March 11, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
WASHINGTON: As Russian and Chinese-made anti-aircraft weapons become ever more lethal, human pilots are, quite literally, the last thing the Army wants to send into harm's way. Before the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft makes its first probe into enemy airspace, and long before the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft carries troops deep into hostile territory, a whole array of unmanned aircraft will scout out the enemy defenses, deceive their radars, and strike vital points.
In fact, much of this drone technology should be available years before the manned FARA and FLRAA aircraft enter production, which means it can help the Army's existing helicopters survive an increasingly dangerous world.
“What we have to do is improve our stand-off and our survivability with the introduction of some technology that will be available prior to the actual FVL [Future Vertical Lift] platform,” said Maj. Gen. David Francis, the commander of the Army's Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala. That includes a new Long-Range Precision Munition – the Army's buying the Israeli Spike missile as an interim solution, but that may not be the permanent one – and a whole family of mini-drones known as Air-Launched Effects (ALE), because they can be launched from the missile racks on both future and existing helicopters.
“Those combined, we think, will keep us very, very competitive in that [air defense] environment until we get the increased speed and survivability of our Future Vertical Lift platforms,” Francis told me during an interview.
Replacing Shadow & Predator
Air-Launched Effects aren't the only drones the Army's Future Vertical Lift task force is developing. The most immediate effort is a competition to replace the aging RQ-7 Shadow, which requires a runway, with a new Future Tactical Unmanned Aerial System (FTUAS), which will take off and land vertically like a helicopter, from wherever soldiers need it. FTUAS also needs to be quieter, so the enemy can't hear it coming as easily, and to require less support equipment, so the Army can more easily deploy it to a war zone more and keep it working in harsh conditions.
The service originally selected two companies to provide demonstration aircraft, then decided to double the number to four. This year, samples of all four types are going to operational Army combat brigades, which will try out the different designs and provide feedback that helps the service shapes its final, formal requirement.
Three of the contenders – Arcturus UAV's Jump 20, L3 Harris Technologies' FVR-90, and Textron's Aerosonde HQ – share a similar configuration, something we've never seen on a full-size manned aircraft. Each of them has wings and a pusher propeller in back for forward flight, but also quadcopter-style mini-rotors for vertical takeoff and landing. The fourth, equally unconventional design is Martin UAV's V-Bat, a “tail-sitter” that has a single large fan for both vertical and forward flight, changing from one mode to the other by simply turning 90 degrees.
Just as FTUAS will replace the Shadow, the Army also wants to replace its long-range Grey Eagle – a variant of the iconic but venerable Predator – with a new Advanced Unmanned Aerial System. The service has revealed very little about what it's looking for in the Advanced UAS, however.
Air-Launched Effects & Missiles
The most innovative of the Army's future drones, however, is definitely the Air-Launched Effects family, because ALE doesn't replace any existing unmanned aircraft. It's altogether new. As computers simultaneously shrink and grow more powerful, it becomes possible to build drones small enough for a person or another aircraft to carry – and to make them smart enough that they can operate largely autonomously, without a human being to provide constant direction by remote control.
Those advances make possible a radically new kind of operation — a single manned mothership launching a flock of mini-drones to scout ahead and provide a host of what the military blandly calls “effects,” from decoying the enemy with fake transmissions to jamming their radars to blowing them up. That combination of new technology and new tactics, in turn, could dramatically improve the chances of Army aviators to survive and prevail in future wars.
“When we look at ALE and Long-Range Precision Munition,” said Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, the Army's FVL director, “what we're finding, in our modeling and our experimentation at Yuma last year, is you really generate that stand-off and overmatch against threats....We can stay outside their weapon engagement zone, and put effects on them.”
In the time-honored military framework where you “find, fix, and finish” an enemy, Rugen told me in an interview alongside Gen. Francis, “Air-Launched Effects are what is going to find and fix these threats, and then what the long-range precision munition is going to do is finish that threat.”
The Army's budget request for fiscal year 2021 includes $152 million to field Israeli armsmaker Rafael's Spike NLOS (Non-Line Of Sight) missile to three Combat Aviation Brigades. “We're currently projecting that it would be an FY'22 initial [operational capability,” Rugen told me. “But that's just our initial increment of the Long-Range Precision Munition. We will follow that on with more detailed requirements to fix some of the challenges that we see already with Spike [and] improve upon that capability.”
To make all this work, however, the Army needs more than new missiles and mini-drones. It also needs a digital communications system that can rapidly pass data between manned and unmanned aircraft, not through slow and error-prone humans, but near-instantly from machine to machine. The electronic architecture to make that possible is the subject of the next story in this series.
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/fvl-attack-of-the-drones
June 8, 2021 | International, Aerospace
U.S. Air Force officials on June 4 expressed enthusiasm about the possibility that commercial space vehicles one day could be used to ship supplies around the world.
August 29, 2018 | International, Aerospace
Par Julien Bouissou L'achat par l'Inde, en 2016, de trente-six exemplaire de l'avion de combat de Dassault suscite la colère de l'opposition. Le Parti du Congrès dénonce le rôle joué par un proche du premier ministre Narendra Modi. Deux ans après l'achat par New Delhi de trente-six avions de combat Rafale, le contrat signé avec Dassault Aviation se retrouve au cœur d'une tempête politique en Inde. Pas un jour ne passe sans que le Parti du Congrès, dans l'opposition, n'attaque le gouvernement de Narendra Modi sur son manque de transparence et sa connivence avec Anil Ambani, le partenaire indien de l'avionneur français. Rahul Gandhi, le président du Parti du Congrès, a qualifié le contrat d'« escroquerie ». Une polémique qui pourrait ternir l'image de Dassault Aviation alors que le groupe tricolore est en concurrence pour fournir à l'Inde 110 avions de combat supplémentaires. Six avionneurs ont répondu, le 6 juillet, à la demande d'information (« Request for Information ») déposée par New Delhi pour ce nouveau contrat. L'« affaire Rafale », comme on la surnomme désormais dans les médias indiens, était née de l'annonce surprise faite par M. Modi d'acheter trente-six avions de combat lors de sa visite à Paris en avril 2015. Premières livraisons prévues en 2019 L'appel d'offres remporté en 2012 par Dassault prévoyait la livraison de 126 appareils, dont 108 assemblés sur le sol indien. Mais en ce printemps 2015, les négociations piétinent depuis trois ans. Elles butent sur le prix final et le partage des responsabilités pour les avions assemblés en Inde. Or les escadrons de l'armée de l'air indienne se rapprochent dangereusement de l'obsolescence, au risque de compromettre la sécurité du pays. M. Modi, pourtant si attaché au « Make in India », enterre le « contrat du siècle » qui prévoyait la construction d'une chaîne d'assemblage Rafale en Inde. Les trente-six avions, dont les premières livraisons sont prévues en 2019, seront produits en France. Le nouveau contrat, signé quelques mois plus tard dans le cadre d'un accord intergouvernemental, est assorti d'une clause d'« offset », c'est-à-dire qu'une... Article complet: https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/08/28/en-inde-le-contrat-rafale-tourne-au-scandale-politique_5347034_3234.html
June 27, 2019 | International, Aerospace
RACHEL S. COHEN Performance and professionalism in the Air Force's nuclear ranks has improved in the last few years following a spate of personnel issues, but there's always more work to be done to ensure the men and women who watch the arsenal are at their best, the service's top uniformed officer said this week. “I believe we've come a long way,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said at a June 26 AFA Mitchell Institute breakfast. “We've all had to make sure that we keep our foot on the gas on this. I'm optimistic, but I'm not comfortable.” Nuclear operators have hit rough patches over the past several years: low morale and lost focus coupled with reports of drug use, weapons mismanagement, a proficiency test cheating scandal, and frequent staff turnover. In response, theservice launched programs to revamp training and regulations and to keep missileers in their jobs longer, rather than send them to other specialties after a few years. The Air Force has also made a conscious effort to offer bonuses, tout missileers' work, and visit the three nuclear missile bases spread across rural Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. Now, the service wants to develop its missile-managing employees' leadership skills at the same time as it develops new nuclear weapons and Northrop Grumman's B-21 bomber. Some airmen at Air Command and Staff College are taking a yearlong course focused on the nuclear enterprise in one effort to bolster leadership in those career fields. “One of the tasks I gave them was to ... give us some fresh thinking on, how do we do command and control if nuclear weapons were inserted into a conventional fight?” Goldfein said. “We built our nuclear command and control to be separate from our conventional command and control.” If the Russians deployed a low-yield, “tactical” nuclear weapon in combat, regional commanders would need the ability to integrate nukes into their otherwise conventionally armed battle plan. However, Goldfein emphasized that a “nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon,” saying many don't believe there is such a thing as a tactical nuke. “Our command-and-control systems right now are not as agile as they need to be,” he continued. “This group of scholars have been doing some extraordinary work, writing papers and thinking about what is the command-and-control mechanism and how does that need to feed into [nuclear command, control, and communications]?” The Air Force's NC3 Integration Directorate has been mulling the idea of dual-use command and control for at least two years, and points to the concept as one of the most complicated security hurdles it faces in bringing the NC3 enterprise into the digital age. Goldfein argues efforts to modernize decades-old NC3 systems also need to dovetail with the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, envisioned as a network of conventional C2 assets spread across air, land, and space sensors and platforms, as well as with the push into commercial space capabilities. http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/June%202019/Missileer-Improvements-Hit-Mark-but-Still-More-to-Do.aspx