Airbus awarded German Armed Forces prime contract for military communications satellite system

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  July 24, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Four companies win contracts to build the Air Force’s Skyborg drone

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Kratos will move forward in the Air Force program to build an AI-enabled drone wingman known as Skyborg. Each company Thursday was awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $400 million, but no seed money was immediately allocated as the firms will have to compete against each other for future orders. Through the Skyborg program, the Air Force wants to field a family of unmanned aerial systems that use artificial intelligence to adapt to battlefield conditions. The Skyborg drone should be cheap enough where the loss of aircraft in combat could be sustained, yet survivable enough so that it could move into a high-end fight and function as a wingman to manned fighter jets. “Because autonomous systems can support missions that are too strenuous or dangerous for manned crews, Skyborg can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for the Air Force,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White, who leads the Air Force's program office for fighters and advanced aircraft. “We have the opportunity to transform our warfighting capabilities and change the way we fight and the way we employ air power.” Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper has said that Skyborg could eventually become smart enough that, like R2-D2 in the Star Wars films, it can autonomously present information and conduct tasks to help decrease fighter pilot workload. The system learns from prior experiences how best to support human pilots. But in the near term, the Air Force wants to use the Skyborg program to integrate an autonomous air vehicle with open mission systems as a way to demonstrate that it can team with a manned fighter, the service said in a statement. “Autonomy technologies in Skyborg's portfolio will range from simple play-book algorithms to advanced team decision making and will include on-ramp opportunities for artificial intelligence technologies,” said Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle, the Air Force Research Laboratory commander. “This effort will provide a foundational government reference architecture for a family of layered, autonomous, and open-architecture UAS.” https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2020/07/23/four-companies-got-contracts-to-build-the-air-forces-skyborg-drone

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  October 10, 2018 | International, Land

  Decision coming soon on who will build prototypes for a new Army light tank

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The Army is expected to make a decision by the end of the year on which companies will build prototype vehicles as part of its light tank competition. The requirement for a Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle to provide infantry brigade combat teams a protected, long-range, cyber-resilient, precision, direct-fire capability for early or forcible entry operations was first laid out in the Army's combat vehicle modernization strategy released in October 2015. The Army is looking to rapidly procure this capability by turning to commercial off-the-shelf technology rather than spend years developing it. Several competitors submitted offerings to the competition in late February in the hopes that they are selected to build 12 prototypes that will be demonstrated and evaluated — and that will ultimately lead to the service selecting a winner to go into production. The low-rate initial production plans are for roughly 54 vehicles — 26 to start, with an option to build 28 more, as well as retrofitting eight of the prototype vehicles. The first unit equipped is planned for 2025. If selected, the contractors have 14 months to deliver MPF prototypes to the Army. A final request for proposals will likely come out in late October or November, and the service will make a decision shortly thereafter. SAIC partnered with Singapore's ST Kinetics and Belgium-based CMI Defense; BAE Systems and General Dynamics Land Systems all submitted written proposals, vehicles and armor coupons for testing. The SAIC team integrated CMI's Cockeril 3105 turret on an ST Kinetics next-generation armored fighting vehicle chassis as its offering. BAE Systems is offering an M8 Buford Armored Gun System with new capabilities and modernized components. GD submitted an offering that combines a version of its latest Abrams turret with a chassis that leverages experience from the United Kingdom's AJAX program. “We have additional new and proven technologies to meet MPF specific requirements,” a GD spokesperson said. The Army has already moved through its testing and evaluation ahead of a decision later this year. Vehicle bid samples were tested to evaluate mobility and firepower performance, and the armor coupons were tested to evaluate protection performance. According to Jim Scanlon, senior vice president and general manager of SAIC's defense systems group, the company did both pre-validation and follow-on testing of its vehicle offering before and after the Army's own evaluation period. The company has brought the vehicle to the Association of the United States Army's annual conference. If selected, SAIC plans to perform final integration work in its Charleston, South Carolina, facility, with the other companies in the team building their contributions in their own facilities. However, Scanlon said, the company is working to come up with ways to do more and more of the production work in the United States, and both companies involved are on board and see moving some work into the country as a necessary investment as big combat vehicle programs gain traction. All options are being considered, Scanlon said. BAE plans to build its EMD prototypes within its manufacturing network including York, Pennsylvania, Aiken, South Carolina, Anniston, Alabama and Sterling Heights, Michigan, according to the company's MPF capture lead Greg Mole. GD said it would not release build locations for the vehicles at this time. The MPF program now falls under the Army's Next-Generation Combat Vehicle cross-functional team's purview, which lies under the new Army Futures Command, charged with modernizing the force more rapidly to maintain overmatch against peer adversaries. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2018/10/10/decision-coming-soon-on-who-will-build-prototypes-for-a-new-army-light-tank

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  May 16, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  The Air Force is looking for new, cheap planes to take the place of advanced fighters — and the 2nd phase of its experiment just started

  Christopher Woody The Air Force has started the second phase of its Light Attack Experiment. The program is looking for cheap aircraft that can be acquired quickly to fill roles currently filled by advanced aircraft. Critics have said such aircraft would expose US pilots to more risks, however. The US Air Force started the second phase of its Light Attack Experiment on Monday, putting the A-29 Super Tucano and AT-6B Wolverine aircraft through more testing at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Air Force officials have touted light-attack aircraft as a cheap option to address low-end threats, like ISIS or other militant groups, and free up advanced platforms, like the F-22 and F-35, to take on more complex operations. Air Force chief of staff Gen. David Goldfein has described the light-attack aircraft as part of a networked battlefield, connecting and sharing information with partner forces in the air and on the ground. "We're looking at light attack through the lens of allies and partners," Goldfein told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "A big part of the Light Attack Experiment is a common architecture and an intelligence-sharing network, so that those who would join us would be part of the campaign against violent extremism." Phase 2 of the experiment The latest phase of the Light Attack Experiment will be a three-month, live-fly experiment intended to gather more information about each aircraft's capabilities, networking ability, and potential interoperability with partner forces, the Air Force said in a release. The first phase of the experiment took place at Holloman in August with four aircraft. In February, the Air Force announced that it had narrowed the field to the two current aircraft. The second phase at Holloman comes in lieu of a combat demonstration, which Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in February the service would forgo. "This second phase of experimentation is about informing the rapid procurement process as we move closer to investing in light attack," Lt. Gen. Arnie Bunch, the military deputy at the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, said in the release. Fighter, attack, and special-operations pilots will take part in this phase of the experiment, working with test pilots and flight engineers from the Air Force, Air National Guard, and Air Force Reserve. They will carry out day and night missions doing air interdiction, close air support, armed overwatch, and combat search and rescue. Addressing the Air Force's pilot shortage Adding light-attack aircraft to the fleet would mean more airframes on which pilots could train in order to maintain their qualifications and prepare to transition to more advanced aircraft — helping address a pilot shortage caused in part by bottlenecks in the training pipeline. "If we can get light attack aircraft operating in permissive combat environments, we can alleviate the demand on our 4th and 5th generation aircraft, so they can be training for the high-end fight they were made for," Bunch said in the release. The Air Force has not committed to pursuing a contract for a light-attack aircraft after the experiment, however. Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris, deputy chief of staff for requirements, told Flight Global that the Air Force hasn't made a final decision, though he said service has reserved more than $2 billion over the next six years should it go forward with production. Critics have said operating such aircraft, even in permissive environments, will expose pilots to more risk. "The last time the US did this in Vietnam, oh boy, it really wasn't pleasant," Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis for aerospace-consulting firm Teal Group, told Air Force Times in February. "They took a lot of casualties, for predictable reasons. It's low, it's slow and vulnerable, and the air defense environment has become a lot more sophisticated." The A-29 Super Tucano is already in service with the Afghan air force, and Wilson said in 2017 that none of those aircraft had been shot down in 18 months of operations. http://www.businessinsider.com/us-air-force-light-attack-experiment-starts-2nd-phase-of-aircraft-test-2018-5