to commit the aging aircraft to the boneyard…. Fifteen of the C-5A Galaxy aircraft are at Lackland, where crews are getting in some flights now preparing for the retirement, while 11 are at Martinsburg, W.Va., and are flown [sic] by the Air National Guard there.”

April 25/13: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co., Marietta, Ga., was awarded a modification on contract for C-5M Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program (RERP). The value of this contract modification is $45.7 million, increasing the total contract value from $3.647 billion to $3.693 billion. The contract modification is for C-5M RERP Lots 3, 4, and 5 Rapid Repair and Response legacy repair efforts.

Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by Oct 29/14. $14.8 million in FY 2011 through 2013 Aircraft Procurement funds are committed immediately by the USAF Life Cycle Management Center/WLSK at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0182).

April 10/13: FY 2014 Budget. The President releases a proposed budget at last, the latest in modern memory. The Senate and House were already working on budgets in his absence, but the Pentagon’s submission is actually important to proceedings going forward. See ongoing DID coverage.

FY 2014 is the last major year of funding at $1.217 billion. That will drop to $334.7 million in FY 2015, when C-5M budgets will almost end completely. The last aircraft scheduled for delivery in Q1 FY 2017.

Jan 31/13: Support. A $16 million firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee and cost reimbursement contract for replenishment spares and repairs in support of the C-5’s AMP and RERP programs.

Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, and expected to be complete by Jan 31/14. The AFLCMC/WLKB at Robins AFB, GA manages this sole source acquisition, using FY 2013 dollars (FA8525-13-D-0001).

Jan 17/13: DOT&E report. The Pentagon releases the FY 2012 Annual Report from its Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E). The C-5M is included, and it still isn’t “operationally suitable”. In fact, the office had recommended last year that C-5M wasn’t ready to proceed to IOT&E testing. It went anyway, and:

“The aircraft’s ability to conduct the strategic airlift mission is hindered by deficiencies in the Automatic Flight Control System, by problems with the Embedded Diagnostics System (EDS) and built-in test (BIT) functionality, by inadequate support equipment, and by a lack of dedicated training systems. Deficiencies in several aspects of C-5M support functions, identified before the 2010 OT&E began, had a significant effect on suitability, specifically the maintainability of the aircraft.”

As one might imagine, the USAF has an “extensive” correction action plan. Diagnostic false alarm rates remain “very high,” which risks sabotaging the entire mission availability rationale for the entire C-5M program. There’s also a problem with training, since C-5M specific aircrew and maintainer training devices are just becoming available, forcing the USAF to use 1 simulator, plus on-aircraft training when possible. That doesn’t help readiness, either, and the USAF plans to buy more training devices in FY 2013.

OFP 3.5 basic flight & operating software helped with some of the airspeed control issues, but the plane still isn’t reliable in critical situations like final approach, or “gusty or turbulent” conditions. The Air Force plans to begin operational testing of OFP 3.5.2 in August 2013. At least the thrust reversers got their heating blankets to prevent ice-up, then got strengthened gears to make sure they stayed retracted. It works, but they need to be inspected more often.

Nov 30/12: RERP. A $9 million contract modification for the C-5 RERP. Work will be performed in Marietta, GA until July 31/15 (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0184).

Nov 29/12: C-5A-M Support. A $56.7 million cost-plus-fixed-fee, cost-reimbursement- no-fee, firm-fixed-price, time and materials contract for the C-5 sustaining engineering and technical support services. It covers all C-5s in service, including the C-5Ms, which are becoming a significant enough presence to matter. Work will be performed in Marietta, GA until Nov 30/12 (FA8525-13-D-0003).

Nov 21/12: A $38.5 million contract modification for procurement of 2 optional C-5 RERP plus-up spare engines, and the engine kits effort. Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by Dec 15/14 (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0161).

Note the purchase order number, this is similar to but distinct from the Nov 19/12 order.

Nov 19/12: RERP. A $38.3 million contract modification to buy 2 spare C-5 RERP RFI engines and RFI engine kits.

Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by May 30/14. The AFLCMC/WLSK at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH manages the contract (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0160).

Oct 31/12: RERP Lot 6. A $489.4 million contract modification for C-5 RERP Lot 6 kits. It’s added to the $160 million advance procurement (vid. Oct 21/11) for these 11 aircraft kits, and the installation and spares contracts are still pending beyond the current $659.4 million.

Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, and the contract will run until July 17/15 (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0140).

Oct 19/12: RERP Lot 5. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Marietta, GA receives a $221.8 million contract modification for the C-5 RERP Lot 5 Installation effort, involving 11 aircraft. That boosts the total cost of publicly-reported RERP-5 contracts to $1,000.5 million, or about $91 million per plane, including spares.

Work will be performed in Marietta, GA, and is expected to be complete by Oct 29/15 (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0166).

FY 2012

79th & last C-5 AMP delivered; All-C-5M fleet?; Cracks sapping fleet capacity; C-5M testing issues.

#5 departs
(click to view full)

July 20/12: #5 delivered. Lockheed Martin delivers the 5th production C-5M, and 8th overall, to Robins AFB, GA.

June 29/12: Un-cracked. Cracks at the C-5 cargo floor’s bulkhead end fittings had restricted its cargo carrying capabilities to a maximum of 80%, lowering its advantage over platforms like the C-17. In response, the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) developed a more stress and corrosion-resistant aluminum alloy, and a new die forging process, under the Durable C-5 Structural Improvements Program. Some C-5s are already being refitted at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, GA. US AFRL:

“The reshaped end fittings provide an optimised design that is less prone to cracks, and also offers multiple benefits for the revamped C-5 aircraft, which includes a 25% overall cost savings, an 80% reduction in fabrication time, and a 60% increase in service life of the fittings… methods employed earlier… insufficient, as the replacement fittings provided to the aircraft often cracked during the machining process, and also had a shorter lifespan than the original parts.”

April 30/12: Last C-5 AMP. Lockheed Martin announces that it has delivered the 79th and final C-5 AMP plane to the USAF. The planned program total had been cut from 111 to 80, but a C-5 crash dropped the number by one.

Last C-5 AMP delivered.

April 15/12: Link for savings. The USAF discusses its Mobility Mission Linking, or MML, program, which aims to make up for the inconvenient positioning of current C-5 wings in Texas and the USA’s east coast. When most missions are in Southwest Asia, it can mean up to 11 flight hours per mission with no cargo on-board. By linking multiple stops and eliminating the transit from Texas, MML expects to save 3.5 million gallons of fuel and $12 million between FY 2012- 2016. USAF.

April 12/12: All C-5Ms? A USAF story makes an interesting statement:

“The C-5 has long been known as the “Air Force’s largest airlifter.” In the future, Air Mobility Command officials say the goal is to have all C-5s become C-5Ms that would further strengthen the airframe’s worldwide airlift capabilities.”

There are 2 ways to do that. One way is to modernize the remaining 27 C-5 AMP aircraft at a later date, bringing the C-5M fleet to 59. the other way is to retire the lower-readiness, lower-capability, more expensive to operate C-5 AMPs early, leaving the USAF with just 52 C-5Ms as the entire fleet. In a coming era of budget cuts, which seems more likely?

April 7/12: Gannett’s Air Force times reports that Dover AFB will be the 1st base to convert to an all-C-5M fleet, after its last C-5B leaves for conversion in June 2012.

Feb 1/12: RERP #11 begins. Lockheed Martin inducts the 11th C-5 RERP aircraft to the Super Galaxy production line. Aircraft 86-0017 has accumulated more than 18,000 flight hours and more than 4,300 full-stop landings.

Jan 17/12: DOT&E test report. The Pentagon releases the FY 2011 Annual Report from its Office of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E). The C-5M RERP is listed as 1 of just 3 USAF programs that met their reliability targets, though a subsequent March 2012 DoD DT&E and SE Annual Report lists C-5M reliability at just 66%, instead of the 75% target that must be met in FY 2016. In the interim, the C-5M is proceeding fairly well, but still has some issues to work on.

The 2010 operational test identified problems with engine thrust reversers (restricted use in flight makes emergency descents and some tactical patterns very difficult), autopilot (too aggressive in cruise operations & turbulence, doesn’t always maintain commanded airspeed), and the Environmental Control System (autopilot problems killing bleed air supply and dropping cabin temperature under 50F/ 10C). Operational testing of the fixes was scheduled to begin in January 2012, in conjunction with operational testing of the plane’s new Block 3.5 software set.

While the C-5M was deemed operationally effective, it wasn’t given an “operationally suitable” rating. That will require testing to eliminate a very high false alarm rate and poor fault diagnosis in the plane’s built-in-test equipment, and the delivery of C-5M aircrew and maintainer training devices. The C-5M is also susceptible to unspecified “information assurance” (data security) problems, but the risk was deemed to be low.

Nov 18/11: RERP Lot 5. Lockheed Martin Corp. in Marietta, GA receives a $13.4 million firm-fixed-fee contract modification for C-5 RERP FRP-5 items required to meet the field needs of its 11 C-5M aircraft. That’s on top of the $602.4 million in Oct 21/11 FRP-5 orders. One firm was solicited and one firm submitted a proposal to the ASC/WLSK at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH (FA8625-07-C-6471).

Oct 21/11: RERP Lots 4-6. Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems in Marietta, GA receives 4 C-5 RERP program contract modifications, worth around $890 million total. All are firm-fixed-price, with economic price adjustments if the cost of key metals etc. rises. They are:

For C-5 RERP Full Rate Production, Lot 4 (FRP-4, FY 2011), $126.7 million to finish C-5M conversion and install the 28 enhanced engines on FRP-4’s 7 aircraft (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0102). They’re Production Lot 4 RERP kits, but they’re installed in the same fiscal year that produces FRP-5.

For C-5 RERP FRP-5 (FY 2012), $518.9 million to build the FRP-5 RERP kits for 11 C-5s (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0107), and $83.5 million to buy initial spares for those planes (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0104).

For C-5 RERP FRP-6 (FY 2013), $160 million for advance procurement of items whose production lead time is more than 12 months, so they’ll be ready when the FRP-6 build contract for another 11 C-5 RERP kits is issued next year (FA8625-07-C-6471, PO 0103).

FY 2011

Civilian C-5s?

C-5 in RERP
(click to view full)

Sept 29/11: RERP #9P in. Lockheed Martin inducts the 9th C-5 for full C-5M conversion. Tail 0045 was the last C-5B produced for the USAF. It has accumulated nearly 18,000 flight hours, and more than 4,200 full-stop landings.

Sept 25-26/11: Non-stop. A C-5M Super Galaxy from the 436th Airlift Wing at Dover AFB, DE, flies direct to Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, passing over the Atlantic and Europe en route. Traditionally, C-5s stop in Germany to refuel the plane and rest the crew, then finish the rest of the flight the next day. For this flight, a KC-135R aerial tanker based in Britain refueled the plane.

There’s a balance between proving out new routes, for use if needed, and using routes that don’t place a routine strain on resources. While the C-5M is capable of these missions, it remains to be seen whether they will become the norm. Another pathfinding example took place on June 5-6/11, as a C-5M crew flew an arctic route to Afghanistan over Canada, Russian, and Kazakhstan, with a KC-135R refueling over northern Canada. USAF AMC.

Aug 17/11: Training. Lockheed Martin announces a $5.8 million base contract from FlightSafety Services Corp. The scope of work includes managing hardware, software and courseware, maintaining simulator certifications to Air Force specifications, and overseeing the operations of the C-5 Aircrew Training System (ATS) program.

C-5 ATS helps train C-5 pilots, flight engineers, loadmasters and maintenance engine run personnel, and the contract will apply to all C-5 variants. Lockheed Martin will manage the Lackland AFB, TX C-5 Training Systems Support Center and formal training unit, and provide support for the other 6 training locations: Dover AFB, DE; Travis AFB, CA; Martinsburg ANG Base, WVA; Memphis ANG Base, TN; Stewart ANG Base, NY; and Westover Air Reserve Base, MA. The contract includes 4 more 1-year options, which could bring this contract up to 5 years and $30 million.

Aug 4/11: RERP #8P in. C-5B tail number 85-0003 becomes the 8th aircraft inducted into modernization production. That number is expected to rise to 10 by the end of 2011. Lockheed Martin.

July 18/11: RERP #3P flies. The 3rd production C-5M Super Galaxy takes its first flight at the Lockheed Martin facility in Marietta. Aircraft 0005 is assigned to Dover AFB, DE, and will be flown by both active duty and reserve airlift wings. Lockheed Martin.

April 27/11: Sub-contractors. Small business qualifier Thomas Instrument in Brookshire, TX receives a maximum $9 million firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/ indefinite-quantity contract for C-5 aircraft gearbox assemblies.

The contract runs to March 2015 and is managed by the US Defense Logistics Agency Aviation at Robins Air Force Base, GA (SPRWA1-11-D-0009).

April 12/11: RERP #2P delivered. Lockheed Martin completes delivery of the 2nd production C-5M at Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Marietta, GA. The plane will undergo internal paint restoration at Stewart Air National Guard Base, NY, before traveling to its home base at Dover. Lockheed Martin.

Feb 15/11: An $8.9 million contract modification for the C-5 RERP Lot 4 readiness spares package, part 2, for Dover and Travis Air Force Bases. At this time, all funds have been committed (FA8625-07-C-6471; P00076). This contract and modification number was also announced on March 7/11, where it did not say that all funds had been committed.

Feb 14/11: FY 2012 Budget. The Pentagon releases its FY 2012 budget request, and the USAF details its major programs [PDF]. FY 2011 was the last year for C-5 AMP funding, at $627.7 million requested. In FY 2012, the C-5M RERP program would receive $851.9 million to convert 7 aircraft (up from 5 in FY 2011; note that conversions are done using the previous year’s production) and buy 11 equipment sets for installation in FY 2013, as well as $9.4 million to get USAF maintenance depots ready for C-5Ms, and $500,000 for an AMP/RERP compliant Aircrew Training System (ATS) and a Maintenance Training Device (MTD). Other USAF budget documents [PDF] add that:

“In FY 2012, the F-35, RQ-4 Global Hawk, and Light Cargo Aircraft have large initial spare requirements in preparation for fielding. Other initial spares programs with large requirements include MQ-9 Reaper, C-5 Airlift Squadrons, Light Cargo Aircraft, CV-22, and EC-130H COMPASS CALL aircraft. In FY2012 some programs, including Global Hawk, MQ-9, and C-5 began budgeting for initial spares in Budget Activity 06 instead of Budget Activities 01 through 05.”

The C-5 RERP is the largest of them all, with $116.175 million in spares. That’s not entirely surprising, given the number of new engines involved. The Pentagon doesn’t include the C-5 in its handout of costs by weapon system, but the C-5 AMP/RERP seems to add up to around $978 million in FY 2012.

Jan 28/11: A $20.6 million contract modification to provide interim contract support for the C-5 RERP Program. At this time, the entire amount has been committed (FA8625-09-D-6485 0008).

Jan 19/11: RERP #5P in. Lockheed Martin announces that the 5th C-5 aircraft has been inducted into the RERP process, to be transformed into a C-5M by the end of 2011.

Nov 30/10: An $8 million contract for C-5 fleet sustaining engineering efforts required to resolve technical, supportability, or efficiency issues. Money will be committed as needed by the WR-ALC/GRSKA at Robins Air Force Base, GA (FA8525-11-D-0003).

Nov 18/10: Training. A $23 million contract modification for Phase 3 of the C-5M RERP’s AMS (aircraft maintenance systems) trainer and flight trainer program. At this time, $14.3 million has been obligated (F33657-02-C-2000; P00227).

Nov 15/10: RERP #1P delivered. The 1st production C-5M leaves Stewart Air National Guard base in Newburgh, NY and arrives at its duty station of Dover AFB, DE. The C-5M planes flying to date have all been pre-production planes from the system development stage. defpro | Mid-Hudson News | NY State.

Nov 8/10: A maximum $29.2 million contract for C-5M AMP program sustainment support. Delivery orders will be issued as needs arise by the Warner-Robins Air Logistics Center at Robins Air Force Base, GA (FA8525-11-D-0001).

Oct 22/10: RERP Lot 4 k+s. A pair of C-5M RERP awards from the USAF, for current production, worth $387.9 million. See also Jan 11/10 entry.

A $326.9 million contract modification for C-5M RERP full-rate production Lot 4 materials and fabrication of material required to modify the 7 seven Lot 4 aircraft. At this time, all funds have been committed (FA8625-07-C-6471; P00041).

A $61 million contract modification for spare parts to cover the 7 C-5M aircraft from FRP Lot 4 production. At this time, all funds have been committed (FA8625-07-C-6471; P00058).

Oct 19/10: RERP Lot 3i/5a. A pair of C-5M RERP awards from the USAF, worth $278.6 million.

The first is a a $115.7 million contract modification for C-5M RERP low rate initial production Lot 3 installations. At this time, the entire amount has been committed (FA8625-07-C-6471).

The second is a $162.9 million contract which covers C-5M RERP full-rate production Lot 5 advance procurement of critical materials and equipment, such as aircraft engines. At this time, the entire amount has been committed (FA8625-07-C-6471).

Oct 4/10: Civil C-5s? Aviation Week reports that both Lockheed Martin and elements in the USAF are re-thinking the decision to terminate RERP for the C-5A fleet, if money allows – and even looking at placing some C-5s in the civilian market:

“Lockheed Martin says it needs long-lead funding in Fiscal 2014 to avoid a gap in the modification line after the last C-5B is upgraded, and to keep prices agreed upon with major suppliers… [including] General Electric for the new CF6-80C engines. “As the aircraft proves itself, we are talking to the Air Force about the benefits of a single fleet,” says Lorraine Martin, Lockheed Martin vice president for C-5 programs… The Air Force also operates 59 C-5As, but plans to retire 22 in 2011-12 because of excess strategic airlift capacity. Congress directed the Air Force to study the potential for placing the retired aircraft with the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) or international coalition partners. A report will be submitted soon… A Defense Acquisition Board decision on full-rate production [of C-5M RERP planes] is set for Oct. 7.”

Barring some sort of government financing agreement that would tip the scales, C-5As and their $82+ million RERP upgrade costs would have to compete against new-build civilian BC-17s at about $225 million, in order to become a preferred option for would-be civilian carriers who wanted to compete with Antonov’s partners in the outsize cargo market.

Sept 20/10: Infrastructure. Soltek Pacific Construction Co. in San Diego, CA wins a $6.4 million firm-fixed-price task order under a multiple award construction contract (N62473-08-D-8615, #0014) to build a C-5 Squadron Aircraft Operations and Maintenance Facility at Travis Air Force Base, CA. The task order also contains one planned modification which if issued, would increase the cumulative task order value to $7.5 million.

Travis AFB is home to the 60th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, which services and supports AMC C-5s. Work will be performed in Fairfield, CA, and is expected to be complete by October 2011. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Southwest in San Diego, CA received 4 proposals for this task order.

FY 2010

C-5 AMP cut from 112 – 92; C-5M RERP operational; RERP gets low-rate production approval

DSRV-1 loading
(click to view full)

Sept 19/10: RERP #1P flies. The first production C-5M takes off from Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, GA facility. It is slated for formal delivery on Sept 30/10, and will arrive at its new home Dover AFB, DE in November 2010.

Note that this is not the 1st C-5M, as there were 3 initial planes built in the system development phase, and they are already operational.

July 29/10: Training. CAE USA, Inc. in Tampa, FL receives $10.6 million contract to purchase 7 C-5 AMP training devices and 5 C-5M RERP program training devices for the C-5 aircrew training system. The simulators will be used by USAF Air Material Command, US Air National Guard, and USAF Reserve Command. CAE will begin by upgrading a C-5 WST(Weapon System Trainer) currently located at Stewart Air National Guard Base (ANGB) to the new C-5 AMP configuration. The other C-5 WST, located at Dover AFB, DE and already upgraded by CAE to the AMP configuration several years ago, will now be upgraded to the RERP configuration using new engine performance simulation software and a new aerodynamics model.

A month later, a CAE release says that the contract includes options to upgrade additional C-5 and C-5 cockpit procedures trainers, which could bring total value to more than $50 million. At this time, $10.6 million has been committed by the GHMKA at Hill Air Force Base, UT (F8223-10-R-3000/2).

June 8/10: RERP #3P in. Lockheed Martin inducts its 3rd C-5 Galaxy strategic airlifter into the RERP production line at Marietta, GA. The company has already delivered 3 initial C-5M aircraft, which Lockheed Martin says passed testing with “the highest rating possible.” The 1st production C-5M is scheduled for delivery to Dover AFB, DE later in 2010, and this 3rd production C-5M is expected to be ready in about a year (mid-2011).

Current Air Force plans call for Lockheed Martin to deliver 52 total C-5Ms (modification of 49 C-5Bs, 1 C-5Cs, and 1 C-5A) by 2016. Lockheed Martin.

June 7/10: A $5.7 million contract for C-5M RERP low rate initial production, and related expenses. At this time, the entire amount has been committed by the 716th AESG at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH (FA8625-07-C-6471).

April 2/10: Training. FlightSafety Services Corporation of Centennial, CO received a $34.8 million contract for C-5 aircrew training system operation, maintenance, and support. At this time the entire amount has been obligated by the 508th ACSS/PK at Hill Air Force Base, UT (FA8223-10-C-0007).

April 1/10: SAR – C-5 AMP cut. The Pentagon releases its April 2010 Selected Acquisitions Report, covering major program changes up to December 2009. The first-stage C-5 AMP program is mentioned, confirming a cut from 112 aircraft to 92 aircraft:

“Program costs decreased $200.2 million (-14.3%) from $1,405.3 million to $1,205.1 million, due primarily to a quantity decrease of 20 aircraft from 112 to 92 aircraft (-$112.9 million), and decreases in other support costs and initial spares associated with the quantity decrease (-$73.3 million). There was also a decrease for prior year actuals for kit buys and installations (-$12.6 million).”

SAR change

The force mix would then become 20 unmodified C-5As, 42 C-5A+ AMP aircraft, and 59 C-5M AMP/RERP aircraft. Future disposition of the unmodified C-5As is not clear, but they could easily slip into the neverland of sitting in hangars at all times, eating maintenance dollars the whole time but not flying, while Congress refuses to allow the USAF to retire them. They would not be alone in this status.

March 30/10: GAO ASP. The US GAO audit office delivers its 8th annual “Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs report. It covers only the full C-5M RERP program, which it describes as mature, stable, and in production, albeit at 66% higher per-unit costs than the original baseline. The remaining program is not completely free of risk, however:

“While the Air Force is expected to spend $3.4 billion less under the restructured program, ultimately, less than one-half of the aircraft will be modernized at a much higher unit cost. Further changes to the program are possible based on whether the program exercises future contract options and the mobility capability study. Program officials have indicated that if options for lots [4] through [7] of the C-5 RERP production contract are not exercised by the dates required in the contract, the remaining lot four through seven negotiated not to exceed prices become invalid for all future options. Consequently, officials indicated that future work may need to be renegotiated and if so, it would lead to a substantial increase in the negotiated prices. In addition, DOD is currently studying its future mobility capabilities requirements with the results expected in December 2009. The study may or may not affect the number of C-5s that require the RERP modification.”

March 16/10: Infrastructure. Lockheed Martin Corp. in Marietta, GA receives a $6.2 million contract. Lockheed Representatives clarify that it will fund the data, support equipment, and spares needed to stand up 5 different Air Logistics Center C-5 AMP maintenance depots, for components manufactured and repaired by GE aviation.

At this time, the entire amount has been obligated. 716 AESG/PK, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33657-98-C-0006, P00231).

Feb 19/10: An $86.2 million contract which will provide for the C-5M RERP. At this time, $23.2 million has been committed by the 716th AESG/SYK at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, OH (FA8625-09-D-6485).

Feb 9/10: C-5M operational. USAF Air Mobility Command announces that the C-5M Super Galaxy has completed 4 months and 1,300 hours of operational test and evaluation, releasing the aircraft for use in worldwide operations.

OT&E began on Oct 1/09, and required the cooperation of USAF Air Mobility command, Air Materiel Command, and the Air Reserve Command. Aircrews from the 436th and 512th Airlift Wings flew a mission that included cold weather operation testing at Eielson AFB, Alaska. They also flew nonstop flights from Dover AFB, DE, USA to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, without refueling, bypassing traditional C-5B fuel stops at Rota Naval Air Station, Spain. USAF AMC announcement | Lockheed Martin release.

The USAF estimates that these direct flights saved more than 365 hours vs. the same mission with a C-5B (N.B. 289 of those are on the ground), and approximately 186,000 gallons of fuel.

Jan 11/10: RERP LRIP-1. Lockheed Martin announces $343.3 million in ongoing funding through a recently issued Acquisition Decision Memorandum (ADM), authorizing Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) associated with the C-5 RERP program. That funding supports LRIP RERP production support for 15 aircraft, including installation on 3 aircraft, material and fabrication for 5 aircraft, and long-lead funding for 7 aircraft.

Production of the C-5M Super Galaxy began on Aug 18/09, and that first aircraft is slated for delivery to the USAF in September 2010. Three test C-5Ms have already been delivered to the USAF, and current USAF plans call for 52 fully-modernized C-5Ms by 2016.

Jan 5/10: Training. A $6.3 million contract to fund C-5 RERP engine maintenance training devices, integration efforts, and a contract change proposal. At this time, $3.9 million has been committed (33657-02-C-2000, P00207).

Nov 6/09: A $143.2 million contract that will provide C-5 AMP sustainment support. The 330 SW at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia manages the contract (FA8525-06-D-0001, P00013).

FY 2009

1st RERP begins; C-5A+ #50 delivered; GAO cites C-5 AMP shortfalls, risks.

C-5M takeoff
(click to view full)

Aug 18/09: RERP Production begins. Lockheed Martin has produced 3 C-5M test aircraft, but today the 1st C-5 Galaxy (USAF serial number 83-1285) flies into Marietta, GA from Dover AB, DE, for induction into the C-5M RERP production line. This aircraft was also the first C-5B to come off the original production line in 1985. RERP modernization is expected to take 13 months, eventually declining to 8 months for subsequent aircraft as production ramps up.

The 3 C-5Ms produced for the test program are already being put to work. Lockheed Martin cites a recent mission from Dover AFB, DE that flew non-stop and unrefueled from Dover to Incirlik, Turkey, while carrying 90,000 pounds of cargo on 36 standard military cargo pallets. The crew was able to complete the round trip in 2 days versus the normal 3, and saved 30,000 pounds of fuel by eliminating an en-route stop. Lockheed Martin release.

May 28/09: +6 AMP. A $7.3 million modification will install AMP kits and the consolidated load panel in 6 aircraft, under firm-fixed-price terms. Time-and-material charges will apply to rapid response and repair for potential aircraft issues that are discovered during kit installation. At this time, the entire amount has been committed (F33657-98-C-0006, P00223).

April 29/09: C-5A+ #50. Lockheed Martin announces the 50th C-5 AMP delivery, to Air Force Reserve Command’s 433rd Airlift Wing at Lackland AFB, TX, completing AMP modifications to the C-5B fleet.

The AMP installations are taking place at Dover AFB, DE and at Travis AFB, CA, and the fleet-wide AMP modifications are scheduled to be complete in the second quarter of 2014. Modification of the C-5A fleet continues at Travis AFB and at Dover AFB, DE. Current plans call for the entire 111-aircraft C-5 fleet to receive the AMP modifications. A majority of those aircraft will be C-5As, but they are not receiving the additional C-5M RERP modification, which is dependent on the AMP work being done first.

April 22/09: Loading practice. The US Air Force discusses cooperative efforts with the Marine Corps to figure out exactly how to load the newest UH-1Y Hueys and AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters into the C-5:

“…the Marines have been working with Air Force representatives for three months to find the best method of transporting their helicopters to the fight. According to John Buchanan, 60th APS cargo operations manager, they tried to use a C-17 Globemaster III first but found they had to strip too many parts off the helicopter. So the next logical step was to test the C-5 capability.”

The UH-1Y/AH-1Z’s 4-bladed rotor doesn’t fully fold, which makes even the C-5 has been a challenge. At one point in the loading process, clearance for the UH-1Y helicopter is down to 3 inches.

March 31/09: A $13.3 million modification to the indefinite-delivery/ indefinite-quantity RERP contract, to cover an undisclosed contract change. The entire amount has been committed (F33657-02-C-2000, #P00175).

March 30/09: GAO ASP. The US government’s GAO audit office issues GAO-09-326SP: “Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs.” The C-5 AMP and RERP sections describe the technologies as mature, but note that:

“The AMP was fielded with waivers to 14 specification requirements [that affect operational requirements]. The C-5 RERP will address 4… Other deficiencies and waivers may be addressed in a new modernization program slated for fiscal year 2010. The AMP is addressing some diminishing manufacturing source problems with the navigation system and backup integrated processor.

According to the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the AMP is partially mission capable, however, not operationally suitable. About 250 deficiencies, including software issues related to autopilot disconnects, were found during testing… A total of 37 deficiencies will be corrected in C-5 RERP and an additional 6 deficiencies will be fixed if the RERP Operational Flight Plan 3.4 software build is fielded. In addition, 73 more deficiency reports have been corrected or are being corrected as part of a sustainment contract software build that will be released in March 2009…

[RERP] Operational testing is expected to begin in August 2009. However, the Air Force does not plan to provide a low-rate initial production aircraft for operational testing… because one will not be available until September 2010… [There is a risk of] design changes, revised production processes, and rework…”

March 2/09: LAST SDD C-5M. Lockheed Martin delivers the 3rd fully modernized C-5M aircraft to the U.S. Air Force.

Feb 27/09: An $8.4 million contract modification for “the C-5 Reliability Enhancement and Re-engineering Program estimate at completion growth and cost overrun.” At this time $6.4 million has been obligated (F33657-02-C-2000, P00172).

Feb 9/09: SDD C-5M #2. Lockheed Martin delivers the 2nd of 3 fully modernized developmental test C-5M AMP-RERP aircraft to the U.S. Air Force. Following a brief ceremony at the company’s Marietta, GA facility, the C-5M flew to Dover AFB, DE.

To date, the company’s release says that it has also completed 40 out of 111 C-5A AMP aircraft.

Feb 6/09: RERP Lot 3. A $299.8 million fixed-price economic price adjustment contract, exercising options for Lot 3 of the C-5M RERP program. At this time $25.3 million has been committed. (FA8625-07-C-6471, #P00011). See also: Lockheed Martin release.

Feb 6/09: A maximum $86.2 million indefinite-delivery /indefinite-quantity contract for interim contractor support activities around the C-5 RERP program. This contract supports the Super Galaxy during familiarization and Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E). At this time $25.3 million has been committed (FA8625-09-C-6485).

Dec 9/08: 1st SDD C-5M. Lockheed Martin delivers the first fully modernized C-5M to the U.S. Air Force at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Robins AFB, GA.

The aircraft is the first of 3 developmental test C-5Ms to be delivered, with the other 2 to be delivered to Dover AFB, Delaware, in February 2009. All three aircraft successfully completed developmental testing in August 2008. Current Air Force plans call for Lockheed Martin to deliver 52 modernized C-5Ms. Lockheed Martin.

1st C-5M

Nov 3/08: A firm fixed price contract modification for $6.1 million, exercising a USAF option for installation of 5 C-5 Avionics Modernization Program (AMP) Kits in its Aircraft. At this time all funds have been obligated (F33657-98-C-0006, Modification P00215).

FY 2008

RERP program cut from 112 to 49.

C-5 & CH-53E Heli
(click to view full)

Sept 24/08: Infrastructure. Kinsley Construction Company Inc in York, PA won a $26.8 million firm-fixed-price contract for a follow-on project, involving the 167th Airlift Wing’s Base conversion from C-130 to C-5 Aircraft. Work will be performed in Martinsburg, WVA, with an estimated completion date of April 2010. Proposals solicited were two-phase design build source selections, and 3 proposals were received by the National Guard Bureau in Buckhannon, WVA (W912L8-08-C-0016).

Sept 17/08: 1st C-5A into AMP. Lockheed Martin announces the induction of the first U.S. Air Force C-5A into the AMP program, adding that:

“There are 111 C-5s to be modified through AMP with 42 production airplanes completed to date. The AMP installations are taking place at Dover AFB and Travis AFB and are scheduled to be completed in second quarter 2014. The C-5 AMP fleet has flown more than 9,400 sorties and 40,000 operational flight hours.”

Some C-5Bs have already begun AMP work. The C-5A fleet was re-winged in the 1980s, extending its structural service life. Mission reliability rates, on the other hand, have remained low. AMP is expected to make only a partial dent in the C-5A’s readiness rates, but the new technologies will make a large difference to C-5A+ fleet’s ability to fly in civil airspace when they are operational.

Aug 18/08: C-5M testing done. Lockheed Martin announces that its team has successfully completed developmental testing of all 3 C-5M RERP test aircraft. Preparations now get underway to deliver the 3 test aircraft to the US Air Force in support of Operational Test and Evaluation scheduled to begin in the 3rd quarter of 2009.

< strong>Aug 18/08: SAR. The US military releases its latest round of Selected Acquisition Reports. The C-5 RERP is included, because its costs have reportedly decreased again. The C-5As will now be abandoned completely, and only the C-5B/C aircraft will be upgraded all the way to C-5Ms:

“The SAR was submitted to rebaseline from a Development to a Production estimate following approval of Low Rate Initial Production (Milestone C) and to reflect the Nunn-McCurdy certified restructured program. Since the last report, costs decreased -$3,436.8 million (-30.9 percent) from $11,130.9 to $7,694.1 million due primarily to a reduction in quantity of 59 aircraft from 108 to 49 (-$3.271.0 million) and associated schedule and estimating allocations (-$163.9 million)

• . In addition, there were reductions in support associated with the quantity decrease (-$401.0 million).”

The move would also have a significant effect on C-17 production, as it will change the number of new airlifters required by the US military.

SAR change

July 7/08: Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems in Marietta, GA received a maximum $17.4 million, unfinalized contract modification. It covers work under CCP 553 for Readiness Spares Package for the C-5M Reliability Enhancements and Re-engining Program (RERP). At this time $8.7 million has been committed (FA8625-07-C-6471, P00005).

June 19/08: Infrastructure. Kern Steel Fabrication, Inc of Bakersfield, CA received a firm fixed price contract for $13.6 million for the design and production of an Isochronal (ISO) Maintenance Stand for the C-5 aircraft. The award amount in item #3 above involves the design and one first production unit (albeit not exercised yet, Option I involves quantities of 1 to 3 maintenance stands). At this time $13.6 million has been obligated (FA8533-08-C-0004).

April 18/08: RERP Lot 1-2. A firm-fixed-price contract for $127.2 million. This contract modification is an Undefinitized Contract Action (UCA) for Lot 1 material/fabrication and initial spares, and Lot 2 advance procurement items, for the C-5M Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program (RERP). At this time the full amount has been obligated (FA8625-07-C-6471, P00003).

April 7/08: SAR – fewer RERP planes. The C-5 RERP program’s changes lead to a detailed cost change breakdown in the Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition Reports release:

“Program costs decreased $6,375.3 million (-36.4 percent) from $17,506.2 million to $11,130.9 million, due primarily to net reductions in the Air Force cost estimate for equipment (-$3,332.0 million), installation (-$1,602.2 million), engineering change order estimates (-$505.5 million), and Government Furnished Equipment (-$210.2 million). Additionally, program costs decreased due to the application of revised escalation indices (-$41.0 million), a decrease in advance procurement costs (-$192.1 million), and decreases in initial spares (-$414.2 million) and other support and training costs (-$417.6 million).”

Feb 15/08: Only 49 C-5Ms. In a confusingly-written release, the USAF states that:

“Air Force officials announced today that officials in the office of the under secretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics have certified the C-5 Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program for 49 additional aircraft.”

Here’s what that actually means. The 62 C-5As that are still flying will all go through the AMP program, and will receive new avionics by 2014. These C-5A+ Galaxys will be flown by the US Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve. Only the 47 flying C-5B transports and 2 C-5Cs used by NASA will receive the full AMP/RERP upgrade, and become C-5Ms by 2014. According to Defense News, US Undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics John Young believes that program costs will drop to $7.7 billion, down from the September 2007 estimate of $17.5 billion. See also: Sen. Carper release [D-DE].

SAR change

February 2008: The US Air Force Association’s Washington Watch feature notes developments on the C-5/ C-17 fronts:

“Congress ordered an “objectivity/sufficiency” review of the RERP by the Institute for Defense Analyses, due March 1. A RAND review is also being done at the Air Force’s request…”

“Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, head of US Transportation Command, said he “cannot support” terminating C-17 production at this time, given the problems facing the C-5 upgrade program. He declared his belief that the minimum fleet now is 205 C-17s… at a briefing on Capitol Hill.”

At present, total American C-17 orders sit at just over 190 aircraft.

Nov 19/07: SAR – RERP critical cost breach.The Pentagon releases their latest Selected Acquisition Report, and offers their official view re: program costs.

“C-5 RERP (Reliability Enhancement and Reengining Program) – The SAR was submitted to report a unit cost increase of more than 25% to the current baseline estimate and more than 50% to the original baseline, which resulted in a “critical” Nunn-McCurdy breach. Program costs increased $6,168.3 million (+54.4%) from $11,337.9 million to $17,506.2 million, due primarily to a revised program estimate based on an analysis of prime contractor production proposal data, System Development and Demonstration (SDD) actuals, and commercial pricing data.”

A critical cost estimate breach forces re-justification of the entire program under the USA’s Nunn-McCurdy legislation, which covers weapons acquisition.

SAR change

Oct 17/07: Flight International reports that the USAF has asked Airbus for information about the A380F freighter version of its super-jumbo jet, and speculates that it may be connected with the C-5AMP/RERP’s rising costs. DID looks at the A380F, whose 150t (33,000 pound) capacity surpasses even the C-5. There may be a connection, but it may or may not be the connection Flight International thinks.

Are you pondering what we’re pondering? See: “USAF Talking to Airbus About A380 Air Force 1, C-5 Replacement?” for the full story and analysis.

FY 2007

RERP blows cost breach; Infrastructure build-out.

C-5 Galaxy
(click to view full)

Sept 27/07: US Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne declares Lockheed Martin’s C-5 Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining (RERP) program in violation of Nunn-McCurdy cost inflation triggers, which require the Pentagon to notify Congress when cost growth on a major acquisition program reaches 15%. If increases reach 25%, the Defense Department must re-justify the program. Lockheed and its supporters are contesting the Air Force’s cost estimates, arguing that the RERP’s costs will grow at rates below the Nunn-McCurdy threshold notification requirement. The notification comes amidst Congressional fights over spending to modernize Lockheed C-5s versus new Boeing C-17s. See the “Additional Readings” section below, and also Aviation Week:

“According to Congressional Research Service defense analyst Christopher Bolkcom, in “then-year” dollars, the Air Force believes the total RERP program will cost $16.1 billion, versus Lockheed’s projection of $11.7 billion and the most recent Selected Acquisition Report’s estimate of $11.3 billion. Another Capitol Hill source has said Air Force forecasts reach $17.8 billion.”

Sept 27/07: RERP Re-baselined. A contract modification for $133.3 million for C-5 Reliability Enhancement and Re-engineering Program (RERP) System Development Re-baseline Engineering Change Proposal. This contract is a modification to an existing contract. At this time, $16.3 million has been obligated (F33657-02-C-2000, P00139).

April 30/07: RERP Lot 1a. A $23 million fixed-price-incentive-firm contract for advance procurement of long lead/ advance buy items for Lot 1 of the Low Rate Initial Production for the C-5M Reliability Enhancements and Re-engining program (RERP). At this time, total funds have been obligated. Solicitations and negotiations were complete April 2007 (FA8625-07-C-6471).

March 26/07: Infrastructure. A DID reader writes:

“I enjoy your articles covering various military spending. I have been checking your aircraft transport listings and haven’t seen much about the C5A. My reason for asking here in Martinsburg, WVA the Air Guard (167th) is spending between 300 million and 400 million to completely rebuild the base that was used for C130H to C5A. The work they’re doing on the other side of the field is absolutely amazing, huge new hangars, new runways and taxiways, construction crews working day and night. I find the amount of money being spent to be simply unbelievable with all of the spare capacity at BRAC’ed air bases. I guess Sen Byrd is spending house ways and means money instead of DoD to get it through, but I was wondering what are you folks hearing? You really got to see it to believe it, and you hear next to nothing in the media. Can your organization tell me anything about the Air Forces plan for the C5A and whats up at the 167th — Big money being spent.”

April 9/07: SAR – more C-5 AMPs. The Pentagon releases its Selected Acquisition Reports for the December 2006 reporting period, and the C-5 AMP program is listed due to cost increases: C-5 AMP (Avionics Modernization Program) costs increased $551.2 million (+64.1%), from $859.3 million to $1,410.5 million. The primary reason is a quantity increase from 59 to 110 kits (+51 kits, +$291.4 million), and associated increases in initial spares, peculiar support equipment, and other weapon system costs (+229.1 million).

SAR change

March 22/07: AMP Lot 5k. A $23.4 million firm-fixed-price contract modification for C-5 AMP production Lot V kits and spares. At this time, total funds have been obligated and work will be complete May 2009 (F33657-98-C-0006/P00167).

Dec 22/06: a $16.7 million cost-plus-award fee contract modification. This is a modification to the C-5 Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program (RERP). This undefinitized contract action will correct 4 of the 14 Avionics Modernization Program (AMP) waivers, incorporate functionally from the AMP Block Cycle Change (BCC) Cycle Change 2006 software build, and address specific high priority issues. At this time, $8 million have been obligated, and work will be complete June 2007 (F33657-02-C-2000/P00119).

March 7/07: C-5 justification. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee Air & Land Forces Subcommittee, Congressional Research Service defense specialist Christopher Bolkcom says [PDF]:

“Current estimates of the per-aircraft cost of AMP and RERP are expected to be approximately one-third that of a new C-17, and the C-5 will carry twice the C-17’s payload. The C-5 also has superior load/off load capabilities. The upgraded aircraft (called the C-5M), is also expected to have greatly improved mission capable rates. It may be noteworthy that during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, DoD leased Russian An-124 aircraft to carry outsize and oversize cargo because not enough C-5 aircraft were available. The An-124 Condor is a strategic lift aircraft larger than, but comparable to the C-5. As Figure 1 below illustrates, the Air Force has spent $170 million since FY2002 for An- 124 missions. It also appears that the number of An-124 missions is accelerating. FY07 figures already are on par with FY05 figures, and the fiscal year is not yet half over. While the C-5 may not be as modern as the C-17, or able to operate from as many runways, the fact that DOD has to outsource missions to Russian aircraft indicates that the C-5 still offers important capabilities that other U.S. aircraft may not be able to satisfy.”

DID will simply note the assumption that AN-124s were leased due to a shortage of C-5s, rather than a shortage of C-5s and C-17s. The testimony also includes program and operating cost data for both the C-5 and C-17 aircraft.

Dec 8/06: Process improvement. USAF Air Mobility Command officials announced Dover Air Force Base, DE as one of 3 central sites selected for future C-5 Galaxy isochronal inspections of the entire aircraft. Two additional C-5 ISO inspection sites, one at an Air National Guard base and another at an Air Force Reserve base, will be announced at a later date. During these ISO inspections, aircraft maintainers look for and repair problems in every system.

The US Air Force is reducing C-5 ISO inspection sites from 8 to 3 in order to centrally schedule the inspection from a fleet-wide perspective. Meanwhile, process improvements will aim to reduce “flow days” required to complete a C-5 ISO to a consistent number across the fleet, and reduce waiting time. If the system works, it would add an estimated average of 2.5 availability-days to every C-5 in the fleet, which equates to about 300 more sorties per year, or 10,000 pallets. USAF release.

Nov 30/06: Training. Flight Safety Services Corp. in Centennial, CO received an $18.1 million firm-fixed-price contract modification for C-5 Aircrew Training Systems Contract-Fund option 8. It covers students throughout and fixed operations, maintenance and support from Oct 1/06 through Sept 30/07. This work will be complete by September 2007. The Headquarters Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base, UT issued the contract (F42630-99-C-0170/P00163).

Nov 17/06: C-5M #2 flies. The 2nd of 3 C-5M AMP/RERP aircraft that will comprise the new test set takes flight for the first time from Dobbins Air Reserve Base, GA. The first test aircraft first flew June 19/06 and has logged more than 51 flight hours to this point. C-5s that have completed only the AMP program, however, have logged more than 4,000 flight hours, many of which were flown in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The first C-5M completed dynamic taxi testing at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, CA in August 2006. This latest aircraft will be used mostly for utilities and subsystem tests, airfield performance, and diagnostics testing. Both of these aircraft were originally C-5B models. A 3rd test aircraft to be brought up to C-5M standards, a C-5A, is currently in the final stages of modernization and is scheduled to fly later in 2006.
Nov 3/06: Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center commander Maj. Gen. Robin E. Scott signs the C-5 AMP Qualification Operational Test & Evaluation (QOT&E) report, which provided a progress update on the C-5M program for the low rate initial production decision. The test team recognized that the C-5 AMP “enhances existing strategic airlift,” but still has limitations. Source.

FY 2006

1st C-5M (RERP) done, flies.

C-5M test flight
(click to view full)

USAF story.

Aug 8/06: A $6.3 million cost-plus-award fee contract modification. This action provides for an expansion of supply support and development for C-5 RERP. At this time $411,000 has been obligated. This work will be completed by August 2008(F33657-02-C-2000/P00092).

July 26/06: C-5M OpEval. The C-5 RERP re-engining program’s Operational Assessment begins. Source.

July 11/06: The C-5 AMP AFOTEC QOT&E test team completes the last test event. Source.

June 28/06: Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (AFOTEC) commander Maj. Gen. Robin E. Scott signs the C-5 RERP operational assessment test plan. Source.

June 19/06: 1st C-5M flight. The first flight of the C-5M, the new designation given to the C-5 aircraft upgraded under RERP, occurs. Source.

C-5M 1st flights.

May 26/06: Sub-contractors. Eagle Tool and Machine Co., Inc. in Springfield, OH received a $7.5 million fixed price with economic price adjustment contract for 104 (each) landing gear cylinder and piston assemblies applicable to the C-5 aircraft. At this time, total funds have been obligated. Solicitations began March 2006 and negotiations were complete May 2006 (FA8203-06-C-0165).

May 16/06: 1st re-engining. The first C-5 RERP modification to re-engine the planes is complete. Source.

April 21/06: AMP’s Eval resumed. Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (AFOTEC) leadership resumes the C-5 AMP’s Qualification Operational Test & Evaluation (QOT&E). Source”.

March 28/06: Flight Safety Services Corp. in Centennial, CO received a $7 million firm-fixed-price contract modification for C-5 Aircrew Training Systems Contract-Fund Option, CLIN installation, integration and testing of the AMP Production Kits. At this time, total funds have been obligated. The scheduled completion date is March 2008. The Headquarters Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base, UT issued the contract (F42630-99-C-0170/P00144).

March 21/06: Infrastructure. Burns & McDonnell in Kansas City, MO received a $20.8 million firm-fixed-price contract for construction of a C-5 corrosion control hangar. Work will be performed in Martinsburg, WVA and is expected to be complete by Oct. 31, 2007. Bids were solicited via the World Wide Web on Oct. 24, 2005, and 9 bids were received by the U.S. Property and Fiscal Office for West Virginia, Buckhannon, WVA (W912L8-06-C-0002).

Feb 2/06: Training. Flight Safety Services Corp. in Centennial, CO received a $5 million firm fixed price contract modification for C-5 Aircrew Training Systems Contract-Fund Option, CLINs for Dover Modernization Program (AMP) Kits. At this time, total funds have been obligated, and work will be complete by November 2006. The Headquarters Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base, UT issued the contract (F42630-99-C-0170/P00142)

Jan 19/06: AMP Lot 4. A $33.3 million firm fixed price contract modification for C-5 AMP Production Lot IV Kits, Support, Spares and Maintenance Training Device Spares. This work will be complete in June 2008, and total funds have been obligated. Negotiations were complete in December 2005 (F33657-98-C-0006/P00161).

Nov 10/05: A $98 million firm-fixed-price, time-and-material and cost reimbursable contract. It will provide supply support, engineering and technical support, and software maintenance services to C-5 Galaxys modified under the Avionics Modernization Program (AMP), plus replenishment spares and non-warranty repair.

Solicitations began July 2005, and 1 proposal was received. Negotiations were complete November 2005, and work will be complete by November 2010. The Headquarters Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in Robins Air Force Base, GA issued the contract (FA8525-06-D-0001).

Oct 12/05: AMP Eval Paused. Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (AFOTEC) leadership pauses the C-5 AMP’s QUOT&E evaluation. Source.

FY 2005

1st C-5 AMP delivered; C-5 AMP OpEval; C-5 RERP begins.

C-5, Truckin’
(click to view full)

Sept 13/05: Lockheed Martin reaches a critical milestone as technicians install the first engine pylon on a Reliability Enhancement and Re-engining Program (RERP) test aircraft. Installation of the new pylons, designed and built by Goodrich Aerospace, prepares the aircraft for the new General Electric CF6-80C2 engines which will be installed later in 2005.

The new General Electric CF6-80C2 engines are very widely used on passenger jets, and currently power the President’s Boeing 747, Air Force One. The engine delivers more than 50,000 pounds of thrust per engine, allowing the C-5Ms to carry more than 270,000 pounds and take off and land in distances as short as 5,000 feet. The new C-5 engines deliver 22% more thrust, achieve 30% shorter takeoff distances, enable 58% faster climb, and have a 99.98% departure reliability rate in commercial service, providing a ten-fold improvement in reliability and maintainability over the current TF39 engines. Lockheed Martin release.

Sept 7/05: AMP eval begins. AFOTEC testers began the C-5 AMP’s Qualification Operational Test & Evaluation (QOT&E). Source.

Jan 24/05: AMP Lot 3. A $59.3 million firm-fixed-price contract modification to provide for C-5 AMP Production Lot III Kits, Installation Option, Spares and Support. Total funds have been obligated. This work will be complete by December 2007. Negotiations were completed December 2004 (F33657-98-C-0006, P00126).

October 2004: 1st C-5 AMP delivered. The first upgraded C-5 AMP aircraft with modern avionics, wiring, etc. is delivered to the Air Force. Source.

1st C-5A+

October 2004: C-5 RERP begins. The first C-5 RERP modification to re-engine the planes begins. Source.

May 5/04: Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center commander Maj. Gen. Felix Dupre signs the C-5 AMP qualification operational test and evaluation plan. Source.

Dec 29/03: A $42.8 million firm-fixed-price contract modification, exercising an option for 18 C-5 AMP kits. Total funds have been obligated, and work will be complete by March 2005. Solicitation began August 2002, and negotiations were completed March 2003 (F33657-98-C-0006, P00110).

FY 2003 and Earlier

Avionics bought; AMP work begins.

C-5, Antarctica
(click to view full)

June 6/03: A $16.7 million contract modification for a C-5 AMP engineering change proposal – the addition of the Integrated Standby Instrument System. At this time, $6.3 million of the funds has been obligated, and work will be complete by August 2004 (F33657-98-C-0006, P00093).

April 3/03: A $20.3 million firm-fixed-price/cost-plus-award-fee contract modification to provide for support of the C-5 AMP. At this time, all funds have been obligated. Solicitation began in August 2002; negotiations were completed in March 2003, and work will be complete by July 2004 (F33657-98-C-0006, P00080).

June 12/02: AMP begins. The first aircraft to be modified under C-5 AMP is brought into Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, GA facility. Source.

AMP Begins

March 25/02: A $5.3 million cost-plus-award fee contract modification to provide for 1 Lot global air traffic management and airworthiness certification support, in support of the C-5 Avionics Modernization Program. At this time, $2.1 million of the funds has been obligated. This work will be complete December 2003 (F33657-98-C-0006, P00048).

Feb 11/02: A $10 million cost-plus-award-fee and firm-fixed price with economic price adjustment contract modification to provide for FY 2002 engineering manufacturing development effort for the C-5 Avionics Modernization program. At this time, the total amount of funds has been obligated. This work will be completed February 2002 (F33657-98-C-0006, P00053).

Dec 21/99: a $28.8 million modification to a cost-plus-award-fee contract, F33657-98-C-0006-P00011, to provide for FY2000 engineering and manufacturing development in support of the Avionics Modernization Program for the C-5 aircraft. Expected contract completion date is September 2001.

Jan 22/99: a $120.5 million cost-plus-award-fee contract to provide for engineering and manufacturing development through FY 2002 for Avionics Modernization Program kits to be applicable to 126 C-5 aircraft. These kits will include Global Air Traffic Management and All Weather Flight Control systems. There were 17 firms solicited and 2 proposals received. Solicitation issue date was May 15/98. Negotiations were completed Nov 16/98, and the expected contract completion date is October 2005 (F33657-98-C-0006).

Base AMP contract.

Additional Readings Background: C-5M

• Lockheed Martin – C-5 Modernization Program

• GlobalSecurity.org – C-5 Galaxy

• The Aviation Zone, ‘Home of the Heavies’ – C-5 Galaxy. We especially love the C-5 flyby sound file [.WAV].

• GE Aircraft Engines – Model CF680C2: High Reliability, Long Life, Low Fuel Burn

Background: C-5M Program

• Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center (Aug 1/07) – Another Galaxy, Another Test: Operational Test and Evaluation of the C-5M. AFOTEC’s historian offers a detailed chronicle of the entire C-5 Galaxy program, from the cost overruns and wing problems that plagued its early years to the present C-5 AMP/RERP program.

• USAF, Wright-Patterson AFB – C-5 Avionics Modernization Program. Solicitation.

• The University of Texas at Austin: Studies in Ethics, Safety, and Liability for Engineers – The C-5 Galaxy: A Question of Need?

• US Joint Aircraft Survivability Program Office – Innovation in the C-5 LFT&E Program. Unfortunately, the old link no longer works and the fragments reproduced on this page are all that’s left. If any readers can give us pointers to the full document, or send us a copy, it was interesting.

• Lockheed Martin Code One Magazine (March 7/12) – Tweak My Ride.

• Lexington Institute (Oct 4/10) – Upgrades To Giant C-5 Galaxy Airlifter Greatly Increase Performance & Reliability. Quantifies some of the C-5M’s advantages over the C-17 in terms of cargo and range.

• USAF (Sept 16/10) – New facility supports C-5 Galaxy software testing. “The building itself cost $658,000, but another $15 million investment was needed for the set up of the lab, including the cockpit wiring and engineering the lab capability, writing the simulation software and validating everything works as intended.”

News & Views

• Aviation Week’s Defense Technology International (Jun 13/07) – A400M could Dominate Strategic Lift. With no C-5 production, and no C-17 production, it would be the only Western choice remaining, competing with Russia’s AN-124s. Also covers the C-17 program, and C-5 AMP/RERP upgrades. There is some question as to whether the upgrades can produce the required readiness rates.

• USAF (Nov 23/07) – AMC commander discusses modernization, recapitalization issues. Among other topics discussed, Gen. Lichte favors re-engining only the C-5Bs, and acquiring more C-17s. Congressional priorities eventually gave him exactly that, in a very roundabout way.

• Defense News (Oct 29/07) – Airplanes on Life Support. Moseley, Wynne Plead: Let USAF Pull the Plug. They’re talking about aircraft that can’t fly but must be kept per Congressional directives, which includes a number of C-130E Hercules and KC-135E Stratotankers. It also talks about the C-5 programs, and thoughts of discarding the C-5As.

• Gannett’s Air Force Times (Oct 29/07) – MRAPs going to Iraq on Russian cargo planes. “The Air Force has been forced to use Russian commercial cargo jets to rush Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles from the U.S. to Iraq because it does not have enough C-5 and C-17 planes to do the job, the service’s top civilian official said recently…” Ever consider sealift?

• Vacaville Reporter (Oct 29/07) – C-5, C-17 topic of planned study.

• DID (Oct 21/07) – USAF Talking to Airbus About A380 Air Force 1, C-5 Replacement? But how serious are they on either score?

• Gannett’s Air force Times (Oct 19/07) – Bill wants a study on airlift capabilities.

• Macon Telegraph (Oct 7/07) – C-5 future hangs on Air Force, Lockheed price differences. “The Galaxy fleet – sixty 1960s-vintage C-5As, forty-nine 1980s-era C-5Bs and two C-5Cs for use by NASA – has been plagued by nagging deficiencies. The C-5Bs were mission ready 66.6 percent of the time last year. The C-5As were much worse at 49.1 percent. The C-5’s counterpart, the much newer C-17 strategic airlifter, registered reliability of almost 85 percent.”

• Flight International (Oct 1/07) – USAF rounds on Congressional C-5 protection

• Defense News (Oct 1/07) – C-5 Upgrade Effort Imperiled by Cost Confusion.

• Stars & Stripes (Oct 1/07) – ‘Winglets’ could save Air Force millions on fuel. The C-5 fleet might be a candidate.

• Flight International (March 20/07) – Latest C-5 flies into budget storm.

• Government Executive (March 8/07) – Lawmakers divided over cargo plane options.

• House Armed Services Committee Air & Land Forces Subcommittee Hearing (March 7/07) – Statement Of Christopher Bolkcom, Specialist In National Defense, Congressional Research Service, On Air Force And Army Airlift And Aerial Re-Fueling Fixed-Wing Aircraft Programs [PDF].

• Air Force Link (Sept 25/06) – Dover AFB receives new maintenance trainer. A training simulator for maintenance? Yes, and it’s working well for the C-5M AMP program.

• Air Force Link (Feb 8/06) – C-5 Galaxy aircraft engine test successful.

• DID (Nov 14/05) – Delayed Pentagon Mobility Study Finally Offers a Preview.

• GE (Sept 16/04) – GE Engine Certified for U.S. Air Force C-5 Galaxy Program.

• Aviation Today (Feb 1/04) – GATM-izing Galaxy: New C-5 Avionics.

• USAF Agile Acquisition magazine (February 2004) – Teamwork, Innovation Eliminate Travis’ C-5 ‘Cannibalization’ Jet.

• Air Force Magazine (January 2004) – Saving the Galaxy.

• Aviation Today (Aug 1/2000) – C-5 Modernization, Step By Step.

• AFA Air Force Magazine (December 1998) – Nickel Grass: The airlift that saved Israel.

French engineering group CNIM has developed a new landing craft assault (LCA) vessel for amphibious operations. The LCA concept, launched at Euronaval 2018 in Paris, has been designed to transfer equipment and ground forces ashore efficiently from a mothership. “It is a modern version of a

Thales has begun systems integration activities for the drone-based French/UK Maritime Mine Countermeasures (MMCM) programme ahead of beginning full contractor trials in 2019. Being jointly funded by the two partner nations, the MMCM programme covers the design, development, integration, and

South Africa’s Milkor has developed a new protected vehicle, the Milkor 4×4, using internal research and development funding. Development began in 2017 and the first prototype was rolled out in August 2018. The vehicle is now undergoing company trials before the design is finalised,

The Dutch Ministry of Defence (MoD) is increasing ammunition stocks by 2033, State Secretary for Defence Barbara Visser informed parliament on 22 October. She said an extra EUR250 million (USD287 million) to EUR1 billion would be spent on ammunition ranging from bullets and grenades to high-tech

The United States is preventing a shipment of weapons reaching government forces in the Central African Republic (CAR), according to a statement released by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 22 October. The statement noted that Russia sent an initial instalment of weapons and ammunition to

The Russian Airborne Troops (VDV) will receive a battalion of Sprut-SDM1 125 mm self-propelled anti-tank guns (SPATGs), VDV commander Colonel General Andrey Serdyukov told Russian media during a visit to the Volgograd Tractor Plant (VgTZ) on 19 October. “Under the State Armament Programme,

A Spanish Air Force KC-130H conducted air-to-air refuelling of a French Air Force Caracal helicopter at the beginning of the month, the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA), the French defence procurement agency, announced on its website on 22 October. The trials conducted from

Turkey has recorded about USD1.5 billion in defence and aerospace exports to date during 2018, and is aiming to reach USD2 billion by the end of the year. The USD1.5 billion represents an annual rise of 14%, which was attributed to a number of major exportable technologies including rotorcraft,

Tests are upcoming in 2019 for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin systems competing for the US Army’s Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) programme, a top acquisition priority to replace the legacy Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). PrSM and similar projects could assume extra urgency as the United

The United States has recently conducted maritime missions in the Arctic in the form of US Coast Guard (USCG) and US Navy (USN) operations. USCG Cutter Healy (WAGB-20) completed the second mission on 18 October of its Arctic West Summer 2018 deployment to study stratified ocean dynamics in the

The Egyptian Air Force (EAF) has acquired Kh-31 supersonic air-to-surface missiles with its new MiG-29M/M2 multirole fighters, a photograph released by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s spokesperson on 19 October revealed. The photograph showed Sisi with EAF personnel in front of a two-seat

Brazilian Aerospace conglomerate Embraer just rolled out a new marketing campaign seemingly aimed directly at Top Gun fans. Embraer released two new private business jets on Sunday, October 14, 2018 in Orlando, Florida. The company’s new Praetor 500 and the Praetor 600 midsize and super midsize personal jets are being marketed with a new ad […]

According to several media outlets, the Belgian Air Force has picked the Lockheed Martin F-35. Belgium may become the 12th country to join the F-35 program. Citing Government sources, Belga news agency reported on Oct. 22, 2018 that a decision has been made to pick the U.S. 5th generation stealth aircraft over the European Typhoon […]

The second day of the Afghan parliamentary election has been as chaotic as the first. Because many polling centres failed to open or opened late on Saturday, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) ruled that some could also open today. However, only some actually opened today and voters were presented with the same bureaucratic and technical difficulties as yesterday. It is difficult, overall, to feel confident about the statistics the IEC has given, and it has already come under scathing criticism from the Election Complaints Commission about its management of the election. Yet none of this, reports Jelena Bjelica and the rest of the AAN team, appears to have had any bearing on the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the election organisers and the country’s political leadership.

This is a follow-on from our reports on election day “A Rural-Urban Divide Emerging” and “Voter Determination and Technical Shambles”.A dossier of our pre-election coverage can also be read here.

It is hard and confusing to tell exactly how many and which polling centres opened today, Sunday, 21 October, the extra day given for Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections. The confusion was mainly caused by the IEC’s impromptu decision (number, 89-1397) to allow the opening, not only of those polling centres that failed to open yesterday, but also those that opened very late, after 1pm. At his late-night press conference on Saturday 20 October, IEC chief Abdul Badi Sayyad had only mentioned the centres that failed to open, meaning voters whose stations opened late were left unsure whether they would be opening today or not. Confusion was only amplified by the IEC’s decision to open stations at 9am this morning, rather than the usual 7am.

The numbers: polling stations that were closed on Saturday and should have opened on Sunday 

Sayyad said that 401 polling centres which did not open because of technical problems or security threats on Saturday would open today (21 October). Many, AAN was told, had not received the electoral material in time. The 401, he said, was out of “over 4,900” polling centres countrywide. This figure should have already excluded the 172 allocated to Kandahar province where elections have been delayed for a week after the murder of senior officials [para corrected on 28 Oct. 2018].

The IEC, had said in an earlier press conference that 370 polling centres had remained closed on election day (see this AAN analysis of the Day one). More reports of closures must have come in after the first figure was publicised.

[updated on 22 Oct. at 10am] At the end of the day on Sunday at a press conference, IEC chair Sayyad said that a total of 4,567 polling centres had opened, on both elections days, 20 and 21 October. On Saturday he had given a number of 4,530 polling centres for 20 October only, which would mean that, of the 401 which did not open on Saturday, only 37 opened on Sunday. Another IEC official gave a strikingly different number again to AFP on Sunday saying that of 401 polling centres that were supposed to open on Sunday, 253 had indeed opened and 148 had not.

However, observers were skeptical. AAN received indications that maybe only 80 polling centres actually opened on Sunday, and among these were many that had been open before 1 am on Saturday, too. A source in Nad Ali district in Helmand province, for example, told AAN that in Zarghon Kalai (Green village) and Shin Kalai (Blue village) polling had continued for the second day in a row. Moreover, Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) spokesman Ali Reza Rohani, reported, that in the centres which did open on Sunday, “Most of the problems we had yesterday were still there today.” He said election workers were still struggling to use the biometric verification devices, and voter rolls were “either incomplete or non-existent.” Some polling sites had again opened late, he said and had insufficient ballot papers.

No numbers: polling stations that opened very late on Saturday and should have opened on Sunday

IEC decision number 89-1397 made on 20 October ruled that, “for the polling centres that were not opened until after 1 pm, the elections will be held tomorrow.” This meant that some centres were open for a day and a half with seals on election materials broken and left overnight – with obvious concerns over the opportunity this gives for ballot rigging. The IEC has also yet to give the exact number of centres that opened after 1pm on Saturday. It has also not given the number of how many polling stations closed on time – at 4 pm – on Saturday, or after an extension – to 8pm – for those that opened late, but before 1 pm, on Saturday.

The confusion has only been exacerbated by a discrepancy in the numbers shared by the IEC publicly and those shared somewhat secretly. According to a spreadsheet the IEC shared with independent observers and international organisations, which AAN received, on Saturday morning the IEC reported that 3,187 polling centres (63 per cent) had opened. Publicly, however, it has repeatedly claimed that 4,530 polling centres (92 per cent) had opened. Aggravating the muddle still further, the publicly-available document on the IEC website which details the number of polling centres by province says that 5,074 centres opened on Saturday. The list still includes Kandahar and must have been uploaded way ahead of election.

The lack of publicly-accessible data on the IEC website is egregious. So far, it has published only a summary of the 20 October press conference in its main, Dari section and no updates on its English section.

Turnout – unknown 

Head of the IEC Abdul Badi Sayyad said on Saturday evening that more than three million people had voted on Saturday. Already this was unusual as, normally, such figures are not rounded up or down, but are exact to the last digit. In the IEC election ‘flash report No.2’ distributed to reporters on Saturday afternoon, the IEC had said that by 2pm, turnout had been 1.5 million voters (in 27 provinces). It is hard to believe that 1.5 additional million voters showed up that afternoon to cast their votes (this would mean that people went to vote between 2pm and 4pm, and in the late opening polling centres, until 8pm). It goes against what AAN researchers in various provinces, as well as accounts from many other sources, journalists, civil society and observers, witnessed, that turnout decreased in the afternoon hours. Nevertheless, given the varying figures of how many polling centres were open or were reported open on Saturday, as well as problems with communication (Badghis province, for example, was out of reach all day on Saturday while four other provinces, including Kunduz, was out of reach for much of the day), it is really hard to say how accurate the IEC’s turnout estimate may or may not be.

The long queues reported on 20 October morning in many places, with great numbers of people waiting between ninety minutes and three hours to cast their vote, may be an indication of massive turnout – or of administrative failures. These failures were reported from all over country and ranged from biometric verification devices not working or working only slowly or not sufficiently charged for the whole day or staff not knowing how to use them; to staff arriving late, some of because they had not been told which centres to go to; to voters with stickers on their tazkeras, proving they had registered, finding their names were missing from the voter lists. Some of the latter were allowed to vote (and their names added on a separate list). Others were not. In other words, there was inequality in dealing with this particular, widespread glitch.

Despite all of this, the IEC’s Sayyad was confident that voter turnout would rise to more than five million after figures from the remaining centres arrived, including those opening on Sunday. In the end, the figure he gave at a press conference on Sunday evening was somewhat lower, 4 million voters, a third of whom, he said, were women.

Bearing in mind that nine million Afghans had registered, turnout can hardly be said to have been good. Moreover, several million other eligible voters were unable even to register because they live in Taleban-controlled areas; the IEC only managed to register voters in two-thirds of its polling centres. By these metrics, the IEC’s estimate of turnout, even if correct, looks a great deal less healthy.

Known irregularities and election-day casualties

On top of all the confusion over turnout and the number of opened/closed polling centres, counting was allowed to start in some places and tally reports are now trickling in from some provinces. In Takhar, for example, counting began last night and ended around midnight. The counting happened despite voting having been authorised for a second day in 15 polling centres (ten had been closed and five centre opened late in Yangi Qala and Dasht-e Qala districts on Saturday). This was probably the result of a lack of instruction by the IEC. However, it should have seemed obvious, surely, that counting cannot start until all voting has ended. This could invalidate the election in Takhar because candidates or officials would know how many votes were needed to tamper with the election result (and turnout figures) ahead of the continuation of voting on Sunday. This is something to watch, especially bearing in mind that candidates’ observers in Takhar told AAN their estimate of turnout on Saturday in the province was very low and most of the candidates had got unexpectedly low numbers of votes.

Some observers’ initial reports are also coming in. The Fair and Free Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA) had 1,500 observers in over 1,000 polling centres countrywide. (1) The head of FEFA, Muhammad Yusuf Rashid told AAN that, of over 1,000 centres the organisation observed on Saturday, around 130 had opened late. He said the biggest issue it witnessed was late opening. (2) “There were also issues with the biometric voter verification (BVV), a lack of printing paper and a lack of IEC staff in many stations,” he said.

Among other serious irregularities FEFA observed were illegal armed groups interfering in the voting in some provinces by forcing people to vote for certain candidates. Rashid also told AAN that “In a number of provinces – Logar, Kunar, Kabul, Takhar, Badakhshan – candidates’ agents interfered in the voting by distributing money to voters who agreed to vote for their contenders.” He also said that in some provinces, “linkages between IEC staff and political candidates had been observed.” AAN has also been told about similar incidents, of voters being interfered with by armed men including in the Deh Sabz district of Kabul.

Some agents have complained about irregularities and ballot stuffing in Kabul city. AAN also received reports about possible ballot stuffing in Paktia and in Mazar-e Sharif and of boxes full of ballot papers without the marks of the IEC.

Tolonews has reported that it received at least 10,000 complaints from voters across the country via WhatsApp and hundreds more on Facebook. Complaints covered a wide range of issues, including “polling station chaos,” Tolo said.

The government also appears to have underplayed the number of Afghans killed and wounded in election-related violence on Saturday. Minister of Interior Barmak at the end of the day reported that 17 civilians had been killed and 83 wounded, with 11 members of the Afghan National Security Forces also killed and 17 injured  (see this AAN analysis). AFP, carrying out its own round-up of casualties, has put the total number of civilians and members of the security forces killed or wounded in polling-related violence on Saturday much higher, at nearly 300.

Conclusion

 The IEC has already come in for damning criticism by the Electoral Complaints Commission for the “serious problems in the management of the elections”  which the EEC said could call into question the “transparency and fairness of the elections.” In this, the discrepancy in the numbers for polling centres open on Saturday given by the IECto the public (4,530 opened) and in its off-the-record, shared spreadsheet (3,187) is particularly worrying and needs to be cleared up as soon as possible.

Yet, despite the chaos, complaints, irregularities and the fact that several million eligible voters live in Taleban-controlled areas and could not even register to vote, both the election organisers and President Ghani have announced the parliamentary elections “a success.”

 

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Kate Clark

 

(1) One FEFA observer was injured in Kabul in an attack on a polling centre. Several FEFA observers in the provinces were caught in the security incidents, but all of them were unharmed. In Logar, the IEC staff did not allow a FEFA observer to enter the polling centre. “After refusing to leave,” spokesman Rashid told AAN, “our observer was arrested by the NDS and kept in custody for several hours.”

The ECC also reported, “In some polling centres, observers were prevented [from entering the centres] or faced threats.” The ECC said  their own staff were not able to enter some polling stations or the necessary materials were not provided to them.

(2) Even Second Vice-President Sarwar Danish waited for 45 minutes for his polling centre to open. He told Tolo reporter that the centre, at the Baqir ul-Ulum mosque, only opened after election observers arrived.

 

 

 

 

In our first update of the day, AAN reported on the mixed turnout – far higher in the cities and other secure places and lower in districts where the Taleban could close roads and prevent voting. Those determined to vote faced not only Taleban violence, but also many technical problems and late-opening polling centres. In response, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) ordered an extension of voting hours today for some centres and for some to be opened tomorrow. In others, the count has already begun. The Election Complaints Commission has been damning of the IEC’s management of the poll, saying it could call into question the “transparency and fairness of the elections.” Kate Clark, Thomas Ruttig and the rest of the AAN team, bring you this update of what has turned out to be the first day of Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections.

This is a follow-on from our earlier report on the day’s events. A dossier of our pre-election coverage can also be read here.

Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections were marred by Taleban threats and violence, and chaotic preparations by the IEC.

Taleban violence: rising casualty figures

As the day wore on, reports of attacks and explosions continued to come in – and the casualty figures kept rising. Minister of Interior Wais Barmak told Tolonews at the end of the day that 192 security incidents had been reported countrywide. While this looks like an underestimate, it is still grievous enough.

Barmak told Tolonews at least 17 civilians had been killed and 83 civilians wounded. 10 policemen had also been killed, he said, along with an Afghan National Army soldier, and 17 members of the security forces had been wounded (note: according to the Laws of War, the police, if guarding election sites, would be categorised as civilian). AFP, quoting officials in the late afternoon, reported a somewhat higher civilian casualty figure – 170 civilians killed and injured. Unfortunately, that figure may yet rise. In Baghlan, for example, the Afghan news website, Khabarnama, quoting provincial health officials said that in their province alone, 12 people had been killed and around 100 injured in election-related violence.

In the early evening came reports of a suicide attack on a polling centre in Kabul’s Sar-e Kotal area (PD 17) – between Khairkhana and the Shomali plain: five policemen and ten civilians were killed and 25 more people injured. Kabul, along with Kunduz and Baghlan, suffered the worst of the day’s violence. In Kunduz, where the Taleban sent more than twenty rockets into the city, health officials told AFP that three people had been killed and 39 injured.

Technical shambles

“Participation was good,” the IEC announced at a press conference at the end of the day, “despite problems and security threats.” The commission’s conclusion is curious, even based on its own statistics. By 2 pm, it said, 1,510,659 million people had voted in 27 provinces (it was still waiting for information from Badghis, Kunduz, Paktia, Wardak, Parwan). Even though the final turnout figure will be higher, it still looks as if only a small portion of Afghanistan’s nine million registered voters will have cast their ballots.

[The following two paragraphs have been corrected, 21 Oct 2018, 9.15am] The IEC further said that 4,530 
out of the 4,901 polling centres due to open had opened (92 per cent) and that only 370 polling centres had remained closed. There also was an unknown but definitely large number of polling centres that opened late, often hours later, judging by numerous media and other reports that had come in from around the country.

Moreover, the IEC has not specified how many polling centres will open on Sunday 21 October. These centres should include the 370 centres that never opened on 20 October and, according to a decision by the IEC, those that only opened after 1 pm on election day one. The IEC so far has not given that second number. It has also not given the number of how many polling stations closed on time, at 4 pm, or after the extended time, at 8 pm.

To make the confusion complete, a number of polling centres have already started the count “The closing of polls in Saturday’s Parliamentary elections,” wrote AP, “was as chaotic as the opening.”

AAN (see annex and our earlier update) and other observers witnessed the following technical problems:

• Voting centres opening late, including staff turning up late. This affected some areas in particular – such as west Kabul where teachers hired for the elections had, reportedly, not been told which centre they should go to;
• Lack of voting materials;
• Biometric verification devices not working or working only slowly or staff not knowing how to use them;
• Voters with stickers on their tazkeras (to prove they had registered) finding their names missing from the voter lists;
• Long queues, with people having to wait several hours to vote;
• Problems with the Kuchi ballots, with some polling centres not having any.

The IEC itself summed up today’s problems, as follows:

• Ineffectiveness of IEC field staff;
• Technical and administrative issues;
• Polling staff – teachers – not showing up;
• Security incidents perpetrated by insurgents and warlords and the use of force at some polling centres;
• Lack of monitoring in some areas;
• Late arrival of biometric verification devices;
• Negative messages discrediting the process though social media.

The technical, bureaucratic and logistical problems were not evident at every polling centre in the country, but they were widespread enough to warrant AFP’s description of IEC preparations for this long-delayed ballot as “shambolic”.

In mid-afternoon, the country’s Election Complaints Commission (ECC) also came out with a damning statement, listing what it called the “severe shortcomings on how the elections had been managed thus far.” For the first time, it said, it had at least one official in each polling centre to receive complaints from voters, observers and candidate agents and who could report own observations. The ECC therefore, presumably, felt confident in its criticism. Part of the statement, as seen on television, said:

1. In a large number of polling centres and stations, polling centres have not been opened and activated yet.
2. In a large number of other polling centres and stations, polling centres have been activated after hours of delay.
3. In a number of polling centres, the necessary electoral materials, totally or partially, were not provided to the IEC staff on time.
4. In some polling centres, the biometric system encountered problems and was not activated on time.
5. In some polling centres, observers were prevented [from entering the centres] or faced threats.
6. There are reports of boxes containing sensitive electoral materials not being intact.
7. In some polling centres, representatives of the ECC were not provided with the opportunity to be present [in the polling stations] or necessary materials were not provided to them.

So far, the impact of violence and mismanagement have overshadowed reports about alleged fraud. AAN has however started collecting reports of incidents and hopes to give a fuller account of this in a future dispatch.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of Afghans turned out to vote, showing commitment and bravery in the face of Taleban threats, and patience in the face of an often shoddily-run election. Where Afghans could vote, it seems they did try. Reports of people waiting several hours to vote were received from many provinces. If these elections were faulty, it was not because of a lack of commitment shown by Afghan citizens. At the end of what has turned out to be in some places, the first day of voting, the conclusion of the ECC may be the one to watch:

[S]erious problems in the management of the elections… have led to the disenfranchisement of some voters, to serious concerns among the citizens and election stakeholders, especially for the ECC. The continuation of the current trend can seriously call into question the transparency and fairness of the elections.

 

Annex: AAN observation of voter identification and voting

AAN has selected some observations by its researchers from various provinces on how voting went and what problems voters faced. Their reports illustrate why voting hours needed to be extended.

Paktika 

In Paktika, many voters complained that their names were not on the voters’ registration list. These were people who had registration stickers on their ID cards, but their names were not on the voter registration list. At the Ali Baba High School, with more than 3,800 voters registered, and the provincial hospital, with 2,247 voters registered, about 200 people found they could not vote and went back home disappointed. According to one tweet, two of Paktika’s candidates also found they were not on the list.

An official that AAN interviewed at the polling centre at the provincial hospital said there were two possible reasons why this had happened.

People got stickers outside of the registration process, ie they got a fake sticker. It might be that they bought or acquired stickers illegally from the IEC officials through a bribe, or the candidates illegally bought stickers to put it on the tazkiras of their people. The second possibility is that their names were among more than 30,000 names that were removed from the main voters’ database, in order to eliminate ‘ghost voters’.

The official did not address the possibility that there had been a bureaucratic muddle. As will be seen below, this was a very common problem.

Other than that, voting seen by the researcher – who visited Sharana and Yusuf Khel and Musa Kheldistricts – went normally and there were no major problems reported. Voters were enthusiastic in Sharana. There were no cases observed where voters refused to be photographed or ‘biometrically verified’. Observers appeared happy with the voting process and did not report irregularities other than the problem of names missing from the voter lists.

Daikundi 

248 polling centres were reported open in Daikundi province. At four polling centres seen by AAN in the provincial capital, Nili, the biometric devices were not working. One voter told AAN that in his polling centre, around 150 voters showed up at 8am, only to find the biometric devices not working. He left for work, saying he might return later.

In the polling centre in the Sang-e Mum High School, most of the voters had to queue for two to three hours before they could cast a vote, but said once they got to the front of the queue, it took only a few minutes to vote. Voters reported similar timings in the polling center in Sar-e Nili High School – they waited more than three hours for their turn to vote, but then it took no more than four minutes to cast their ballot. The longest step in voting process, AAN observed in Nilli, was not the fingerprinting, but finding the voter on the voters’ list. The main concern of the voters was that they would not have an opportunity to cast their votes before the polling centres closed, if voting continued to be so slow. The polling centres reported this problem to the IEC.

In the polling centre in Chahar Dar High School, voters were also waiting for two and a half hours and then found it took five minutes to vote. There was no room in the polling stations for all the observers, so they were taking turns to monitor. They told AAN that 13 voters, with stickers issued from the centre, found their names were not on the voter list.

Takhar

In Taloqan city, most of the poling stations had closed their doors by 4pm and counting had begun. Candidates’ agents continued to monitor. AAN visited around 20 polling stations and found some irregularities, with mismanagement and technical issues to do with the biometric devices and voters lists, mainly in the morning. There were no obvious signs of manipulation or fraud.

In most of the polling stations there were problems with the biometric system. For instance, in Bibi Marya, the biometric system in the women’s polling station did not work until 8:45am. IEC officials also had trouble finding people’s names on the voter lists. It took more than five minutes for the queue controllers to find each voter and check their name and sticker. In a few cases, AAN noticed voters had to go from one polling station to another to find their names. Observers and agents also raised no serious issues of concern; most of their complaints were about technical problems.

Outside the provincial capital, though, the security forces came under criticism from many candidates who complained they had not been able to secure the area and allow people to vote in Dasht-e Qala, Durqad, Yang-e Qala, Khawja Bahauddin and Khawja Ghar districts.

Balkh

The polling centre in the Oil and Gas Institute in Mazar-e Sharif opened 20 minutes late. The biometric machines worked properly, but turnout was very low, at least initially. AAN observed some voters taking photos of the ballot paper while voting (a female observer also said she saw women photographing their ballot papers). They explained they had sold their votes and needed to take the photos as proof. (Photographing ballot papers is illegal – see here). There were 80 to 85 male observers, mainly candidates’ agents. A female observer told AAN there were 40 female observers, but the female voter turnout was very low in the centre.

In the Kart-e Bokhdi area of Mazar, an observer told AAN the polling centre was very crowded and that it had run out of ballot papers.

The voting process took between three and five minutes in most polling centres in Mazar, while checking the voter’s tazkeras against the voter registration took a little longer.

One observer told AAN that many centres had received the wrong voters’ lists, and that voters who were not on the list of the polling station they had (or thought they had) registered and were sent to wander from centre to a centre in search of their names. AAN interviewed one female voter whose name the IEC staff said they had been unable to find. She was asked to wait outside for one hour, but went home instead, without voting.

Herat 

In Herat city, polling centres opened an hour late, at around 8am. However, it seems there was a good turnout. Beginning from about 6:30am, queues were already forming, for men outside the polling centres and for women inside. The queues were already long by 08:00am when the polling centres opened.

In the districts, some polling centres opened much later. One in Guzara district opened at 11:00am. Polling centre officials said election materials had not been provided to them. In some polling centres, election staff did not come on time. Many people have had to wait for more than an hour to get into the polling station.

It generally took more than ten minutes for each voter to cast their vote (less than five minutes in less busy stations). In some cases, the biometric equipment was not working. A more common problem was that the names of some voters could not be found on the voter list, despite having the relevant sticker of the polling centre pasted on their tazkera.

 

Read our earlier report about Election Day One here.

 

 

 

Afghanistan’s third post-Taleban parliamentary elections have started slowly, with a lot of technical chaos and significant fighting in a number of provinces. Polling hours have now been extended. Even in many areas of Kabul, polling centres had not opened by 9:30am. There are widespread reports of a lack of polling material, electoral staff being unfamiliar with the biometric devices, that are being used for the first time to try to prevent multiple voting, and reports of explosions, attacks and Taleban closing roads and keeping away voters. By noon, dozens of casualties from rocket and mortar fire and explosions had been reported in Kunduz and later in Kabul. Apart from in Daykundi, where the governor held a small ceremony in the capital, Nili, voting began without ceremony. Thomas Ruttig and the rest of the AAN team have put together this initial look at ‘E-Day’ 2018. With reporting from Ali Mohammad Sabawoon (Kandahar), Obaid Ali (Taloqan), Rohullah Sorush (Mazar-e Sharif), Ehsan Qaane (Nili/Daikundi), Said Reza Kazemi (Herat), Fazal Muzhary (Sharana/Paktika) and Ali Yawar Adili and Jelena Bjelica (Kabul).

General observations on preparation and turnout

By noon, according to IEC sources speaking unofficially, only around 3,000 polling centres were open around the country, about 60 per cent (by 10am, it had been 2,300). Measures were underway, the sources said, to increase that number. Voting had been scheduled to close at 4pm, but IEC chairman Abdul Badi Sayyad has now announced at a press conference that polling centres will stay open beyond that, to “compensate” for the lost time. He apologised for the late opening. Sayyad said that polling centres where opening was delayed can now stay open until 8pm today, while in those not open before 1pm, polling would also take place on Sunday, 21 October (media reporting here). (1)

In many areas of Kabul and Herat as well as in Paktika and Balkh, IEC staff arrived at polling centres only at 7am when the centres were due to open. They started preparations and often did not allow observers to watch this. (2) AAN staff observed in a polling centre in Rahman Mena in southeastern Kabul that ballot boxes were not ready and observers were not allowed in, while long queues of voters gathered, on both the women’s and men’s sides. Voting started late at 7:45. AAN received reports from local sources in Paktika that, in a number of polling centres, voter lists were incomplete and many names were missing. (3) IEC personnel in the Paktika capital, Sharana, defending the late start, told AAN that people in the province “only wake up or start working about 8am.” In many places, IEC staff also banned the use of phones with cameras, probably to prevent voters from taking photos of their ballots (a method used to show to candidates who might have paid for the vote that the voter had complied), but also making observation difficult. Those voters then had to leave because there was no provision for leaving phones outside the centres; some may not return to vote. There were complaints that the IEC had not announced this ban.

In Kabul, only a few polling centres opened as scheduled at 7am. They included Amani High School where President Ashraf Ghani and IEC chairman Sayyad cast their votes. Ghani held a short, uninspired speech, explaining once more why the vote in Ghazni and Kandahar had been postponed and assuring voters there they would not lose their franchise. In Herat, as AAN witnessed, voting mostly began around 8am. Afghan media have published photos of a number of provincial governors casting their votes.

It appears that in many rural areas, however, there has been no voting, either after threats on the eve of elections or because the Taleban closed roads or there was fighting (reported from at least ten provinces). The first security incident in the morning was reported from Khushi district of Logar province where a polling station came under fire from a nearby hill shortly after polling opened officially. According to security sources in Kabul, there have been 107 incidents countrywide, 27 of them in Kabul province by noon. Most of the other incidents were reported from Kunar and the northeast, particularly Kunduz.

At noon, one of the country’s major observer organisations, the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) said “the situation is out of the control of the IEC.”

According to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Interior, Najib Danesh, quoted by Kabul-based news agency, 4,900 polling centres with more than 20,000 polling stations (4) should have opened in 32 of Afghanistan’s provinces. The figure looks overstated – very likely this is the number the Independent Election Commission (IEC) intended to open. By mid-morning, anyway, many were still shut.

On the eve of the elections, the IEC had given a number of 5,074 polling stations it intended to open (a few days before the elections, it had used a figure of “around 5,100”), but Kandahar has [corrected: 172] polling centres and voting there was delayed after the murder of Provincial Police Chief General Abdul Razeq on Thursday (read AAN analysis here) , so neither figure is fully accurate. Even before that, another 2,292 polling centres originally envisaged to be used were dropped, as the Afghan security forces could not see themselves able to defend them (more detail in this AAN overview).

The IEC had also officially claimed that there would be no voting in ten districts in five provinces, Musa Qala, Dishu, Nowzad, Reg/Khaneshin and Baghran in Helmand; Kakar/Khak Afghanin Zabul; Yamgan and Warduj in Badakhshan; Dahana-ye Ghori in Baghlan and Kohistanat in Sar-e Pul. However, AAN found from local sources that in Zabul, for example, there was no voting before noon in four districts – Arghandab, Mizan, Syuray and Kakar/Khak Afghan – due to ongoing fighting. The way to another Zabul district centre, Shahr-e Safa, was also closed due to fighting in the morning, so that election material only arrived briefly before noon. In Shajoy, the wrong election material was sent to one polling centre. This had to be corrected before voting could start. After noon, government forces started operations in two Zabul districts where the election process had also not started, Syurai and Mizan.

At the IEC press conference the day before the elections (19 October), IEC chairman Sayyad had called on the Taleban to allow the people to vote by announcing a ceasefire on that day. This plea remained unheeded. Over the days immediately before the election, the Taleban had instead issued a series of statements: they called on teachers and ulema not to support the elections, while the movement’s military commission threatened to close “all major and minor roads” on election day and called on people to stay indoors (quoted here). In early October, the Taleban had called for a boycott, stating it would “leave no stone unturned” to prevent the elections from taking place, but adding the movement would “instructs all its Mujahideen (…), while taking extensive and intensive care of civilian Afghan lives and their properties” and only attacking those who “secure” the polls (quoted here).

Turnout

Turnout has, so far, been mixed. In the large cities and many of the provincial centres, it has been good. Footage from Afghan media has shown queues of both male and female voters in Kabul, Herat, Maimana, Jalalabad, Lashkargah and Gardez, as well as some districts near to cities like Injil and Guzara in Herat province, and Batikot near Jalalabad, and Panjshir province as a whole. The tendency of good turnout in the cities and nearby districts was also confirmed by AAN staff members in Herat and Mazar-e Sharif.

In some places, such as Hazara-dominated west Kabul and some parts of Tajik-dominated Khairkhana, the turn-out has been massive. At one polling station in Khairkhana, however, voters reported to AAN that there were “more observers than voters” and that three candidates had distributed money to voters. In one centre in Nili, AAN saw 500 voters already queuing at 6:30am. In Mazar-e Sharif, it was good in the morning, but had dropped significantly by noon. In other places, there have been fewer voters. At one centre in Paktika’s capital Sharana, only one out of 25 registered women appeared to vote this morning.

In many places, voters arriving early or on time were left waiting because of the lack of IEC preparation; anger was already growing. In Qarabagh district, north of Kabul, angry voters blocked the main Kabul-Parwan highway with burning tires in protest that no election material had been delivered.

Government officials talking to AAN who wanted to remain anonymous played down the problems, saying there had only been “some minor difficulties” with IEC staff being late.

Biometrics

As to the new biometric procedures, AAN found that in Paktika’s provincial capital Sharana, the process took between four to eight minutes – rather than the one minute envisaged (see AAN reporting here). It appeared the Biometric Voter Verification (BVV) devices did not easily read voters’ fingerprints, but most of the  devices did work. Those not functioning were sent for repair or to be changed.

In at least four polling centres in Daykundi’s provincial capital Nili the biometric devices did not work. In the polling centre in Sang-e Mum High School most voters had to queue two to three hours before they could cast a vote. A group of ten observers, mainly from candidates, AAN talked to at this polling centre said the process was very slow. The longest step in voting process, AAN observed in Nilli, was not fingerprinting, but finding the number of a voter on the voters list. In one centre, where there were problem,  some voters left, saying they would come back later.

In several polling centres in Taloqan city there were issues with the biometric system that failed to operate. IEC workers spent more than five minutes on each voter, and it took a long time for the queue controllers to find a voter name on the voter registration list. In few cases AAN noticed, voters had to go from one polling station to the other to find their names.

In Kart-e Bokhdi area of Mazar, an observer told AAN that the polling centre in the area was really crowded and that it had run out of ballot papers. An observer told AAN that many centres had received the wrong voter lists, and that the voters were sent off to wander “from centre to centre” in search of their name.

In Mazar-e Sharif, AAN observed that some voters took photos of the ballot paper while voting. They explained that they have sold their votes and they take photos for proof.

Afghan journalist Ahmad Wali Sarhadi reported via social media from Kharjui, Zabul, that a long line of voters was still standing in the polling station by noon and waiting for the biometric devices to work. In one Kabul polling centre visited by AAN staff, the whole voting process was taking between three and five minutes.

Female voters queue in Sharana, provincial capital of Paktika. Photo: Fazal Muzhary

Security incidents round the country

The most casualties by far were reported from Kunduz. According to an AAN colleague observing the region from Takhar, who spoke to journalists in Kunduz, around 30 people – civilians and members of the security forces – were wounded in the morning as a result of rocket and mortar fire and scattered clashes ongoing in some parts of the city, outside the city centre. According to election observers who spoke to AAN, two mortar rounds hit polling centres in the centre of Kunduz. According to officials from the Kunduz Provincial Hospital, the casualty figures later rose to three killed – among them two IEC staff who were killed at Charkhab secondary school east of the city centre – and 39 others injured.

The shelling in Kunduz had decreased by 11am, as more security forces came in and candidates tried to persuade people to come out and vote, offering transportation. Even so, many people were reported still to be too scared to vote. The Kunduz-Takhar highway remained blocked.

In Kabul, at least 30 people have been taken to a trauma hospital run by the Italian NGO Emergency, including a dead child, AFP reported. Afghan health officials said, there were at least three dead and over 30 wounded,

There were also reports of Taleban rockets fired on Lashkargah (Helmand). By noon, one person was reported injured – in Paktia (more on which below). Explosive devices were used mainly in Kabul, designed, it seems more to scare voters from voting, not to harm then.

The Afghan media has (so far) been notably quiet about security incidents. AAN heard from reliable sources working with the media that there was a tacit agreement between some key media outlets not to report security incidents until noon.

Kabul

The capital had experienced ten small explosions by 12:30pm and one rocket, which landed in the Gulayi neighbourhood of Khairkhana in the city’s north. The first explosions occurred in the south-eastern area of Arzan Qemat (PD 12) in front of a high school polling centre and in Bibi Sara high school polling centre (PD 15). Two mines exploded outside Zabihullah Esmati school in Rahman Mena in southeastern Kabul (PD 8). The centre was temporarily evacuated. An explosion in Qala-ye Shahda (PD 6), in front of the Ahmadi mosque also caused the evacuation and closure off a polling centre. No casualties were reported in Kabul.

Voters from southeastern Kabul said there were sufficient police and NDS personnel, while reports from Hazara-dominated areas in the west said police were scarce.

Herat

Herat, like other cities, has strict security measures. There has been little traffic on the streets inside the city and the roads leading to it from nearby. The streets leading to the provincial government’s seat are all closed to public traffic.

In the contested districts of Obe and Pashtun Zarghun, voters turned out in the more secure areas. In Obe, a young man accompanying his wife, who is an IEC staff member, reported to AAN that people were voting “in good numbers” in about ten polling centres located in safe areas in the district especially those near the district centre. There were problems, he said, in the three remaining centres in the district. There, the Taleban had distributed night letters threatening all those working for or taking part in the elections, that they would kill them and cut off their fingers. In one of those stations, no one had turned up to vote this morning. Security forces had been deployed in order to make voting possible later in the day.

An IEC staff member in Pashtun Zarghun district reported that “Queues have formed for men and women, and people are voting. According to his estimation, there would  be a good turnout, with polling centres opened in about 70 per cent of the district. In the remaining 30 per cent, polling centres were closed and not expected to open. (It was unclear whether these were among the 2,292 the IEC said it would not be able to open or additional ones.)

Takhar and Kunduz

Polling centres are operating normally and groups of people are still arriving from villages to the nearest centre to vote. They were less crowded this afternoon. The polling in Takhar has been interesting because it seems more women are turning out to vote than men. The IEC workers and voters are now better familiar with the biometric verification devices and are quicker using them. In two PC, AAN witnessed it taking three minutes for voters to vote.

The capital Taloqan city is quiet with people making only limited movements. NDS has set up checkpoints at the entrances to the city. The army are also stationed around the city and the police are active inside and are in charge of security at the polling centres, where they search all voters. The NDS and the army are searching all vehicles wanting to enter the city. The Taleban destroyed a power line at around 11am, as a result of which at least parts of Taloqan city are without electricity. AAN has further confirmed fighting near Dasht-e Qala and Khwaja Bahauddin district centres. It is not clear whether this has stopped voting altogether in those places. The Taloqan-Dasht-e Qala road has also been closed by the fighting.

Kunduz city has no electricity since the Taleban have destroyed an electricity pylon. They have also closed the Takhar-Kunduz highway for the last two days. This, along with the frequent rocket fire and fighting in the morning kept turnout low. More security forces were being deployed and candidates were sending vehicles to take voters to the polling centres, so the turnout was slowly increasing.

Paktia and Paktika

A small explosive device was planted in Tera High School, just outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia early this morning, but it was defused. In the city, there was a good turnout.  In Zurmat district, a Taleban stronghold, only three polling centres have opened in the immediate district centre, in the Muqarabkhel and Batur neighbourhoods and in Zurmat Lycee. All other centres are closed and armed Taleban have been standing in front of them, so that election materials cannot be transferred. A rocket landed at Tamir, the district centre, and wounded one person.

In Paktika, Taleban fighters have fired rockets at the Jehad Mena area, which is about 15 kilometres to the north of Sharana city, as well as at locations in Urgun, Sarhauza, Matakhan and Sarobi districts. No casualties have been reported. According to deputy police chief Hamidullah Omarkhel, 2,000 security forces have been deployed to provide security for the election. They do not allow anyone riding motorbikes into the city, but they do allow cars.

Wardak and Logar

In Maidan-Wardak province, there was no voting in the Sayyedabad and Sheikhabad district centres. Near Sayyedabad, in Tangi-ye Duab, the Taleban have set up a checkpost and are not allowing people into the bazaar to vote. In Sheikhabad, after a local candidate visited the day before the elections, Taleban fighters appeared and started firing into the air. This morning, all the shops were closed, the bazaar was empty and there was no voting. The two IEC staff members and two policemen who turned up this morning also left. There is also no voting in Chak district, after the Taleban issued warnings to the population.

A similar situation was reported from local sources from Muhammad Agha in Logar province. There, also, the Taleban are not allowing anyone into the bazaar and no voting is taking place. Local people sent photos of Taleban in camouflage uniforms on motor bikes in the area. In the high school of Zahedabad village, near Muhammad Agha, voters turned up to cast their ballots at 9.30am, but there were no IEC staff, no ballot papers, no voter lists or biometric devices. The voters left again.

Baghlan

Local sources in Tala wa Barfak district of Baghlan told AAN that no polling stations were open and ballot boxes instead had been delivered to the guest house of one of the candidates, a sitting MP.

IEC information policy

Apart from two press conferences, the IEC has distributed information only very sparsely. It has so far not published any updates on their English website and the Dari website just has a summary of one of the press conferences. Candidates and voters have urged the IEC over social media to show up at problematic sites. The latest news item on its website is dated 26 Mizan (18 October 2018), its last tweet, made this morning, at the scheduled time of opening, is now over eight hours old.

Edited by Kate Clark and Martine van Bijlert

 

(1) More detail on the IEC decisions to address arising problems:

Since voting started this morning the IEC has issued two decisions to manage the fallout from issues that have plagued some polling centres but not others: late openings and problems with the voter lists and biometric devices. In decision 88- 1397 the IEC stated that in polling stations where the voter list is unavailable or where parts are missing, the provincial offices should print and send the lists. If this is not possible, voting should be done based on voter confirmation stickers [whoever has tazkera labelled with a registration stickers tied to the same polling centres should be allowed to vote] and a manual voter list be made.

In decision 89- 1397 the IEC ordered that in polling stations where biometric machines failed to work or were not delivered, technical options [not clear what it means] should be used to solve the problem. If the problem remains [unresolved], contingency machines or the machines belonging to the closed polling centres should be used. If the problem still remains [unresolved], the voting should continue based on the voter list and people should be allowed to vote. At the end, the polling station chairperson and monitors should log the issue in the journal and get the approval of the agents and observers. 

It further decided that in polling stations where employees arrived late (the IEC said that some of the teachers working as IEC staff had been unable to report on time due to security problems) or election materials arrived late, voting would be extended (the written statement said 6pm, while the IEC chairperson during the press conference said that it should be extended until 8 pm] and the voting should continue until [all]the voters who are in queue by that time have voted. Fort he the polling centres that were not opened until 1 pm, the elections will be held tomorrow. 

(2) The IEC polling and vote counting procedure says that “the polling station chairperson shall announce the opening of the polling station for voting at 7am in the presence of agents and observers.”

(3) On the subject of unavailability of voter lists, the IEC decided that:

In polling stations where the voter list is not available at all or some letters [of the names] are missing, the voter list should be printed by the provincial offices and sent to the polling centres that are close to the provincial offices, and in other [faraway] polling centres, voting should be conducted based on the voter confirmation stickers [whoever has tazkera labelled with election stickers tied to the same polling centres be allowed to vote] and a manual voter list be made for them in accordance with the voter list sample [similar to the printed and real voter list] and approved by the chairperson and monitors of the polling station. [In this case], If the list of the excluded [those who had registered to vote but were later excluded from the voter list by the IEC] is available in the polling stations, the voters who are on this list cannot vote.

The text was unclear and AAN has put explanations in brackets; IEC deputy spokesperson Kobra Rezayi has confirmed our understanding.

(4) A polling centre consists of least two polling stations, one for female and one for male voters.

 

 

 

Source : © European Union, 2018 - EP

Tomorrow’s parliamentary vote will use biometric voter verification machines, the first time ever in an Afghan election. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) has said the use of these machines in every polling station will boost transparency and deter fraud. Yet questions abound. The decision was made at the last minute and because of political pressure. There are concerns that the system can trace fraud, but not prevent it, and that its linking of (encrypted) voter data to ballot papers raises questions about the secrecy of the vote. The IEC, in the meantime, seems mainly to have been preoccupied with the logistical task of actually receiving and shipping the devices to the provinces. On the eve of the election, AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili, lays out the new procedures and delves into the host of new problems which the new system could spawn (with input from Martine van Bijlert).

AAN has put together a dossier of dispatches related to the coming elections, looking at preparations and political manoeuvring. Each dispatch in the Election Conundrum series will be added to it.

What exactly did the IEC decide? A last-minute compromise

In a last-minute decision, only about one month before the election, the IEC decided to procure, ship and distribute 22,000 biometric devices to verify the identity of voters at polling stations on election day. In its official decision of 3 October 2018, the IEC said the last-minute change was made “to ensure more transparency, mitigate fraud and gain public confidence in the electoral process.” This was also reflected in its outreach video released on its Facebook page on 14 October 2018, only six days before the poll. Observers criticised the decision as hasty. Yusuf Rashid of Free and Fair Elections Afghanistan (FEFA) told AAN on 16 October 2018 that such a last-minute decision could have been justified if there had been previous technological infrastructure investment, expertise, and experience, all of which were absent. He called the decision unprofessional: “The IEC started from zero andon a much too short notice.”

However, the IEC had come under increasing pressure as it became clear that its new voter registration drive, that was implemented earlier this year (see here), had not resulted in a clean database of voters. A large number of political parties joined forces and – impractically – called for a completely new biometric voter registration. The current decision appeased the demands of the political parties, but has not solved the election’s looming problems to do with

How did the IEC come to its decision? Political party demands

At a conference in Kabul on 24 February 2018, the leaders and officials of 21 political parties and groups gathered to demand a change to the electoral system. (1) At the time, they were not yet calling for biometric voter registration. The IEC rejected their demand and gave a statement that, “Changing the electoral system at this sensitive time would seriously affect the preparations for the upcoming elections, and probably may [sic] result in delaying the elections.” On 25 March 2018, the political parties reiterated their position and threatened to reconsider their cooperation with the IEC if it continued to take “unconsidered stances.” (See AAN’s previous report here)

On 14 July 2018, the leaders of the parties met again. (2) This time they called on the government and the IEC to suspend voter registration and use biometric technology to start voter registration anew, calling the manual voter registration “flawed and fraudulent” (see media reports here  and here). The voter registration was launched on 14 April and ended on 6 July. (For details about its procedures, see AAN’s previous reporting here and here). The IEC was at the stage of verifying the registration at IEC headquarters when the parties made their call to suspend the whole process.

A joint committee was established on the president’s orders, to discuss the political parties’ demands; it consisted of representatives of the political parties, the government and the IEC, led by second Vice-President Sarwar Danesh. During one of the technical meetings, on 1 August 2018, a German company called Dermalog gave a presentation on the use of ‘biometric technology’. This was less than three months before the poll. (3) In the committee’s last of five meetings, on 5 August 2018, according to Danesh’s media office, the committee concluded that the government “had stressed the use of biometric technology in elections more than any other organisation in the past. Now if the IEC agrees, the government does not have any problem [with it] and also calls on the IEC to pave the way to use this technology in the [next] presidential election.” (emphasis added) See also here) (4)

On 8 August 2018, the IEC reiterated this same conclusion, saying that since only around 70 days were left before the election, it was no longer possible to procure and implement the necessary technology and promised  to use technology in the presidential elections scheduled for 20 April 2019, to ensure more transparency.

However, the opposition did not accept the IEC’s reasoning and threatened to reject the results of an election which used the manual voter registration and in the absence of any change to the electoral system (see this Khabarnama report) quoting Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi, head of the New National Front of Afghanistan, who satirically likened the manual registration system to “Mullah Nasruddin’s grave which had doors, but lacked three walls”. They reached  out to more political groupings and on 8 August 2018 leaders and officials of the Grand National Coalition (5), the Council for Protection and Stability of Afghanistan (see the council’s background here) and independent figures issued a joint statement (see here and here) giving the government and the IEC a two-week ultimatum to (a) announce biometric voter registration for both the parliamentary and presidential elections; (b) change the electoral system to a multidimensional representation (MDR) system (background here); and (c) pave the way for  political parties and civil society organisations to effectively monitor all electoral processes. After the two weeks passed without any result, the parties announced the launch of a “civil disobedience campaign” (media report here).

In mid-August 2018, President Ashraf Ghani issued a decree tasking the Central Statistics Office (CSO) with buying “modern technology” to verify the exact number of voters (media report here). It was unclear at the time what the decree referred to and whether this would include a biometric identification system. On 29 August, during a demonstration in Kabul, the political parties said they would continue their protests until their demands were met (media report here and here).

On 1 September 2018, the Grand National Coalition increased the pressure as it displayed to the media what it said were “thousands” of fake tazkeras with voter registration confirmation stickers. The tazkeras had photos of well-known government officials, MPs and deceased people, and included multiple documents with the same pictures on them. The coalition said it had collected the fake documents with the help of IEC employees (although it was not clear how the IEC employees themselves had obtained them).The Afghanistan Central Civil Registration Authority (ACCRA) responded by saying that the tazkeras the Grand National Coalition had displayed had no legal validity and called on the security and judicial agencies to investigate how the coalition had got hold of them and identify the perpetrators of the forgery. A day later, on 2 September 2018, the IEC tried to reassure the public that it had “created a database in which all voter registration books that had been sent to polling centres in the provinces, districts and villages are recorded and can be tracked.” (6) The IEC further accused the Grand National Coalition of trying to sabotage the national election process and of disturbing public opinion.

This did not end the commotion. On 3 September, BBC Persian claimed it had been able to verify that several of the fake tazkeras and stickers displayed by the Grand National Coalition had been entered into the IEC’s database. According to the BBC report, it had taken 50 fake tazkera and 35 election stickers to the IEC where they were checked against the database in the presence of IEC commissioner Mazallah Dawlati and head of the IEC’s technology department Ibrahim Sadat. All five tazkeras that were checked were found in the system. In one case, the report said, three fake tazkeras had been made for one individual, with all details recorded in the system. The IEC’s Sadat was quoted as saying that there might be tens of thousands of such tazkeras and they may have been entered into the IEC database. On 4 September, President Ghani appointed a “competent commission” led by the Attorney General’s Office to investigate fraud in the distribution of tazkeras.

On 15 September 2018, supporters of the Grand National Coalition forcibly closed the IEC offices in three ‘heavyweight’ provinces: Herat, Balkh and Kandahar (media reports here and here). The Herat office was re-opened by force on the same day, on the order of Herat’s provincial police chief General Aminullah Amarkhel. The police dispersed the protestors by firing shots in the air, and rolled up their protest tent, injuring and arresting some people in the process (see AAN’s previous reporting from Herat here). Senior deputy interior minister for security Akhtar Muhammad Ibrahimi told the media on 15 September that he had ordered security forces in the provinces to not allow any person or group to close provincial offices, telling them they could “use force if necessary.”  On 17 September 2018, however, the coalition’s supporters proceeded to shut down the IEC office in Nangrahar (media report here). All this happened at a very crucial time, when the IEC offices had to be in full swing in order to prepare for the looming elections.

On 19 September 2018, the IEC made its first move towards public acceptance of the political parties’ demands when IEC chairman Abdul Badi Sayyad told a press conference: “We are currently in contact with different companies for the biometric registration of voters on the parliamentary election day.” Sayyad added that their only concern was that the election process should continue to be controlled by the IEC (media report here) – seemingly a reference to concerns that they might be forced to outsource a key component of the vote to other government institutions or private companies. On 22 September, less than a month before the poll, IEC spokesman Hafizullah Hashemi told the media that the IEC’s assessment of one biometric system on 20 October had been completed “by up to 70 per cent, but there are still questions. We hope we can find answers for them.” He also hinted that Dermalog would be the company providing the technology as he said that a German company had presented its proposals for a biometric system and that discussion on this was ongoing.

On 24 September 2018, the Grand National Coalition announced that two of their major demands had been accepted and that they had allowed the reopening of the IEC provincial offices they had closed down. Muhammad Nateqi of the of the Grand Coalition told AAN that although biometric voter verification on election day had not been their first option, the parties had “accepted it out of necessity.”

What did the IEC do after it decided to go biometric?

On 27 September 2018, the IEC announced that 4,000 sets of biometric devices had arrived in Kabul and 18,000 other sets would be delivered shortly – this happened on 5 or 6 October 2018 (see here. All of this happened while, as reported by the president’s office,  the contract was only approved four days later, on 1 October. On 10 October 2018, IEC spokesman Hafizullah Hashemi announced that 10,000 – almost half – of the biometric devices had been charged, updated with local languages and packaged. (7)

IEC chair Gula Jan Abdul Badi Sayyad told a number of political parties on 14 October 2018, less than one week before the poll, that all the biometric devices had been sent to 33 provinces (Ghazni is not holding parliamentary elections) after having been “received and activated.” He also said the company had provided two servers to the IEC, which would be “installed and activated by technical personnel of the company in the next few days.” This was echoed by IEC spokesman Hafizullah Hashemi who told a press conference on the same day that the devices had been delivered to the 33 provinces and their transportation to the districts would be completed by the end of the week.

In the meantime, on 3 October 2018, the IEC signed its official decision to use biometric voter verification. Itapproved an annex to the polling and vote-counting procedures, on how to use the devices, on 7 October 2018 – less than two weeks before election day.

What will the biometric machines do?

The biometric machines do not replace the old, manual voter registration or the manual voting system. Instead, they represent an attempt to introduce an additional anti-fraud measure, following questions about the integrity of manual voter registration, and the pressure from political parties. At the polling station, a voter’s biometric data is registered before he or she casts their vote. The data is then entered both into a central database and printed and attached – in encrypted form – to the ballot paper. According to the IEC, this will enable them to identify those who vote more than once, and to invalidate duplicate votes and ballots that are without biometric verification sticker or that have fraudulent voter details.

According to the IEC’s new procedures (the main parts of which have been reproduced in the annex to this dispatch, below), the biometric voter verification machines are configured to capture the following data:

• Fingerprints of both the right and left index fingers (90 per cent of the finger should be placed on the machine to minimise error; if a voter does not have an index finger, the fingerprint of the thumb of the same hand will be captured; if the voter does not have a thumb either, the fingerprint of any other finger of the same hand will be captured; if a voter does not have any fingers, a photo is mandatory, regardless of whether the voter is male or female);
• Photo of the voter’s face with a voting screen in the background to show that it was taken at a polling station – optional for women (8);
• Photo of the voter’s tazkera and the voter registration confirmation sticker that was fixed on the voter’s tazkera during the latest round of voter registration;
• A printed QR code sticker that includes the polling centre code, the date of voting, the time of voting, a unique code and an encrypted QR image (see the IEC’s 3 October decision for more details.

The data capture will be carried out by the biometric registration officer (previously the queue controller) of the polling station, who will then guide the voter to the ballot paper issuer. The ballot paper issuer will be responsible for:

• Preparing a ballot paper for the voter
• Inking the index finger of the voter
• Collecting the biometric certificate (QR sticker) from the printer
• Attaching the biometric certificate (QR sticker) on the top left side of the stamp on the back of the ballot paper.
• Giving the ballot paper to the voter and guiding him/her to the voting booth.

According to the IEC, ballot papers that do not have a QR sticker will be invalidated, as will multiple votes (that have been cast under the same identity). Both the IEC procedures and the publicity campaign say that only the first of any multiple votes will be valid. The other duplicate votes will be invalidated and the violators “will be prosecuted.” But there are doubts as to whether the IEC will be able or willing to implement this stringently, particularly if irregularities are widespread, as was the case in previous elections.

What if the biometric machines are not used or not used properly?

First, there is the concern over what happens if machines are not delivered to the polling stations or if IEC employees fail to operate them properly, or at all. On 13 October, a week before the election, IEC deputy spokesman Abdul Aziz Ibrahimi told Hasht-e Sobh that the IEC would train 125,000 employees on how to use the system by Wednesday 17 October. Experts, however, doubt the quality of the training and whether all employees will have indeed learned how to operate the machines in such a short period of time. Added to this is the concern that the machines have not gone through proper field testing, a common necessary practice when preparing to use new technology in elections.

The rules also appear to have been made on the fly, with still some room for ‘discretion’. On 7 October 2018, IEC spokesman Hashemi said that the IEC had decided to accept only the votes of the people registered on biometric devices, but that the IEC had not yet decided what to do if biometric devices were not delivered to all polling stations on time, or if the devices became dysfunctional. “If any problem happens with the transportation [of the devices] or any other problem arises,” said Hashemi, “the commission will make a decision on the day.”

The IEC’s annex on the voting and counting procedures says that:

The use of biometric machine is mandatory at each polling station. If the biometric machine in a polling station stops functioning for any reason or has not been delivered to a polling station due to problems, the contingency biometric machines or biometric machines of another polling station shall be used.

However, it does not state what should be done if no functioning machine can be found, or what the IEC will do with the voting data if IEC staff do not (properly) use the machines.

Although the IEC has stated that it will invalidate all ballots that do not carry a proper QR sticker, it may find this difficult to uphold if this affects large numbers of polling stations or certain areas more than others. In past elections, safeguards and fraud triggers were often abandoned when it turned out that large portions of the polling station staff – intentionally or unintentionally – had not followed procedures. As one international expert highlighted in a conversation with AAN, all these questions mean that the IEC has “stored up many difficult decisions.”

Moreover, it turns out that the machines can be deliberately misused. On 4 October 2018, Tolo TV reported that the head of the CSO had called the devices that were just coming into the country “flawed,” as it turned out they could record duplicate voters without alerting anyone. CSO head Ahmad Jawid Rasuli said that if a voter registered on one device twice, it would show that he or she had already voted, but if that voter went to another polling station, they would be able to vote there. He also said that it would only be possible to detect the duplicate or multiple votes only after the votes had been counted and that it would be up to the IEC officials whether they discarded the duplicate votes or added them to the total.

Muhammad Nateqi, a member of the Grand National Coalition, told AAN on 16 October that when they tested the device at the IEC, they found that voters could vote more than 45 times by playing around with their fingerprints, registering more than once by using different fingers each time. He said thatthe machine still printed the QR stickers, as if the identification had been valid. (9)

In response to these issues, the political parties raised their concerns on 6 October 2018, They demanded that (a) the biometric technology should be used online wherever there is internet, as offline use could lead to a huge wave of duplicate and invalid votes which would cause a lot of problems when they have to be cleared after the data is loaded onto the central server; (b) biometric verification should be used countrywide and that from polling stations where the biometric fingerprint was not carried out, the votes should be invalidated; (c) political parties and civil society organisations should be allowed to fully observe the central database to ensure that the separation of valid votes from duplicate ones was not manipulated and that there should be a separate audit of the ballot boxes in which there were duplicate votes and the audit of the boxes in which the number of ballots differed from the biometric statistics; (d) the fingerprint of two index fingers and the photo of the voter and their tazkera should be mandatory; (e) because the manual voter registration with its stickers was plagued by fraud and a large number of people had not been able to register, every eligible Afghan should have the right to vote at any polling stations by providing an identification document on polling day.

Some of their demands appear to be IEC policy, although it is not clear to what extent they will be upheld, while others – in particular the wish that all Afghans regardless of their registration status should be allowed to vote – do not seem to have been accepted. There is however still a considerable lack of clarity, as the rules were hastily made while the IEC scrambled to make this happen in time.

Who is in charge of the biometric system?

There has also been a lack of clarity, and some concerns, over who would be in charge of the implementation of the system and the management of the data. Yusuf Rashid of FEFA wondered whether the IEC would undertake the management of the biometric or if it was some special company. If a special company had the responsibility for the biometric voter verification on the election day, he said, the political and legal credibility of the company should be carefully reviewed. Muhammad Nateqi of the Grand National Coalition raised the question of whether the IEC would guarantee that the gathered data would not be handed over to any group or agency and said it had to specify where the final data would be collected and kept.

On 27 September, Ahmad Jawid Rasuli, the head of the CSO, reiterated that the biometric technology belonged to the IEC and that no other agencies, including the CSO, could access its data. He told the media that “No agency has access to the [biometric] system. We alone had the responsibility to provide it.” On the same day, IEC officials stressed that the IEC itself had “collected all equipment directly from the airport, so no other organization could meddle in the process” and that it would be the IEC that would employ the biometric operators on election day.

However, the management of the system is obviously more than just the physical custody of the devices. AAN’s conversations with both national and international sources have, for instance, shown that the CSO has been the main agency in charge of the procurement and has been most closely aware of the details. This was illustrated when, during a joint meeting of the IEC, CSO, civil society organisations and donors on 26 September 2018, the IEC commissioners asked the head of the CSOto provide information on how the system would be used on election day.

IEC officials have insisted that the biometric devices are secure and that no one will be able to access the data even if they are stolen. This was said in response to concerns that strongmen or local commanders could take them and meddle with the data. (Media report here). However, since the details of the contract are not known and it was not the IEC that determined the specifications of the biometric solutions or carried out the procurement, there is a question as to who controls the coding and programming of the machines and the servers. AAN’s conversations show that Dermalog’s engineers and technicians have been at the IEC in Kabul to assist in setting up the server. However, they will apparently not be in the country on election day, in a bid to dispel concerns about the ownership of the system. This could be problematic, if problems arise.

There have also been questions about the quality of the devices and the process of procurement. On 11 October 2018, Tolonews reported that the devices that had been delivered differed from the samples that had been shown to the IEC by the government before it signed the contract with Dermalog. For instance, these biometric devices, Tolo said, do not bear Dermalog’s logo and the power bank and chargers are “made in China.” This has led to doubts as to the quality and specification of the delivered devices.

The contract that was signed with Dermalog has, moreover, not been made public and there is no clarity about the way the procurement was done. However, it appears to have been single-source and without a regular tender procedure. This is allowed only under certain conditions. (10) A National Procurement Authority press release on 16 October 2018 called it a “government to government (G2G) contract” with both the German company and the German government assuring the standardisation of the devices and systems. German embassy officials in Kabul have, however, told AAN that Berlin was not in the deal and that the biometric machines were not part of their government’s official assistance to the Afghan government.(11) Other donor sources also told AAN that the money for the devices had not been taken from the funds they contributed for the elections through UNDP. It seems that the procurement was financed from the government’s own budget. (12)

A whole host of new concerns

In an attempt to address rising concerns over a faulty registration process, the IEC has introduced a new anti-fraud system that has a host of concerns of its own. So far, nobody has had the time – or the information – to fully assess or prepare for the possible problems this might cause.

First, there is the concern over what will happen if the machines are not delivered to the polling centres, if they are delivered but not used, and if they are not used properly. The IEC says they will invalidate all ballots without the required QR sticker, but they may be forced to rethink this if the number of invalidations becomes very high.

Second, there is a continuing concern over multiple voting, as several tests have shown that devices will accept registrations that have already been made on other machines and duplicate registrations by those playing around with fingerprints and photographs to get multiple QR stickers. It is not clear how strong the capacity of the servers is to recognise such duplications. Moreover, there seems to be a fair amount of discretion where the IEC can decide how stringently they want to track and address the irregularities that the system could find.

Third, there is concern about the lack of clarity regarding what will happen to the data after the elections. It is also not clear whether the data can or will be used to clean up the voter list ahead of the presidential election, slated to be held on 20 April 2019.

Fourth, there are concerns around who has control over and access to the system and its data. Since the details of the contract are not known and it was not the IEC that carried out the procurement, there is a question about who controls the coding and programming of the machines, as well as the servers. The last-minute decision to change the procedures, against the IEC’s wishes, appears to have further undermined the IEC’s independence and its control over the electoral processes and materials used for the elections. There is moreover a complete lack of clarity on how immune – or not – the system is to hacking, especially given that this has become a growing reality and concern, globally.

Fifth,the constitution (as well as the electoral law) stresses that elections, voting and ballot should be “free, general, secret and direct.” Given the fact that a sticker with – albeit encrypted – voter data will be fixed to each ballot paper, the secrecy of the vote appears to be under question. This is especially the case as the QR image can be read with the right software. AAN’s conversations with different interlocutors within the international community show that this concern has still not been resolved.

Finally, the last-minute decision to use biometric verification has led to a fair amount of ambiguity which could easily be – and, on past record usually is – exploited. It is also debatable whether the last-minute changes were legal given the fact that article 19 of the electoral law stipulates that the IEC cannot amend the laws and procedures during the electoral process.

The biometric machines are intended to mitigate fraud, but they have changed the rules of the game at the last-minute, complicated the voting procedure and added major concerns.

 

 

(1) These are the 21 parties that first coalesced around these demands in February 2018. Since then, they claim that the number has increased up to 35 (see here).

• [Hezb-e] Eqtedar-e Melli
• Afghan Mellat
• [Hezb-e] Paiwand-e Melli
• Jabha-ye Nawin-e Melli Afghanistan
• Jabha-ye Nejat-e Melli Afghanistan
• Jamiat-e Islami Afghanistan
• Jombesh-e Melli Islami Afghanistan
• Herasat-e Islami Afghanistan [previously known as Hezb-e Wahdat-e Melli Islami-ye Afghanistan]
• Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan
• Harakat-e Islami-ye Mutahed Afghanistan
• Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami Mardom-e Afghanistan
• Hezb-e Islami Afghanistan [both Hekmatyar and Arghanidwal factions]
• Hezb-e Islami-ye Mutahed Afghanistan
• Hezb-e Etedal-e Afghanistan
• [Hezb-e] Haq wa Adalat
• Rawand-e Hefazat az Arzeshha-ye Jihad wa Muqawamat
• Hezb-e Qeyam-e Melli Afghanistan
• Mahaz-e Melli Islami Afghanistan
• Nahzat-e Hambastagi-ye Melli Afghanistan
• [Hezb-e] Wahdat-e Islami Afghanistan
• [Hezb-e] Wahdat-e Islami Mardom-e Afghanistan

(2) Those attending the meeting were: Hezb-e Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; Jamiat-e Islami leader and foreign minister Salahuddin Rabbani; Hezb-e Islami Wahdat-e Mardom leader and deputy chief executive Mohammad Mohaqeq; son of Jombesh-e Melli leader and first Vice-President Abdul Rashid Dostum, Bator Dostum; representative of former President Hamed Karzai, Zerar Ahmad Moqbel; member of Council for Protection and Stability Yunus Qani; leader of Hezb-e Mahaz-e Melli Sayyed Hamed Gilani, and head of New National Front of Afghanistan Anwar-ul Haq Ahadi. (see here.)

(3) Sayyed Mosavi, the chief executive officer of MyICT, a local partner of Dermalog, told AAN on 17 October that Dermalog and MyICT had been approached by “friends in the government, political parties and the IEC” in July 2018 to offer a biometric solution, since they had also submitted a proposal for hybrid technology when the government had earlier explored the use of full biometric technology (for details on the earlier decision to implement “plan B” – manual instead of biometric voter registration – see AAN’s previous reporting here). Mosavi said that they had, in the end, not participated in the earlier – biometric registration and polling – bid “since the IEC had wanted to purchase only the hardware, not the solutions. It simply wanted to buy 8,000 devices, whereas the trump card in these devices is the solution that provides the possibility of de-duplication.” A similar concern was communicated by Smartmatic, a company that had also been an early contender to provide an “integrated technology-based solution proposal” to address electoral fraud. In a 5 September 2018 letter to the IEC, which AAN has seen, Smartmatic wrote that it would not participate in the tender as “the way it was structured exposed the automation project to a high risk of implementation failure” since it did not include essential implementation services, but simply involved the purchase of “off the shelf hardware.” A similar case – hardware without proper fraud prevention and de-duplication solutions – could be made for the current approach that has been chosen.

(4) With respect to the parties’ demand to change the voting system from SNTV to MDR, the vice-president’s media office reported that the committee had concluded that this proposal “in addition to the time constraints, has its own complexity and thus, requires a broad national debate. Even if this proposal could be passed through a presidential legislative decree, it might still be rejected by the parliament. Therefore, the best way is that the [next] Afghan parliament [should] decide about changing the electoral system.”

(5) The Grand National Coalition was launched on 26 July (media report here). It is an expansion of the proto ‘Ankara coalition’ that was formed in June 2017 (AAN background here) to include the New National Front (AAN background here), Mehwar-e Mardom (AAN background here) and influential figures from the Greater Kandahar Unity and Coordination Movement and the Eastern Provinces Coordination Council (AAN background here).

(6) The statement saidthe IEC was able to establish which registration books belonged to which polling centre, who had been responsible for transporting, distributing and using them and who had done the registration in each polling centre. The IEC also said that, based on reports it had received and using its tracking system, it had found that 60 registration books had gone missing or had been burned. The books had been tracked and invalidated and would not be included in the voter list.

(7) Deputy IEC spokesperson Kobra Rezayi told AAN on 17 October that the updates they made to the settings includedchanging the operating language into Dari and Pashto, and entering the province, district, polling centre and polling station (male or female). According to the IEC procedure, however, these are entries that need to be made at the polling stations on election day:

The IEC procedure tasks the queue controller with making the following entries after switching on the machine at the polling stations on elections day:

• Province
• District
• Polling centre code
• Polling station code
• After switching on the biometric machine, the biometric registration officer should go to the statistics option and show the agents and observers that no data has been recorded.

At the end of the vote, the biometric registration officer will show the agents and observers how many voters have been recorded.

(8) On 3 October 2018, the IEC, in decision number 74-1397, determined that the taking of facial photographs of women would be optional. Three IEC members – deputy for operations Wasima Badghisi and commissioners Maliha Hassan and Mazallah Dawlati – disagreed with this decision.

(9) Mosavi of the MyICT told AAN that they had been told to offer a solution that was “cheap, simple and understandable to the public. It is a portable device. If the procedures are implemented and two index fingers are fingerprinted, it can prevent duplicate votes. The de-duplication can happen in two phases. The preliminary de-duplication can be performed by the devices at the polling stations, as it will show when the same fingers are entered [at that station]. After that, when the devices are retrieved and all data loaded into the server, the server can de-duplicate two similar fingers. The full de-duplication can be done by the server, but not on the elections day.” He also said that “a solution able to capture all ten fingers, iris and face would have been better, but we were told that due to limited budget and time, we should come up with a solution that could prevent ‘buji buji-level’ fraud [ie fraud on the level of gunnysack’, mass fraud, not just the odd individual].” He concurred with Nateqi, however, that “one person could deliver 35 to 45 patterns of fingerprints.” There is also the concern that the IEC’s decision not to photograph women will pave the way for fraudulent voting.

(10) According to rule 22 of the general procurement rules, such single-source procurement may only be used when: 1) a particular potential bidder has exclusive rights in respect to the provision of goods, works and services or the procurement can only be conducted from single source; 2) there is an emergency need for the goods, works or services, involving an imminent threat to public health, welfare or safety, or an imminent threat of damage to property, and engaging in open tendering proceedings or other procurement methods would be impracticable or; 3) where the estimated value of the procurement does not exceed 5,000 Afghanis (around 70 USD). (See the Dari version of the rules of procedure here);  see also previous AAN reporting about a similar procurement by the IEC of tablets used for polling centre assessment here.

The political parties in their 6 October statement called on the government to share the contract with the people of Afghanistan so they could know the details.

(11) The NPA statement said that the contract “with the largest German company by the name of Dermalog Identification System” had been entered into “in collaboration with [CSO] … through a government to government (G2G) contract.” It further said that the total cost of “22,000 central biometric devices and systems including: printers, batteries, software, electoral stickers etc. is more than 18 million EUR paid by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. … Moreover; the contract will control and support [sic] by the Ministry of Finance (BUNDESDRUCKERE) of Germany.”

The German government is an indirect minority stakeholder in Dermalog, as a state-run printing company called Bundesrucherei has a 20 per cent share. German embassy officials told AAN that the company has knowledge and experience, designed the devices and the software itself and delivered the machines with “speed on a very short notice,” but that it might have partners in other countries. This was in response to the media reports that the delivered devices had been made in China.

 

Annex English translation of new procedures on using biometric machines

This is an English translation of an annex to the polling and vote counting procedure about using biometric machines. AAN obtained the original Dari version on 14 October from the head of the IEC legal department, Jafar Nuri. In this version, the queue controller of a polling station is tasked with capturing the biometric data, while in an earlier version that AAN had obtained, the biometric data capturing was assigned to the identification officer. In this version, the duties of queue controller have been given to the polling station chairperson. An international who was privy to the IEC internal discussion told AAN that that the IEC had been struggling to decide who should do the biometric data capturing. AAN is not sure if this is the final version to be applied tomorrow, 18 October. (In this translation, AAN excludes the introduction).

Poll opening

• A voter shall carry his/her citizenship tazkerabearing the voter registration confirmation sticker on the election day.
• No one has the right to take a photo or video of their own ballot or that of any other person. In order to adhere to the principle of the secrecy of the ballot and prevent its violation, carrying any photographic or video equipment behind the voting booth is prohibited.

(3)   The body searcher is duty-bound to prevent voters from bringing in the above-mentioned equipment.

(4)   The use of biometric machine is mandatory at each polling station. If the biometric machine at a polling station fails to function properly for any reason or has not been delivered due to problems, the contingency biometric machines or the biometric machines of another polling station shall be used.

The Biometric machine

The biometric machine to be used in the upcoming elections is an electronic device in which multiple types of data applications can be installed.

 

How to use the biometric machines:

Biometric registration will be conducted at exactly the third phase of the polling process by the biometric registration staff (who had been queue controller before):

1. The biometric registration officer shall ensure that the biometric machine has been set in a way that the exact date and time of recording voter information into the biometric machine is set and [then] select the following options after switching on the biometric machine:

• Province
• District
• Polling center code
• Polling station code
• After switching on the biometric machine, the biometric registration officer should go to the statistics option and assure the agents and observers that there is no [pre-]recorded data on it.
• At the end of the process, [the biometric registration officer] shall show the agents and observers how many voters have been recorded.

How to use the biometric QR of the biometric machines:

Use of printer:

• The printer shall be used for printing the biometric confirmation [QR code] for each voter. Once the biometric registration phases are completed, a biometric confirmation with an adhesive QR code will be printed for every voter.
• The biometric QR code certifying the presence of the voter will be printed and fixed onto the rear of the ballot paper to be used by the voter.
• The biometric confirmation will have a unique serial number for each voter which will show that the voter’s information has been recorded on the biometric machines. [The information] comprises the following information:
  • Polling centre code
  • Date of voting
  • Time of voting
  • Encrypted QR code
• After the completion of the biometric process, the biometric officer shall press the “print” option to print the biometric confirmation [sticker] using the printer.
• One biometric confirmation shall be printed for each voter. Re-printing of the biometric confirmation is not allowed.
• Attaching the biometric confirmation on the back of the ballot paper is mandatory.
• The first vote cast by those who have voted multiple times shall be valid and their remaining duplicate votes shall be invalidated.
• Anyone who has voted more than once shallbe identified and introduced to the Complaints Commission to be prosecuted in accordance with the electoral law.

 

Polling phases

1. The chairperson of the polling station, in addition to the duties specified in the Polling and Counting Procedure, shall also undertake to control the queue at the polling station.

2. The identification officer shall see the voter’s tazkera in accordance with the polling and counting procedure

• that it bears a voter registration confirmation sticker
• [he/she should] check the back of the tazkera with a special torch provided to [ensure] there is no sign of a pen whose ink is invisible [has been used].
• check the name of the voter is on the voters list and if it is on the list, mark it with (√)sign
• mark the left-hand side of the voter registration confirmation with a (√)sign with a pen whose ink is invisible.
• guide the voter to biometric registration officer

3. The biometric registration officer (who had previously been the queue controller[in earlier versions of the procedure]) shall ask the eligible voter to:

• Place the entire index fingers of both hands on the machine, first the index finger of the left hand and then the index finger of the right hand, in such a way that 90 per cent of the finger is placed on the machine to minimise the error.

• If the index finger of the voter is not available, the thumb of the same hand shall be used.

• If the thumb is not available, other fingers of the same hand shall be used.
• If fingers of neither hand are not available, no fingerprint shall be captured, and he/she shall be referred to the next option.
• After reading the fingerprints on the machine screen, the machine will record them and the biometric registration officer shall click on “next” to prepare the machine for taking facial photo of the voter.
• The voter’s photo shall be captured in a way that shows the voting booth in the background (the photo shall show that it has been captured at a polling station).
• After taking the facial photo, [the biometric registration officer] shall again click “next” to complete taking the photos of the tazkera and the voter registration confirmation number.
• S/he will take photo of the voter’s tazkera vertically.
• S/he will take a photo of the voter registration confirmation sticker on the back of the tazkera vertically.

Note: If both hands are not available, taking photos of both female and male voters is mandatory.

• The [biometric registration officer] shall go to the print option and guide the voter to the ballot paper issuer

4. The ballot paper issuer:

• The ballot paper issuer, in accordance with the polling and counting procedure, shall separate the ballot and show the voter how to fold the ballot
• Unfold the ballot again and remove the biometric confirmation sticker from the biometric machine printer
• Attach the sticker on top left side of the stamp on the back of the ballot .

 

• check the fingers of both hands of the voter to ensure that his/her fingers have not been inked with indelible ink before
• Clean the voter’s index finger with a handkerchief
• shake the ink bottle and then open it
• then put the index finger of right hands into the indelible ink bottle. The entire finger of the voter should be covered with ink and should touch inside the bottle
• ask the voter not to clean his/her index finger until the ink dries
• give the ballot paper to the voter and guide the voter to the polling booth Note: the voter shall use his/her vote behind the voting booth.

5. The Ballot box controller shall

• guide the voter in casting the ballot in the box
• tell the voter to take his/her tazkera and not put it inside the box

The photo will be used for facial recognition and the system will be able to identify duplicates based on fingerprint and facial photographs, photos of tazkeras, and photos of the voter registration confirmation sticker

• Taking photos of females shall be optional (unless they lack fingers).
• One minute has been considered [sufficient] for each voter [to vote].

Note: biometric machines are configured to work offline

Training of Biometric Staff

• The polling center managers will have the technical skills.
• The training process for biometric staff will be conducted using cascade training methodology as follows:
  • The HQ trainers will train the IT staff.
  • The provincial IT staff will train district electoral officers and their deputies.
  • The district electoral officers and their deputies will train the polling centre managers, polling station chairpersons and the identification officers.
  • The polling station chairpersons will train the ballot paper issuers, the ballot box officers and the queue controllers.

Spoiled Ballot Papers

If a ballot paper is spoiled for various reasons as mentioned in the polling and counting procedure, the ballot paper issuer will act as follows:

• Detach the biometric confirmation sticker from the spoiled ballot paper and re-attach it to the ballot paper to be issued to same voter. On the spoiled ballot paper, on the bottom of the area identified for attaching the biometric confirmation sticker, write “The biometric certificate is attached on a new ballot paper” and the issue shall also be recorded on the journal.

Vote Counting

• Prior to the commencement of the counting process, the biometric registration officer shall open the statistics option in the biometric machine and show and read the information recorded on it to the agents and observers.
• Vote-counting shall be conducted in accordance with the relevant polling and counting procedure
• Pack the machine and place it in the relevant box, put the temper-evident barcode (TEB) of the polling station results on the biometric machine box
• The ballot papers lacking biometric confirmation stickers will be considered as invalid and counted as invalid votes.

Movement of Biometric Machines

Up to five biometric machines are put into an empty ballot box (without ballot papers) and sent to the provincial offices to be sent on to the districts and to polling centres and stations.

(The number of biometric machines equals the number of polling stations). At the end of the process, the biometric machines shall be put into empty ballot boxes (without ballot papers) again and sealed and along with other sensitive materials handed by the polling station chairperson to the polling centre manager, then to the district electoral officer and then transferred to the provincial office. The seal numbers like other sensitive materials shall be recorded in accordance with polling and counting procedures.