Robots in the ranks: Army integrating robots in two platoons

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  July 28, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval

  How One Component Improved U.S. Navy F/A-18 Fleet Readiness

  The U.S. Navy's F/A-18 and EA-18G fleets have experienced a dramatic turnaround. In 2017, less than half of the Navy's Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets were able to fly. Now, 80% of its carrier-based fighters are ready for missions. The solution involved fixing a single component within the General Electric F414 engine. The Navy faulted constrained spending following the 2008 financial crisis and increased demand from the wars in the Middle East as reasons for the fleet's lack of readiness. More specifically, those conditions exacerbated an issue embedded in the military's vast supply chain. For 20 years, the Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers have continually had electronic systems and new sensors added that placed greater and greater demand for power from its General Electric engine. That demand taxed a key component of the F414's electrical power generation system—its generator control unit (GCU), which keeps the generator output within a specified range. Initial attempts to address the GCU's issues through “component-level reliability improvements were not sustainable,” Navy spokeswoman Gulianna Dunn tells Aviation Week. Eventually, the GCU, already in short supply, failed to keep pace, causing a cascading effect on the availability of the carrier-based fighters. In the words of a Navy program official, the GCU was the “top platform degrader for all naval aviation.” When sequestration-era spending limits were imposed on the Pentagon in 2013, the entire military faced across-the-board funding cuts, including the operations and maintenance accounts. The Navy had to make tough choices about what bills it would pay and what to defer. At the same time, flight hours for the Super Hornet and Growler in the Middle East increased to meet the high operational tempos of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve. As the Navy reduced aviation sustainment budgets, the program office did not have sufficient funding to purchase spare parts. From fiscal years 2013-16, the program office requested between $193.6-311.5 million and received between $85.2-136.3 million, according to a 2019 Defense Department Inspector General report. To compensate, Navy officials cannibalized aircraft to obtain the required spare parts. Maintainers removed working parts from an aircraft and installed them on a second jet to make that aircraft operational. A backlog of spare parts exacerbated fleet readiness and availability rates—an issue that affected the GCU acutely. New mission payloads created new types of electrical load, straining the aircraft's electronics, and wearing out the GCU at a faster rate. The second-generation (G2) and G3 GCU models that equipped the fleet could handle only about 150 flight hours. To increase reliability General Electric Aviation Systems, in consultation with the Navy, began working to redesign the GCU. A G3-to-G4 conversion kit could reach up to 532 flight hours. A G4 GCU was even better—sustaining 1,220 flight hours. Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) flight-tested the G4 in August 2015, and GE started production in mid-2016, Joe Krisciunas, general manager and president of GE Aviation Electrical Power Systems, tells Aviation Week. But the part was still only being manufactured at a minimal rate. The matter came to a head in October 2018, when then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis set an 80% mission-capable readiness goal. At the time, only 260 F/A-18 and EA-18G aircraft were capable of flying missions—approximately 60%, far short of the mandate. In response, the Navy convened a Reliability Control Board (RCB) in 2019 to improve the F/A-18 and EA-18G mission-capable rate. The board pinpointed the main problem—insufficient production of the F414's GCU. The Navy had 200 of the units on back order. Navair worked with GE to ramp up GCU production, according to Lt. Cmdr. Jason Shaw, power and propulsion lead at the F/A-18 and EA-18G program office. The RCB determined GE was producing roughly six GCUs per month that would funnel into the program office, Boeing or Naval Supply Systems Command (Navsup). The program and Boeing had predictable delivery schedules, but Navsup would only receive GCUs that were produced beyond what the other two contracts required. “It created a hole on the supply shelf,” Shaw says. “When a jet would lose a GCU, there was no other one to replace it from supply.” The team brainstormed and decided GE would increase production to about 21 GCUs each month, while Navair would defer a contract for 320 GCU conversion kits to 2021. Pushing the contract would leave room for Navsup to acquire a more predictable delivery schedule. The company doubled its GCU production rate from 2018 to 2019, and almost doubled it again in 2020 to reach the 21 units per month rate, Krisciunas says. These courses of action resulted in zero GCU back orders by mid-June 2020. Additionally, the team is working with GE to resolve production issues related to GCU testing capacity. The plan is to purchase new, larger test stands and upgrade software on existing test equipment. This would allow the company to conduct more tests and further increase production. The test stand is a large electric motor that simulates the engine spinning the gearbox, and it has a pad that duplicates the GCU interface. A test stand costs approximately $1.5-2 million and typically takes 15-18 months to get up and running, Krisciunas says. Still, more improvements are being made: The program office is now assessing wiring issues that may have also contributed to low GCU reliability. The service awarded a $17 million contract to purchase additional software and cables for Automated Wiring Test Sets, which will allow aircraft mechanics to identify system faults. “The U.S. Navy is the only [Pentagon] military branch to have met and sustained the 80% readiness call that Mattis put out, and that is largely associated with resolving the issues with GCUs,” Shaw says. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/how-one-component-improved-us-navy-fa-18-fleet-readiness

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  August 21, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  North Korean Hackers Deploy New MoonPeak Trojan in Cyber Campaign

  Discover MoonPeak, a new remote access trojan linked to North Korean hackers. Learn about its features, targets, and evolving infrastructure in this c

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  July 27, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  How the Army’s new PEO C3T boss views network modernization

  Andrew Eversden It's certainly busy at the Army's Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical. The office is currently working to procure its new set of network tools, known as Capability Set '21, while simultaneously preparing Capability Set '23 for its preliminary design review next year and going through the early stages of planning for Capability Set '25. In addition, PEO C3T, which is tasked with tactical network modernization, is under new leadership. Brig. Gen. Robert Collins, formerly program executive officer of the Army's PEO Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, took over June 1, after now-Lt. Gen. David Bassett took over the Defense Contract Management Agency. At PEO IEW&S, Collins oversaw the efforts to integrate sensors and sensor data to give soldiers a better overview of the battlefield. His work at PEO IEW&S, where he worked closely with PEO C3T and the Network Cross-Functional Team, also focused on the Joint All-Domain Command and Control and the Multi-Domain Operations concepts — work he will continue focusing on at PEO C3T. Collins discussed his priorities and goals for PEO C3T in an interview with C4ISRNET. C4ISRNET: What are your priorities as you take over the Army's PEO C3T? Brig. Gen. Robert Collins: We've established a very rigorous and methodical two-year capability set cycle. It's got a series of increasing capabilities over time from Capability Sets '21, '23, '25. And really, as we increase our networking capability from intuitive to expeditionary to increasing capacity, keeping a kind of a laser focus on lethality portions of sensor to shooter, and as you kind of heard about from Joint All-Domain Command and Control. One of the things that I would certainly underscore that I've carried from my past position into this position is we here are acquisition professionals. We will continue to underscore acquisition, discipline and rigor within our programs. And what I mean by that is we're certainly given a healthy amount of resources to execute our programs and to make sure that we are doing things such as acquisition strategies; establishing baselines; we're doing experimentation with rigor and data collection; and things such as developmental testing, operational tests prior to procurement so that we've got the best of capability, the best value and the highest-performing kit for our Army soldiers. The other thing I'll underscore is we do this with continuous industry feedback and involvement. And when I say industry, I'm talking more than just your traditional, your nontraditional. And so we do a continuous outreach with industry, and I'm very proud of that. And not just traditional industry days, but other one-on-ones and allowing them to bring in and demonstrate and then probably, most importantly, I would tell you across this whole process is soldier involvement, soldier touchpoints, and really capabilities and requirements driven by soldiers and acquisition process that informs soldiers. They, at the end of the day, are helping us shape these investments that we've got. C4ISRNET: As you move from capability set to capability set, what do you want industry to know? What are some areas that stand out to you in terms of where industry can help? COLLINS: There are some significant opportunities. We're going to continue to be open. We're going to continue to be competitive, and I need them to be agile and adaptive. And when I talk about opportunities, when I look across what we have going on with Multi-Domain Operations, we've got the addition of cyber and space. And that is a tremendous opportunity within the industry to help us as we start to pull those into the domains and orchestrate: How do we fluidly move in and out of, and have operational advantage, in those domains? We look to link where we can have any sensor link to any shooter through any C2 node, and do that at the pace of combat. There's going to be linkages and artificial intelligence and machine learning. So there's opportunity there. Where we're a little unique from our commercial counterparts as we operate in this environment: We've got to work in a contested, congested, disconnected, intermittent, limited-bandwidth environment, and we have got to do it in an expeditionary nature. And so those are opportunities for industry. How do we operate in that unique environment, and in such a way that it's small and expeditionary and we can move at pace? Those are certainly some of the opportunities with industry. And we will continue to have open and transparent dialogue with them. Even as far as capabilities at '23, we're getting ready to host our next technical exchange where we look for them to come in with ideas that we can, they can submit areas for us to assess, and then we'll continually iterate that, assess, and then put it into our design review process to see what's available, what's mature and what's ready. And then continue to iterate that over time. C4ISRNET: What did you learn as program executive officer at PEO IEW&S? COLLINS: I think my experience being on the intelligence, electronic warfare and sensor side has given me an appreciation of the types of information that will traverse our networks. [I've kept an eye on] sensors that are looking deep [and] opportunities with other agencies [and] the types of data that are collected that have to move across the network, have to be synthesized so we can inform decision-makers. I think that's been very valuable. C4ISRNET: At PEO IEW&S you focused a lot on Multi-Domain Operations. How does that translate to your new role at PEO C3T, one of your partners in your last position? COLLINS: When I look at network modernization and opportunities, I see an opportunity with MDO. Certainly space and cyber are tremendous opportunities. Cyber in and among itself is a domain that not only is an area we need to watch from [a] “how do we collect data from an intel” [perspective], “how do we organize ourselves from a defensive posture” and “where there may be opportunities in the competition element.” I think space, too, is an area. One of the things on the network is to make sure that we can operate at distance and beyond line of sight. So I think MDO has got an opportunity. I look at sensor to shooter; the network doesn't necessarily exist for just removing data. It exists to help decision-makers make decisions and get them information and link sensor to shooters, so I think that's a tremendous opportunity. I think continuing to refine our ability to be expeditionary and make sure that this kit can, at any place, anytime when the nation calls, we can put communications into austere environments and it can operate, even if the environment includes things such as limited communications. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/07/24/how-the-armys-new-peo-c3t-boss-views-network-modernization/