June 10, 2020 | International, Aerospace
June 9, 2020 - Contested environments: Threat levels are rising due to the increasing development and dissemination of Anti Access/Areal Denial means. European air forces and navies need to prepare themselves for potential large scale high tempo operations in contested environments. To maintain air superiority and minimize attrition levels, Europe's Future Combat Air System (FCAS) will be a system of systems leveraging manned and unmanned collaborative combat, bringing the next level of Air Power.
Decisive tactical edge: FCAS will ultimately require a New Generation Fighter in 2040, which will be more sophisticated with very low observability, cutting edge passive and active sensors, on board smart applications and human machine collaboration. Such a New Generation Fighter will be a battle management platform capable of operating deep within enemy space. When teaming with unmanned modular platforms, named Remote Carriers, New Generation Fighters will have the needed scalable and flexible force multipliers to open new fields of tactics based on deception and numeric superiority.
Accelerated operational tempo: European air forces and navies will need to accelerate the operational tempo to complete OODA (Observe Orient Decide Act) loops faster than the adversary and take control of the situation. The interoperable Air Combat Cloud will provide common situational awareness by instantaneously capturing, sharing, merging and processing massive amounts of data from all connected manned and unmanned platforms. The Air Combat Cloud's warfare analytics and real-time coordination will provide better situational awareness, tactical options, decisions and collaborative effects to speed-up the OODA loop.
Better effects paths: Operating as a system of systems orchestrated by an Air Combat Cloud, FCAS will allow the OODA loop to be distributed across platforms allowing the dynamic combination of sensing, shooting and battle management capabilities. With a distributed OODA loop, FCAS will provide European air forces and navies with better, faster and more resilient effects paths under human supervision.
Incremental journey: FCAS will be an incremental journey. In a world with increasing threats, Airbus and its industrial partners need to start providing from 2025 the first capabilities to maintain European and National sovereignty. FCAS will lead to a doctrinal and technological change. Using such new capabilities will be a huge challenge for European air forces and navies, which cannot be instantaneously achieved. New doctrines, processes and skills need to be gradually developed in alignment with the planned arrival of FCAS capabilities and meeting the related technological challenges. FCAS will require a step by step approach to be jointly tackled by European air forces, navies and industry.
More on FCAS here
View source version on Airbus: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/Ensuring-Future-Air-Power-Capability.html
July 28, 2023 | International, Land
Slidell, Louisiana, July 26, 2023 – Textron Systems Corporation, a Textron Inc. (NYSE:TXT) company, announced today that the company will move ahead into Phases 3 and 4 of the U.S....
September 3, 2024 | International, Aerospace
February 15, 2021 | International, Naval, C4ISR, Security
Mark Pomerleau CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified the organization soliciting white papers as the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command. WASHINGTON — The Navy is searching for solutions from industry that can fill needed gaps in cyber warfare capabilities to secure weapon systems and exploit cyberspace. The Naval Air Systems Command Cyber Warfare Detachment is looking for white papers for research and development efforts on resilient cyber warfare capabilities, according to a Feb. 11 posting to a government contracting website. The proposals should offer advancements or improvements to fill gaps, the notice stated, listing eight buckets of technological interests: Size-, weight- and power-sensitive cyber resiliency for real-time operating systems and aviation warfare environment Access point identification, prioritization and defense Cyber-electronic warfare convergent capabilities Full acquisition cycle cybersecurity measures Cyber test, inspection and incident response concepts Cyber warning system techniques Cyber fault, risk and threat assessment methodologies Resilient network concepts NAVAIR provided a more in-depth list of 36 specific areas, including full-spectrum cyber response and enablement capabilities for multiple weapon system kill chains, sacrificial infrastructure and reactive cyber “armor,” deceptive/misinformation software and hardware capabilities, threat attribution, identification and geolocation, software defined radio protections and capabilities networking, tools for weapon system cyber protection teams for incident response and inspection, and suppression and discovery of malware command and control mechanisms to include triggering, reconnaissance and logic bombs. The command will accept responses until Feb. 10, 2022, and review them quarterly. The next phase of the program will be by invitation. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2021/02/11/navwar-looking-for-emerging-cyber-research-and-development/