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  October 2, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  US Army to upgrade bigger units with new electronic warfare gear

  Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — In what some observers might view as back to the future, the U.S. Army is altering the way it fights to keep up with sophisticated adversaries, which means shifting from the brigade-centered focus of the last decade to bringing the division and corps levels into the fold. As a result, new capabilities are under development to increase range, fight deeper and bolster presence on the nonphysical battlefield, such as the electromagnetic spectrum. Officials said a fight against a nation-state like Russia or China must begin at the corps level, where the focus is destroying high-priority systems to lay the groundwork for lower echelons. They added that the corps level must eliminate these targets first, passing them to the lower echelons to include division and brigade, which are both designed for a closer fight to move the enemy back. “We have got to be able to see deep. If we don't have the ability to sense at the corps level, really what we're doing is we're deferring that fight down to the brigade level,” Col. Clint Tracy, III Corps cyber and electromagnetic activities chief, said during a Sept. 29 virtual panel hosted by the Association of Old Crows. “If we build the other way up, from the brigades to corps ... they may not necessarily be equipped without additional enablers to kill those things in the battlespace.” Enter what officials are calling the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade, or TLS-EAB, formerly referred to as TLS-Extended Range. Army leaders this week detailed the first initial notional concepts and timeline for the new capability, which will be mainly a division and corps asset capable of reaching and prosecuting targets that the TLS system at the brigade combat team level cannot. “TLS-EAB is intended to provide commanders at echelons above brigade the ability to sense, provide improved precision geolocation, conduct non-kinetic fires and support kinetic targeting for a broad coverage of targets ... [that] are unreachable by TLS at BCT,” Col. Jennifer McAfee, Army capability manager for terrestrial layer and identity, said during the same event. TLS-BCT, or Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team, is the Army's first brigade-focused, integrated signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber platform. “TLS-EAB also provides defensive electronic attack to protect our critical nodes, i.e., our command posts and other critical nodes vulnerable to the adversary's precision fires,” McAfee added. She also said TLS-EAB will address several gaps in large-scale combat operations to include deep sensing to help target enemy systems in anti-access/area denial environments, and to conduct reconnaissance and security at long ranges. It will also provide capabilities for signals intelligence and electronic warfare teams within the Multidomain Task Force's Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space (I2CEWS) battalion, as well as signals intelligence and electronic warfare battalions at the division and corps levels. How is TLS-EAB different from existing capabilities? The key difference between TLS-EAB and other electronic warfare, intelligence and cyber platforms — both airborne or ground-based — is that the former protects static assets from enemy missiles and unmanned systems that use radar fusing and homing. Officials said the new system will be broken into two broad threat categories: the aforementioned protection against precision-guided munitions dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum; and theater, corps and division targets to include ISR, command and control, low- and mid-altitude beyond-line-of-sight comminutions, navigation, and air and ground radars. The service will achieve these effects through advanced electronic attack techniques, radio frequency-delivered cyber effects, military information support operations (formerly called psychological operations), and the deception of adversary sensors. More granularly, TLS-EAB will be broken into two subsystems for those two missions: one for long-range collection, electronic support and effects; and one for defensive electronic attack. Each will include a trailer attached to the eventual vehicle the Army determines for TLS-EAB. While a specific platform hasn't specifically been identified for TLS-EAB, officials said they are eyeing something wheeled from the family of medium tactical vehicles. Interoperability and long range Moreover, the system will connect with other reconnaissance systems in an attempt to shorten the sensor-to-shooter timeline, which involves rapidly delivery sensitive data from sensors to the platforms or individuals who take action. These include the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, or TITAN; the Multidomain Sensing System; TLS-BCT; the Electronic Planning and Management Tool; the Multifunction Electronic Warfare-Air Large; and the integrated tactical network. TLS-EAB is one of the top priorities of the Army's ISR Task Force, which is modernizing the service's ability to see across huge ranges through a layered approach that involves the ground, air and space domains. U.S. adversaries have invested in capabilities that aim to keep forces at bay, such as advanced missiles and radars. To allow American forces to penetrate those capabilities and move back ground-based adversaries, larger echelons such as the corps must be able to see and understand these regions in full, which could be over thousands of miles. This also means sifting through all the noise in the congested electromagnetic spectrum to understand and prioritize specific targets. As such, the corps level must see more of the spectrum than the brigade, said Tracy of III Corps, because if the higher echelons did their jobs right, there shouldn't be a whole lot left for brigades to deal with in the non-kinetic realm when they are eventually deployed. Timeline Units aren't expected to first receive TLS-EAB until at least fiscal 2022, the same year as TLS-BCT. The current plan outlined by officials, which they stressed is all notional, is to have a total of 67 TLS-EABs: four per I2CEWS equaling 16; three per corps equaling nine; four per division equaling 40; and two at training locations. The sketch provided by Army leaders is an industry day in January, with a draft request for proposals set for February and bids in October. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2020/10/01/us-army-to-upgrade-bigger-units-with-new-electronic-warfare-gear/

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  February 10, 2020 | International, Naval

  Defense Secretary Mark Esper on how the Navy can get to 355 ships

  By: Aaron Mehta and David B. Larter WASHINGTON — Despite expected cuts to shipbuilding programs in the fiscal year 2021 budget request, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is committed to a bigger, but much lighter, naval force, he said in an exclusive interview with Defense News. In the wake of reports that the Navy may cut shipbuilding in its upcoming budget request, Esper said he is “fully committed” to building a fleet of 355 ships or larger. But to get there, the Navy is going to have to fundamentally reshape itself around smaller ships that can be more quickly bought than the large, exquisite designs the service now relies on — a shift that could have big implications for both the industrial base and the carrier force. Such a plan would mark a departure from the current Navy force structure assessment that calls for twice the number of larger ships over small surface combatants: 104 large, 52 small. But inverting that structure is essential to building a bigger, more deadly fleet that lives within the constraints of future budgets that the Pentagon expects to remain largely flat, Esper said. To get there, the Navy must push hard on fielding lightly manned ships, Esper said, an effort that has been a major focus of Naval Sea Systems Command's Unmanned Maritime Systems Program Office in recent years. The first step, though, is getting through the process of figuring out what the fleet should look like. “What we have to tease out is, what does that future fleet look like?” Esper said. “I think one of the ways you get there quickly is moving toward lightly manned [ships], which over time can be unmanned. “We can go with lightly manned ships, get them out there. You can build them so they're optionally manned and then, depending on the scenario or the technology, at some point in time they can go unmanned. “To me that's where we need to push. We need to push much more aggressively. That would allow us to get our numbers up quickly, and I believe that we can get to 355, if not higher, by 2030.” Cuts versus growth In addition to the reported cut of a Virginia-class submarine out of the FY21 budget, it is expected that other cuts may be coming in the short term for the Navy. Late last year, a memo from the White House's Office of Management and Budget to the Defense Department, obtained by Defense News, outlined a series of cuts over the next five years that OMB contends would shrink the size of the fleet. The cuts outlined in the OMB memo included cutting a submarine, a next-generation frigate and a Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer from the 2021 budget. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the Navy intends to request eight ships in its 2021 budget, which would be four fewer than was requested in 2020, but that the budget restored the missing Arleigh Burke. The Navy contends that even with the cuts, the service is still on a path to growth. In a recent interview with Defense News, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly said the budget documents that leaked were not final. Esper noted that his stamp on the 2021 budget was relatively limited, given he took office in August, at which point most of the service budget work had already been completed. “The services have already developed their budgets at that point,” Esper said. “So now it's at OSD level. As you know, at this point I was able to go through budgets, free up money. I was able to move some money around, but, to me, my big impact will be on the upcoming budget.” Lighter Navy Esper's backing of a larger Navy built on the backs of lightly or optionally manned ships echoes calls by Modly to get to a fleet of 355 ships in the next 10 years, and is in line with recent statement by the Navy's top officer, Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday. At the USNI Defense Forum in December, Gilday said the Navy needed to change the way it built its ships. “I know that the future fleet has to include a mix of unmanned,” Gilday said. “We can't continue to wrap $2 billion ships around 96 missile tubes in the numbers we need to fight in a distributed way, against a potential adversary that is producing capability and platforms at a very high rate of speed. We have to change the way we are thinking.” Congress, however, has been reluctant to back the push for more unmanned ships, believing that the Navy hasn't done enough work on how the concept of operations would work or how they'd support them. Esper said his office would be taking a leading role in bringing Congress to the table on a new fleet design. “DoD will run this ... I want to invite some of our congressional interested parties in, certainly from the defense committees, to observe the process and watch what we're doing and how we're going about it,” Esper said. “That's part of what I want to do, is to invite folks in.” Retired Navy and defense officials will also be involved in the planning and outreach process to make sure the department is on the right track, Esper continued. “We talk about the gray beards as validators, folks who make sure that nobody's putting their finger on the scale, that we've considered all factors,” Esper said. “I want it to be that type of process, if we can get there.” Expanding the fleet with more small, lightly manned ships will also increase opportunities for smaller shipyards to enter the shipbuilding industrial base, a proposal that may be attractive for congressional members in an election year. The secretary stressed that “the United States must have an expanded and healthy industrial base with modern shipyards” to make such a reality happen, adding that “I think we can actually expand the number of shipyards in the United States and highly skilled workers [as well] around the country to ensure adequate capacity.” In terms of planning, Esper said the Pentagon's Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE), along with the Navy, will be conducting a series of war games and exercises in the coming months in order to figure out the way forward. But any major decisions will be based around the completion of a new joint war plan for the whole department, which the secretary said should be finished this summer. “I think once we go through this process with the future fleet — that'll really be the new foundation, the guiding post,” Esper said. “It'll give us the general direction we need to go, and I think that'll be a big game changer in terms of future fleet, for structure, for the Navy and Marine Corps team.” The Carrier Question As the Defense Department looks to craft a lighter Navy, the obvious question is: What will become of the Navy's 11 super carriers? Defense Department officials such as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin have publicly questioned whether ground-based hypersonic missiles might more effectively deter China than an aircraft carrier that he believes is increasingly vulnerable. Esper said he's not sure what the ultimate answer is on aircraft carriers – but rejected the idea there is a binary choice to be had. “This discussion often comes down to a binary: Is it zero or 12?” Esper said. “First of all, I don't know. I think carriers are very important. I think they demonstrate American power, American prestige. They get people's attention. They are a great deterrent. They give us great capability.” The Navy may have to think about new ways of building carriers, however, if they are going to stay relevant in the future, Esper said. As an example, he pointed to what Japan is doing with its F-35B jump-jet models, which have been tested for use on lighter ships previously designed for use with helicopters. “There are various ways to do carriers,” Esper said. “So, we can talk numbers or we can talk the sizes of carriers, right? There's been discussion in the past about: do you keep building big carriers or do you go to smaller carriers, Lightning carriers? Acting Secretary Modly and I have talked about that. “I think this gets into the future fleet designs we look at. That will be one element that we look at.” https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/02/09/defense-secretary-mark-esper-on-how-the-navy-can-get-to-355-ships

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  August 30, 2022 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  Drone networks can cut cost of Middle East security, AF general says

  The Navy's effort to adopt small drones as its main source of situational awareness at sea is going well enough that the Air Force wants to copy it.