Next-gen fighter not dead, but needs cheaper redesign, Kendall says

On the same subject

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  December 5, 2019 | International, Naval

  HII awarded $11.5M for further repairs on USS Gerald R. Ford

  ByChristen McCurdy Dec. 4 (UPI) -- Hungtington Ingalls of Newport News, Va., was awarded an $11.5 million contract for further repairs on the troubled USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier. The contract, announced Tuesday by the Department of Defense, funds the advance planning, design, documentation, engineering, procurement, ship checks, fabrication and preliminary shipyard work on the first-in-class carrier. Work will be performed at Huntington Ingalls Newport News, Va., site and is expected to be completed by September 2020. The Pentagon has obligated $1 million at the time of the award that will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Ford, intended to replace Nimitz-class carriers, has been plagued by cost overruns and delays, including problems with its 11 electromagnetic elevators -- just seven of which were operational at the end of October. In recent months, the vessel completed a training evolution and sea trials, as well as an independent steaming exercise that included sailing more than 7,000 nautical miles, completing more than 1,000 cycles of the advanced weapons elevators and performed more than 200 advanced arresting gear simulations. The carrier is expected to start compatibility testing early next year, and is now expected to be ready for deployment sometime before 2024. https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2019/12/04/HII-awarded-115M-for-further-repairs-on-USS-Gerald-R-Ford/4431575418593

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  September 18, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Land

  Lockheed Aims For Laser On Fighter By 2025

  SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. How do you keep a laser focused on a target moving at hundreds of miles per hour? The answer is crucial to Lockheed lasers being fitted on Army trucks and Air Force fighters over the next few years. WASHINGTON: “Lockheed Martin is working to fly a laser on tactical fighters within the next five years,” Lockheed laser expert Mark Stephen told reporters yesterday afternoon. “We're spending a lot of time to get the beam director right.” That beam director, which keeps the laser beam on target, is a crucial but easily overlooked component of future laser weapons. The Air Force Research Lab's SHiELD program aims to put defensive laser pod on fighters to defend them against incoming anti-aircraft missiles. An offensive laser to shoot down enemy aircraft would have to hit harder and at longer distances, so it's a more distant goal: Such weapons are envisioned for a future “sixth generation” fighter — like the NGAD prototype now in flight test — to follow the 5th-gen F-35, while the SHiELD pod will go on non-stealthy 4th gen aircraft like the F-16, as in this Lockheed video. But the company's new beam-director design is actually getting its first workout on an Army system, the truck-mounted IFPC Energy Laser, which will defend against artillery rockets, drones, and, potentially, subsonic cruise missiles. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/09/lockheed-aims-for-laser-on-fighter-by-2025/

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  September 20, 2018 | International, C4ISR

  DoD releases first new cyber strategy in three years

  By: Mark Pomerleau In its first formal cyber strategy document in three years, the Department of Defense said it would focus its cyber efforts on China and Russia and use the Pentagon's cyber capabilities to collect intelligence as well as to prepare for future conflicts. According to an unclassified summary and fact sheet released Sept. 18, the documents lay out a vision for addressing cyber threats and addresses the priorities of the department's National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, which focused on a new era of strategic great power competition. “The United States cannot afford inaction,” the summary reads. It notes that China and Russia are conducting persistent campaigns in cyberspace that pose long term risk. The documents also say that China is eroding the U.S. military's ability to overmatch opponents and that Russia is using cyber-enabled information operations to influence the U.S. population and challenge democratic processes. The DoD's strategy comes on the heels of other major movements in cyberspace from the department. These include the elevation of U.S. Cyber Command to a full unified combatant command — which affords new and exquisite authorities — the full staffing of Cyber Command's cyber teams, an update to DoD's cyber doctrine and new authorities delegating certain responsibilities from the president to DoD to conduct cyber operations abroad. The summary's lists five objectives for DoD's cyberspace strategy: - Ensuring the joint force can achieve its missions in a contested cyberspace environment; - Strengthening the joint force by conducting cyberspace operations that enhance U.S. military advantages; - Defending U.S. critical infrastructure from malicious cyber activity that alone, or as part of a campaign, could cause a significant cyber incident; - Securing DoD information and systems against malicious cyber activity, including DoD information on non-DoD-owned networks; and - Expanding DoD cyber cooperation with interagency, industry, and international partners. The strategy also describes the need to remain consistently engaged with this persistent adversary and to “defend forward” as a means of disrupting or halting malicious cyber activity at its source, including activity that falls below the level of armed conflict. While academics have criticized the U.S. response to Russian election interference, the strategy notes that the United States tends to view conflicts through the binary lens of war or peace while competitors such as Russia see themselves constantly engaged in a state of war. U.S. Cyber Command's new leader is taking a different tact. “We've got to act forward outside of our boundaries, something that we do very, very well at Cyber Command in terms of getting into our adversary's networks. That's this idea of persistent engagement, the idea that the adversary never rests, so why would we ever rest,” Gen. Paul Nakasone said during an August dinner hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Nakasone also has described the notion of defending forward as enabling forces to act outside the boundaries of the U.S. to understand what adversaries are doing in order to better defend against them. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2018/09/19/department-of-defense-unveils-new-cyber-strategy