The U.S. Navy is dropping plans to extend by another 10 years the expected 35-year service lives of DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers after it found that the plan was not cost effective, Defense News reported Saturday.

“Service life extensions can be targeted, physical changes to specific hulls to gain a few more years, or a class-wide extension based on engineering analysis,” James Geurts, assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition at the Navy and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said in his written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The Navy has evaluated the most effective balance between costs and capability to be removing the service life extension on the DDG 51 class.”

The Navy is expected to lose 27 DDG 51s between 2026 and 2034 as a result of the cancelation of the hull life extensions. The service said in its 30-year shipbuilding plan for fiscal year 2020 the proposed service life extension for destroyers was key to reaching the 355-ship goal.

The Pentagon has yet to submit its three-decade shipbuilding plan for FY 2021.

About Wash100 

The Wash100 Award, now in its seventh year, recognizes the most influential executives in the GovCon industry as selected by the Executive Mosaic team in tandem with online nominations from the GovCon community. Representing the best of the private and public sector, the winners demonstrate superior leadership, innovation, reliability, achievement and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2020 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2020.

Alexander Mather, a seventh-grade student at Lake Braddock Secondary School, won an essay contest that determined the name of the Mars 2020 rover. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, congratulated Mather who won the Name the Rover contest, the space agency said Friday.

Mather's win renders the rover's name to be "Perseverance," following Curiosity that began Mars exploration in 2012. NASA launched the contest in late August 2019. Experts from different sectors evaluated the 28,000 entries and selected 155 for the semifinals.

"This Mars rover will help pave the way for human presence there and I wanted to try and help in any way I could," said Mather.

The space agency then opened voting to the public, narrowing the competition down to nine finalists who got the chance to talk with NASA officials, astronauts and the winner of the last rover-naming contest in 2009. Perseverance is scheduled to launch in July this year and begin exploration on the red planet's Jezero Crater in February 2021.

Sens. John Thune, R-S.D., Mark Warner, D.-Va. and a three-time Wash100 Award recipient, and Deb Fischer, R.Neb., have unveiled a bill to require the U.S. government's executive branch to maintain the security of communications networks.

The Network Security Trade Act will modify the 2015 Trade Promotion Authority and work to address security gaps in supply chains and communications systems, the office of John Thune said Thursday. The bill will also respond to issues concerning unfair practices of communications equipment suppliers in trade agreements.

“This legislation would ensure the security of equipment and technology that create the global communications infrastructure are front and center in our trade negotiations, because you can’t have free trade if the global digital infrastructure is compromised,” said Thune.