April 27, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Why the U.S. Air Force Won't Follow the F-35 Model for Future Aircraft
No one likes the idea of reliving the troubled development process that produced it.
October 21, 2020 | International, Land, Security
WASHINGTON: The Army is seeking a self-propelled replacement for its venerable towed artillery pieces. The old ones can't keep up with mechanized Stryker units and lack armor protection. BAE Systems says its Archer armored howitzer is the quickest cannon on the draw — a life-or-death factor in fast-moving future combats.
The US is experimenting intensely in how to speed the process from detecting a potential target to sending accurate target coordinates to a specific gun. Once Archer receives such target coordinates, it can come to a stop and open fire within 20 seconds, said Henrik Knape, a BAE exec based in Sweden, where the gun is already in service. Within two minutes from that first shot, Knape went on, the truck-mounted 155mm howitzer can fire another five to seven rounds, get back underway, and put 500 meters (a third of a mile) between itself and the location it fired from.
That's a long enough distance in a short enough time that retaliatory fire from the enemy's artillery is probably going to miss. Even for an advanced adversary (pronounce that “Russia”), which uses specialized counter-battery radars to track the trajectory of incoming rounds and calculate the precise position of the unit firing them, it will take multiple minutes to bring its own guns or drones to bear.
In US operations, the time from detecting a target to firing on it is typically “tens of minutes.” Experimental artificial-intelligence systems can cut that to tens of seconds, but those are years from being battle ready.
Archer has other advantages as well, Knape and his US-based colleague Chris King told a small group of reporters:
April 27, 2021 | International, Aerospace
No one likes the idea of reliving the troubled development process that produced it.
August 2, 2022 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
The testbed is scheduled to be on orbit in time for next year's Northern Edge exercise hosted by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
February 11, 2022 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR, Security
Reports indicate artificial intelligence played a key role in the Israel conflict with Hamas in Gaza in May 2021, and artificial intelligence is increasingly being incorporated into systems developed by Israeli defense companies, such as rifles, bombs and other systems.