April 23, 2020 | International, Naval
By: Tom Kington
ROME — Italy shipbuilder Fincantieri has reopened its facilities after more than a month of closure due to coronavirus.
The state controlled firm shut down on March 16 after talks with unions as the virus swept through Italy — the first Western country to be hit hard.
Since then, Italy's death toll has been overtaken by the U.S., but remains the most exposed country in Europe, with more than 25,000 deaths and 187,000 total infections.
As the contagion rate slows however, the government is targeting May 4 as the date to relax rigid lockdown rules for the public. Fincantieri was given the go ahead to restart production on Monday — at a reduced pace.
At the firm's Riva Trigoso yard in the Liguria region, where 1,800 were employed before lockdown building Italy's final FREMM frigate and PPA vessels for the Italian navy, just 350 will initially return to work, a spokesman said.
Of that number, 150 will be Fincantieri staff, while the remainder are maintenance, cleaning and security contractors.
A similar policy is being followed at Fincantieri's Muggiano yard, also in Liguria, where 2,600 are normally employed, and where just 200 staff and 200 contractors have returned to continue work for Italy on a logistics vessel, the Vulcano and a new LHD, the Trieste; as well as a corvette for Qatar.
“We hope to be back to full personnel numbers by the end of May or the start of June,” said the spokesman.
In the meantime, safety precautions will be taken, including staggered entrances to the yards for staff, obligatory masks and gloves at work, temperature checks at entrances to spot fever sufferers and in-house medical staff.
Each staff member will be given a packet of 20 masks per week so they can change them multiple times during each day.
“We are planning buses to get staff to work so they don't have to use public transport,” said the spokesman.
Similar measures will be taken at Fincantieri's other yards in Italy, which build cruise ships.
During the shutdown, the firm's 8,900 staff were kept at home through use of vacation time, furloughs and home working.
By contrast, Italian state defense group Leonardo did not close during the lockdown, although many staff worked from home when possible. A deal was struck with unions to introduce social distancing and cleaning at facilities in Italy, and no staff were furloughed, a spokeswoman said.
Separately, the Italian government has reconfirmed Leonardo CEO Alessandro Profumo in his role after his mandate ended. The government did however appoint a new chairman, Luciano Carta, who moves from his post as director of Italy's foreign intelligence service.
He replaces Gianni De Gennaro, who was head of the government department overseeing Italy's foreign and domestic intelligence services between he joined Leonardo in 2013.
https://www.defensenews.com/coronavirus/2020/04/22/fincantieri-reopens-shipyards-in-italy
December 3, 2023 | International, Land
German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall AG wants to build its first armored vehicles in Ukraine next year, Chief Executive Armin Papperger was cited as saying by German magazine WirtschaftsWoche.
November 13, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — French and German officials celebrated the signing of a new defense export agreement last month as a watershed moment, but political and industrial mistrust remains a wild card for the Future Combat Air System program — an envisioned sixth-generation fighter jet. The export pact, which entered into force in late October with the formal exchange of government notes, is meant to streamline a contentious process that has clouded bilateral defense cooperation for some time. Namely, the agreement dictates that joint government programs, like FCAS fighter jet, be free from interference by partner nations when it comes to eventual exports. The clause is mainly aimed at Germany, where politicians and lawmakers tend to scrutinize weapons deliveries to countries with known or suspected human rights abuses more heavily than their French colleagues. The situation has grown more tense since the October 2018 death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Western officials believe was murdered by order of Saudi Arabia. Germany has since frozen all exports to the kingdom, prompting an outcry from France, where companies had to stall deliveries of equipment to Saudi Arabia in all cases where even a small number of components originated from Germany. The new agreement ensures “nobody can throw a wrench” into the other's export planning, says Matthias Wachter, chief defense analyst at the Federation of German Industries lobbying group. Having such a guarantee in writing is good news for FCAS and its ground-focused sister project, the Franco-German future main battle tank known as the Main Ground Combat System, he added. The language of the export pact is reminiscent of the 1971 Schmidt-Debré agreement, named for the German and French defense ministers at the time and panned in the left-leaning Spiegel magazine as an “embarrassing pact” when reporters found out about the then-secret understanding a year later. Fast-forward almost 50 years, and defense cooperation remains a thorny subject between the two countries destined to spearhead Europe's envisioned military autonomy in the coming decades. And there are also long-standing cultural differences that linger. There is a perception among some German lawmakers, for example, that cooperation with Paris inevitably means ceding power to French influence to the point that Germany plays only second fiddle, according to Wachter. That sentiment has led appropriators to craft a package deal for FCAS that would release funding for the next phase — building subcomponent demonstrators — only when there are assurances that Germany's tank makers, namely Rheinmetall, play a prominent role in the Main Ground Combat System effort. With armored vehicles traditionally being a strong suit for German industry, some here have privately complained about the 50-50 division of responsibility. “It's an emotional issue here in Germany,” Wachter said. Once the money begins to flow for an additional set of contracts early next year, there is a litany of questions yet to be sorted out. The fate of intellectual property rights, for example, remains unsorted, according to the analyst. In addition, as of late October, there was no agreement on Spain's industrial work share. Spain is something of a junior partner in the FCAS project, though officials in Madrid have said they expect equal treatment as a full member of the trinational project team. The Spanish government in the summer designated defense electronics company Indra as the national lead for the fighter program. The move angered Airbus, where officials were hoping to give their Spanish subsidiary a role that would satisfy Madrid's demands for industrial participation. Another potential point of contention has to do with military requirements for the future fighter. Perhaps the most prominent issue is that French officials want a carrier-capable jet, which Germany does not need. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/11/11/can-a-new-franco-german-export-agreement-clear-the-air-for-europes-future-fighter/
September 9, 2020 | International, Naval
9/8/2020 By Yasmin Tadjdeh Over the past few years, the Navy has been hard at work building a new family of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles through a variety of prototyping efforts. It is now standing up an integration lab to enable the platforms with increased autonomy, officials said Sept. 8. The Rapid Integration Autonomy Lab, or RAIL, is envisioned as a place where the Navy can bring in and test new autonomous capabilities for its robotic vehicles, said Capt. Pete Small, program manager for unmanned maritime systems. “Our Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab concept is really the playground where all the autonomy capabilities and sensors and payloads come together, both to be integrated ... [and] to test them from a cybersecurity perspective and test them from an effectiveness perspective,” Small said during the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's Unmanned Systems conference, which was held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Robotics technology is moving at a rapid pace, and platforms will need to have their software and hardware components replaced throughout their lifecycles, he said. In order to facilitate these upgrades, the service will need to integrate the new autonomy software that comes with various payloads and certain autonomy mission capabilities with the existing nuts-and-bolts packages already in the unmanned platforms. “The Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab is where we bring together the platform software, the payload software, the mission software and test them,” he explained. During testing, the service will be able to validate the integration of the software as well as predict the performance of the unmanned vehicles in a way that “we're sure that this is going to work out and give us the capability we want,” Small said. The RAIL concept will rely on modeling-and-simulation technology with software-in-the-loop testing to validate the integration of various autonomous behaviors, sensors and payloads, he said. “We will rely heavily on industry to bring those tools to the RAIL to do the testing that we require,” he noted. However, the lab is not envisioned as a single, brick-and-mortar facility, but rather a network of cloud-based infrastructure and modern software tools. “There will be a certain footprint of the actual software developers who are doing that integration, but we don't see this as a big bricks-and-mortar effort. It's really more of a collaborative effort of a number of people in this space to go make this happen," Small said. The service has kicked off a prototype effort as part of the RAIL initiative where it will take what it calls a “third-party autonomy behavior” that has been developed by the Office of Naval Research and integrate it onto an existing unmanned underwater vehicle that runs on industry-made proprietary software, Small said. Should that go as planned, the Navy plans to apply the concept to numerous programs. For now, the RAIL is a prototyping effort, Small said. “We're still working on developing the budget profile and ... the details behind it,” he said. “We're working on building the programmatic efforts behind it that really are in [fiscal year] '22 and later.” The RAIL is part of a series of “enablers” that will help the sea service get after new unmanned technology, Small said. Others include a concept known as the unmanned maritime autonomy architecture, or UMAA, a common control system and a new data strategy. Cmdr. Jeremiah Anderson, deputy program manager for unmanned underwater vehicles, said an upcoming industry day on Sept. 24 that is focused on UMAA will also feature information about the RAIL. “Half of that day's agenda will really be to get into more of the nuts and bolts about the RAIL itself and about that prototyping effort that's happening this year,” he said. “This is very early in the overall trajectory for the RAIL, but I think this will be a good opportunity to kind of get that message out a little bit more broadly to the stakeholders and answer their questions.” Meanwhile, Small noted that the Navy is making strides within its unmanned portfolio, citing a “tremendous amount of progress that we've made across the board with our entire family of UVS and USVs.” Rear Adm. Casey Moton, program executive officer for unmanned and small combatants, highlighted efforts with the Ghost Fleet Overlord and Sea Hunter platforms, which are unmanned surface vessels. The Navy — working in cooperation with the office of the secretary of defense and the Strategic Capabilities Office — has two Overlord prototypes. Fiscal year 2021, which begins Oct. 1, will be a particularly important period for the platforms, he said. “Our two Overlord vessels have executed a range of autonomous transits and development vignettes,” he said. “We have integrated autonomy software automation systems and perception systems and tested them in increasingly complex increments and vignettes since 2018.” Testing so far has shown the platforms have the ability to perform safe, autonomous navigation in according with the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, or COLREGS, at varying speeds and sea states, he said. “We are pushing the duration of transits increasingly longer, and we will soon be working up to 30 days,” he said. “Multi-day autonomous transits have occurred in low- and high-traffic density environments.” The vessels have already had interactions with commercial fishing fleets, cargo vessels and recreational craft, he said. The longest transit to date includes a round trip from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast where it conducted more than 181 hours and over 3,193 nautical miles of COLREGS-compliant, autonomous operation, Moton added. Both Overload vessels are slated to conduct extensive testing and experimentation in fiscal year 2021, he said. “These tests will include increasingly long-range transits with more complex autonomous behaviors,” he said. "They will continue to demonstrate automation functions of the machinery control systems, plus health monitoring by a remote supervisory operation center with the expectation of continued USV reliability." The Sea Hunter will also be undergoing numerous fleet exercises and tactical training events in fiscal year 2021. “With the Sea Hunter and the Overlord USVs we will exercise ... control of multiple USVs, test command-and-control, perform as part of surface action groups and train Navy sailors on these platforms, all while developing and refining the fleet-led concept of operations and concept of employment,” Moton said. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/9/8/navy-testing-new-autonomy-integration-lab