December 3, 2024 | International, Land
Marines take steps to hack human performance with data
A new Marine Corps program aims to enhance lethality by using wearable data to improve every area — from sleep and stress level control to marksmanship.
August 28, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Land
Can Army Futures Command Overcome Decades Of Dysfunction?
ARMY S&T CONFERENCE: How broken is the procurement system the new Army Futures Command was created to fix? It's not just the billions wasted on cancelled weapons programs. It's also the months wasted because, until now, there has not been one commander who can crack feuding bureaucrats' heads together and make them stop bickering over, literally, inches.
“I have not always been an Army Futures Command fan,” retired Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr told the National Defense Industrial Association conference here. But as he thought about his own decades in Army acquisition, he's come around.
How bad could things get? When he was working in the Army resourcing office (staff section G-8), Spoehr recalled, the Army signals school at Fort Gordon wanted a new radio test kit that could fit in a six-inch cargo pocket. The radio procurement programmanager, part of an entirely separate organization, reported back there was nothing on the market under eight inches. The requirements office insisted on sixinches, the acquisition office insisted they had no money to develop something smaller than the existing eight-inchers, and memos shot back and forth for months. At last, Spoehr warned both sides that if they didn't come to some agreement, he'd kill the funding. Suddenly Fort Gordon rewrote the requirement from “fit in a cargo pocket” to “cargo pouch” and the procurement people could go buy an eight-inch kit.
That kind of disconnected dithering is what Army Futures Command is intended to prevent. “I had the money, but nobody really had control of all of this,” Spoehr said. As a result, he said, “we probably spent six months trading memos back and forth on the size of the radio frequency test kit.”
Multiplying that by thousands of requirements over hundreds of systems, and the wasted time and money gets pretty bad. But what's often worse is when the requirements are unrealistic and no one pushes back. Most notoriously ,Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki demanded easily airlifted Future Combat Systems vehicles that weighed less than 20 tons but had the combat power of a 60-ton M1 Abrams tank. The designs eventually grew to 26 tons, and the performance requirements came down, but by then FCS had lost the confidence of both Congress and Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who canceled it in 2009. It was another casualty of overly ambitious requirements drawn up by staff officers in isolation from the people who'd actually have to build them. Army Futures Command is structured to force those two groups to talk to each other from the start.
Full article: https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/can-army-futures-command-overcome-decades-of-dysfunction
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June 15, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Trump administration considering new plan to ease drone export rules
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON —The Trump administration reportedly plans to reinterpret a key arms agreement that governs the sale of unmanned aircraft, opening the door for more countries to buy drones from U.S. defense contractors. According to Reuters, the Trump administration plans to loosen its interpretation of the Missile Technology Control Regime, an agreement among the U.S. and 34 other nations that governs the export of missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. The report does not exactly lay out how the White House's interpretation of the MTCR will change, but it likely involves how the administration construes the phrase “strong presumption of denial.” Currently, the U.S. government's interpretation of that clause leads to a blanket denial of most countries' requests to buy “category-1” systems capable of carrying 500-kilogram payloads for more than 300 kilometers. The White House's National Security Council is set to review the change during a June 16 meeting, according to Reuters. The departments of Commerce, Energy, Justice and Homeland Security signed on to the new interpretation in May, and key industry stakeholders — including General Atomics and Northrop Grumman — have already been notified. The State Department could approve the first UAV sales under the new interpretation as soon this summer, a U.S. official and multiple industry executives told Reuters. The Trump administration has made loosening arms sale restrictions a major priority, but so far the changes to drone export policies have not had the impact desired by defense companies, which argue that they continue to lose sales to China and Israel. During a June 3 event on drone export policy, Keith Webster, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's defense and aerospace export council, said the administration has made some positive changes — including the approved sale of General Atomics MQ-9 Sea Guardian drones to India — but “for the policy changes, it has been disappointing.” In April 2018, the White House announced changes in policy allowing companies to sell certain unmanned aircraft through direct commercial sales to international militaries rather than having to go through the more laborious Foreign Military Sales process, where the U.S. government plays a large role in negotiating an agreement. It also struck rules that categorized unarmed drones with laser-designator technology as “strike enabling,” which grouped them with more highly restricted armed drones. The United States also attempted to change the MTCR by proposing language that would assign drones that fly under 800 kilometers per hour to “category-2” status, where sales are subject to approval on a case-by-case basis, said Heather Penney, a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies. However, that proposal was not approved by all members of the regime and was thus denied. “We have information that the U.S. is potentially looking at an additional airspeed proposal, not from 800 kilometers per hour, but dropping that to 600 kilometers per hour — which is roughly about 320 knots,” she said at a June 3 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “This does not solve the problem set. It enables the look of advancement, the look of change, but really it does not move the ball forward.” Webster agreed, calling proposed changes to the MTCR a Band-Aid. “That buys us a year or two, but we're right back to square one because we haven't resolved the issue,” he said. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/06/12/trump-administration-considering-new-plan-to-ease-drone-export-rules/
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February 26, 2024 | International, Land
Hungary’s parliament ratifies Sweden’s NATO bid
The vote, which passed 188-6, was the culmination of months of wrangling by Hungary’s allies to convince its nationalist government to lift its block.