October 3, 2022 | International, C4ISR
L3Harris to buy Viasat's Link 16 portfolio, expand JADC2 offerings
Link 16 is a secure, jam-resistant and high-speed line of communication used across domains and by international players including NATO.
December 2, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
Coming off a troubled year
By: Jill Aitoro
The strategy for reading tea leaves of the year to come is naturally anchored in the lasting events of the year just passed.
So then let us consider 2019. The year was, in many respects, one of messiness. The already tense relationship between Turkey and NATO allies got worse, leading to the decision by the U.S. to kick the country out of the F-35 program. High-profile program struggles plagued some of the largest defense companies in the world. Political turmoil led to leadership shakeups both in the U.S. and across the pond. Instability in the industrial base made advancements in technology by adversaries all the more troubling.
But there were also some signs of progress. Modern warfare capabilities — from hypersonics to artificial intelligence — transitioned from a footnote for only some to the everyday vernacular of most. More experimentation emerged in techiques for system development and acquisition. And around the world, countries from various regions grew more earnest in their desires to expand their influence and investment in global defense.
What can we predict, then, based upon this, for 2020? Global relations will continue to shift, no longer defined by existing alliances but rather by individual behavior and more self-serving demands. Elections stand to turn the current state of political affairs on its ear, whether it be for better or for worse. And competition will grow more fierce, driven by a shrinking industrial base and the fact that defense companies will need to look beyond the U.S. to find the most sought-after programs with the biggest potential payout.
Obviously, there is a lot we don't know. Will NATO flounder or regain its footing? Will election results drive allies closer together or farther apart? Will defense budgets go up or down? And will the increasing use of hybrid tactics reshape both the forces of today and the systems of tomorrow?
We asked leaders from around the world to provide their perspective. See what's on their minds here in Outlook 2020.
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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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June 14, 2019 | International, Aerospace
KC-46 refueling system flaws will take years to fix and cost hundreds of millions, GAO says
By: Stephen Losey New designs will be required to fix some of the issues with the refueling boom and the remote vision system on the Air Force's new KC-46 Pegasus tanker, and that could take years to fix, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Wednesday. The refueling boom on the Pegasus could inadvertently scratch fighter jets' stealth coatings, or otherwise damage aircraft, according to the GAO. The good news is that the cost of delivering all 179 KC-46 tankers is now expected to come in at $43 billion, or nearly $9 billion cheaper than originally estimated in 2011, GAO said in the report. More, the KC-46 is ultimately expected to meet all 21 of its performance goals. But delays in the program mean that Boeing will not be able to make good on its most significant delivery requirement — delivering nine sets of wing aerial refueling pods — until mid-2020, or nearly three years later than originally expected. In addition to previously reported foreign object debris problems, the GAO report details deficiencies with the tanker's remote vision system and refueling boom — which could damage aircraft, especially stealth coatings. As has been previously reported, the remote vision system's cameras sometimes had problems with glare when the sun shone at certain angles, GAO said. This caused the display screens to be washed out or blacked out during some test flights, and the aerial refueling operators had a hard time seeing the receiving aircraft's receptacles to guide in the boom. The system also doesn't provide enough depth perception in some lighting conditions, GAO said. Boeing said it has already made changes, such as adjusting the contrast on the display screen and allowing operators to more quickly switch between different viewing options. However, GAO responded that those changes didn't fix the underlying problem: KC-46 operators need to be able to refuel aircraft in all conditions, with sufficient visual clarity in all lighting conditions. Boeing has agreed to redesign the vision system to do so, but the redesign could take three or four years, plus several more years to install it in the planes. That vision problem also caused the boom nozzle to bump into the receiving aircraft, without the knowledge of the refueling operators. This could damage the antenna or other structures near the refueling receptacle, GAO said. This especially presents a problem for low-observable planes such as the F-22 fighter, because inadvertent boom nozzle contact could scratch or damage special stealth coatings, and make them visible to radar. GAO also said the Pegasus' telescoping boom is stiffer than expected, which means lighter aircraft — such as the A-10 and F-16 — must use more power to move the boom forward while in contact to compress it and stay in refueling position. The need for additional force can create a problem when the receiving planes disconnect from the boom. When they disconnect, their additional power can cause them to lunge forward back into the boom, which could damage the plane and the boom itself. For the A-10, because the receptacle is located on its nose, a collision with the boom could damage the windshield and put the pilot at a greater risk. Boeing said that fixing that problem will require a hardware change, which could take three or four years to be designed and certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. But because the contract didn't specify how much force should be needed to compress the boom, and because the Air Force signed off on Boeing's original proposed specifications, program officials said the Air Force will have to foot the bill. The total cost for designing and retrofitting roughly 106 KC-46s? More than $300 million, GAO said. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/06/13/kc-46-refueling-system-flaws-will-take-years-to-fix-and-cost-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-gao-says/