Indra signs an agreement with Spanish startup IDBOTIC, now onboard NGWS/FCAS, Europes largest defence program

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  October 9, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Pentagon announces $600M in 5G experiments

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Defense announced $600 million in contracts for 5G experiments Thursday evening for projects at five military bases across the country. The long-anticipated awards are for a series of 5G experiments, including smart warehouses, advanced radars, and augmented and virtual reality capabilities. The awards are part of a Pentagon effort to work with commercial vendors to advance the 5G capabilities of both the department and industry. “The Department of Defense is at the forefront of cutting edge 5G testing and experimentation, which will strengthen our Nation's warfighting capabilities as well as U.S. economic competitiveness in this critical field," said Michael Kratsios, acting under secretary of defense for research and engineering, in a statement. “Through these test sites, the Department is leveraging its unique authorities to pursue bold innovation at a scale and scope unmatched anywhere else in the world. Importantly, today's announcement demonstrates the Department's commitment to exploring the vast potential applications and dual-use opportunities that can be built upon next-generation networks.” The DoD is setting up test beds at several bases where military leaders, industry and academia will work together on a broad range of experiments. The test beds are Hill Air Force Base, Utah; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Georgia; Naval Base San Diego, California; and Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada. According to Joseph Evans, the DoD's director of 5G, the department plans for the testbeds to be working in a year. “Each of the experiments has some aspect that's really new and exciting to us,” Evans told reporters. “In addition, it also provides an opportunity for industry to experiment and mature their technologies along those parallel tracks.” According to a DoD press release, the bases were chosen because of their access to spectrum, and mature fiber and wireless infrastructure. At Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the Pentagon will work with four vendors to experiment with 5G-enabled augmented and virtual reality goggles for mission planning, training and operations using mid-band spectrum. The vendors are GBL System Corp., AT&T, Oceus Networks and Booz Allen Hamilton. Evans told reporters that in year three of the work at the base the department wants a “brigade-sized deployment of the technology.” The department will also address 5G spectrum sharing challenges with cellular networks through an experiment at Hill Air Force Base. The project, according to a DoD press release, will “develop sharing/coexistence system prototypes and evaluate their effectiveness with real-world, at-scale networks in controlled environments.” The department is seeking to allow sharing or coexistence between airborne radar systems and 5G cellular technology in the 3.1-3.45 GHz band. Vendors for the spectrum sharing test bed include Nokia, General Dynamics Mission Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Key Bridge Wireless, Shared Spectrum Company and Ericsson. The Defense Department is also partnering with AT&T at Nellis Air Force Base for a distributed command and control testbed to enhance C2 survivability in combat. The telecom giant will eventually provide a mobile 5G environment with high capacity, low latency communications to meet the needs of a mobile combined air operations center. “We're basically trying to make our forces more survivable by taking command and control functions that have long been housed in single buildings and spread them out and make them make them mobile,” Evans told reporters. “So [we're] really trying to change the way our forces are deployed in the field.” The department will experiment with 5G-enabled smart warehouses at both Naval Base San Diego (NBSD) and Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Ga. The project in San Diego will focus on transshipment between shore facilities and naval units, while the Marines Corps project will center on vehicle storage and maintenance. Both projects will work “to increase the efficiency and fidelity of ... operations, including identification, recording, organization, storage, retrieval, and transportation of materiel and supplies,” a DoD press release said. Industry partners for the San Diego-based project are AT&T, GE Research, Vectrus Mission Solutions Corporation and Deloitte. AT&T will use cullar spectrum in the sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave bands, the DoD press release said. Partners at Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Ga. are Federated Wireless, GE Research, KPMG and Scientific Research Corporation. The Air Force also recently chose AT&T to provide 5G capabilities at three bases. The DoD is also in the process of choosing vendors for 5G experiments at seven more bases. According to Evans, the first solicitation release and industry day for the Navy and Marines Corps bases in that tranche will come in mid-October using the Navy's Information Warfare Research Project consortium. The Air Force and Army solicitations are expected to be rolled out through December through the National Spectrum Consortium, Evans said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/5g/2020/10/08/pentagon-announced-600-million-in-5g-experimentation-contracts/

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  July 20, 2020 | International, Land

  OMFV: Army Wants Smaller Crew, More Automation

  The draft RFP for the Bradley replacement, out today, also opens the possibility for a government design team to compete with private industry. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on July 17, 2020 at 1:51 PM WASHINGTON: The Army is giving industry a lot of freedom in their designs for its future armored troop transport, letting them pick the gun, weight, number of passengers and more. But there's one big exception. While the current M2 Bradley has three crew members – commander, gunner, and driver – a draft Request For Proposals released today says that its future replacement, the OMFV, must be able to fight with two. Fewer humans means more automation. It's an ambitious goal, especially for a program the Army already had to reboot and start over once. The other fascinating wrinkle in the RFP is that the Army reserves the right to form its own design team and let it compete against the private-sector contractors. This government design team would be independent of any Army command to avoid conflicts of interest. If the Army does submit its own design, that would be a major departure from longstanding Pentagon practice. But the Army has invested heavily in technologies from 50mm cannon to automated targeting algorithms to engines, so it's not impossible for a government team to put all that government intellectual property together into a complete design. The Army has embraced automation from the beginning of the Bradley replacement program, and that's been consistent before and after January's decision to reboot. OMFV's very name, Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, refers to the service's desire to have the option to operate the vehicle, in some situations, by remote control – eventually. But an unmanned mode remains an aspiration for future upgrades, not a hard-and-fast requirement for the initial version of the vehicle scheduled to enter service in 2028. By contrast, the two-person crew is one of the few hard-and-fast requirements in the draft RFP released this morning. It's all the more remarkable because there few such requirements in the RFP or its extensive technical annexes (which are not public). Instead, in most cases, the Army lays out the broad performance characteristics it desires and gives industry a lot of leeway in how to achieve them. That's a deliberate departure from traditional weapons programs, which lay out a long and detailed list of technical requirements. But the Army tried that prescriptive approach on OMFV and it didn't work. Last year, in its first attempt to build the OMFV, the Army insisted that industry build – at its own expense – a prototype light enough that you could fit two on an Air Force C-17 transport, yet it had to be tough enough to survive a fight with Russian mechanized units in Eastern Europe. Only one company, General Dynamics, even tried to deliver a vehicle built to that specification and the Army decided they didn't succeed. So the Army started over. It decided heavy armor was more important than air transportability, so it dropped the requirement to fit two OMFVs on a single C-17; now it'll be satisfied if a C-17 can carry one. In fact, it decided rigid technical requirements were a bad idea in general because it limited industry's opportunity to offer ingenious new solutions to the Army's problems, so the service replaced them wherever it could with broadly defined goals called characteristics. And yet the new draft RFP does include a strict and technologically ambitious requirement: the two-person crew. Now, since the OMFV is a transport, it'll have more people aboard much of the time, and when an infantry squad is embarked, one of them will have access to the vehicle's sensors and be able to assist the crew. But when the passengers get out to fight on foot, there'll just be two people left to operate the vehicle. A two-person crew isn't just a departure from the Bradley. This is a departure from best practice in armored vehicle design dating back to World War II. In 1940, when Germany invaded France, the French actually had more tanks, including some much better armed and armored than most German machines. But a lot of the French tanks had two-man crews. There was a driver, seated in the hull, and a single harried soldier in the turret who had to spot the enemy, aim the gun, and load the ammunition. By contrast, most German tanks split those tasks among three men – a commander, a gunner, and a loader – which meant they consistently outmaneuvered and outfought the overburdened French tankers. A lot of modern vehicles don't need a loader, because a mechanical feed reloads automatically. But in everything from the Bradley to Soviet tanks, the minimum crew is three: driver, gunner, and commander. That way the driver can focus on the terrain ahead, the gunner can focus on the target currently in his sights, and the commander can watch for danger in all directions. A two-person crew can't split tasks that way, risking cognitive overload – which means a greater risk that no one spots a threat until it's too late. So how do fighter jets and combat helicopters survive, since most of them have one or two crew at most? The answer is extensive training and expensive technology. If the Army wants a two-person crew in its OMFV, the crew compartment may have to look less like a Bradley and more like an Apache gunship, with weapons automatically pointing wherever the operator looks. The Army's even developing a robotic targeting assistant called ATLAS, which spots potential targets on its sensors, decides the biggest threat and automatically brings the gun to bear – but only fires if a human operator gives the order. Now, industry does not have to solve these problems right away. The current document is a draft Request For Proposals, meaning that the Army is seeking feedback from interested companies. If enough potential competitors say the two-man crew is too hard, the Army might drop that requirement. The current schedule gives the Army about nine months, until April 2021, to come out with the final RFP, and only then do companies have to submit their preliminary concepts for the vehicle. The Army will pick several companies to develop “initial digital designs” – detailed computer models of the proposed vehicle – and then refine those designs. Physical prototypes won't enter testing until 2025, with the winning design entering production in 2027 for delivery to combat units the next year. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/omfv-army-wants-smaller-crew-more-automation/

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  March 12, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Air Force offers glimpse of new, stealthy combat drone during first flight

  By: Kyle Rempfer The XQ-58A Valkyrie demonstrator, a long-range, high-subsonic unmanned combat air vehicle, completed its inaugural flight Tuesday at Yuma Proving Grounds, in Arizona. The Air Force's fleet of current drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper, are basically giant gas bags that fly — able to loiter for long periods above friendly forces in order to provide armed overwatch and intelligence. But the airspace over future battlefields will likely not be permissive, and so new drones will need to be developed. XQ-58A Valkyries were developed under the low-cost attritable aircraft technology program — meaning they're cheap and can be lost in combat without too much concern. The drone and its derivatives are anticipated to perform a range of missions, including suppression of enemy air defenses, offensive and defensive counter-air maneuvers, nap-of-the-earth or terrain masking flight and high-altitude flying. The Valkyrie appears to come with a stealthy, low radar signature design, meaning it may be able to be paired with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in a manned-unmanned configuration. When entering enemy airspace filled with counter-air systems, the Valkyrie could conceivably soak up enemy fire or even attack enemy positions and aircraft. The F-35 has been touted by the Air Force chief of staff as the “quarterback of the joint team," and not simply another stealth aircraft. The fifth-generation fighter is expected to come with a suite of information fusion capabilities, enabling its pilot to process information and coordinate on the battlefield like never before. Full article: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/03/08/air-force-offers-glimpse-of-new-stealthy-combat-drone-during-first-flight