October 10, 2018 | International, Land
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — The Army has entered the final stages of hashing out requirements for ramping up Stryker combat vehicle lethality and will make a decision in January on what it wants in order to increase its battlefield effectiveness.
The service in January will hold an Army Requirements Oversight Council meeting, with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, to cement requirements on how it will improve the Stryker fleet's lethality, according to Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the service's new G-8 lead, in charge of program development and justification.
The AROC will produce a “kind of ‘Y in the road' of what we think we are going to want to look at,” when it comes to making the Stryker more lethal, Pasquarette told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the United States Army's annual meeting.
The Army conducted a test fire of one of its 30mm cannon solutions on Stryker at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, as recently as last month, he noted.
“We know we believe the Stryker has to have capability to defeat light armor,” Pasquarette said. “We are developing the concept more to validate that on the front-end.”
The Army is looking at roughly three different caliber weapons systems, he said. They include a couple of Common Remotely Operated Weapon Stations with different caliber weapons, as well as a 30mm cannon like what was outfitted on Strykers that went to the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany earlier this year.
“We want to make sure the concept is tight, about what we think we need based on threat and capability we want to have, then we will have to see what direction we go,” which could include competitions to upgun the fleet — or parts of the fleet — in the future, Pasquarette said.
“We are still determining balance. Does everyone need to have this, or is it just parts of the fleet?” Pasquarette asked. “How do we want to fight Stryker units, if we have this capability in there?”
May 15, 2023 | International, Land
Germany has placed an order worth 1.087 billion euros ($1.20 billion) for a further 50 Puma infantry fighting vehicles with Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW), the Frankfurt-listed German arms maker said on Monday.
December 27, 2022 | International, Aerospace
The F-35 Joint Program Office told services a fuel tube failure may have caused an F-35B's crash, which has now led to some fighters being grounded.
May 8, 2019 | International, Aerospace
by Sandra Erwin Airbus is ramping up satellite production in Florida and hopes to attract Pentagon buyers. WASHINGTON — The first project of the newly created Space Development Agency will be to design a large constellation of commercially produced satellites in low Earth orbit to serve as a communications layer and take over military space missions ranging from missile tracking to navigation. Airbus is preparing to start cranking out 32 satellites every three weeks for the broadband venture OneWeb. It built an assembly line on Florida's Space Coast to manufacture up to 648 satellites for OneWeb but also hopes to ramp production to fill orders for the Defense Department, intelligence community and other U.S. government buyers, Nicolas Chamussy, the outgoing head of Airbus Space Systems told SpaceNews on Monday at the Satellite 2019 conference. The company received a $2.9 million contract last fall from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to produce satellite buses for DARPA's Blackjack program, an experiment intended to show the military utility of LEO constellations and mesh networks. DARPA will marry up commercial satellite buses with military sensors and payloads. Former DARPA official Fred Kennedy conceived the Blackjack project and is now head of the Space Development Agency. He said the SDA will tap into the commercial industry's mass satellite production capabilities in order to build a military constellation in LEO. Airbus' main satellite manufacturing plant is in Toulouse, France. It now has U.S.-based design teams staffed with U.S. citizens as well as the Florida production facility, Chamussy said. “It's an opportunity for the U.S. government” to take advantage of these capabilities, he said. The U.S. plant only builds commercial satellites but it could be expanded to produce classified spacecraft, he said. The contract with DARPA has been valuable to Airbus to learn about U.S. defense programs and as a stepping stone to possibly other projects, Chamussy said. “With DARPA, we are learning how to work together, we are trying to understand if our platform is a valuable asset for the U.S. government.” The company is focused now on making satellites and installing OneWeb payloads, but “we can install whatever you want,” he said. For the military, the same satellites could carry positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), electronic warfare, Earth observation or weather payloads. “This is the beauty of have a design team and dedicated facility in U.S.,” said Chamussy. Airbus is hoping to be chosen as the satellite supplier to Canadian satellite operator Telesat, which also received a DARPA Blackjack contract to study the use of commercial buses in LEO-based military systems. Airbus is competing against a Maxar Technologies-Thales Alenia Space team for a contract worth an estimated $3 billion to build Telesat's megaconstellation. Chamussy told reporters at a news conference on Monday that the company expects to submit a proposal in the coming months. “We are still waiting for the request for proposals,” he said. Chamussy insisted that the Telesat concept is very different than OneWeb because the Canadian operator is asking for a full “end to end” system that includes not just the satellites but also ground systems and managed services. Airbus announced last month that Chamussy will be stepping down as executive vice president of Airbus Space Systems under Airbus Defence and Space. He will be replaced by Airbus Defence and Space executive Jean-Marc Nasr. Chamussy declined to comment on whether he will stay at Airbus or in what capacity. https://spacenews.com/airbus-eyes-opportunities-in-future-u-s-military-leo-constellations/