Raytheon Technologies awarded $619 million US Navy contract for SPY-6 family of radars

On the same subject

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  April 14, 2020 | International, Land

  Pandemic not slowing Army plans to field enduring indirect fires protection capability

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The COVID-19 pandemic is not slowing down the Army's plans to field an enduring indirect fires protection capability, according to Lt. Col. Juan Santiago, the service's program development manager for the effort. The Army has had to take a few steps back over recent years to reconsider its ways forward to develop an enduring capability to defend against rockets, artillery and mortars as well as cruise missiles and unmanned aircraft systems. As the service re-examined its path, Congress mandated that it buy an interim capability aimed directly at protecting the force from a growing cruise missile threat, but the Army has stressed that the system it will use — Rafael's Iron Dome — won't cover all the bases needed for a lasting capability. Earlier this year, the Army sent a report to Congress outlining its plans to get after the enduring capability, partly by hosting a shoot-off with vendors that bring launcher and interceptor capabilities next year. The Army issued a request for information to industry at the beginning of March with plans to conduct an industry day. But with the COVID-19 pandemic raging in the United States and limiting travel and social contact, the IFPC program office had to get creative in order to keep the program moving forward. The office was able to host one-on-one meetings with interested vendors as part of an industry day this month and is planning to answer industry questions, which have been submitted virtually, Santiago told Defense News in an April 9 interview. To stay on track with the program, the office couldn't afford to delay industry engagements in order to keep the ball moving, Santiago explained. The next big step for industry is to submit white papers to the Army toward the end of April, Santiago said. The Army will review the papers over the course of a month and will notify industry by the end of May whether or not they will be invited to proceed into an agreement with the service to move forward, he said. Those selected will move into a modeling and simulation phase that will also include some hardware-in-the-loop activities where capabilities are demonstrated in a simulated environment to determine if they are ready to go out on the range for the live shoot-off next year in the 3rd quarter of fiscal 2021 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Santiago said he could not disclose the number of agreements that might be awarded. The Army will invite vendors to submit final proposals following the shoot-off, Santiago said, but even if a vendor isn't ready for that phase, it can still submit a final proposal that draws upon performance in a simulated environment and includes a plan to get to a live-fire capability within the desired timeline. The government will evaluate final proposals and choose one vendor to provide the launcher and interceptor solution in the fourth quarter of FY21, Santiago said. Initial capabilities are expected to be fielded by FY23. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/04/10/pandemic-not-slowing-down-army-plans-to-field-enduring-indirect-fires-protection-capability/

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  July 7, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Future Missile War Needs New Kind Of Command: CSIS

  Integrating missile defense – shooting down incoming missiles – with missile offense – destroying the launchers before they fire again – requires major changes in how the military fights. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on July 07, 2020 at 4:00 AM WASHINGTON: Don't try to shoot down each arrow as it comes; shoot the archer. That's a time-honored military principle that US forces would struggle to implement in an actual war with China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran, warns a new report from thinktank CSIS. New technology, like the Army's IBCS command network – now entering a major field test — can be part of the solution, but it's only part, writes Brian Green, a veteran of 30 years in the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and the aerospace industry. Equally important and problematic are the command-and-control arrangements that determine who makes the decision to fire what, at what, and when. Today, the military has completely different units, command systems, doctrines, and legal/regulatory authorities for missile defense – which tries to shoot down threats the enemy has already launched – and for long range offensive strikes – which could keep the enemy from launching in the first place, or at least from getting off a second salvo, by destroying launchers, command posts, and targeting systems. While generals and doctrine-writers have talked about “offense-defense integration” for almost two decades, Green says, the concept remains shallow and incomplete. “A thorough implementation of ODI would touch almost every aspect of the US military, including policy, doctrine, organization, training, materiel, and personnel,” Green writes. “It would require a fundamental rethinking of terms such as ‘offense' and ‘defense' and of how the joint force fights.” Indeed, it easily blurs into the even larger problem of coordinating all the services across all five domains of warfare – land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace – in what's known as Joint All-Domain Operations. The bifurcation between offense and defense runs from the loftiest strategic level down to tactical: At the highest level, US Strategic Command commands both the nation's nuclear deterrent and homeland missile defense. But these functions are split between three different subcommands within STRATCOM, one for Air Force ICBMs and bombers (offense), one for Navy ballistic missile submarines (also offense), and one for Integrated Missile Defense. In forward theaters, the Army provides ground-based missile defense, but those units – Patriot batteries, THAAD, Sentinel radars – belong to separate brigades from the Army's own long-range missile artillery, and they're even less connected to offensive airstrikes from the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. The Navy's AEGIS system arguably does the best job of integrating offense and defense in near-real-time, Green says, but even there, “different capabilities onboard a given ship can come under different commanders,” one with the authority to unleash Standard Missile interceptors against incoming threats and the other with the authority to fire Tomahawk missiles at the enemy launchers. This division of labor might have worked when warfare was slower. But China and Russia have invested massively in their arsenals of long-range, precision-guided missiles, along with the sensors and command networks to direct them to their targets. So, on a lesser scale, have North Korea and Iran. The former deputy secretary of defense, Bob Work, warned of future conflicts in which “salvo exchanges” of hundreds of missiles – hopefully not nuclear ones – might rocket across the war zone within hours. It's been obvious for over a decade that current missile defense systems simply can't cope with the sheer number of incoming threats involved, which led the chiefs of the Army and Navy to sign a famous “eight-star memo” in late 2014 that called, among other things, for stopping enemy missiles “left of launch.” But that approach would require real-time coordination between the offensive weapons, responsible for destroying enemy launchers, command posts, and targeting systems, and the defensive ones, responsible for shooting down whatever missiles made it into the air. While Navy Aegis and Army IBCS show some promise, Green writes, neither is yet capable of moving the data required among all the users who would need it: Indeed, IBCS is still years away from connecting all the Army's defensive systems, while Aegis only recently gained an offensive anti-ship option, a modified SM-6, alongside its defensive missiles. As two Army generals cautioned in a recent interview with Breaking Defense, missile defense and offense have distinctly different technical requirements that limit the potential of using a single system to run both. There are different legal restrictions as well: Even self-defense systems operate under strict limits, lest they accidentally shoot down friendly aircraft or civilian airliners, and offensive strikes can easily escalate a conflict. Green's 35-page paper doesn't solve these problems. But it's useful examination of how complex they can become. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/future-missile-war-needs-new-kind-of-command-csis/

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  April 6, 2021 | International, Land

  These Are The Two Companies Competing To Build The Army's Next Arctic Combat Vehicle

  The new vehicles will offer Army soldiers added mobility and other capabilities while operating in the increasingly strategic Arctic region.