Aselsan unveils new weapons and capabilities for armored combat vehicle

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  December 13, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Brexit A Certainty After Boris Johnson Election Landslide

  By Tony Osborne LONDON – Britain's aerospace industry is waking up to Brexit certainty after Prime Minister Boris Johnson secured a landslide majority in a Dec. 12 general election. Johnson's Conservative party secured a significant majority in the British Parliament – the largest since Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s - which will enable him to push through his vision of Brexit on Jan. 31, 2020 ending Parliamentary and legal deadlocks that have delayed the UK's departure from the EU since the original date of March 29, 2019. For aerospace, the Parliamentary majority means stability in planning and investment, and there are unlikely to be any more delays to the process. It should also mean that the threat of a no-deal Brexit – widely considered the worst-case scenario for aerospace – has largely evaporated for now. The current iteration of the withdrawal agreement between Britain and the EU calls for regulatory alignment with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), but the two sides still have to negotiate future trade agreements once the UK has exited the EU. A lack of agreement here could result in a no-deal. British aerospace and defense trade association ADS said it was looking forward to working with the new government but said that ministers needed to “deliver a close future relationship with the European Union." In a statement, ADS CEO Paul Everitt called on the government to push forward with “investments in innovation and green technologies, develop a defense and security industrial strategy and an ambitious national space program.” Airbus, one of the most vocal aerospace companies against Brexit, said it welcomed the fact that the British government now has a “clear mandate” and is looking forward to “positive discussions.” “Airbus remains concerned by the potential for a ‘no-deal' in December 2020 and we will continue to plan for that scenario as that is the only way any responsible business can plan,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to run our major Brexit project in order to further eradicate and/or mitigate risks.” If the election result made Brexit more likely, it makes the break-up of the UK more probable too after the Scottish National Party (SNP) secured 48 of the 59 Parliamentary seats in Scotland. SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said the result was a mandate for a second Scottish independence referendum. The Conservative government is unlikely to green-light such a referendum, but independence would have significant ramifications for UK defense given the presence of several airbases and the UK's ballistic missile submarines carrying the nuclear deterrent. https://aviationweek.com/defense/brexit-certainty-after-boris-johnson-election-landslide

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  June 11, 2024 | International,

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  March 10, 2020 | International, Naval

  Navy Needs Bigger Budget Than Other Services: Rep. Wittman

  “You can have the greatest brigade combat team in the world," Rep. Wittman said, "but if they can't get to the fight because we don't have a robust ready reserve fleet, that's pretty shortsighted.” By PAUL MCLEARY ]WASHINGTON: A prominent lawmaker waded into the inter-service money wars today by calling for the Navy receiving a larger share of the budget than the other branches of the armed forces. The Army, Rep. Rob Wittman emphasized, can't even deploy abroad without the Navy's help. “We need to look at the one-third, one-third, one-third allocation of defense dollars to all the different service branches,” said Wittman, the top Republican on the Democratic-controlled House Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee. (The actual allocation is a bit trickier than that, but it's close). “No offense in any way, shape, or form to the other service branches, but we're going to need capability in certain areas and we're going to need those at a faster pace than in other areas.” Wittman represents the shipbuilding powerhouse of Virginia — home to massive naval bases and Newport News Shipbuilding, which makes all the nation's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and half its nuclear submarines. He appeared at the Hudson Institute today alongside Rep. Joe Courtney, who chairs the subcommittee and who represents Connecticut, where the other half of the nation's nuclear subs are built at Electric Boat. But it wasn't any of these high-tech, high-cost warships that Wittman singled out today. Instead, the congressman was referring to the major shortfalls in allocating money to modernize the nation's sealift fleet, humble but essential transports. A recent exercise showed the sealift fleet would be unable to haul military equipment overseas quickly in the event of a national security emergency. The snap drill found that of the 33 ships activated, only 22 were ready enough to leave port, according to a December paper from US Transportation Command. Shifting more money to the Navy would be a tough sell in Congress, with its hundreds of parochial interests, but Courtney added that his committee might take up the sealift shortage in its markup of the 2021 budget request in a few weeks, a move that could have wide-ranging implications for the Navy's budget. Wittman didn't lay out plans for shifting money to the Navy, but said “a great example” of why sealift needs to be a priority is “you can have the greatest brigade combat team in the world, you can have the greatest Stryker brigade in the world, but if they can't get to the fight because we don't have a robust ready reserve fleet, that's pretty shortsighted.” Splitting the budget roughly in thirds between the services “is not letting the strategy drive the budget, it's letting the budget drive the strategy,” added, which “creates a strategic vulnerability.” Wittman's comments come in the wake of a earlier dust-up between the services over their share of the budget, after Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told a navy conference in January “we need more money,” in order to modernize. Budgeting as usual, he said, which means “a one-third, one-third, one-third cut, does not reflect the strategy,” laid in in 2019's National Defense Strategy, Gilday said. “It isn't necessarily aligned with where we need to go against the pacing threat that we face.” The Navy is in many ways faced with the trickiest path to modernizing among all the branches of the military. Even as the service continues to struggle to get ships out of repair availabilities on time, it has also committed to building a new class of aircraft carriers, and has to overhaul its Virginia-class submarines. On top of all that comes the biggest-ticket item — a new class of nuclear-powered submarines about to begin construction, which will eat up over 30 percent of Gilday's budget in a few years. The first of the 12 Columbia subs is scheduled to begin construction in 2021 and enter service in 2031. Once completed they'll carry a staggering 70 percent of the country's nuclear arsenal. To clear space, and the chart a path toward a planned 355-ship fleet, the Navy is scrambling. Last week, plans leaked of Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly's intent to stand up a Future Carrier 2030 Task Force, which will take six months to study how carriers stack up against new generations of stealthy submarines and long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia. The study likely won't be ready until after Defense Secretary Mark Esper wraps up his assessment of the Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan and its new force structure assessment, however. Esper took control over both studies last month. The Navy is also looking to speed up the acquisition of a new class of 20 frigates, which would be a relative bargain of about $900 each if the service can stick to its plans and things work out the way they envision. In an attempt to clear some budgetary space for all of this, Modly has kicked off a new ‘Stem to Stern' review of back office functions to try and wrong more money out of existing accounts, which he's hoping to find about $8 billion a year in savings. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/navy-needs-bigger-budget-than-other-services-rep-wittman/