November 24, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
Bruno Even, président d'Airbus Helicopters, Pierre-Eric Pommellet, PDG de Naval Group, Eric Béranger, PDG de MBDA, et Hervé Grandjean, Conseiller pour les affaires industrielles auprès de la ministre des Armées, ont livré, au cours d'un débat organisé par La Tribune lors du Paris Air Forum, leurs retours d'expérience sur l'industrie de défense française face à la crise. «L'industrie de défense a été résiliente», affirme Hervé Grandjean : «La lutte contre le terrorisme et les opérations extérieures ne s'arrêtent pas et on ne peut pas mener ces opérations sans les industries de défense qui, embarquées avec nous dans la défense du pays, assument d'une certaine manière une mission régalienne». Bruno Even indique que les hélicoptères ont continué de voler pendant cette période, avec «très peu d'annulations». Bruno Even et Eric Béranger précisent toutefois qu'un impact de la crise sur l'activité «d'ici deux ou trois ans» n'est pas à exclure. «L'export est l'un de nos enjeux majeurs de la période», souligne Bruno Even.
La Tribune du 24 novembre
April 24, 2023 | International, C4ISR
Singapore's Ministry of Defence and France's Ministry of the Armed Forces will jointly develop artificial intelligence capabilities, with potential research areas that include natural language processing.
April 22, 2020 | International, C4ISR
While the pandemic's halted field exercises, tabletop wargames can continue long-distance. The catch? Getting classified bandwidth so you can discuss specific military capabilities. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on April 21, 2020 at 7:31 AM WASHINGTON: With Pentagon travel restrictions now extended through June 30th, the Army's in-house futurists can't hold their usual face-to-face brainstorming sessions. So rather than delay their work for months, they're moving seminars and wargames online – but there's a tradeoff. The long-distance collaboration tools available so far aren't secure enough for classified data, which means some scenarios are off-limits. The COVID-19 coronavirus has halted some – but far from all – military training and experimentation. Army Futures Command in particular has had to cancel some high-priority field exercises to try out new tactics and technologies, but a lot of its work is thinking about the future, which you can do long-distance, one of its deputy commanders said in a video town hall last week. “We did have to cancel the Joint Warfighting Assessment [JWA] in Europe,” Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley said, “[but] a lot of the work we do in terms of developing concepts...is moving ahead without significant impact.” Wesley runs one of Army Futures Command's three major subunits, the internal thinktank now known as the Futures & Concepts Center (formerly ARCIC), which brainstorms, wargames, and writes about how conflict will change. Tabletop exercises (TTXs, in Army jargon) can move online. That will include the Futures & Concept Center's annual “capstone exercise” on the Army's concept for future warfare, Multi-Domain Operations, he said. It also included another MDO exercise that had been set to take place in May at the Army War College. Four-Star Orders The May wargame was particularly important because it was the kick-off for a study ordered by the four-star chief of Army Futures Command himself, Gen. John “Mike” Murray, one of Wesley's staff officers told me when I followed up. “We wanted to be able to return to Gen. Murray sooner versus later with initial findings,” Col. Chris Rogers told me, “then continue to experiment throughout the summer and the [fall].” The topic that Murray was so intent on? “It was focused specifically on addressing concerns that Gen. Murray had with calibrated force posture,” Rogers said. In layman's terms, that means what soldiers need to be where, with what equipment, at what time, to handle specific threats. In practice, “calibrated force posture” is a 3-D chess game with a few hundred thousand pieces. You have to figure out what kind of forces need to be forward-deployed on allied territory before a crisis starts, what they should do to deter potential adversaries, what warning you might have of an impending attack, what reinforcements you can send in time, how the adversary can stop those reinforcements, how you can stop the adversary from stopping you, and so on ad infinitum. To start tackling these questions, the plan had been to bring officers and civil servants together from all the Army's “schoolhouses” – the armor and infantry center at Fort Benning, the artillery center at Fort Still, the aviation center at Fort Rucker, and so on – for two weeks at the War College. The scenarios to be examined, focused on a particularly challenging region for military deployments: the vast expanses of the Pacific. Now, this wasn't going to be a wargame in the classic sense, with somber men pushing wooden blocks on big maps or icons battling each other on a big screen. No one can write the rules for a detailed simulation yet because the Army's still brainstorming solutions. Instead, such events are more like highly structured seminars, with teams splitting off to analyze particular aspects of the scenario and reporting back on possible plans, at which point they may get challenged with “well, what if the enemy does this?” But precisely because this wasn't a detailed simulation, the Army didn't need specialized software to run it long-distance – just standard online collaboration tools. (In this case, those tools were provided by DTIC, the Defense Technical Information Center). Rogers described the process as a “guided, threaded discussion.” As he explained it, it sounded a lot like an online discussion board, with moderators posting topics and participants posting replies and replies to replies back and forth. That's actually one of the longest-established applications of the Internet, dating back to the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that predate the World Wide Web. Modern equivalents are much more sophisticated: You can post graphics like maps and operational diagrams, for instance, which are definitely useful for a military planner. But the systems available to Rogers & co. in May still had definite limits. Limiting Factor The biggest issue? “It's an unclassified network, so there are certain things that we lose,” Rogers told me, like the ranges of specific current and future weapons. The compromise the wargamers made is they'll restrict this first exercise to what's called the “competition phase.” That means everything that happens before – or hopefully instead of — the outbreak of a shooting war — the “conflict phase.” Not simulating actual battles might sound like a major handicap for military planners. But the Army has slowly and painfully come to realize that, while it's really, really good at planning combat operations (what it calls “kinetics”), it really needs to practice the strategic, political and propaganda maneuvering that goes on outside of combat (“non-kinetics”), because you can win every battle and still lose the war. Indeed, from Russia seizing Crimea without a shot to China quietly annexing large portions of the South China Sea, America's adversaries have proven highly capable of accomplishing military objectives without firing a shot. Now, military power still matters in the competition phase: Over all the shadow-boxing there looms the threat of force. But because the competition phase is about deterring war, not waging it, what matters is not the actual capabilities of your weapons, but what the enemy thinks your weapons can do. That, in turn, means you can brainstorm the competition phase in an unclassified discussion, using publicly available information, without ever getting into the classified details of what your weapons could really do when and if the shooting starts. “That's why we felt very comfortable with [changing] from a classified event to an unclassified event, [for] the first iteration,” Rogers told me. Likewise, instead of using classified scenarios depicting potential future crises, he said, they used real crises from recent history, where there's plenty of unclassified information, and then discussed different ways the US could have approached them. At some point, of course, the discussion will have to move on from the competition phase to conflict – from how you calibrate the posture of your forces to how those forces, once postured in the right place, would actually fight. Rogers & co. help to get into those classified details in the next major wargame, scheduled for August. August is after the Pentagon's travel ban expires – at least, in its current form. But given how unpredictable the pandemic has been so far, another extension is entirely possible, Rogers acknowledges, so he and his team are studying alternatives to a face-to-face event. As Lt. Gen. Wesley put it in his town hall: “The real issue is, how long does this last?” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/covid-19-army-futures-command-takes-wargames-online/
January 24, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Jeff Jeong SEOUL — It looked like Italy's aerospace group Leonardo was going to be an easy winner for South Korea's second batch of anti-submarine helicopters. The procurement program would seek 12 more AW-159 “Wildcat” helicopters, with no other competitors for the $840 million program. But the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, or DAPA, threw a curveball, deciding to accept a U.S. proposal for alternate option and to begin the competitive bidding process from the scratch. The plan for the maritime operational helicopter, or MOH, was originally to sign a direct commercial deal with a foreign helicopter maker, with three bidders — Leonardo, Lockheed Martin and NH Industries — showing interest. The two latter contenders failed to submit their proposals by the Oct. 31 deadline, leaving Leonardo seemingly as the only remaining bidder. According to sources from DAPA, however, the U.S. government in November sent a letter of price and availability of Lockheed Martin's MH-60R Seahawk, causing South Korea's arms procurement officials o rethink the acquisition approach. “We've decided to consider the U.S. FMS option,” DAPA spokesman Park Jung-eun told Defense News. “We're going to weigh in on both options of commercial and FMS contracts.” As dictated by acquisition regulation, two successive failed biddings mean that the agency can make a private contract with a sole bidder, but that's not mandatory. The agency is expected to issue a renewed request for proposals as early as March, according to DAPA officials. Leonardo would be a direct buy, while the Sikorsky bid would be a foreign military sale. Leonardo said in a statement that it would still pursue the South Korean naval helicopter program “in a fair and transparent manner.” A Leonardo spokesman said the AW-159 is optimized for the Korean theater of operations, pointing to an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar for detecting North Korea's coastal weapon system and a missile firing range that is more than three times longer than Seahawk. “We do not really know about the details of the U.S. Navy's latest proposal,” a Lockheed Martin communications official said, declining to elaborate. “After an RFP is issued, we could be able to discuss with the service.” Pundits here expressed different reactions to the renewed MOH bidding process. Shin In-kyun, head of Korea Defense Network, a Seoul-based private defense think tank, said it's a better opportunity to acquire state-of-the-art naval helicopters with better performances. “The Seahawk is estimated to be more expensive by 20 to 30 percent than the Wildcat, but the former has performances about two times better than the latter,” said Shin. “The unit price of the MH-60R could be lowered through the FMS, as the U.S. and Indian Navies are also said to be procuring more than 40 MH-60Rs.” Shin Jong-woo, a senior analyst at the Korea Defense & Security Forum, said an FMS deal may not guarantee economic benefit for South Korea. “You give up offset programs should an FMS deal be made,” he said. “I'm not really sure how much the unit cost of the MH-60R could be lowered. If lowered, we may have to lose some optional functions of the helicopter.” Moreover, a possible MH-60R selection will bring more work to change the designs of warships, he added. “The Navy's existing warships, including the KDX-III Aegis destroyer, are not able to accommodate the MH-60R, so it's inevitable to change the design should the American helicopter be chosen.” The South Korean Navy currently operates eight AW-159s acquired under a 2012 deal. The helicopters fly missions aboard KDX-series destroyers and Incheon-class guided-missile frigates. The service plans to commission at least 12 more new frigates fitted with a flight deck and a hangar that can accommodate one Lynx helicopter. https://www.defensenews.com/2019/01/23/change-of-plans-seoul-decides-to-start-from-scratch-with-helo-competition