Army Wants Extended Training for Armor, Engineers, Other Combat Jobs

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  May 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Air Force rolls out Advanced Battle Management System devices in COVID-19 fight

  Nathan Strout The U.S. Air Force has begun deploying thousands of personal devices to military personnel and health care providers that allow them to access classified information from home or outside of the office, even though the devices themselves are unclassified. The devices were supposed to be demonstrated during a test of the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System in April, which was delayed to August or September due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation. With the test pushed back, the Air Force decided to begin rolling out the devices to support the fight against COVID-19. “Even in a virtual, COVID environment, the team pulled together very rapidly to do something that we were going to demonstrate in April as a prototype,” said Air Force Chief Architect Preston Dunlap during a virtual Mitchell Institute event May 7. The devices are loaded with SecureView, a software architecture built on an “unclassified at rest” model. “(The software has) the ability to process classified information on a device that's unclassified when you're not using it. So you could literally throw it on the street—no problem. I wouldn't recommend it, but no problem. But then when you use it, you actually can operate and access the information you need much like you would in your office,” explained Dunlap. “We're deploying about 1,000 of those in about three week sort of cycles now to get them out to the force,” said Dunlap. In addition, the Northern Command ABMS team was able to deploy unclassified tablets with SecureView to healthcare workers in New York City and aboard the hospital ship previously deployed to New York City, the USNS Comfort. The team is also pushing out data and applications to those devices to give users real time awareness of patients' health status, Dunlap said. He also said they were using artificial intelligence algorithms to predict how COVID-19 will spread. The software was developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory as part of DeviceOne, a line of effort under the Air Force's ABMS family of systems. ABMS is the Air Force's contribution to the Department of Defense's Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, an ongoing effort to ensure connectivity between the services. Under JADC2, the Department's leaders want sensors to feed data to shooters in near-real time, regardless of domain. As envisioned, JADC2 systems should enable National Reconnaissance Office satellites to feed data to U.S. Army shooters, or U.S. Navy sensors to feed data to Air Force shooters. Dunlap noted that the use of DeviceONE to fight COVID-19 represented a real world on ramp of ABMS. “So from both a classified and unclassified world, seamless devices, mobility, data and applications where you need it, when you need it, are actually being demonstrated before our eyes in a real world current operation,” said Dunlap. “In some sense, you could call that we're actually doing a current ops on ramp to be able to support people and keep people safe.” The Air Force is largely agnostic towards which hardware is used for DeviceONE, said Dunlap. The program utilizes off-the-shelf consumer devices, enabling easy upgrades and keeping costs low compared to other DoD technology efforts. “For DeviceONE, all of the work that the team did was software-based and software security-based, and the hardware piece of that (we) are procuring and competing across the vendors that can provide the laptops, the tablets, the servers in the backend and so forth,” said Dunlap. While the system can be used to access any classification level, the configuration rolled out for COVID-19 support was limited to just the secret level. However, Dunlap said the software can be used for any classification level and was currently in use around the world by several combatant commanders. “It's incumbent for us to be able to provide the security and software on top of (the hardware) that enables our operators to be on that island, on that aircraft, in that Humvee, in the tents, and be able to get the information they need,” said Dunlap. And Dunlap added that the delayed ABMS test will be expanded when it does occur, incorporating Strategic Command and Space Command. Dunlap also hinted that the ABMS test after the August/September test will include Indo-Pacific Command, bringing the on ramp to the operational edge. “There's going to be a variety of key adjustments there,” said Dunlap. “Before, in December, it was mostly a Northern Command focus. We now have a Space Command and a Space Force, and so the predominant thing here is we're going to have the U.S. Space Command Commander, Gen. (John) Raymond, actually be the supported commander for the first time as opposed to a supporting commander.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2020/05/07/air-force-rolls-out-advanced-battle-management-system-devices-in-covid-19-fight/

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  October 9, 2019 | International, Land

  Who Will Build 651 Parachuting Trucks For The Army?

  By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: Three very different teams are vying to build the Army's Infantry Squad Vehicle, a truck tough enough to parachute out of an airplane and then drive away cross-country with nine heavily armed infantrymen. By Nov. 13th, each team owes the Army two vehicles for testing, with the winner getting a contract for 651 ISVs next year. Let's meet the players. The Oshkosh-Flyer team is the closest thing to an incumbent in the competition. The Army had earlier picked the Flyer-72 as an interim air-droppable transport, the A-GMV, and Flyer is offering an upgraded version for the follow-on program, ISV. Actual mass production will be done by Oshkosh, which makes a host of Army trucks — most prominently, the beefed-up successor to the Humvee, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), which the Army and Marine Corps plan to buy over 50,000 of in the coming decades. What's more, Oshkosh plans to build the 5,000-pound ISV on the same assembly line as all its other vehicles, from the 14,000-lb JLTV to 10-ton FMTV dump trucks. (The earlier version of the Flyer-72 was mass-produced by General Dynamics). The ISV will be the lightest vehicle on the Oshkosh line, VP George Mansfield told me, but the company is confident it can build the air-droppable trucks more affordably than Flyer could — and at least as well. In fact, Mansfield said, he expects the Oshkosh-built version to be more reliable. That's in part because of Oshkosh's manufacturing expertise — it won the JLTV contract in large part because its offering broke down less than half as often as uparmored Humvees — and in part because of Flyer's extensive field experience with the earlier versions built for the Army and Special Operation Command. As a team, Mansfield told me, “we've learned a lot about reliability, we've learned a lot about life-cycle cost, that now we can take here at Oshkosh with our extensive knowledge of all the other product lines we sell to the Army.” Polaris and SAIC both have plenty of defense experience. Polaris's DAGOR did lose the earlier A-GMV contest to Flyer, but numerous DAGOR variants are in widespread service with Special Operations Command, the 82nd Airborne Division (shown in the video above), Canada, and other foreign customers the company can't disclose. “The DAGOR is already certified” — by the Army itself — “for all of the transport requirements that the Army is looking for, whether that's internal air transport, sling-load transport, or air-drop,” Polaris VP Jed Leonard told me. And each of those prior customers required tweaks to the platform or special mission equipment — heavy weapons, sensors, radios — that the DAGOR could easily accommodate. Integrating such high-tech kit is SAIC's core competency. While not a manufacturer itself, SAIC has done decades of integration work for the military, most extensively on the MRAP program, fitting other companies' vehicles with the sophisticated electronics that turn a truck into a weapons system. It also provides extensive maintenance and other support worldwide. The two companies have worked together on and off, on small projects, for years, as various customers bought Polaris vehicles and then asked SAIC to equip them for specific military missions. But the current partnership is a big step up for both. The odd man out is GM Defense, which giant General Motors created — in a sense, re-created — not quite two years ago after selling off most of its defense programs back in 2003. GM Defense president David Albritton just came aboard a year ago and has spent much of his time working with “Mother GM” on potential joint projects and spin-offs, from self-driving car technology to hydrogen fuel cells, he told me in an interview. “I'm not reporting any revenues at this point,” he said, although GM Defense does already have some contracts he can't disclose. GM's offering is the only contender without a prior track record in the military. But their ISV is derived from the Chevrolet Colorado, of which US customers have bought more than 100,000 a year of since 2016, giving GM staggering efficiencies of scale no competitor can match. Specifically, the GM ISV a beefed-up, militarized version of the Colorado's offroad racing variant, the ZR2, with which it shares 70 percent of the same parts — parts that are available from Chevy dealers worldwide. GM builds over 10,000 ZR2s a year: a rounding error for General Motors but a megaprogram for the Army. GM's scale advantage is not just in production and parts. It's also in engineering. The company spends over $7 billion a year on R&D, Albritton told me, and its ISV offering includes advanced suspension systems like jounce shocks and dynamic spooling. GM's challenge is overcoming its inexperience in the defense sector — especially, proving it can integrate military electronics onto its civilian-derived vehicle. LRPF: Long-Range Precision Fires. NGCV: Next-Generation Combat Vehicle. FVL: Future Vertical Lift. AMD: Air & Missile Defense. SL: Soldier Lethality. SOURCE: US Army. (Click to expand) The Big Picture Overall, ISV is an especially interesting competition because none of the contenders is a classic defense prime: Oshkosh and Polaris both have lots of civilian customers alongside their extensive military business. Flyer is a subunit of a modest aerospace and defense components-builder called Marvin Group. SAIC is a systems engineering and service firm rather than a traditional Original Equipment Manufacturer. And GM of course is one of the biggest civilian manufacturers in the country. “We make upwards of nine million cars a year,” Albritton told me, each put together out of roughly 30,000 different parts. Compare and contrast the Army's Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program, which is de facto down to a single competitor — defense industry stalwart General Dynamics (which bought GM's previous defense business back in 2003). ISV shows the kind of variety that the Army wants to encourage and needs to infuse innovation and competition into its programs. Yes, at 651 trucks — at least, in the initial 2020 contract — this is a modest program in both size and technological ambition. It's easily overshadowed by the hypersonic missiles, high-speed aircraft, and robotic tanks of the Army's Big Six priorities. By contrast, for the predecessor competition (the one Flyer won) back in 2015, we ran eight stories in three months because there was so little else the cash-strapped and acquisition challenged Army was buying at the time. But the Infantry Squad Vehicle is still an important piece of the larger Army puzzle. The Army's infantry brigades — especially its 82nd Airborne parachutists — are its most strategically deployable units, easily packed into aircraft and flown around the world overnight, while heavy armored forces cram two tanks into one C-17 or, more often, go by ship. But once the infantry arrives, it moves on foot. (Although we bet everyone in the 82nd remembers being called a “speed bump” in this Defense Science Board study.) The idea of ISV is a troop transport light enough to be air-dropped or, more often, delivered by helicopter. That way, the troops can land a long distance from their target — specifically, far enough their transport planes or helicopters aren't shot down by anti-aircraft missiles — and then advance quickly overnight before attacking on foot at dawn. We expect to see all three competing vehicles on the show floor at the Association of the US Army megaconference next week. https://breakingdefense.com/2019/10/who-will-build-651-of-the-armys-parachuting-truck/

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  October 25, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Pourquoi pas un porte-avions franco-européen ?

  OPINION. Le porte-avions offre une capacité militaire majeure à une marine. Son déploiement, lors d'une crise, représente un signal politique fort. L'apparition d'un porte-avions aux couleurs de l'Europe serait certes « hautement symbolique », mais le symbole ne suffit pas dans les questions de défense. Par un groupe de travail au sein de l'association EuroDéfense-France(*). « Le Charles-de-Gaulle aura besoin d'un successeur », souligna Florence Parly, la ministre des Armées, au salon Euronaval en octobre 2018, en lançant une phase d'études pour la construction d'un nouveau porte-avions, qui pourrait entrer en service vers 2030-2035. Ce successeur sera-t-il isolé ? Ou en couple, comme le furent naguère le Clemenceau et le Foch ? Cette solution serait militairement préférable, permettant à la France de toujours disposer d'un b'timent opérationnel, tandis que l'autre serait en période d'entretien ou en refonte. Elle aurait toutefois un coût élevé, celui d'un seul navire étant estimé à 4,5 milliards d'euros. Le porte-avions offre une capacité militaire majeure à une marine. Son déploiement, lors d'une crise, représente un signal politique fort. Dans sa mission Clemenceau, entre mars et juillet derniers, le groupe aéronaval, constitué par le Charles de Gaulle avec ses b'timents d'accompagnement, a participé à l'opération Chammal contre Daech au Moyen-Orient, puis a rejoint la région indo-pacifique pour une série d'exercices avec les marines de l'Inde, des États-Unis, de l'Australie, de la Malaisie et du Japon, et celle de l'Egypte au retour. Combat contre le terrorisme et coopération avec nos alliés ont ainsi conjugué guerre et diplomatie. Dans sa réponse aux propositions d'Emmanuel Macron en vue d'une réforme de l'Union européenne, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, alors successeure d'Angela Merkel à la présidence de l'Union chrétienne-démocrate d'Allemagne et désormais ministre fédérale de la Défense, a écrit en mars de cette année : close volume_off « Dès à présent, l'Allemagne et la France travaillent ensemble au projet d'un futur avion de combat européen... La prochaine étape pourrait consister en un projet hautement symbolique, la construction d'un porte-avions européen commun, pour souligner le rôle de l'Union européenne dans le monde en tant que puissance garante de sécurité et de paix. » Macron et Merkel ont plusieurs fois exprimé l'ambition d'une « armée européenne. » Si l'Europe veut tenir sa place dans le concert mondial, tel qu'il se dessine avec des puissances-continent comme les États-Unis, la Chine, la Russie ou l'Inde, elle doit se doter d'une capacité militaire d'action. Des progrès indéniables sont intervenus depuis 2017, notamment gr'ce à la coopération structurée permanente, le fonds européen de défense, l'initiative européenne d'intervention, mais l'Union européenne reste loin de disposer d'une véritable armée. Un porte-avions aux couleurs de l'Europe ? L'apparition d'un porte-avions aux couleurs de l'Europe serait certes « hautement symbolique », comme l'écrit la responsable allemande, et ce navire pourrait montrer le drapeau de l'Union sur les mers du globe et aux approches des continents. Cependant, le symbole ne suffit pas dans les questions de défense. Un porte-avions est un navire de guerre et, s'il peut remplir des missions diplomatiques de présence, il faut, pour que celles-ci soient crédibles, qu'il soit aussi capable d'intervenir militairement, qu'il sache effectivement combattre. À cet égard, la réalisation d'un porte-avions peut paraître prématurée à ce stade de l'intégration européenne. Florence Parly a, en effet répondu, sur les ondes de RMC en mai dernier qu'on « n'en est pas encore tout à fait là », en évoquant les conditions d'emploi d'un tel navire. Il ne suffit pas de construire un porte-avions, encore faut-il être capable de l'employer, certes pour des missions de présence, mais également, si besoin, pour un engagement armé dans une crise ou un conflit. Or, l'on n'en est pas encore là. La brigade franco-allemande est déployée au Sahel, mais seules ses composantes françaises se battent contre les djihadistes, la partie allemande intervenant dans le cadre d'un mandat de l'Union européenne pour la formation de l'armée malienne ou dans celui de la force onusienne Minusma. Conjuguer les besoins de la France et ceux de l'Europe ? Faut-il alors abandonner l'idée d'un porte-avions européen ? Ne pourrait-on conjuguer les besoins de la France et ceux de l'Europe ? Un second porte-avions serait utile à la marine française. Un porte-avions européen signifierait une étape considérable dans l'affirmation militaire de l'Union, qui est en chemin. Pourquoi la France ne partagerait-elle pas un porte-avions ? Pourquoi ne pas engager la construction de deux porte-avions, le premier français, le second franco-européen. Celui-ci naviguerait sous le pavillon national, celui-là naviguerait généralement sous le pavillon européen et arborerait le pavillon français, quand l'autre serait indisponible. Le premier serait financé uniquement par la France, le second le serait à parité par la France et l'Union européenne. Budgétairement, l'opération serait rentable : la France disposerait toujours d'un porte-avions opérationnel pour un coût probablement inférieur à celui d'un b'timent et demi, une série de deux s'avérant à l'unité moins couteuse que la construction d'un seul ; l'Union européenne acquérait, de même, un porte-avions pour un budget inférieur sans doute à la moitié du coût d'un navire isolé. Mettre en œuvre un groupe aérien de qualité Des questions sensibles seraient à résoudre, l'une des premières concernant le groupe aérien. En effet, la puissance d'un porte-avions réside dans sa capacité mettre en œuvre un groupe aérien de qualité. La France est le seul pays européen à utiliser, comme les Etats-Unis, des catapultes. La Grande-Bretagne, l'Espagne et l'Italie déploient des porte-aéronefs avec des avions à décollage court ou vertical, aux capacités moindres. Le groupe aérien, qui réunirait des appareils capables d'apponter sur les nouveaux porte-avions, serait logiquement composé du futur avion de combat européen, dont le projet a été lancé par la France et l'Allemagne, rejointes par l'Espagne. Des évolutions devraient intervenir chez nos amis, soit, comme en Allemagne, pour reconstituer une aviation embarquée, soit, comme en Italie, pour choisir un avion européen. Des décisions significatives seraient nécessaires, mais ces pays, voire d'autres, pourraient vouloir développer une composante aéronavale moderne, dès lors que le coût budgétaire, né de la coopération européenne, serait raisonnable. Rien, techniquement, n'interdirait de créer des flottilles européennes d'avions pouvant apponter sur ces porte-avions. Un autre sujet délicat est celui de l'équipage. Celui-ci rend opérationnel le porte-avions, qui accueille des flottilles d'avions et l'état-major du groupe aéronaval. Il doit être en phase avec son navire. Quand le b'timent franco-européen naviguerait sous pavillon français, son équipage devrait, au besoin, pouvoir être engagé au combat, y compris avec ses membres non français. Développer la participation, étendre le périmètre de discussion S'agissant du groupe aéronaval, d'ores et déjà l'habitude est prise que des navires européens intègrent celui du Charles-de-Gaulle, y compris dans des missions d'engagement armé. Ainsi, chaque fois que ce b'timent a été déployé pour frapper Daech, il a été accompagné par de tels navires (allemand, belge, britannique et italien). L'existence d'un porte-avions européen développerait la participation des marines européennes, en contribuant à leur excellence. L'accord devrait intervenir également sur le système de propulsion, nucléaire ou non, et sur le partage des t'ches entre les industries navales, la France étant la seule, à ce jour, à disposer des compétences pour construire des porte-avions dotés de catapultes. D'autres sujets seraient à traiter, comme le port d'attache, la formation et l'entrainement, la chaîne de commandement... La résolution de certaines questions serait indéniablement délicate, mais possible en présence d'une vraie volonté politique. Cette volonté témoignerait d'un pas nouveau et significatif de l'Europe pour sa défense et de son rayonnement dans le monde. https://www.latribune.fr/opinions/tribunes/pourquoi-pas-un-porte-avions-franco-europeen-831590.html