Pentagon’s CIO shop teams with armed services to prep for move to JEDI cloud

On the same subject

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  May 6, 2019 | International, Naval

  Robots and Lasers Are Bringing Shipbuilding into the Digital Age

  BY MARCUS WEISGERBER Even decades-old aircraft carriers are being mapped onto digital models at Newport News Shipbuilding. NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — When the USS George Washington took shape here in the late 1980s, endless paper blueprints guided the welders and shipfitters of Newport News Shipbuilding. Now, with the aircraft carrier back in a drydock for its midlife overhaul, shipyard workers are laser-scanning its spaces and bulkheads. They're compiling a digital model of the 104,000-ton carrier, which will allow subsequent Nimitz-class projects to be designed and planned on computers. That will help bring the shipyard's carrier-overhaul work in line with its digital design-and-manufacturing processes that are already speeding up construction and maintenance on newer vessels. Newport News executives say these digital shipbuilding concepts are revolutionizing the way ships are designed and built. “We want to leverage technology, learn by doing and really drive it to the deckplates,” Chris Miner, vice president of in-service carriers, said during a tour of the shipyard. This is the future. This isn't about if. This is where we need to go.” This storied shipyard, now a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, has been building warships for the U.S. Navy for more than 120 years. Some of its buildings are nearly that old, and some of its employees are fifth-generation shipbuilders. But the technology they use to design, build, and overhaul submarines and mammoth aircraft carriers is rapidly changing. Paper schematics are quickly becoming a thing of the past, being replaced by digital blueprints easily accessible to employees on handheld tablets. “The new shipbuilders coming in, they're not looking for you to hand them a 30-page or a 200-page drawing,” Miner said. “We're really transitioning how we train folks and how we do things as far as getting them proficient.” This digital data will “transform the business,” said Miner. The technology is spreading beyond the shipbuilding sector. Boeing used digital tools to design a new pilot training jet for the Air Force and an aerial refueling drone from the Navy. The Air Force is planning to evaluate new engines for its B-52 bombers, nearly six-decade-old planes, using digital tools. The technology is allowing companies to build weapons faster than traditional manufacturing techniques. Engineers here at Newport News Shipbuilding are already using digital blueprints to design ships, but they plan to expand the use of the technology into manufacturing in the coming years. “We want to be able to leverage off all that data and use it,” Miner said. “There's lots of things we can do with that [data].” The USS Gerald Ford — the Navy's newest aircraft carrier and first in its class — was designed using digital data. The Navy's new Columbia-class nuclear submarines are being digitally designed as well. Parts for the future USS Enterprise (CVN 80) — the third Ford-class carrier — are being built digitally. Data from the ship's computerized blueprints are being fed into machines that fabricate parts. “We're seeing over 20 percent improvement in performance,” Miner said. When the Navy announced it would buy two aircraft carriers at the same time, something not done since the 1980s, James Geurts, the head Navy acquisition, said digital design would contribute to “about an 82 percent learning from CVN79 through to CVN 81” — the second through fourth Ford ships. Geurts called the savings “a pretty remarkable accomplishment for the team.” In the future, even more of that data will be pumped directly into the manufacturing robots that cut and weld more and more of a ship's steel parts. “That's the future,” Miner said. “No drawings. They get a tablet. They can visualize it. They can manipulate it, see what it looks like before they even build it.” As shipyard workers here give the George Washington a thorough working-over, they are using laser scanners to create digital blueprints of the ship. These digital blueprints are creating a more efficient workforce and reducing cutting as many as six months from a three-year overhaul, Miner said. The top of its massive island — where sailors drive the ship and control aircraft — has been sliced off. It will be rebuilt in the coming months with a new design that will give the crew a better view of the flight deck. The island already sports a new, sturdier mast that can hold larger antennas and sensors. Shipyard workers lowered it into place in early March. The yard is also combining its digital ship designs with augmented reality gear to allow its designers and production crews to virtually “walk through” the Ford class's spaces. This helped the yard figure out, for example, whether the ship's sections were designed efficiently for maintenance. In addition to robots, the additive manufacturing techniques, like 3D printing, could speed shipbuilding even more and reduce the Navy's need for carrying spare parts on ships. The Navy is testing a valve 3D-printed here. Right now, at a time when the Navy is planning to drastically expand its fleet size, shipyards like Newport News are expanding, but not yet to the levels of the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s. Despite the technology advantages, Miner said people still play essential roles in the manufacturing process. “It's really not about reducing our workforce as much it is about doing more with the workforce we have,” he said. “We're still going to hire people. We still have to ramp up. There's still hands-on things that are always going to have to be done. But it definitely helps us with cycle time to be able to build things quicker” and “enable our workforce to be more efficient.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/05/robots-and-lasers-are-bringing-shipbuilding-digital-age/156763/

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  June 15, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Trump administration considering new plan to ease drone export rules

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON —The Trump administration reportedly plans to reinterpret a key arms agreement that governs the sale of unmanned aircraft, opening the door for more countries to buy drones from U.S. defense contractors. According to Reuters, the Trump administration plans to loosen its interpretation of the Missile Technology Control Regime, an agreement among the U.S. and 34 other nations that governs the export of missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. The report does not exactly lay out how the White House's interpretation of the MTCR will change, but it likely involves how the administration construes the phrase “strong presumption of denial.” Currently, the U.S. government's interpretation of that clause leads to a blanket denial of most countries' requests to buy “category-1” systems capable of carrying 500-kilogram payloads for more than 300 kilometers. The White House's National Security Council is set to review the change during a June 16 meeting, according to Reuters. The departments of Commerce, Energy, Justice and Homeland Security signed on to the new interpretation in May, and key industry stakeholders — including General Atomics and Northrop Grumman — have already been notified. The State Department could approve the first UAV sales under the new interpretation as soon this summer, a U.S. official and multiple industry executives told Reuters. The Trump administration has made loosening arms sale restrictions a major priority, but so far the changes to drone export policies have not had the impact desired by defense companies, which argue that they continue to lose sales to China and Israel. During a June 3 event on drone export policy, Keith Webster, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's defense and aerospace export council, said the administration has made some positive changes — including the approved sale of General Atomics MQ-9 Sea Guardian drones to India — but “for the policy changes, it has been disappointing.” In April 2018, the White House announced changes in policy allowing companies to sell certain unmanned aircraft through direct commercial sales to international militaries rather than having to go through the more laborious Foreign Military Sales process, where the U.S. government plays a large role in negotiating an agreement. It also struck rules that categorized unarmed drones with laser-designator technology as “strike enabling,” which grouped them with more highly restricted armed drones. The United States also attempted to change the MTCR by proposing language that would assign drones that fly under 800 kilometers per hour to “category-2” status, where sales are subject to approval on a case-by-case basis, said Heather Penney, a senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies. However, that proposal was not approved by all members of the regime and was thus denied. “We have information that the U.S. is potentially looking at an additional airspeed proposal, not from 800 kilometers per hour, but dropping that to 600 kilometers per hour — which is roughly about 320 knots,” she said at a June 3 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “This does not solve the problem set. It enables the look of advancement, the look of change, but really it does not move the ball forward.” Webster agreed, calling proposed changes to the MTCR a Band-Aid. “That buys us a year or two, but we're right back to square one because we haven't resolved the issue,” he said. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/06/12/trump-administration-considering-new-plan-to-ease-drone-export-rules/

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  May 30, 2023 | International, Other Defence

  Zelenskiy urges South Korea to provide defence systems - report

  Ukraine "desperately hopes" that South Korea will provide defensive military equipment such as anti-aircraft systems to fend off Russian attacks, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was cited as saying in an interview with a South Korean newspaper.