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January 13, 2024 | International, Land

France buys 42 Rafale jets for more than $5.5 billion

The purchase comes as French lawmakers express concerns about the Franco-German project to develop a successor to the fighter.

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/01/12/france-buys-42-rafale-jets-for-more-than-55-billion/

On the same subject

  • Saab to equip Bulgarian Navy’s new patrol vessels

    December 9, 2020 | International, Naval

    Saab to equip Bulgarian Navy’s new patrol vessels

    December 8, 2020 - Saab has signed a contract with the German shipbuilding company Lürssen and received an order to provide and integrate the combat system for the Bulgarian Navy's new Multipurpose Modular Patrol Vessels, MMPV. Lürssen is the prime contractor to the Bulgarian Ministry of Defence, and will build the two new patrol vessels at the Bulgarian shipyard MTG Dolphin JSC. The vessels are scheduled to be delivered to the end customer between 2025 and 2026. “We are proud to continue our successful cooperation with Lürssen. We look forward to contributing to strengthen Bulgaria's defence and national security for years to come with our proven technology and solid naval combat system expertise”, says Anders Carp, deputy CEO of Saab and head of business area Surveillance. Saab will carry out the work at its premises in Sweden, Denmark, Australia and South Africa. For further information, please contact: Saab Press Centre, +46 (0)734 180 018 presscentre@saabgroup.com www.saabgroup.com Twitter: @Saab Saab serves the global market with world-leading products, services and solutions within military defence and civil security. Saab has operations and employees on all continents around the world. Through innovative, collaborative and pragmatic thinking, Saab develops, adopts and improves new technology to meet customers' changing needs. View source version on Saab: https://www.saab.com/newsroom/press-releases/2020/saab-to-equip-bulgarian-navys-new-patrol-vessels

  • Air Force gets new stopgap system for GPS 3 satellites

    June 12, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Security, Other Defence

    Air Force gets new stopgap system for GPS 3 satellites

    By: Nathan Strout The U.S. Air Force's first next-generation GPS satellite launched in December and the second GPS III satellite is slated to liftoff in July. But there Air Force has a problem: The ground system currently in use isn't fully capable of controlling GPS III satellites. Worse, a new ground system that can, formally known as the next-generation operational control system (OCX), is five years behind schedule and won't be delivered until June 2021 at the earliest, according to the Government Accountability Office. Enter the GPS III Contingency Operations (COps) software—a critical stop gap measure that will update the current ground control system and allow it to access some of the more advanced features of the GPS III satellites until the next-generation operational control system is ready. On July 11, primary contractor Lockheed Martin announced that it had delivered the COps upgrade to the Air Force. “Positioning, navigation and timing is a critical mission for our nation and COps will allow the Air Force to gain early access to its new GPS III satellites,” said Johnathon Caldwell, Lockheed Martin's vice president for Navigation Systems. “We just finished final qualification testing and delivery on COps, and it will be integrated and installed on the [Architecture Evolution Plan Operational Control System] over the summer. We look forward to the Air Force ‘flying' a GPS constellation on the COps OCS which includes the new GPS III satellites, later this year.” The new GPS III satellites are built to be more robust and accurate than their predecessors and come with advanced features such as the ability to use M-Code, an encrypted GPS signal for use by the military. The COps upgrade will allow the current ground system to control the GPS III satellites as well as the legacy GPS satellites. It will also allow the current system to access M-code Early Use, an encrypted GPS signal with improved anti-jamming and anti-spoofing capabilities, beginning in 2020. The Air Force contracted with Lockheed Martin to deliver the patch in 2016, the same year that the OCX program triggered a Nunn-McCurdy cost breach—a type of violation caused by significant cost growth that requires a program to be shut down unless the Department of Defense intervenes and approves a new cost estimate. The $6.2 billion OCX program is already five years behind schedule, and a May 21 Government Accountability Office report warned that the OCX program could be delayed even further. In addition, the Air Force has acknowledged that delays are possible during the seven-month testing period following delivery. Raytheon, the primary contractor behind OCX, rejected the GAO report, claiming that its findings were inaccurate. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2019/06/11/air-force-gets-new-stopgap-system-for-gps-3-satellites/

  • The new ways the military is fighting against information warfare tactics

    July 22, 2020 | International, C4ISR

    The new ways the military is fighting against information warfare tactics

    Mark Pomerleau One of the clearest examples of how the military wants to defeat adversaries using information warfare is by publicly disclosing what those enemies have been doing and what capabilities they have. Information warfare can be abstract, combining cyber, intelligence, electronic warfare, information operations, psychological operations or military deception as a way to influence the information environment or change the way an adversary think. “At our level, the most important thing we can do is to be able to expose what an adversary is doing that we consider to be malign activity, in a way that allows that to be put in the information environment so that now more scrutiny can be applied to it,” Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander 16th Air Force, the Air Force's newly established information warfare organization, told reporters during a media round table in late February. One of the first ways the Department of Defense has sought to test this is through U.S. Cyber Command's posting of malware samples to the public resource VirusTotal. Malware samples discovered in the course of operations by the Cyber National Mission Force are posted to the site to inform network owners. It also helps antivirus organizations of the strains build patches against that code and helps identify the enemies' tools being used in ongoing campaigns. Haugh, who most recently led the Cyber National Mission Force, explained how these cyber teams, conducting what Cyber Command calls hunt forward operations, were able to expose Russian tactics. U.S. military teams deploy to other nations to help them defend against malign cyber activity inside their networks. “Those defensive teams then were able to identify tools that were on networks and publicly disclose them, [and] industry later attributed to being Russian tools,” he said. “That was a means for us to use our unique authorities outside the United States to be able to then identify adversary activity and publicly disclose it.” Officials have said this approach changes the calculus of adversaries while also taking their tools off the battlefield. “Disclosure is more than just revealing adversary intent and capabilities. From a cyberspace perspective, disclosure is cost imposing as it removes adversary weapons from the ‘battlefield' and forces them to expend resources to create new weapons,” Col. Brian Russell, the commander of II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, told C4ISRNET in June. “Disclosure forces the adversary to ask: ‘How were those capabilities discovered?' It causes them to investigate the cause of the disclosure, forcing them to spend time on something other than attacking us. If I can plant a seed of doubt (messaging) that the disclosure might have been caused by someone working on the inside, it makes them question the system's very nature, perhaps spending more time and resources to fix the system.” The NSA has demonstrated a similar tactic when it created its cybersecurity directorate in late 2019. The entity was formed in part, due to the fact that adversaries were using cyberspace to achieve strategic objectives below the threshold of armed conflict. Now, the directorate uses its intelligence and cyber expertise to issue advisories to the network owners of cybersecurity threats so they can take the necessary steps to defend themselves. One recent advisory had direct bearing on a nation state's malicious activity, according to a senior intelligence official. In late May, the agency issued an advisory regarding a vulnerability in Exim mail transfer agent, which was being widely exploited by a potent entity of Russia's military intelligence arm the GRU called Sandworm. “Quickly thereafter, we saw five cybersecurity companies jumped on it and really used that to deepen and expand and publish information about the GRU's infrastructure that they use to conduct their cyberattacks and further information as well,” the official told reporters in early July. “That was terrific because we felt that that had a direct impact on a major nation state in terms of exposing their infrastructure ... and we saw significant patch rates go up on a vulnerability that we knew they were using. That's the kind of thing that we're looking for.” The military has had to think differently to combat for how adversaries are operating. “A central challenge today is that our adversaries compete below the threshold of armed conflict, without triggering the hostilities for which DoD has traditionally prepared,” Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of Cyber Command, wrote in prepared testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in early March. “That short-of-war competition features cyber and information operations employed by nations in ways that bypass America's conventional military strengths.” These disclosures or efforts to call out malign behavior have also taken the forms of media interviews and press releases. For example, Gen. Jay Raymond, the head of U.S. Space Command and the commandant of Space Force, said in a February interview in which he detailed what he deemed unacceptable behavior by Russia in space, a surprising charge given how tight lipped the U.S. government typically is about its satellites. “We view this behavior as unusual and disturbing,” he said of Russian satellites creeping up to American ones. “It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space.” Or consider that leaders from Africa Command on July 15 issued a press release detailing the activities of the Wagner Group, a Russian security company, as acting on behalf of the Russian state to undermine the security situation in Libya. “U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has clear evidence that Russian employed, state-sponsored Wagner Group laid landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in and around Tripoli, further violating the United Nations arms embargo and endangering the lives of innocent Libyans,” the release said. “Verified photographic evidence shows indiscriminately placed booby-traps and minefields around the outskirts of Tripoli down to Sirte since mid-June. These weapons are assessed to have been introduced into Libya by the Wagner Group.” Moreover, Africa Command's director of operations called out Russia, noting that country's leaders have the power to stop the Wagner Group, but not the will. Sixteenth Air Force, at the request of C4ISRNET, provided a vignette of such behavior from Russia in the form of how it covered up the explosion of a radioactive rocket, dubbed Skyfall. According to the service, Russia took extreme steps to curb monitoring of the site where the explosion took place and sought to conceal the true nature of the explosion potentially hindering surrounding civilian populations from receiving adequate medical treatment and guidance. With new forces integrated under a single commander, using unique authorities to collect intelligence and authorities to disclose, 16th Air Force is now better postured to expose this type of malign activity, which previously the U.S. government just didn't do. Top Pentagon leaders have explained that the dynamic information warfare space requires a new way of thinking. “We've got to think differently. We've got to be proactive and not reactive with messaging,” Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds, the Marine Corps' deputy commandant for information, told C4ISRNET in an interview in March. “We have been very risk averse with regard to the information that we have. You can't deter anybody if you're the only one who knows that you have a capability.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/07/20/the-new-ways-the-military-is-fighting-against-information-warfare-tactics/

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