F-35 : la pleine cadence de production reportée à date ultérieure

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  January 15, 2021 | International, Aerospace

  Indian government clears $6.5 billion deal for homemade Tejas fighter jets

  By: Vivek Raghuvanshi NEW DELHI — India on Wednesday cleared the country's largest-ever indigenous defense deal worth $6.5 billion for the purchase of 83 LCA MK1A Tejas light combat aircraft. The deal was approved by the government's apex security body, the Cabinet Committee on Security, which is chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The deal will see state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited manufacture 73 LCA MK1A Tejas fighter versions and 10 trainers versions, the Ministry of Defence said. “This deal will be a game-changer for self-reliance in Indian defence manufacturing. It would act as a catalyst for transforming the domestic aerospace ecosystem. The LCA-Tejas is going to be the backbone of the [Indian Air Force] fighter fleet in the years to come,” Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said. “Under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan [Self-Reliant India Initiative], India is continuously growing in its power to indigenously design, develop and manufacture advanced cutting edge technologies and systems in the defence sector,” the MoD said in a statement. “About 500 Indian companies including MSMEs [micro, small and medium enterprises] in the design and manufacturing sectors will be working with HAL in this procurement. The programme would act as a catalyst for transforming the Indian aerospace manufacturing ecosystem into a vibrant self-sustaining ecosystem.” The MoD said this deal is the first “Buy (Indian-Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured)” category procurement of combat aircraft with indigenous content of at least 50 percent — and it's expected that will increase to 60 percent by the end of the program. HAL Chairman Ramakrishnan Madhavan said the Tejas program will involve the highest level of local work in comparison to any Indian program of this scale. According to a senior HAL executive, the private defense companies that will support assembly include Larsen & Toubro for the wings, Dynamatic Technologies for the front fuselage, Alpha Tokal for the rear fuselage, and VEM Technologies for the center fuselage. The LCA MK1A fighters will have new capabilities including midair refueling; improvement in operational roles; enhanced combat capability; maintainability improvements; and active electronically scanned array radar, an electronic warfare suite and beyond-visual-range missile capabilities, a company executive said. The Indian Air Force will sign a formal contract with HAL during the Aero India air show in Bengaluru next month, according to an MoD official. Each LCA MK1A fighter is powered by a single F404-GE-IN20 engine, and each jet will cost about $78.5 million, another HAL executive said, adding that the program is expected to generate 5,000 jobs in India. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/01/14/indian-government-clears-65-billion-deal-for-homemade-tejas-fighter-jets

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  June 12, 2020 | International, Security

  The Army AI task force takes on two ‘key’ projects

  Andrew Eversden The Army's artificial intelligence task force is working on two key projects, including one that would allow unmanned vehicles in the air to communicate with autonomous vehicles on the ground, after securing new funding, a service official said June 10. Gen. Mike Murray, commander of Army Futures Command, said during a June 10 webinar hosted by the Association of the United States Army that the task force has moved forward on the projects through its partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, launched in late 2018 . First, the team is working on programs dedicated to unmanned-unmanned teaming, or developing the ability of air and ground unmanned vehicles to talk to one other. The other effort underway is on a DevSecOps environment to develop future algorithms to work with other Army systems, Murray said. He did not offer further detail. The task force force has fewer than 15 people, Murray said, and fiscal 2021 will be the first year that it receives appropriated funds from Congress. Much of the work the task force has done so far as been building the team. In response to an audience question, Murray said that the task force is not yet working on defending against adversarial machine learning, but added that leaders recognize that's an area the team will need to focus on. “We're going to have to work on how do we defend our algorithms and really, how do we defend our training data that we're using for our algorithms," Murray said. In order to train effective artificial intelligence, the team needs significant amounts of data. One of the first projects for the task force was collecting data to develop advanced target recognition capabilities. For example, Murray said, being able to identify different types of combat vehicles. When the work started, the training data for target recognition didn't exist. “If you're training an algorithm to recognize cats, you can get on the internet and pull up hundreds of thousands of pictures of cats,” Murray said. “You can't do that for a T-72 [a Russian tank]. You can get a bunch of pictures, but are they at the right angles, lighting conditions, vehicle sitting camouflaged to vehicle sitting open desert?” Murray also said he recognizes the Army needs to train more soldiers in data science and artificial intelligence. He told reporters in late May that the Army and CMU have created a masters program in data science that will begin in the fall. He also said that the “software factory,” a six- to 12-week course to teach soldiers basic software skills. That factory will be based in Austin, where Futures Command is located, and will work with industry's local tech industry. “We have got to get this talent identified I'm convinced we have it in our formations,” Murray said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/06/10/the-army-ai-task-force-takes-on-two-key-projects/

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  July 10, 2020 | International, Land, C4ISR

  Army to award new contracts to support mobile comms units

  Mark Pomerleau The Army is awarding delivery orders to three vendors to support equipment for three Expeditionary Signal Battalion-Enhanced (ESB-E) units. Specifically, the awards will support fielding of satellite baseband equipment, said Paul Mehney, director of public communications at Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical. Expeditionary signal battalions support units that don't have organic communications capabilities. These groups could include military intelligence battalions, chemical battalions, engineering battalions or air defense artillery branches. The ESB-E aims to be more mobile and require less equipment in order to drop in, support units and move more quickly on the battlefield. Overall, the vendors will be responsible for providing 48 baseband sets of equipment for each ESB-E formation. “Due to aggressive initial fielding timelines, after the first six ESB-E formations are fielded, the program office intends to open baseband capability competition for future ESB-E needs,” Mehney said. PacStar was recently awarded a contract to support the ESB-E program to provide its 400-Series modular platform to enhance tactical expeditionary communications, the company said in a July 7 release. The 400-Series is lightweight allowing these smaller and expeditionary units to maneuver more quickly. It includes 128 GB RAM, virtual routing and the PacStar 463 Radio Gateway. “Network modernization to meet warfighter needs and defense priorities is a core focus for the Army and across the DoD, and we are proud to support these efforts with PacStar 400-Series for ESB-E,” Peggy J. Miller, chief executive of PacStar, said in a statement. “With these solutions, ESB-E [Scalable Network Node] will get the smallest, lightest, modular tactical communications platform in the industry, which is part of our larger initiative to enable increased reliability and innovation for warfighters.” The other vendors include Klas and DTECH, with all three supporting one ESB-E. An additional delivery order for each vendor to a second ESB-E will be issued, meaning in the near future, each vendor will support two units a piece. After that, the Army will open up the contracts to competition. This approach follows how the Army has been experimenting to date by providing similar, yet comparable equipment to several ESB-E's. These companies have provided separate equipment to three units allowing the Army to gain useful feedback from units to see what they liked and disliked about the gear. This has allowed the Army to execute rapid prototyping and experimentation on a tighter timeline for making fielding decisions while providing equipment to soldiers in the interim. The first two ESB-Es fielded include the 57th ESB-E at Fort Hood and the 50th ESB-E at Fort Bragg. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/2020/07/08/army-to-award-new-contracts-to-support-mobile-comms-units/