British MoD shortlists four vendor teams for its multibillion-dollar Skynet satellite program

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  August 3, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Budget Shows Flightworthy Sixth-Generation Fighter Engines Ready By 2025

  Steve Trimble July 31, 2020 Details of the first of two mostly secret initiatives to support the U.S. Air Force's five-year-old pursuit of a sixth-generation successor to the Lockheed Martin F-22 are now released and reveal that a critical technology for the Next-Generation Air Dominance program could become flightworthy by mid-2025. GE Aviation and Pratt & Whitney are scheduled to complete separate competitive designs for a Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) system by the second quarter of 2022 and finish assessments on a full-scale engine three years later, according to Air Force budget documents. The schedule and spending details on the NGAP appeared for the first time in the Air Force's budget justification documents for fiscal 2021 that were submitted to Congress in February, but passed unnoticed for several months. The Air Force awarded GE and Pratt each a $427 million contract to support the NGAP program, but the details were shrouded in budget documents within the related Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), an unclassified effort to develop a reengining candidate for the Lockheed F-35. After Senate authorizers cited the Air Force's lack of transparency for justifying a $270 million budget cut for AETP this year, service officials decided to break out funding for the NGAP in budget documents. In fact, the NGAP program reappeared in the fiscal 2021 budget documents for the first time in more than six years. The Air Force has kept all details about the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program highly secret since 2016, but there was a brief, two-year window in 2014-15 when senior defense officials provided information about the underlying technology development efforts. The NGAP was first referenced in testimony by Alan Shaffer before House Armed Services Committee in March 2014. Shaffer is now the deputy to Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. Six years ago, he was the principal deputy to the director for research and engineering. In that role, Shaffer introduced the NGAP as an enabler to the NGAD program, along with another, complementary initiative focused on new airframes. “This program will develop and fly two X-plane prototypes that demonstrate advanced technologies for future aircraft,” Shaffer said in 2014. “Teams will compete to produce the X-plane prototypes, one focused on future Navy operational capabilities, and the other on future Air Force operational capabilities.” A year later, Frank Kendall, then undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, elaborated on the Aerospace Innovation Initiative (AII). The development of the X-planes would be led by DARPA, he said. “To be competitive, the Navy and the Air Force each will have variants focused on their mission requirements,” Kendall said. “There will be a technology period leading up to development of the prototypes. This will lead to the systems that ultimately will come after the F-35.” The results of the AII program have not been released or even acknowledged by Air Force or defense officials since 2015, but the initiative suggests that one or two X-plane aircraft could be in testing now. Kendall's remarks to Congress in 2015 came a year before the Air Force received the results of an Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team on the Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan, which urged the development of a family of systems anchored by a next-generation fighter to replace the F-22. The Flight Plan prompted the Air Force to commission an analysis of alternatives (AoA) in late 2016. The results of that study were originally scheduled to be released by the end of 2017, but the analysis continued until early 2019. Meanwhile, a 2015 presentation by the Air Force Research Laboratory showed a notional schedule for the NGAD program; a contract award to launch the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase is set for fiscal 2023. As late as the Air Force's fiscal 2019 budget request, the financial resources devoted to the NGAD appeared to support that schedule: A significant increase in funding starts in fiscal 2023, and $13 billion is set aside overall between fiscal 2019 and 2023. Last year, however, as the results of the AoA study became available, the Air Force appeared to defer the launch of the EMD by at least a few years. The fiscal 2020 budget request included only $6.6 billion for the NGAD from fiscal 2020-24. Funding for the NGAD and NGAP programs is accounted for separately in Air Force budget documents. The fiscal 2021 budget justification documents reveal that the Air Force spent $106 million for the NGAP in fiscal 2019. Another $224 million is allocated to the NGAP this year. But the program has requested an additional $403 million in fiscal 2021, the budget documents show. “The Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion effort consists of four phases: preliminary design, detailed design, engine fabrication and engine assessments,” the Air Force's budget documents state. “Program deliverables include military adaptive engine detailed design parameters and models, engine hardware (plus spare parts), matured technologies, major rig assessment data (controls, combustor, etc.), program reviews, and technology, affordability and sustainability studies for next generation fighter aircraft,” the documents add. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/budget-shows-flightworthy-sixth-generation-fighter-engines

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  October 29, 2020 | International, Land

  https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/10/27/us-army-gets-first-infantry-squad-vehicle-from-gm-defense/

  Jen Judson UPDATE — This story has been updated to correct the location for ISV production in North Carolina. A GM Defense representative previously misspoke. WASHINGTON — GM Defense delivered its first Infantry Squad Vehicle to the U.S. Army in an Oct. 27 ceremony at its proving grounds and production facility in Milford, Michigan, just 120 days after being chosen to build the new troop carrier. The Army awarded the company a $214.3 million contract to produce 649 vehicles by the end of fiscal 2024. The service is planning to procure a total of 2,065 ISVs. Designed to carry a nine-soldier squad, the ISV was specifically put together to be light enough to be sling loaded from a UH-60 Black Hawk and small enough to fit inside a CH-47 Chinook, to provide maximum flexibility for deployment. GM's design is based off the company's 2020 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck and uses 90 percent commercial parts including a 186-horsepower, 2.8L Duramax turbo-diesel engine and performance race components. It also features a custom rollover protection system. While the first low-rate initial production vehicles — 27 in total — will be built in Michigan, GM has a long-term plan to move its ISV manufacturing to Concord, North Carolina, where it is standing up a facility to manage its higher volume ISV production. The Army first identified a need for a light infantry vehicle in 2015 when its most recent combat vehicle strategy was released, but nothing materialized until Congress forced the Army to launch the competition as part of the FY18 National Defense Authorization Act. The Army awarded $1 million contracts to three teams in August 2019 to develop offerings — GM Defense, a team of Oshkosh Defense and Flyer Defense LLC and an SAIC and Polaris team. “One hundred and twenty days from contract award to delivery is a significant milestone, and I am very proud of the team for this accomplishment,” David Albritton, president of GM Defense, said in a statement. “We're leveraging General Motors' engineering prowess and immense manufacturing capabilities to bring transformative solutions to the military vehicle market. Our initial success with the ISV shows our commitment to our customer and highlights our unique right to win in the military mobility market.” GM Defense has a “very, very talented team," Albritton said during the ceremony, and “their innovation, attention to detail, flexibility when incorporating soldier feedback during testing and a magnitude of other factors helped us to win this ISV contract and gives me great hope for how we will tackle other pursuits in the future.” The first vehicles will be going to the 1st Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division, but ultimately 11 IBCTs will be outfitted with 59 vehicles each under the first contract covering the 649 ISVs. The vehicles are slated to go through tests in the coming year, including further analysis of its air-deployable capability, as well as verification the maintenance manuals are complete. The first unit equipped will take the ISV through an initial operational test and evaluation. With the success of the ISV, GM Defense is setting its sights on other opportunities with the Army and other military services. “We have a strong interest in the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Program,” Albritton said. The Army is planning to re-compete for the JLTV and for new Humvees to round out the tactical vehicle fleet. “If you look at the size and scale of this program, obviously, this is closer to a commercial-size vehicle, but as you step up in class and step up in weight, we believe we have a right to win in vehicles sizes of that size,” he added. “That doesn't limit us there, as well. There are only a few ground vehicle programs across the [Defense Department] right now, but we believe that other than doing a fully integrated vehicle like we do on ISV or what we potentially could do on JLTV in partnership with other companies, we can look at programs like the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle for the U.S. Marine Corps, or we can look at the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle," Albritton said. “But if you think about power and propulsion solutions, you think about light weighting, think about cybersecurity, there's other types of capabilities that we can apply in partnership on a variety of platforms as well.” GM spent several recent years helping the Army evaluate a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle using a ZH2 Chevy Colorado and the Army is now taking some renewed steps at getting after an electric vehicles in its fleet to include the pursuit of an electric light reconnaissance vehicle. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/10/27/us-army-gets-first-infantry-squad-vehicle-from-gm-defense/

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  October 30, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Researchers Uncover Python Package Targeting Crypto Wallets with Malicious Code

  Malicious Python package "CryptoAITools" targets crypto wallets, stealing sensitive data on Windows and macOS.