August 1, 2023 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
Indonesia has bought 12 new drones from Turkish Aerospace worth $300 million, its defence ministry said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of purchases aimed at modernising the country's ageing military equipment.
October 5, 2023 | International, Aerospace
The strategy pursues a two-lane approach to procuring launches -- one for emerging providers a second for rockets that can fly more demanding missions.
July 11, 2018 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
By: Shawn Snow The Corps is looking to install antennas in its F/A-18 C/D Hornets to help the aircraft defeat GPS jammers. In a request for information posted in early June by Naval Air Systems Command, or NAVAIR, the Corps wants to install the anti-jam antennas known as the Air Navigation Warfare Program, or NAVWAR, in 120 of the legacy Hornets. The anti-jamming antenna “provides Global Positioning System (GPS) protection for Naval Air platforms by allowing for continued access to GPS through the use of Anti-Jam (AJ) Antenna Systems designed to counter GPS Electronic Warfare threats from intentional and unintentional interference,” Michael Land, a spokesman for NAVAIR, told Marine Corps Times in an emailed statement Tuesday. The development comes as U.S. aircraft have faced mounting electronic warfare attacks against aircraft in Syria. Army Gen. Tony Thomas, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, told audience members at a conference in April that adversaries were trying to bring down AC-130 gunships in Syria using electronic warfare, or EW. “Right now in Syria, we're in the most aggressive EW environment on the planet, from our adversaries,” Thomas said. “They're testing us every day, knocking our communications down, disabling our AC-130s, et cetera.” The Corps is amid an overhaul of its forces and equipment to prepare for a potential fight with near-peer adversaries like Russia and China. Both countries boast an impressive array of electronic warfare capabilities. Russia has been using the Syrian battlefield to hone its EW skills. The top Marine has oft repeated the threats posed to GPS systems from rising adversaries and says the Corps needs to be prepared to fight in GPS denied environments. The F/A-18 is the Corps' bridging aircraft as it moves to the new high-tech F-35. As the Corps transitions the older legacy Hornets are undergoing a service life extension, meaning the aircraft are being updated to handle the modern battlefield. “Installation in F/A-18 A-D helps ensure continued mission capability as the service life of the aircraft is extended and facilitates supportability by using more common equipment,” Land said. The Navy and the Marine Corps already use the anti-jamming GPS antenna in a number of airframes, according to Land. “Typical installations replace a platform's existing GPS antenna with a NAVWAR antenna and separate antenna electronics, while leaving a platform's GPS receiver in place,” Land added. The Corps expects the F/A-18 to be in sunset by 2030. As the Corps moves to the F-35 and phases out its Hornets, the legacy fighters will consolidate on the West Coast by 2018 with the exception of VMFA (AW)‐242, which will remain aboard the Corps' air station at Iwakuni, Japan until it transitions to the F-35 in 2028, according to the Corp's 2018 aviation plan. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/07/10/the-corps-wants-to-protect-its-hornets-from-gps-jammers/
August 17, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval
by Carlo Munoz The US Marine Corps (USMC) is seeking solutions for a new prototype for the airborne pod variant of its Fused Integrated Naval Network (FINN) programme, designed to upgrade overall interoperability between US Navy (USN) and the marines' tactical data links. The FINN airborne pod prototype being sought by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory's Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) directorate “will provide a persistent [network] gateway that receives, bridges, translates, processes, and distributes information between other FINN nodes and the end-user nodes connected to them”, according to a 10 August service solicitation. Designed for deployment aboard the General Atomics' MQ-9B Reaper unmanned aerial system (UAS), the FINN airborne pod must be capable of cross-banding Internet Protocol (IP) and non-IP based data transfers, transmitted on current and legacy data link technologies, the solicitation stated. The pod technology aboard the new FINN prototype must also have beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) transmission capability. The prototype pod must also enable real-time data translations between users across Link-16, Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT), Bandwidth Efficient Common Data Link (BE-CDL), the Intelligence Broadcast System (IBN), and National Security Agency Type-1 certified TrellisWare Tactical Scalable MANET-X (TSM-X) waveforms, as well as the Next Generation Waveform (NGW) developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the document added. https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/usmc-seeks-new-finn-gateway-pod-prototype