November 23, 2018 | International, Naval
Defence Minister Stuart Andrew has today announced the name of a future world-beating British warship as HMS Sheffield.
Built on centuries of history, the state-of-the-art submarine hunter will be the fourth ship to carry the name, and will be Britain's fifth state-of-the-art Type 26 frigate.
The Defence Minister announced the news at Chesterfield Special Cylinders in Sheffield, a key supplier to the multi-billion-pound Type 26 programme. The company makes high pressure gas storage systems for the ships.
Defence Minister Stuart Andrew said:
HMS Sheffield will be at the forefront of our world leading Royal Navy for decades to come, providing cutting edge protection for our aircraft carriers and nuclear deterrent, and offering unrivalled capability at sea.
From north to south, these ships are truly a national endeavour, built on centuries of British expertise and supporting thousands of businesses like Chesterfield Special Cylinders across the UK.
Defence boosts the economy of Yorkshire and the Humber economy by £232million every year and it's only right the region's significant contribution to our national security is recognised by the naming of HMS Sheffield.
The fourth HMS Sheffield will be built on more than 80 years of proud naval history, with the first ship carrying her name in 1935. She played a vital role in Scandinavia during the Second World War and assisted with the evacuation of Andalsnes in 1940. She also took part in the first major Allied landing of the war in North Africa during Operation ‘Torch', and patrolled waters from the Mediterranean to the Arctic. The second HMS Sheffield, a Type 42 destroyer, was lost during the Falklands War.
The naming of HMS Sheffield, the fifth ship in the city-class of Type 26 frigates, came as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson also announced the sixth ship would be called HMS Newcastle during a visit to the Tyne today.
The two ships will join HMS Glasgow, HMS Belfast, HMS Cardiff, HMS Birmingham and HMS London. The final name has yet to be announced.
All of the Type 26 frigates will be built on the Clyde, supported by suppliers across the country and securing decades of work for more than 4,000 people. The first three ships have already been ordered for £3.7bn.
Chesterfield Special Cylinders is just one of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises in the supply chain delivering essential services to the UK defence sector. It is a world-leading designer and manufacturer of safety-critical high pressure gas storage systems. Its bespoke products are deployed in the Type 26 frigate for breathing air storage, safety and backup systems, fresh water and power systems.
Chesterfield Special Cylinders' managing director, Mick Pinder, said:
Chesterfield Special Cylinders has been a strategic supplier to the Royal Navy for over 100 years. Our high-pressure gas storage systems are in use across many platforms, from submarines to surface ships.
Our reputation for excellence in the design, manufacture and maintenance of safety-critical naval systems has seen our customer base grow in recent years to now include almost every NATO-friendly overseas navy, though the Royal Navy remains a prime partner.
It is an honour to host the Minister for Defence Procurement and for our manufacturing site to be the location for this important announcement.
Last year the MOD injected nearly £2.5bn into small and medium businesses. The visit by the Defence Minister came ahead of Small Business Saturday on 01 December, an opportunity for defence to thank the workforce behind many SMEs.
The news also came as the Defence Secretary announced he will retain three of the Royal Navy's patrol ships to bolster Britain's fishery protection capability.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/hms-sheffield-revealed-as-new-warship
August 5, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Lockheed Martin surprised stakeholders late Aug. 3 when it announced the sudden departure of its chief financial officer, the second in almost as many years, as well as lower earnings per share guidance for the year, albeit due to a one-time financial transaction.
September 10, 2019 | International, C4ISR
By: Heiko Borchert und Christian Brandlhuber As the United States, China and Russia are accelerating their use of artificial intelligence in military settings, Europe risks falling behind unless leaders on the continent take steps to bundle their efforts. Estonia, Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands presented a food-for-thought paper in May 2019, posing a series of questions aimed at boosting defense-relevant AI research in Europe. Our suggestion: Create a data mobility framework that would guide future concepts, models, algorithms, data sharing, access to elastic computing power, and sophisticated testing and training. Key challenges have yet to be addressed. Among them is a solid conceptual framework to help underline the benefits for armed forces. Second, AI solutions need to be integrated into a complex web of legacy systems, which puts a premium on interoperability. Third, defense AI solutions must comply with legal requirements. Finally, Europe lacks a common, trusted defense data pool. European leaders should take a lesson from the military mobility project, which simplifies and standardizes cross-border military transport procedures to ease the movement of personnel and equipment. Europe needs to match physical mobility with digital mobility. Data needs to travel, too. To stimulate defense AI solutions, the continent needs a platform economy that emerges around a portfolio of relevant infrastructure elements and services that a new “Center for Defense AI” could build. For the platform to become attractive, the data acquisition strategy must focus on the need to share. Readiness to share must be incentivized by a data pool that offers true, added value. Therefore, the center would offer access to data on anything from missile defense to combat aircraft maintenance under strict, government-controlled regulation, enabling users to build novel use cases for military scenarios. Mission-critical systems cannot rely on a single machine-learning technology but require a combined approach to data fusion that increases reliability and reflects the specific requirements of the different domains like land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. In addition, data must be validated to avoid manipulation. This data pool would become enormously attractive if the center managed to establish arrangements with the European Union and NATO to share data collected in international operations. This would provide an unprecedented opportunity to develop future concepts, models and algorithms based on real-life data reflecting mission requirements, environmental conditions in different theaters of operation and adversarial behavior. In addition, the European Defence Agency and NATO's Science and Technology Organization should make use of the joint data pool for their defense AI projects, thus expanding the data pool as well as the concepts and models used for data curation and solutions development. With the help of the European Defence Fund, the center could establish the first European defense data pool spanning across military services, missions and domains. This will drastically reduce data-handling costs, as data curation activities required for every single defense AI project can be pooled. While hugely important, data is only a means to develop capabilities-based AI solutions. That's why the center would offer complementary services addressing two current shortfalls: First, commonly available computing capacity required for large-scale learning is somewhat novel to the defense industry. A new defense AI cloud would significantly enhance data mobility by offering elastic computing capacity up to supercomputer levels, and dedicated data fusion capabilities currently unavailable to train very large-scale, AI-based data fusion models. Second, the center could provide a sophisticated simulation environment to run AI operations in a realistic battlefield environment. Based on its trusted data sources, the center and defense AI developers could join forces to build a defense AI app store. Apps could capture different sensor and effector characteristics or emulate particular patterns of adversarial behavior. Defense contractors and defense procurement agencies could use these apps to verify and validate new AI systems as if they had access to the respective algorithms, but without exposing the original vendor to the risk of being reverse engineered. In addition, the simulation environment would be instrumental to assess the ethical, legal and societal impact of AI solutions, thus providing a sound basis to decide on the use of AI systems and to enhance live, virtual, constructive training solutions. Europe should take bold steps toward channeling its collaborative defense AI activities, building on the strengths of each partner: The center would offer joint services; defense AI developers could concentrate on designing and producing intelligent sensors, effectors and decision-making solutions, while military end-users would contribute capabilities-based thinking and operational experience. Heiko Borchert runs Borchert Consulting & Research, a strategic affairs consultancy based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Christian Brandlhuber is senior adviser at Reply, a European IT systems integrator, and coordinates the company's AI strategy and activities. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2019/09/09/jump-starting-europes-work-on-military-artificial-intelligence/
May 11, 2021 | International, Aerospace
The company is building position, navigation and timing payloads for DARPA's Project Blackjack, a demonstration satellite constellation that will operate in low-Earth orbit.