Bulgaria issues request for proposals for fighter jets

On the same subject

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  September 4, 2018 | International, Land, C4ISR

  New military drone roadmap ambivalent on killer robots

  By: Kelsey Atherton Drones are everywhere in the Pentagon today. While unpeopled vehicles are most closely associated with the Air Force and targeted killing campaigns, remotely controlled robots are in every branch of the military and used across all combatant commands. The fiscal year 2018 defense authorization contained the largest budget for drones and robots across the services ever, a sign of just how much of modern warfare involves these machines. Which is perhaps why, when the Department of Defense released its latest roadmap for unmanned systems, the map came in at a punchy 60 pages, far shy of the 160-page tome released in 2013. This is a document less about a military imagining a future of flying robots and more about managing a present that includes them. The normalization of battlefield robots Promised since at least spring 2017, the new roadmap focuses on interoperability, autonomy, network security and human-machine collaboration. The future of drones, and of unpeopled ground vehicles or water vehicles, is as tools that anyone can use, that can do most of what is asked of them on their own, that communicate without giving away the information they are sharing, and that will work to make the humans using the machines function as more-than-human. This is about a normalization of battlefield robots, the same way that mechanized warfare moved from a theoretical approach to the standard style of fighting by nations a few generations ago. Network security isn't as flashy a highlight as “unprecedented battlefield surveillance by flying robot,” but it's part of making sure that those flying cameras don't, say, transmit easily intercepted data over an open channel. “Future warfare will hinge on critical and efficient interactions between war-fighting systems,” states the roadmap. “This interoperable foundation will transmit timely information between information gatherers, decision makers, planners and war fighters.” A network is nothing without its nodes, and the nodes that need to be interoperable here are a vast web of sensors and weapons, distributed among people and machines, that will have to work in concert in order to be worth the networking at all. The very nature of war trends toward pulling apart networks, toward isolation. Those nodes each become a point at which a network can be broken, unless they are redundant or autonomous. Where will the lethal decision lie? Nestled in the section on autonomy, the other signpost feature of the Pentagon's roadmap, is a small chart about the way forward. In that chart is a little box labeled “weaponization,” and in that box it says the near-term goals are DoD strategy assessment and lethal autonomous weapon systems assessment. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are of such international concern that there is a meeting of state dignitaries and humanitarian officials in Geneva happening at the exact moment this roadmap was released. That intergovernmental body is hoping to decide whether or not militaries will develop robots that can kill of their own volition, according to however they've been programmed. The Pentagon, at least in the roadmap, seems content to wait for its own assessment and the verdict of the international community before developing thinking weapons. Hedging on this, the same chart lists “Armed Wingman/Teammate (Human decision to engage)” as the goal for somewhere between 2029 and 2042. “Unmanned systems with integrated AI, acting as a wingman or teammate with lethal armament could perform the vast majority of the actions associated with target identification,tracking, threat prioritization, and post-attack assessment," reads the report. "This level of automation will alleviate the human operator of task-level activities associated with the engagement of a target, allowing the operator to focus on the identified threat and the decision to engage.” The roadmap sketches out a vision of future war that hands off many decisions to autonomous machines, everything from detection to targeting, then loops the lethal decision back to a human responsible for making the call on whether or not the robot should use its weapons on the targets it selected. Humans as battlefield bot-shepards, guiding autonomous machines into combat and signing off on the exact attacks, is a possible future for robots in war, one that likely skirts within the boundaries of still-unsettled international law. Like its predecessor, this drone roadmap is plotting a rough path through newly charted territory. While it leans heavily on the lessons of the present, the roadmap doesn't attempt to answer on its own the biggest questions of what robots will be doing on the battlefields of tomorrow. That is, fundamentally, a political question, and one that much of the American public itself doesn't yet have strong feelings about. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/08/31/new-military-drone-roadmap-ambivalent-on-killer-robots

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  August 10, 2020 | International, Naval

  PBO to examine $60 billion price tag of new warships and compare to other less expensive foreign programs

  David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen, Postmedia News (dpugliese@ottawacitizen.com) Published: Aug 07 at 6:31 p.m. Updated: a day ago The $60 billion price tag of Canada's proposed new fleet of warships will come under the scrutiny of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who will also examine other less costly similar projects underway in other countries. The House of Commons government operations committee requested that Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux examine the cost of the Canadian Surface Combatant project and take a look at the cost of two other types of warships: the FREMM and the Type 31. PBO spokeswoman Sloane Mask said the analysis would be presented to the committee by Oct. 22. “The analytical work is currently underway,” she added. Last year the Liberal government signed an initial deal that is expected to lead to the eventual construction of 15 warships in the largest single government purchase in Canadian history. Lockheed Martin offered Canada the Type 26 warship designed by BAE in the United Kingdom. Irving is the prime contractor and the vessels will be built at its east coast shipyard. Construction of the first ship isn't expected to begin until the early 2020s. But the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program has already faced rising costs. In 2008, the then-Conservative government estimated the project would cost roughly $26 billion. But in 2015, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, then commander of the navy, voiced concern that taxpayers may not have been given all the information about the program, publicly predicting the cost for the warships alone would approach $30 billion. The overall project is currently estimated to cost around $60 billion. “Approximately one-half of the CSC build cost is comprised of labour in the (Irving) Halifax yard and materials,” according to federal government documents obtained by this newspaper through the Access to Information law. But some members of parliament and industry representatives have privately questioned whether the CSC cost is too high. There have been suggestions that Canada could dump the Type 26 design and go for a cheaper alternative since the CSC project is still in early stages and costs to withdraw could be covered by savings from a less expensive ship. Canada had already been pitched on alternatives. In December 2017, the French and Italian governments proposed a plan in which Canada could build the FREMM frigate at Irving. Those governments offered to guarantee the cost of the 15 ships at a fixed $30 billion, but that was rejected by the Canadian government. Earlier this year, the U.S. Navy selected the FREMM design for its newest fleet of warships. The estimated cost is around $1.3 billion per ship. The other type of warship the PBO will look at is the Type 31, which is to be built for the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Those ships are to cost less than $500 million each. In 2017, then Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette estimated the CSC program would cost $61.82 billion. The entry of the BAE Type 26 warship in the Canadian competition was controversial from the start and sparked complaints that the procurement process was skewed to favour that vessel. Previously the Liberal government had said only mature existing designs or designs of ships already in service with other navies would be accepted on the grounds they could be built faster and would be less risky. Unproven designs can face challenges if problems are found once the vessel is in the water and operating. But the criteria was changed and the government and Irving accepted the BAE design, though at the time it existed only on the drawing board. Construction began on the first Type 26 frigate in the summer of 2017 for Britain's Royal Navy. Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020 https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/news/canada/pbo-to-examine-60-billion-price-tag-of-new-warships-and-compare-to-other-less-expensive-foreign-programs-482874/

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  February 4, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Germany officially knocks F-35 out of competition to replace Tornado

  By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany ― Germany's Ministry of Defence has officially ruled out the F-35 joint strike fighter as a choice to replace its aging Tornado fleet, Defense News has learned. An official from the ministry confirmed that the F-35 is not a finalist in the competition, which seeks a replacement for the 90-jet fleet. The news was first reported by German site AugenGeradeaus. The move is not altogether surprising. Berlin for some time has officially favored an upgraded version of the fourth-generation Eurofighter Typhoon, built by a consortium of Airbus, Leonardo and BAE Systems, as the Tornado replacement. The main argument is to keep European companies involved in building combat aircraft and, perhaps even more importantly, staying clear of disturbing Franco-German momentum in armaments cooperation. However, the decision leaves open the question of certification for nuclear weapons. The Typhoon is not certified to carry the American-made nuclear bombs that Germany, as part of its strategic posture, is supposed to be able to carry on its jets. Competing against the Typhoon is Boeing's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. Before the German MoD confirmed that the F-35 was officially out of the running, Reuters on Thursday reported that the ministry was considering splitting the buy between the Typhoon and either the F-35 or Super Hornet. Ordering both the Typhoon and an American aircraft would make it easier to continue carrying out the NATO nuclear mission, while also lending support to the European industrial base. However, it could complicate logistics, adding more expense and forcing the German air force to maintain two supply chains. It is worth noting that despite complaints about the cost of keeping the ageing Tornados flying, keeping around a certain number of them always has been considered a painful, but not impossible, proposition among some defense experts. That is especially the case for the nuclear mission. “There does not have to be a nuclear Tornado replacement,” Karl-Heinz Kamp, president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy, a government think tank, told Defense News last August. He noted that any German government is acutely averse to the publicity surrounding Berlin's would-be atomic bombers. “That's why they will keep flying the Tornados, despite the price tag and despite having asked about a Eurofighter nuclear certification in Washington,” Kamp predicted at the time. German defense officials on Thursday evening stressed that no decisions had been made besides reducing the playing field to the FA-18 and the Eurofighter Typhoon. The Defense Ministry will request additional information from the respective manufacturers, Boeing and Airbus, on the issues of operations, economic viability and timing, these officials said. Germany's decision appears to have come at the surprise of F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin, which was not told by the ministry of the imminent announcement. “We have not been officially notified of a decision on Germany's future fighter,” Lockheed spokesman Mike Friedman said in an emailed response to a query. “The F-35 delivers unmatched value as the most capable and lowest life-cycle cost aircraft, while delivering the strongest long-term industrial and economic opportunities compared to any fighter on the market. As the foundation of NATO's next generation of air power, the F-35 is the most advanced aircraft in the world today, and includes Electronic Attack capabilities well beyond any specialized fourth generation aircraft.” Valerie Insinna in Washington contributed to this report. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/01/31/germany-officially-knocks-f-35-out-of-competition-to-replace-tornado/