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April 12, 2023 | International, Other Defence

Moldova needs $275 mln to modernise armed forces -defence official

Moldova needs 250 million euros ($275 million) to modernise its armed forces following Russia's invasion of neighbouring Ukraine last year, a senior defence official in the pro-Western country said on Wednesday.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/moldova-needs-275-mln-modernise-armed-forces-defence-official-2023-04-13/

On the same subject

  • General Dynamics gets $1.2 billion to build short-range air defense systems for US Army

    October 2, 2020 | International, Land, Security

    General Dynamics gets $1.2 billion to build short-range air defense systems for US Army

    Jen Judson WASHINGTON — General Dynamics Land Systems has secured a $1.2 billion contract at the close of the fiscal year to build and deliver the U.S. Army's Interim Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense system, or IM-SHORAD. The Stryker combat vehicle-based system includes a mission equipment package designed by Leonardo DRS. That mission equipment package includes Raytheon's Stinger vehicle missile launcher. The estimated completion date of the contract is Sept. 30, 2025, according to a Defense Department contract announcement. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order. GDLS officials told Defense News on Oct. 1 that the initial order for the contract, worth $230 million, is for 28 vehicles, and that the company has begun ordering material and laying out production for those vehicles. The first vehicle under this contract will roll off the line in roughly 18 months, but the first platoon will be fielded in March 2021 and the first battalion (of 32 vehicles) will be fielded in September 2021 using prototypes already built to fill it out. A second battalion will be fielded in 2022. The Army wrapped up developmental testing for the SHORAD system after experiencing a minor “hiccup” that, when paired with complications due to the coronavirus pandemic, set the program back by a few weeks, Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch, the service's program executive officer for missiles and space, said Aug. 5. The production contract award came on time. It took just 19 months from the time the service generated the requirement to the first delivery of a platform for testing, answering an urgent call in 2016 from U.S. Army Europe to fill the short-range air defense capability gap. The service received the requirement to build the system in February 2018. After a shoot-off in the desert of White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and subsequent evaluations of vendors, the Army selected a Stryker combat vehicle-based system with the Leonardo DRS mission equipment package. Training has already begun at White Sands in preparation for an early user assessment in the latter part of the year. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/10/01/general-dynamics-gets-12-billion-to-build-short-range-air-defense-systems-for-us-army/

  • White House unveils cybersecurity labeling program for smart devices

    July 18, 2023 | International, C4ISR

    White House unveils cybersecurity labeling program for smart devices

    U.S. Cyber Trust Mark initiative to be overseen by the Federal Communications Commission, with voluntary industry participation.

  • The Key To All-Domain Warfare Is ‘Predictive Analysis:’ Gen. O’Shaughnessy

    May 6, 2020 | International, C4ISR

    The Key To All-Domain Warfare Is ‘Predictive Analysis:’ Gen. O’Shaughnessy

    By THERESA HITCHENS on May 05, 2020 at 3:23 PM WASHINGTON: Northern Command head Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy says the key to winning tomorrow's all-domain wars is predicting an adversary's actions — as well as the impacts of US military responses — hours and even days in advance. The capability to perform such “predictive analysis” will be enabled by the US military's Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative for managing high-speed battle across the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains,” he told the Mitchell Institute yesterday evening in a webinar. “We see JADC2 is absolutely core to the way we're gonna defend the homeland,” O'Shaughnessy enthused. “And the part that I think is going to be so incredibly game-changing is the ability for us to really use predictive analysis and inform our decisions going into the future.” “That's, to me, what JADC2 is going to do: it's going to inform our decision-makers, it's going to help them make decisions that, like playing chess, are thinking about two or three moves downstream,” he added. “It's going to give the decision-makers, at the speed of relevance, the ability to make really complex decisions.” NORTHCOM was a key player in the Air Force's first “On Ramp” demonstration in December of technologies being developed under its Advanced Battle Management System effort, which the service sees as a foundation for JADC2. O'Shaughnessy said he is excited that NORTHCOM will be expanding its participation in the next demonstration, now slated for late August or early September having been pushed back from its original April data due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. O'Shaughnessy said JADC2 also will be critical for providing much-needed improvements to domain awareness in the Arctic. The US military has to “put together a bigger ecosystem for sensing” rather than relying on “traditional stovepiped systems” in the High North, he explained. That ecosystem needs to fuse information from as many systems as possible — from submarines patrolling beneath the icy waters to ground-based radar to long-endurance unmanned drones to future sensors based on large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites — which is exactly the goal of JADC2. “We have to continue to work on our ability to see the approaches to our homeland and understand what what is there and be able to react to it,” said O'Shaughnessy, who also is the commander of NORAD. As Breaking D readers know, the US military is turning an increasingly worried eye toward the Arctic where Russia and China both have begun to covet as a future zone of economic wealth as the Earth's climate opens shipping routes and expands access to undersea oil. O'Shaughnessy said he sees three areas where more investment is required to up the US military's game in the Arctic: communications, training, and infrastructure. Communications at northern latitudes is a particular struggle due to the difficulties of laying fiber optic cable in the harsh terrain, and the paucity of satellite coverage in the region. This, he said, is why NORTHCOM is extremely interested in the potential for so-called proliferated LEO satellite constellations. — both those currently being built by commercial firms and any future military networks. As Breaking D readers are well aware, DoD's Space Development Agency is planning a multi-tiered network of satellites in LEO that includes “data transport” satellites to allow faster communications between satellites and air-, land- and sea-based receivers that Director Derek Tournear sees as integral to JADC2. DARPA also is experimenting with proliferated LEO architectures under its Blackjack program, which plans 20 satellites using various buses and payloads to test their capabilities by the end of third-quarter 2022. DARPA late last month selected Lockheed Martin to undertake Phase 1 satellite integration of satellite buses with payloads and the central Pit Boss C2 system under a $5.8 million contract. SEAKR Engineering announced on April 28 that it had been granted a sole source Phase I, Option 2 contract (under a three-phased program plan) to develop a Pit Boss demonstrator, beating out two other teams led, respectively, by BAE and Scientific Systems. “One of the things we find is after you get above about 65 degrees or so north, some of our traditional means of communications really start breaking down,” he said, “and once you get closer to 70, almost all except for our most exquisite communications capability really starts to break down. And so we see a need to relook our ability to communicate in the Arctic” — with proliferated LEO “one of the best approaches.” “If you look at some of the companies out there doing incredible things, we see that as a solution set to allow us to communicate in the Arctic in the relatively near future, and that will be critical,” he added. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/the-key-to-all-domain-warfare-is-predictive-analysis-gen-oshaughnessy

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