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On the same subject

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  August 17, 2021 | International, Aerospace

  US Army endorses tactical drone contest to replace Shadow

  The Army is embarking on a competitive prototyping effort to replace its Shadow unmanned aircraft with an advanced, runway-independent capability.

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  January 4, 2019 | International, Land, C4ISR

  Here’s the Army’s latest electronic warfare project

  By: Mark Pomerleau Europe's increasingly contested environments have required increasingly complex electronic warfare planning tools. Vehicles, however, can't house the power of command posts, so the Army is adapting an existing system for the tactical edge. The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool, or EWPMT, is a command-and-control planning capability that allows commanders and soldiers to visualize on a screen the effects of electronic warfare in the field. As part of efforts to provide soldiers additional capabilities for EWPMT ahead of the program's scheduled add-ons — an effort dubbed Raven Claw — the Army received feedback that troops at the vehicle or platform level don't need the full application required at command posts. This feedback coincided with other observations from the Raven Claw deployment, which officials said were mixed. “It does what it's supposed to do, but it requires a lot of computing capacity and also it requires a lot of inputs from the [electronic warfare officers] right now,” Col. Mark Dotson, the Army's capability manager for electronic warfare, told C4ISRNET in a November interview. In response, a new effort called Raven Feather “will address both processing consumption and critical EW tasks required at the vehicle/platform level,” Lt. Col. Jason Marshall, product manager for electronic warfare integration at Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told C4ISRNET in response to written questions. “Raven Feather will provide a more tactically focused Graphical User Interface as part of the EWPMT Raven Claw system mounted in the vehicle or loaded into the Mounted Family of Computer Systems (MFoCS).” Dotson added that the Army is eyeing lighter versions of the capability that could be available for lower echelons that may not need as much modeling and simulation. “We're looking at ways to tailor it specifically to the echelon, and then that will help us with the platform we need to put it on,” he said. The modeling and simulation might be important at the staff officer level, he added, but he questioned whether that computing power is needed at the micro-tactical level. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2019/01/03/heres-the-armys-latest-electronic-warfare-project

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  October 22, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Roketsan chief says Tunisia interested in guided bombs for UAVs

  Lale Sariibrahimoglu Tunisia and Indonesia are both interested in acquiring Roketsan guided munitions for their future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to Murat İkinci, the Turkish company's general manager. “Countries like Indonesia and Tunisia, which are in search of unmanned aerial vehicles, have a high demand for the procurement of mini smart munitions MAM-L and MAM-C, the main weapon systems mounted on the Turkish UAVs,” İkinci said in an interview with state-owned Anadolu Agency (AA) on 18 October. It was reported earlier this year that Tunisia had ordered six Anka-S systemsfrom Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), each with two UAVs. However, Africa Intelligence reported in September that the contract had been cancelled as Tunis could not find the funds. The Anka-S is the version of TAI's Anka family that has a satellite communications capability for beyond-line-of-sight operations. Roketsan's MAM-L and smaller MAM-C laser-guided bombs have been integrated with the Anka. These weapons have proved effective when used with the Bayraktar TB2, a smaller Turkish-made UAV, in Syria and Libya earlier this year. “Their usage in recent fights have changed the course of the operations in Turkey's favour,” İkinci noted. https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/rokestan-chief-says-tunisia-interested-in-guided-bombs-for-uavs