December 19, 2024 | International, Naval
India commissions Russian-built warship amid enduring ties with Moscow
India has been trying to diversify its weapons portfolio, as Russian-made equipment permeates the country's armed forces.
July 13, 2020 | International, Land
As Defender 2020 drill winds down, US Army plans for 2021 edition
By: Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — As the last portions of the altered Defender 2020 exercise kick into gear, the U.S. Army is beginning to plan its 2021 edition, a top general said Thursday.
Speaking at a Defense News virtual panel on trans-Atlantic alliances Brig. Gen. Sean Bernabe, deputy commander of U.S. Army Europe, expressed confidence that Defender 2021 will be able to happen despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“We've been continuing to look forward now that we've gained some confidence that we can train large-scale, collective [military exercises] in this environment,” Bernabe said. “We've been looking further and further forward. As we speak, we're planning exercise Defender Europe 2021, to take place in the late spring, early summer of 2021, focused in the Black Sea and Balkans.”
Planning “is underway, again informed by our experiences between March and June. Having validated that we can do it, we're confident that we'll figure it out in partnership with our allies,” he added. “I feel confident that we will [be able to] maintain readiness and interoperability across Europe, despite COVID, regardless of how long it may be a part of our operating environment.”
Bernabe predicted the 2021 exercise will likely be smaller than 2020′s planned version, which should be no surprise.
Defender 2020 was billed as the third-largest military exercise in Europe since the end of the Cold War, a major test of the United States' ability to move stateside forces to locations across Europe, including Poland, the Baltics, some Nordic nations and Germany. A total of 20,000 soldiers were expected to participate.
However, the COVID-19 outbreak forced the Army to hit pause on the exercise in March just as it was starting. Several smaller, related drills were canceled outright, and U.S. forces were sent back home. A smaller associated exercise picked up again in June.
Bernabe's comments came just hours before the Army announced that a combined arms battalion would deploy to Europe between July 14 and Aug. 22 as part of the “final phase” of the modified Defender 2020 exercise.
The deployment will involve 550 soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas, with the 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters in Poznan, Poland, serving as mission command.
Approximately 55 Abrams tanks and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles will take part. The tanks will be equipped with the Trophy active protection system so the Army can “assess and experience the dynamics of moving and installing the system in a field environment.”
At the end of June, the European Union put citizens of the United States on a list of countries barred from traveling to EU member states due to the continued spread of COVID-19. However, military movements are exempt from that rule, and Bernabe believes the Army has a good plan in place for the intake of forces into Europe.
“To be good neighbors, we are using some very, I'd say, aggressive approaches to make sure that we are screening and testing for COVID as personnel arrive,” he said. “Make sure that we're putting in the mandatory 14 days' [quarantine], making sure that we continue screening, we wear masks, we practice physical distancing to make sure that we're not bringing infection into Europe while we focus on maintaining the military readiness.
“So thankfully we've worked with our host nations to continue to flow personnel into and out of Europe.”
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August 14, 2018 | International, Aerospace
New Spy Drone Flies Non-Stop for a Month
Airbus's Zephyr solar-powered drone flew for 25 days straight during a test-flight over Yuma, Arizona beginning on July 11, 2018. The flight represented a record for aircraft endurance, breaking the previous 14-day record also set by a Zephyr back in 2015. The long flight has big implications for military surveillance. Drones like Zephyr could loiter over a low-intensity battlefield far longer than current drones can do. The latest high-endurance Reaper drone maxes out at 40 hours in the air. The propeller-driven Zephyr belongs to a class of aircraft known as “high-altitude pseudo-satellites,” or HAPs. Flying as high as 70,000 feet for weeks or even months at a time, HAPs perform many of the same missions that low-orbiting satellites do. “The main HAP applications are in telecommunications and remote sensing, both civilian and military,” Flavio Araripe d'Oliveira, Francisco Cristovão Lourenço de Melo and Tessaleno Campos Devezas wrote in a 2016 paper. Compared to comms satellites, HAPs have the advantages of lower latency and the ability to land for maintenance or reconfiguration, d'Oliveira, de Melo and Devezas explained. For surveillance missions, HAPs unlike satellites can linger over a particular area and could produce images with better resolution, since they fly lower than satellites do. HAPs could be more vulnerable to enemy defenses, however. Where satellites orbit many hundreds of miles over Earth, beyond the reach of most conventional weaponry, Zephyr — so far the only HAP undergoing realistic testing — attained a maximum altitude of 70,000 feet, well under the ceiling for modern air-defense missile systems such as the Russian S-300. Also, the drone is slow, with a cruising speed of just 20 miles per hour. Zephyr and similar pseudo-satellite drones could be best-suited for operations over lightly-defended territory. In 2016, the U.K. ministry of defense bought three Zephyrs for around $6 million apiece in order to evaluate them for potential use by the military and other government agencies. “Zephyr is a cutting edge, record-breaking piece of kit that will be capable of gathering constant, reliable information over vast geographical areas at a much greater level of detail than ever before,” then-defense secretary Michael Fallon said in a statement. Airbus is still refining Zephyr, in particular its power-consumption. During daytime, the lightly-built solar-powered drone — which features an 82-foot wingspan and yet weighs just 165 pounds — can fly as high as 70,000 feet while also charging its batteries. After the sun goes down, Zephyr runs on batteries ... and slowly loses altitude. During the record-setting Yuma flight, the drone dipped as low as 50,000 feet at night. The challenge for Airbus is to balance weight and power-consumption to produce the optimal flight profile for a particular task. “You have to find the right equation between flying altitude plus battery life, maintaining this or that power,” said Alain Dupiech, an Airbus spokesperson. It's unclear just how long Zephyr could stay aloft under the right conditions. The drone's lithium-ion battery eventually dies, forcing it to land for maintenance. But battery technology is advancing rapidly, driven in part by consumer demand for electric cars, d'Oliveira, de Melo and Devezas wrote. In the short term, a maximum endurance of several months is not inconceivable. But longer flights might not be particularly useful for surveillance and comms missions, Dupiech said. “At this stage, most of those missions are not calling for a year and half up there.” Airbus has scheduled Zephyr's next test flight for October in western Australia. http://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/
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June 23, 2023 | International, Aerospace
Berlin plans to spend 8 billion euros in package for 60 Boeing Chinook helicopters
Germany aims to purchase 60 Chinook helicopters from Boeing in a package that would cost up to 8 billion euros ($8.71 billion), including necessary infrastructure for the aircraft, a parliamentary source told Reuters on Friday.