Inside the intelligence community’s new plan for commercial imagery

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  June 20, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  Thanks To NATO Infighting, the Future of the F-35 Is Shrinking

  PATRICK TUCKER The U.S. Senate wants to revoke Turkey's license to buy the jet, while other European governments are looking to get a competitor off the ground. The most sophisticated fighter jet in the world, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, will play a smaller role in the future of European security than originally conceived. On Monday, the Senate amended its version of the 2019 defense authorization act to block the sale of the fifth-generation fighter jet to Turkey. The reason: the NATO ally's purchase of the Russian S-400, a radar and missile battery with a lethal range of 250 km. In routine operation, the sensor- and transmitter-packed jet exchanges electronic data with friendly anti-air systems and sensors, and if Turkey were to do this, data collected by the Russian-built weapon might find its way back to Moscow. The House version of the bill also expresses concerns about the S-400 and Turkey and requires a report 60 days after the bill's enactment to assess Turkey's purchase of the system and possible consequences to U.S. aircraft. Turkey inked the S-400 deal last year, over strenuous objections from the U.S. and other NATO-member governments concerned about an ally using Russian air defense systems. “A NATO-interoperable missile defense system remains the best option to defend Turkey from the full range of threats in the region,” Pentagon spokesperson Johnny Michael told CNBC last fall. Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim called Monday's decision“lamentable.” It's also very inconvenient for Turkey's political elite, coming just days before Turkish elections. The U.S. military has gotten up close and personal with the S-400 over Syria, where the Russian military has deployed to aid the Assad regime. Its deadly presence reshaped how the U.S.-led coalition flies air ops, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigan told reporters in September. “‘We are consistently monitoring them to see if something changes their intent because we have to manage that and respond quickly...We look at it every day. It's an everyday discussion to make sure our force can manage that risk.” Strained Atlantic relations aren't just affecting today's jet sales and development today, but potentially decisions far off as well. France and Germany have agreed to work together on a sixth-generation fighter, the so-called Future Combat Air System, or FCAS, to begin to replace the Tornado by 2040. The previous chief of the Luftwaffe, Lt. Gen. Karl Müllner, had been in favor of replacing the Tornado with the F-35. Partly for that reason, he was dismissed in May. Going with the F-35 would “eliminate the need for a next-gen European fighter and possibly cripple Europe's capacity to develop such a system for years to come,” said Ulrich Kühn, a German political scientist and senior research associate at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. The move has ramifications far beyond what new jets are sitting on the tarmac in Western Europe in ten years. “Since Germany takes part in NATO nuclear sharing, a new platform would have to be certified by the U.S. to deliver U.S.B61s,” thermonuclear gravity bombs, Kühn pointed out on Twitter. He was responding to an article that ran Sunday in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “But [the] new fighter should be nuke capable,” says Kühn. “Now, German Airbus officials have started asking the Gretchen Question: what nukes shall the FCAS carry? U.S. or French ones?” Kühn argues that the question of how to develop the FCAS as a nuclear capable jet will be one of the most important decisions that Germany will take in the next few years and could have ramifications for the future of the nuclear umbrella over Europe. What was supposed to be a unified, highly interoperable American weapons web could become more fractured, less under American control. “The decision about the FCAS as a nuclear platform will have wide-ranging repercussions on Germany, the EU and NATO,” he says. The U.S. military has been pushing allies to buy the F-35 not just to expand America's weapons reach but because the jet is a flying intelligence fusion cell as much a bomb-dropper. One of its core selling features is its ability to transmit rich targeting intelligence to nearby drones or faraway jets or even Aegis warships rigged for missile defense miles away. That interoperability is key to the Pentagon's vision of future wars. As alliances with Western partners fray, those plans may need revision. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/06/thanks-nato-infighting-future-f-35-shrinking/149136/

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  June 12, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Year two post merger, L3Harris looks toward $1B more in divestitures

  By: Jill Aitoro WASHINGTON — One year post merger, L3Harris is a third of the way to its goal of shedding roughly $1.5 billion of the company, with COVID-19 slowing progress, said its two top executives in an interview with Defense News. About $500 million in business has been divested since June 2019, when Harris and L3 Technologies combined into a single, $17 billion company. That total came by way of three deals that shed the EOTech business, the night vision business, and the security detection and automation businesses. “Out of the gates, we were really running at this,” said CEO Bill Brown, who noted in previous interviews the audacious goal for divestitures of 8-10 percent of total revenue. “We continue to make progress on others, but obviously with the COVID crisis and the financial impacts of that, it's moved some opportunities to the right.” The sale of the security detection and automation businesses to Leidos for about $1 billion will ultimately be one of if not the biggest divestiture for the company, said Brown, who declined to point to any specific portions of business as currently up for sale or likely to be shed. Thus far divestitures have been driven either by overlap created by the merger — which subsequently raised the alarm bells of regulators — or by a desire to focus the portfolio even more to become what Brown described as a “powerhouse C4ISR company.” Brown stopped short of stating any intention to exit the commercial or federal business altogether — even as the former took a significant hit from pandemic fallout: Commercial revenues are expected to be down around 35 percent organically for the year. Also likely to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic is international business. Foreign sales, which account for 20 percent of total revenue, will likely remain flat, versus the increase in low to mid-single digits previously expected. “We identify that as an area where we think we can outperform,” Chris Kubasik, L3Harris chief operating officer, said during the interview. “Clearly the global pandemic applies some pressure, especially in the Middle East with the prices of oil and all the countries having their own bailouts or stimulus plans. Just like the U.S., I think the situation is going to call into question how those countries deal with defense going forward. It's going to be one of these areas that we need to monitor, and are probably going to have to take market share to grow.” An inability to travel has, however, opened doors to new ways of doing business around the world. Kubasik pointed to a particular deal with a customer in a Far East country that was negotiated via Skype. “Nobody's really closed for business,” he said. “We've just got to be creative and do it differently. You feel pretty good when you do a one- or two-hour Zoom [video conference], where in the old days it would have taken four days by the time you flew to the country, cleared customs, got a good night's rest, held a meeting, met again and flew back.” For L3Harris, year two post merger will focus on the remaining $1 billion in divestitures and see a continuation of company integration. In the longer term, those efforts will set the company up nicely for additional acquisitions, which Kubasik called “a clear expectation” for spurring growth. And C4ISR is the area that will likely be the focus of potential buys. “The value of those capabilities and technologies will be even greater in the future in a near-peer competition,” Brown said. “It's not the platforms, but what the platforms do and how they interoperate that requires networks and new ways of communicating, which is in the sweet spot of the company. So I would imagine that anything we would do through acquisition would happen in that broad C4ISR domain.” But for now, he added, the company is focusing on “the basic fundamentals." "And if we do that really well, then we build credibility to go and do another acquisition, another merger over time. The key is earning the right to do that — building the credibility and the muscle to go down that path, and that's what we're doing today.” https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/06/11/year-two-post-merger-l3harris-looks-toward-1b-more-in-divestitures/

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  January 4, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  Bombardier Global 6500 selected for U.S. Army HADES prototype - Skies Mag

  The U.S. Army has awarded a contract to Bombardier for one Global 6500 jet aircraft to support the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES).