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On the same subject

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  August 27, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Turkey’s New Akinci Drone Is Impressive, But It’s No Substitute For Modern Fighter Jets

  Paul Iddon The Bayraktar Akinci drone is the most sophisticated built by Turkey to date. However, Ankara cannot count on the Akinci to serve as a substitute for its air force either acquiring or developing a fifth-generation fighter jet sometime in the next decade. The second Akinci (Turkish for ‘raider') prototype completed a 62-minute flight test in August, according to its manufacturer. The Akinci has a 65-feet wingspan, and is designed to have an impressive 24 hours of endurance, a range of over 300 miles, and to fly as high as 40,000 feet. Ukrainian-built AI-450 turboprop engines will power the heavy drones. According to the Turkish press, the drone “has two 450-horsepower engines but can be equipped with 750-horsepower engines or locally made 240-horsepower engines.” The Akinci will carry a variety of weaponry, including the same Smart Micro Munitions (MAM-L) its predecessor the Bayraktar TB2 does in addition to general purpose bombs. It can also reportedly fire Turkish-built Bozdoğan (Merlin) and Gökdoğan (Peregrine) within visual range and beyond visual range air-to-air missiles. The Akinci can even launch Turkish-built Roketsan SOM long-range air-launched cruise missiles that can hit targets up to 150 miles away. All of this makes it a very impressive weapons platform. Perhaps even more impressive are the drone's indigenous radars. “Ankara sees the Akinci as its main aerial vehicle for intelligence-surveillance-target acquisition (ISTAR) and command-control-communication (C3) tasks in the next decade,” wrote Turkish military expert Metin Gurcan. “The drone will be equipped with indigenously developed systems, including a multi-role active electronically scanned array radar, a SAR/GMTI radar, a wide-area surveillance system, electronic warfare, an electronic and signal intelligence suite, and beyond-line-of-sight satellite communications systems, the sum of which makes the Akinci the best-ever ISTAR+C3 asset the Turkish military has had,” he added. This combination of advanced radars and the multitude of weapons the Akinci can carry certainly make it a highly formidable piece of military hardware. “This weapons system could be quite effective in detecting and destroying individual land targets, such as enemy howitzers or mortars, or special equipment like electronic warfare (EW) stations,” noted a Jamestown Foundation analysis. Turkey has made impressive progress in drone production in recent years. Turkish drones have also seen combat and proven themselves formidable opponents. Its Bayraktar TB2s and TAI Anka-S drones devastated Syrian regime ground forces during clashes in Idlib province in February-March 2020. Turkish drones also gave decisive air support to Turkey's ally in the Libyan Civil War and successfully guided airstrikes that assassinated senior PKK leaders over the last two years. Given this record, it's not at all surprising that Turkey is investing in bigger and more advanced drones like the Akinci since it will be well suited for the kind of conflicts Turkey is fighting and will most likely continue to fight for the foreseeable future. While certainly impressive, the Akinci is, nevertheless, no substitute for Turkey acquiring a fifth-generation fighter jet. As Gurcan noted, by building the Akinci, Ankara is “hoping to extend its military reach in the region and compensate, even if fractionally, for the loss of the F-35 new-generation jets.” Turkey got suspended by the United States from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program in 2019 for purchasing and taking delivery of Russian S-400 air defense systems. Also, Turkey's fifth-generation fighter jet project, the TAI TF-X, is unlikely to become operational until the 2030s for a variety of reasons. On top of these serious shortcomings, Turkey might even find it difficult to buy 4.5 generation aircraft in the meantime to serve as stopgap fighters that can gradually replace its aging fleet of fourth-generation F-16s and even older F-4s until Ankara can finally acquire a fifth-generation jet. So while the Akinci is an undoubtedly impressive achievement it's not the aircraft Turkey needs to substantially modernize its air force for the decades to come. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauliddon/2020/08/25/turkeys-new-akinci-drone-looks-impressive-but-its-no-substitute-for-modern-fighter-jets/

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  June 25, 2019 | International, Naval

  Leidos awarded $72.8M for Navy's TRAPS sub detection system

  By Ed Adamczyk June 24 (UPI) -- Leidos Inc. was awarded a $72.8 million contract for work on submarine detection sonar for the U.S. Navy, the Defense Department announced. The company, based in Reston, Va., will perform work on the Transformational Reliable Acoustic Path System, or TRAPS, one of two prototypes developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies military applications. Leidos' Leidos' work on TRAPS comes under an indefinite quantity, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract with a three-year ordering period and no options, the Defense Department announced on Friday. The TRAPS system uses a fixed sonar mode placed on the ocean floor, exploiting advantages of operating from the seafloor, to achieve large-area surveillance of the area surrounding the submarine. Each node communicates back to a floating "stationary surface node" through a wireless acoustic modem when the ocean floor node detects a sound. The other prototype, called Submarine Hold at Risk [SHARK], has an unmanned underwater vehicle as a mobile platform to track enemy submarines. Both are part of DARPA's Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting [DASH] program. Leidos' work on the contract will be done at the company's Long Beach, Miss., facility, with an expected completion date of June 2022. https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2019/06/24/Leidos-awarded-728M-for-Navys-TRAPS-sub-detection-system/9201561393132/

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  July 24, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  The unlikely way to improve Air Force information warfare: forums

  Mark Pomerleau One way the Air Force's new information warfare command is trying to bring together the disparate parts of the organization is through forums where leaders put representatives from different components in the same room. Sixteenth Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, created in October, combined what was previously known as 24th and 25th Air Force. The move placed cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare and weather capabilities under one commander, serving as the Air Force's first information warfare entity. With all these new wings and capabilities now under a single unit, they need to understand what everyone is doing and how it can feed together. “How do we bring forums together where all of our wings that are focused on a problem can be in the same room and we start to build out what things are they all contributing,” Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, 16th Air Force's commander, told a webcast hosted by the Mitchell Institute. “Then taking it to the next layer, so all the weapons and tactics teams are talking. That simple act of creating a forum was built largely on our component responsibilities. We have very good forums ... for how do we support and produce cyber outcomes. We expanded that forum into an information warfare environment.” Some of this integration is already taking hold. Haugh explained he received a positive update earlier this month about how one meeting had led to fewer stovepipes and more data sharing. In addition, he said he'd like to see more components share intelligence as a way to enable others within the enterprise. For example, if a portion of the ISR enterprise, be it analysis or exploitation, in support of Air Forces Africa, discovers a Russian private military corporation conducting malign activities in Africa, they can pass that to the cyber enterprise to potentially pursue the adversary. Then the cyber element can feed their information or operation back to the ISR enterprise to produce better intelligence for the air component. “This is where for us, that art is starting to come together. Right now, it's very manual, and we're seeing the processes and the data flows start to fall in place that that will become a more automated and routine function that now becomes mutually supportive across our enterprise,” Haugh said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/smr/information-warfare/2020/07/22/the-unlikely-way-to-improve-air-force-information-warfare-forums/