March 18, 2020 | International, C4ISR
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — The first antenna array for the U.S. Army's Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor passed through initial testing at Raytheon's Massachusetts-based facility, and it will embark on future testing at an outdoor range in the short term, a company official told Defense News.
The antenna array went into an indoor, climate-controlled test range, and its performance was evaluated against simulated targets, Bob Kelley, Raytheon's director of domestic integrated air and missile defense programs for business development and strategy, said during a March 16 interview.
The technology “came out fantastic on the other side,” he added.
Now the array will be mounted on a precision-machined enclosure for integration, Kelley said, and then it will head to a range for testing with real-world targets such as air traffic coming in and out of Boston's Logan International Airport.
Raytheon is plowing ahead with an aggressive schedule to deliver the first LTAMDS radar to the Army next year. So far it's on track and on schedule.
The company finished building the first radar antenna array in less than 120 days after being selected for the job, following a competition to replace the service's Patriot air and missile defense system sensor.
The radar will become a part of the service's future Integrated Air and Missile Defense System that will replace the entire Patriot system. Raytheon also manufactures the Patriot.
Raytheon has taken its years of experience refining gallium nitride technology at its Massachusetts-based foundry to help design a new radar system that will provide the Army 360-degree threat detection capability in a configuration that includes one large array in the front and two smaller arrays in the back.
The contract is worth roughly $384 million to deliver six production-representative units of the LTAMDS. The Army is working to rapidly deliver initial capability under an urgent materiel release.
The service in 2019 held a “sense-off” at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, between three working radars from Raytheon, a Lockheed Martin and Elta Systems team, and Northrop Grumman.
March 20, 2024 | International, Aerospace
Through this Contract GKN will support Safran with its significant future demand and will start up new Shaft production at GKN Aerospace’s global center of excellence in Kongsberg, Norway.
April 20, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR
Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — The U.S. and Japan need to expand their collaboration on defense technologies in the future, with a specific focus on four technologies that can help counter the rise of China, according to a new report released Friday by the Atlantic Council. The report also highlights the ongoing discussions about U.S. involvement in Japan's next domestic fighter program as a high-stakes situation that could dictate industrial cooperation between the two nations for years. “The most important component of cooperation on defense capabilities is direct coordination and collaboration on emerging technologies and capabilities,” write authors Tate Nurkin and Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, identifying unmanned systems, hypersonic/hyper-velocity missiles, and the defense applications of AI as three key areas where the U.S. and Japan need to start working together on. “These three areas are at the center of the intensifying U.S.-China military-technological competition. They are key to challenging or upholding military balances and stabilizing imbalances in and across key domain-area competitions — strike versus air and missile defense or undersea — on which regional and, over time, global security is at least partly based,” the authors note. Specifically, the authors identify four project areas that both fit into U.S. strategy and Japan's regional interests, while also matching industrial capabilities: Swarming technology and the loyal wingman: For several years the Pentagon has been investing R&D funding into the development of drones that can be slaved to a fighter jet, providing a “loyal wingman” controlled by the one pilot. Drone swarms are another area of heavy investment. Both concepts fit for Japan, whose Ministry of Defense expressed interest in both concepts going back as far as 2016. Unmanned underwater vehicles and anti-submarine warfare capabilities: China has invested heavily in submarines over the last decade, both manned and unmanned. The U.S. has also begun investing in UUV capabilities, but while Japan's IHI has developed a domestic UUV, the MoD has yet to go all in on the capability. The authors note it is a logical area of collaboration. AI-enabled synthetic training environments: The U.S. and Japan ran a joint synthetic training exercise in 2016, but the authors would like to see development expanded in the future. “Given both countries' need to accelerate training, their shared competency in machine learning and virtual and augmented reality, and a highly fractured simulation and training market, there is potential for a collaborative program to develop a synthetic simulation and training capability, to stress the specific operational contingencies to which US and Japanese forces will have to respond,” they write. Counter-unmanned systems: The entire world seems to be investing in weapons to counter unmanned systems, but the authors see a solid spot for the two nations to find workable technologies together. Japan's acquisition group is currently testing a “high-power microwave generation system” for this mission. That all sounds good on paper, the authors acknowledge, but there are very real challenges to increasing technology development between the two countries. Japan's modernization priorities are best viewed through a defensive lens, designed to protect the island nation. That's a contrast to America's posture in the region, which tends more towards force projection. In addition, Japan lags in military space and cyber operations compared to the U.S., making cross-domain collaboration challenging in several areas. Those negotiations have also been impacted by “different perceptions of the nature of joint technology research,” the authors write. “U.S. defense officials have ‘emphasized operational concepts and capability requirements as the basis for collaboration,' while Japanese officials have ‘continued to focus on technology development and industrial base interests.'” Other challenges include Japan's 1 percent-of-GDP cap on defense spending, as well as the state of Japan's defense industry, which until 2014 was focused entirely on serving the Japanese government's needs. Hence, the industry, while technically very competent, is also relatively small, with limited export experiences – and Tokyo has an interest in protecting that industry with favorable contracts. Meanwhile, U.S. firms have concerns about “potentially losing revenue, transfer of sensitive technologies, and the potential replacement of US companies with Japanese ones in critical supply chains,” the authors write. Some of those issues have come to the forefront in the ongoing discussions about what role American firms can play in Japan's ongoing fighter development program. Japan recently rejected an offer by Lockheed Martin of a hybrid F-22/F-35 design, stating that “developing derivatives of existing fighters cannot be a candidate from the perspective of a Japan-led development.” Getting the F-3 deal right will have long term implications for how the two nations develop capabilities together, the authors warn, quoting defense analyst Gregg Rubinstein in saying “Successfully defining a path to U.S.-Japanese collaboration on this program could make the F-3 an alliance-building centerpiece of cooperative defense acquisition” while failure to do so could “undermine prospects for future collaboration in defense capabilities development.” Putting aside the internal issues, any collaboration between the U.S. and Japan has to be considered through the lens it will be see in Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Seoul. “Even marginal differences in perception produce limits to the parameters of U.S.-Japan joint development of, and coordination on, military capabilities. Especially provocative programs like joint hypersonic-missile development will be viewed as escalatory, and will likely generate a response from China,Russia, and/or North Korea that could complicate other trade or geopolitical interests that go beyond Northeast Asia,” the authors warn, noting that China could attempt to exert more pressure on the ASEAN nations as a counterweight. Additionally, South Korea would likely “see substantial U.S.-Japan collaboration not through an adversarial lens, but certainly through the lens of strained relations stemming from both historical and contextual issues, further complicating U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea trilateral cooperation.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/04/16/four-technologies-japan-and-the-us-should-team-on-to-counter-china/
June 21, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Marshall Aerospace and Defence Group has signed a new multi-million-pound contract with the Bangladesh Air Force to support additional C-130J aircraft purchased from the UK Ministry of Defence. This new multi-year contract follows on from the landmark contract signed in May 2018 and will see Marshall provide total support to the entire Bangladesh Air Force C-130J fleet. Marshall will deliver aircraft maintenance, logistics support, including the provision of spare parts and ground support equipment for establishing local capabilities, as well as engineering services to ensure the effective operation of the entire fleet. The company will also carry out critical capability enhancement modifications to the avionics equipment and provide a passenger transport capability, as well as in-country technical support to the operator for an initial period, along with specific technical services to support the longer-term sustainment of the fleet. This new support contract has been signed in accordance with a Government-to-Government agreement for the sale of an additional batch of former Royal Air Force C-130J aircraft from the UK MoD to the Bangladesh Air Force. Full article: https://marshalladg.com/insights-news/marshall-aerospace-and-defence-signs-new-multi-million-pound-support-contract-for-bangladesh-c-130j-fleet