March 24, 2023 | International, Other Defence
Pentagon selects Defense Innovation Unit director
The organization has been without a formal leader since September 2022.
February 11, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Sorry, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Textron: The US Air Force isn’t buying light attack planes
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — At long last, the U.S. Air Force has definitively stated it will not procure light attack planes, putting to bed a three-year-long debate about whether to buy upward of 300 low-cost aircraft for the counterterrorism fight.
In a statement to Defense News, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek confirmed that the service will not move forward with a program of record for light attack planes.
Instead, U.S. Special Operations Command has requested $106 million in the fiscal 2021 defense budget for its armed overwatch requirement, according to Defense Department budget materials. As part of that program, SOCOM is set to acquire as many as 75 light attack aircraft, the command stated in a Feb. 3 solicitation.
The funding would support “prototype demonstrations and the testing of Special Operation Forces-unique capabilities and air worthiness release efforts” as well as the “procurement of aircraft, mission kits and associated support equipment,” according to the department.
Last year, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein said the Air Force would continue experimenting with light attack aircraft, using funding from FY18 and FY19 to buy a handful of AT-6 Wolverine turboprop planes from Textron and A-29 Super Tucanos from a Sierra Nevada Corp.-Embraer team. Then, in FY22, the service would be ready to decide whether to venture into a program of record, he said.
The Air Force still intends to buy two AT-6s and two A-29s, Stefanek said. However, the scope of their future operations has become more limited as the service opted to not pursue a larger buy.
At Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, “[the] AT-6 will be used for continued experimentation on exportable network/data link capabilities for allies and partners,” said Stefanek, referencing a project under development known as Airborne Extensible Relay Over-Horizon Network, or AEROnet.
“The Air Force has prior year funds available to continue the experiment,” she added.
Meanwhile, U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command pilots will use the A-29s to conduct training at Hurlburt Field, Florida, allowing them to act as instructor pilots and advisers for partner nations that plan to operate the A-29, Stefanek said.
For the past year, Air Force leaders have been sending signals that their interest in buying light attack aircraft was waning. The service originally considered a buy of several hundred planes that would be able to augment pilot absorption and provide a less expensive alternative to using high-cost fighters like the F-15 and F-35 for low-threat strikes against terrorist groups. However, a national defense strategy that prioritizes the fight against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China made it difficult to justify buying an aircraft fleet only survivable in the most uncontested environments.
In contrast, SOCOM has been bullish on light attack capabilities, with its commander, Gen. Richard Clarke, describing it as “a need for SOCOM” and “a need for our nation.”
In the FY20 national defense policy bill, Congress instructed the Air Force to coordinate with SOCOM on light attack capabilities and included an option “to transfer a portion of funds authorized for Air Force light attack aircraft experiments to procure aircraft for supporting the combat air adviser mission of the Special Operations Command.”
While the Air Force seemed most interested in the A-29 and AT-6 as potential light attack platforms, SOCOM appears to want to explore all options. The command is holding an Armed Overwatch industry day March 4-5 to discuss an upcoming demonstration of prototype aircraft.
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November 18, 2019 | International, C4ISR
How Lockheed Martin Is Trying To Link Everything on the Battlefield
BY PATRICK TUCKER Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options. The Pentagon's efforts to digitally connect everything on the battlefield is has a big challenge to overcome: getting disparate vehicles and weapons to share data. “The interoperability of various, different systems, that's really where we are struggling. We don't have that machine to machine connection to begin with,” Air Force Brig. Gen. David Kumashiro recently told the audience at last week's Defense One Outlook 2020 conference. Over the past several years, Lockheed Martin officials say they've been working to build those connections, piece by piece and plane by plane. They started by asking, “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” and then working backwards, J.D. Hammond, vice president of C4ISR systems, told reporters at one of the company's offices. The company began by asking “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” They started with an idea of the state they wanted to reach and then worked backward. In 2013, the company launched a project, dubbed Missouri, to link the stealthy F-22 and F-35 combat jets. The Air Force has announced that they are to test a similar link next month, but the Air Force is establishing more complete linkages, including new forms of secure radio linkagages using software defined radio, and also including other assets such as Valkyrie drones. In 2015, they launched Project Iguana, extending the datalinks to the high-flying U-2 spy plane, fourth-generation combat aircraft such as the F-16, and satellites. In February 2018, they conducted an experiment under DARPA's SoSITE program that added other aircraft and a ground station. In April, their RIOT experiment connectngi jets to ground vehicles. Experiment by experiment, Lockheed tried to “systematically work” to build the components of a larger network of networks, said Hammond. There are four experiments projects planned for next year: Mayhem, focusing on links for satellites; Edison, datalinks for the Navy; Brennan, aircraft and Army units; and Project CASTL, satellites and a “space tactical layer”. Ultimately, Lockheed wants all this to add up to a “virtualized cloud-based architecture.” Think of it like the branches of a tree. A handful of ships and planes might form one network. That will, in turn, connect to a larger network that would, in turn, would be connected to the larger JEDI cloud. “You end up with virtual private clouds on the edge with a computing architecture you could have on an aircraft, on a ship, or any of the deployed nodes,” said John Clark, Lockheed's vice president of intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance and unmanned aerial systems. Most of the linked aircraft and ships in these experiments carry an Enterprise Mission Computer 2.0 — dubbed “Einstein box” after its abbreviation, EMC2 — that translates each platform's data into a shared protocol that can go out to the larger wireless network. Lockheed officials hope that bringing all these pieces together will enable a new sort of operating system for warfare. They showed journalists a new experimental battle management display to illustrate the concept. The system presents the operator with a list of effects, from devastating explosions to a quiet disabling of some enemy system; a list of available assets, including planes or drones; a map of targets; and recommendations for the best way to deliver effects to targets. As circumstances change — fuel gets low, ammunition is depleted, targets are destroyed, new enemy forces arrive, etc. — the system can send out alerts that a new plan is needed — or automatically update the plan with new instructions for pilots and drone operators. It all depends on how high the operator wants to set the autonomy. That vision is very different from the way mission tasking works today. Preston Dunlap, the chief architect of the Air Force, said at the Defense One Outlook 2020 conference, “Right now, our commanders are very limited in who they can assign to do certain” things. “More often than not, you have to assign someone because they happen to be in front of a specific place in front of a specific computer,” he said. Of course, realtime data sharing across platforms isn't a simple or clear-cut affair, even after successful experimentation. The years-long problems with Lockheed's Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, for the F-35 show how hard it can be simply to share data between operators and just one platform. The challenges of sharing data between multiple platforms, in the middle of battle in a highly contested airspace, are far larger. But commanders say they must try. “In terms of where our adversaries are,” Kumashiro said, U.S. forces have “a need to have this joint all-domain command-and-control system.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/how-lockheed-martin-trying-link-everything-battlefield/161355
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April 23, 2019 | International, Land
Army Expects Major Competition for Bradley Fighting Vehicle Replacement
The deputy commander of Army Futures Command told lawmakers recently that he expects the competition to replace the Bradley Fighting Vehicle to be highly competitive. The Army recently released the request for proposal (RFP) for the Next Generation Combat Vehicle-Optional Manned Vehicle (NGCV-OMFV), the second-highest priority in the service's new modernization strategy. The new vehicle will be designed to maneuver a squad of soldiers through dense urban terrain as well as wooded areas and deliver "decisive lethality" in close combat against a near-peer foe such as Russia, according to the RFP the Army released in late March https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/04/03/army-expects-major-competition-bradley-fighting-vehicle-replacement.html