Back to news

November 21, 2022 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR

German defence ministry: working at full speed on procurement proposals

There will be many more defence procurement proposals heading to the German parliament for approval this year, said a defence ministry spokesperson on Monday, as the war in Ukraine has put renewed focus on bringing the country's military up to speed.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-defence-ministry-working-full-speed-procurement-proposals-2022-11-21/

On the same subject

  • Missileer Improvements Hit Mark, but Still More to Do

    June 27, 2019 | International, Aerospace

    Missileer Improvements Hit Mark, but Still More to Do

    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

  • Polish PM flags wrinkle in multibillion-dollar arms buy from SKorea

    January 3, 2024 | International, Land

    Polish PM flags wrinkle in multibillion-dollar arms buy from SKorea

    The new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is scrutinizing the paperwork for weapons deals struck by the Law and Order government.

  • Naval Engineers Must 'Lean In' to Advance Technological Agility

    June 21, 2019 | International, Naval

    Naval Engineers Must 'Lean In' to Advance Technological Agility

    BY C. TODD LOPEZ Rebuilding "strategic momentum" and growing advantages in the maritime domain are challenges Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson addressed in "A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority, Version 2.0," which updated a 2016 document. At an annual meeting of the American Society of Naval Engineers today in Washington, Richardson said meeting those challenges is a "human problem" that must be met, in part by naval engineers. His plan for how the Navy will maintain maritime superiority relies in part on three aspects of agility. "With the joint force, we will restore agility — conceptual, geographic, and technological — to impose cost[s] on our adversaries across the competition-conflict spectrum," the report reads. For engineers, Richardson focused on their contribution to technological agility. "The technological landscape is changing so fast across all of technology," Richardson said. "It's really fueled by this information revolution that we are in the middle of right now. And so as we think about the Navy as a learning engine in and of itself, restoring these technical agilities is really important. We do need to move at pace." For comparison, the admiral referred back to Dec. 8, 1941 — a day after the bombing at Pearl Harbor. It was then, Richardson said, that the Navy began a quick transition from battleship-based tactics to aircraft carriers and aerial battles. He said the switch in strategy wasn't a surprise for the Navy, because it had been researching and engineering for that possibility for years. "We had been 20 years into naval aviation," he said. "This was not just something that we did as a pickup team on Dec. 8. We had been putting investments in with folks like [Joseph] Reeves and [William] Moffett and all those pioneers of naval aviation. We had evidence. A lot of experimentation, a lot of engineering that had gone into that." Now, Richardson said, the Navy must again have that kind of experimentation, engineering and prototyping to ready it for the next conflict — and it must get on that mission quickly to stay ahead of adversaries. "We do not want to be the second navy on the water with these decisive technologies: the directed energy, unmanned, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc., you name it," he said. "That's the great challenge now: to get out, start prototyping, get at this pace, plus evidence ... to yield a relevant Navy that is ready to defend America from attack and protect our interests around the world." The admiral said that a knee-jerk reaction might be to cite Defense Department acquisition regulations, like DOD 5000, for inhibiting the type of rapid development, engineering and research he thinks will be needed to maintain maritime dominance. But he said that's not entirely correct. "I think a new set of rules would help," he said. "But this is, I think, a human problem at the end of the day. If we are all biased for action, if we all lean into this, we will get it done. There is nothing that will prohibit us or inhibit us from getting that done if we are all leaning in." https://www.defense.gov/explore/story/Article/1882567/naval-engineers-must-lean-in-to-advance-technological-agility/

All news