Great Britain procures Rheinmetall Mission Master – Cargo

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  July 9, 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

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  December 27, 2018 | International, Naval

  The US Navy’s surface fleet: Here’s what’s ahead in 2019

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. surface fleet has a big year in store for 2019, and we're going to start getting more details very soon on what the future has in store for surface warriors. But surface leadership has been dropping clues on where things are going. Here's a handy reference guide for heading into January's Surface Navy Association annual symposium and for what the fleet has up its sleeve for the coming months. Robot wars The Chief of Naval Operations' Surface Navy Director Rear Adm. Ron Boxall forecast what was on his mind at a recent training and simulation conference in Orlando. The focus for Boxall and the N96 shop will be to get more sensors and weapons into the battlespace, distributed and networked, so that a smaller number of larger warships can act as command and control for smaller units. “If you think about what we are trying to do with the surface force, we have large and small surface combatants that will [ultimately make up part of the 355-ship Navy] but we have no requirement for unmanned surface vessels right now, which I see as an absolutely critical part of distributed lethality, distributed maritime operations environment that we are moving into,” Boxall said. “Ultimately I need more nodes out there.” N96 is looking closely at what might be needed for a large unmanned surface vessel, much like the Sea Hunter drone developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “I think these are what you need to go in the water and carry large things and be more places at less cost,” Boxall said. “So, in that nodal structure, we are looking at them becoming large sensors or large shooters, but we are still working out the requirement.” Developing unmanned vessels for military use was a key component of a recent agreement with NATO forged during the July summit. Future frigate Next year is the crucial year for FFG(X), the year when the Navy finalizes its requirements and puts the first hull out to bid for a 2020 detailed design and construction award. Look for news to creep out on this ship throughout the year but Boxall had some remarks on how it will fit into the fleet now in development. Boxall hinted that the planned 20 hulls may be a low-ball figure, and that he's looking to maybe keep the program going beyond that. “It will be a very capable ship, but it won't have a lot of capacity,” he said. “But it will be able to both sense and shoot and do command and control at a smaller level. It will be a much less expensive platform and I can have more of them.” Training Training is a major focus of Surface Navy boss Vice Adm. Richard Brown, and some ongoing efforts will start to bear fruit in 2019. Earlier in 2018, the Navy reprogrammed $24 million to build a Maritime Skills Training Program, which will be heavily reliant on simulators to bring together officer and enlisted watchstanders from both the bridge and the combat information center to train on equipment and work as a unit. “We've secured the funding for the maritime skills training centers, which is going to do two things: individual officer training through the [officer of the deck training],” Brown said earlier this year. “So that, in conjunction with building out the navigation, seamanship and ship-handling trainers in the fleet concentration areas, will give us integrated bridge and [combat information center] training at the high end. That's my No. 1 priority.” Those facilities will be ready for use by the waterfront in the 2021 time frame, Brown said. Upgrades to existing simulators are being rolled out this month. DDG-1000 Look for news on the future of DDG-1000. The first of the class, the Zumwalt, is wrapping up its combat systems installation in San Diego and will start the process of integrating the three-ship class into the fleet. We're going to find out more about its new mission – surface strike – and how the Navy plans to employ its behemoth new surface combatant. The Navy has pivoted away from its long odyssey to find a use for its advanced gun system, with requirements boss Vice Adm. William Merz saying in testimony in April that the Sisyphean task of getting a working gun on Zumwalt was holding the ship back. “Even at the high cost, we still weren't really getting what we had asked for,” he said. “So what we've elected to do is to separate the gun effort from the ship effort because we really got to the point where now we're holding up the ship.” Instead, efforts are going to focus on getting Zumwalt into the fleet and on the hunt for ships to kill. Large surface combatant Last up, the Large Surface Combatant should start getting some meat on its bones in 2019. Boxall and company are aiming to put the fleet on a course to buy its cruiser and destroyer replacement in 2023 or 2024, which means a request for information from industry could be in the near future. What we know is that, like the small surface combatant, the Navy wants commonality with other nodes in the network. That means a similar radar as on FFG(X), the same combat system and as much overlapping equipment as the fleet can manage to tamp down on compatibility issues and on how much specialized training sailors need to be on one platform or another. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/12/26/the-us-navys-surface-fleet-heres-whats-ahead-in-2019/

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  October 1, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  US government may gain new power to track drones and shoot them down

  By: David Koenig, The Associated Press An aviation bill Congress is rushing to approve contains a little-noticed section that would give authorities the power to track, intercept and destroy drones they consider a security threat, without needing a judge's approval. Supporters say law enforcement needs this power to protect Americans from terrorists who are learning how to use drones as deadly weapons. They point to the Islamic State terrorist group's use of bomb-carrying drones on battlefields in Iraq, and warn that terrorists could go after civilian targets in the United States. Critics say the provision would give the government unchecked power to decide when drones are a threat. They say the government could use its newfound power to restrict drone-camera news coverage of protests or controversial government facilities, such as the new detention centers for young migrants. The provision is tucked in a huge bill that provides $1.7 billion in disaster relief and authorizes programs of the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates drones. The House approved the measure Wednesday by a 398-23 vote, and the Senate is expected pass it on to President Donald Trump's desk in the coming days. The White House signaled support of the drone provision in July. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, introduced the Preventing Emerging Threats Act this year. It would give the Homeland Security Department and the Justice Department power to develop and deploy a system to spot, track and shoot down drones, as unmanned aircraft are called. Officers would have the authority to hack a drone operator's signal and take control of the device. The bill was never considered on its own by the full Senate or the House. Instead, in private negotiations that ended last weekend, it was tucked into a "must-pass" piece of FAA legislation. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen wrote in a recent op-ed that the threat of drone attacks "is outpacing our ability to respond." She said criminals use drones to smuggle drugs across the border, but worse, terrorists like the Islamic State are deploying them on the battlefield. "We need to acknowledge that our first and last chance to stop a malicious drone might be during its final approach to a target," she wrote. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement this week that the measure "would finally give federal law enforcement the authority we need to counter the use of drones by drug traffickers, terrorists and criminals." The National Football League's top security executive recently endorsed the bill's intent but said it should go further by letting trained local police officers intercept drones. The official, Cathy Lanier, a former Washington, D.C., police chief, said the NFL is alarmed by an increase in drone flyovers at stadiums. Opponents including the American Civil Liberties Union argue that the proposal gives the government unchecked power to track and seize drones without regard for the privacy and free-speech rights of legitimate drone operators. It exempts the government agencies from certain laws, including limits on wiretapping. The bill provides no oversight or means to question a government decision about what is a "credible threat" and what is an "asset" or "facility" in need of protection when drones are nearby. News organizations are increasingly using drones. They deploy them to cover natural disasters like the recent flooding from Hurricane Florence and also controversies such as the Trump administration's construction of new camps for migrant children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. "Being able to see footage of protests, the size of protests, being able to see facilities like those at the border is useful — those are newsworthy events," said India McKinney, a legislative analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Without a specific means to protect First Amendment rights — something not in the bill — "it's entirely feasible to think that the DOJ or DHS could just decide that a drone owned by a news organization provides a credible threat and then destroys the footage," she said. ___ David Koenig can be reached at http://twitter.com/airlinewriter https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/09/28/government-may-gain-new-power-to-track-drones-and-shoot-them-down