April 5, 2018 | International, Aerospace

Switzerland names contenders in $8 billion ‘Air 2030’ program

COLOGNE, Germany — Swiss officials have unveiled details of their envisioned reboot of the country's air-defense complex, setting the stage for purchases of aircraft and ground-based missiles totaling more than $8 billion.

The head of Switzerland's defense and civilian protection department, Guy Parmelin, on Friday unveiled a list of requirements for the “Air 2030” program that the neutral country wants to begin fulfilling in the mid-2020s to defend its skies and repel intruders.

The existing fleet of decades-old F/A-18 and F-5 jets is considered too outdated for the task.

New aircraft under consideration include the Airbus Eurofighter, Dassault's Rafale, Saab's Gripen, the F/A-18 Super Hornet from Boeing and Lockheed Martin's F-35A, according to the March 23 list of requirements published by the defense department.

Ground-based weapons on the short list are the Eurosam consortium's SAMP/T system; the David's Sling missile shield from Israel; and Raytheon's Patriot system. Swiss officials want to protect an area of 15,000 square kilometers with ground-based weapons, which is more than one-third of the country. They also seek to intercept targets up to 12 kilometers high and 50 kilometers away.

The envisioned concept of operations dictates that a fleet of roughly 40 aircraft will intercept those targets outside of the ground weapons' range. Officials want enough capacity to have four planes in the air at any given time during crises.

Request for proposals for an acquisition program are expected to be published in the summer, Renato Kalbermatten, a spokesman for the defense department, told Defense News in an email Tuesday.

Before a referendum is held about the project in the first half of 2020, ministry officials want to finish qualification of all potential vendors. That includes studying the data from a first round of proposals and collecting final offers from those still in the running at that time, according to Kalbermatten.

Referendums are a key tool of the Swiss political process. Asked by a Swiss news agency this month if the country would still have an air force if the population voted against spending money on Air 2030, Parmelin responded dryly: “That's policymaking in Switzerland.”

The Swiss won't be asked which type of aircraft the country should buy, only about the program as a whole. Government analysts would then decide which system is best suited for the task, Parmelin said.

A 2014 plebiscite saw the acquisition of Sweden's Gripen defeated, a rare outcome for a referendum on security policy matters, Swiss national broadcaster SRF commented at the time.

Notably, Germany's future TLVS air and missile defense system, a development based on the trinational Medium Extended Air Defense System, is missing from the lineup of candidate ground-based weapons. That is because the Swiss consider that system suitable only for short and medium ranges, according to Kalbermatten.

“As Switzerland has not had a defense system for long ranges since 1999, the first goal is buying a long-range system,” he wrote.

Exactly how much money will go to aircraft purchases and how much to ground weapons will depend on the interplay between the two program components ultimately picked, according to officials. However, previous estimates assume that $6 billion or $7 billion would be spent on planes.

Winning bidders must agree to arrange for 100 percent of the program cost to flow back into the Swiss economy through so-called offset agreements. Those can be negotiated after final contracts are signed, according to the defense department.

The government is looking for aircraft and missile hardware as is, meaning few to no “Helvetizations,” or Swiss-specific tweaks, would be made to the weapons, the new requirements document states. The ministry wants to purchase a single plane type under a “one-fleet policy.”

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2018/03/27/switzerland-names-contenders-in-8-billion-air-2030-program/

On the same subject

July 20, 2020 | International, C4ISR

Inside the intelligence community’s new plan for commercial imagery
Nathan Strout Starting in 1961, the National Reconnaissance Office has been tasked with designing, building, launching and operating the United States' fleet of intelligence satellites. Over the years, that mission has evolved, bolting on new components and missions. Now in 2020, the NRO is looking to change once again, moving beyond the status quo by issuing a new set of contracts toward the end of this year that will reshape the intelligence community's relationship with commercial imagery. Peter Muend, the head of NRO's commercial imagery efforts, told C4ISRNET that the agency is “obviously very committed to utilizing commercial imagery to the maximum extent practical in support of defense, national security and all the other mission areas that we serve.” “I think the best philosophy that underpins that is one that says ‘We really are looking to buy everywhere we can and only build what we have to—what's really not available on the commercial market,‘” Muend said. An important condition to that approach is that the commercial imagery market actually have commercial support. In other words, Muend doesn't want any of these companies to exist solely to support government requirements. There should be a real commercial market for these capabilities, which will help drive down costs for the government. To understand the agency's approach to commercial imagery, it's best to go back to 2017, when the NRO took over the role of acquiring commercial satellite imagery on behalf of the intelligence community from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Under this new paradigm, NGA serves as the geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) functional manager, determining what imagery the intelligence community needs and writing those requirements, but it's up to NRO to determine how those requirements are filled. Then in 2018, another step occurred when the NGA's EnhancedView contract was transferred to NRO, which issued a follow-on contract to Maxar shortly thereafter. That single EnhancedView contract has been one of the primary source of commercial imagery for the intelligence community for years. The goal now is to start the move beyond EnhancedView. That process started in 2019, when the NRO issued a request for information (RFI) to see what types, quality and quantity of imagery industry could provide. For Muend, that RFI sent a message to industry: the intelligence community was looking to the commercial sector for imagery that went beyond the requirements, capacity and capability the government had sought in the past. That RFI initially led to a trio of study contracts for Maxar, BlackSky and Planet. “Really, the purpose of those study contracts was to serve a couple purposes, one being to take a look at their systems and really understand their performance from a modeling and simulation standpoint to really see what they can do and how they would measure up and meet our capability,” said Muend. “The other part was really to assess imagery, because of course a lot of the input we got back from the RFI emphasized the quality of the imagery and how much they could deliver. It's one thing to get an RFI response. It's another thing to actually formally assess and measure.” In the year since those first study contracts were issued, the agency has issued a handful of other study contracts, primarily to companies offering different phenomenologies than electro-optical imagery, including synthetic aperture radar and radio frequency sensing. Muend clarified that those study contracts were less focused on purchasing data from those phenomenologies and more focused on ensuring the agency's systems could interface with those phenomenologies. “We certainly see a very vibrant future ahead for those phenomenologies. We're excited for them to continue to mature and we're certainly looking forward to taking advantage of them in the future,” said Muend. “But again, the specific contracts we're moving forward with toward the end of the year are more focused on the electro-optical side.” Back on that electro-optical side of things, the study contracts have been mutually beneficial, said Muend. Not only has NRO learned what capabilities are available commercially and how they can be incorporated, the vendors have gotten a better understanding of what the agency is looking for. “And then on the imagery side, we've certainly learned a lot — certainly some of the differences between what the glossy advertising sheets say and then what's really available when looked at analytically in the way that we and the larger community do,” said Muend. When pressed on that point, Muend declined to characterize whether any company had failed to live up to or superseded its claims. All of those efforts are leading up to source selection and contract awards toward the end of the year. Muend noted that there were likely to be awards to multiple companies and those contracts will specifically pertain to electo-optical imagery. “One thing that we have seen out of our study contracts and our market research is that no single provider can currently meet what we're asking for out of our requirements. So it is going to be an aggregate of capability from multiple vendors, and in addition it's going to be something that they're going to have to grow into over time, that they expand their capabilities to meet our needs,” he explained. As a precursor to that decision, NRO issued an RFI in June to help the agency standardize end user license agreements for imagery. Those agreements govern how the agency is able to use and share the imagery it collects, explained Muend. As NRO prepares to begin purchasing imagery from multiple companies, it wants to make sure those agreements are clear, intuitive and broadly uniform. “We're very, very excited about the future, about establishing a new set of operational imagery contracts to not only take advantage of our current industry base, but the growing new entrants and new providers as well,” said Muend. “We're eager to get moving.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2020/07/17/how-the-intelligence-community-is-approaching-commercial-imagery/
July 23, 2018 | International, Land

America’s largest business lobby endorses Trump’s arms export plan
By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON — America's largest business lobby is hailing the Trump administration's plansto boost American weapons exports. “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Defense and Aerospace Export Council (DAEC) welcomes the State Department's announcement regarding the approved implementation plan for the Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) Policy," council President Keith Webster said in a statement Friday. The U.S. State Department this week announced its planned process to implement the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, which adds economic security as a factor when the government considers whether to approve arms exports. It intends for the executive branch to advocate strongly on behalf of companies exporting defense items. Webster, who was President Barack Obama's last director of international cooperation at the Pentagon, called the policy “a major first step toward improving government decision processes and policies.” Aerospace and defense firms rely on innovation and U.S. government support to compete on a global scale, he noted. The export council last month offered some 30 recommendations on how to hardwire economic security and defense-industrial base considerations into the government's international arms sale decisions. “We appreciate the administration's outreach throughout this process and are pleased to see DAEC priorities in the plan, including policy changes that will improve bid timeliness while reducing costs to industries, place emphasis on economic considerations in the federal transfer decision process, and expand trade promotion," Webster said. The policy has attracted pushback from arms control advocates who say it risks fueling conflicts around the world and aiding regimes that do not respect human rights. “If the administration is serious about claims that these changes make for responsible policy, it should add much greater transparency into the arms transfer and monitoring process,” Forum on the Arms Trade's founder and coordinator, Jeff Abramson, wrote last month. The U.S. leads the world in arms transfers, with $47 billion expected so far this year, whereas the State Department approved $42 billion in government-to-government sales for all of 2017. “Defense exports are good for our national security, they're good for our foreign policy. And they're good for our economic security. And as the administration and our leadership has said, economic security is national security,” Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper, head of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, said during the Farnborough International Airshow on July 18. Aaron Mehta in London contributed to this report. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2018/07/20/business-org-hails-trump-arms-export-plan/
June 28, 2018 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

Australia commits to Triton in $5 billion deal
By: Nigel Pittaway MELBOURNE, Australia — Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on June 26 that the Australian government will purchase six Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton unmanned surveillance aircraft. The initial investment in the Triton capability is AU$1.4 billion (U.S. $1.03 billion), which includes AU$200 million to enter into a cooperative development program with the U.S. Navy; and AU$364 million for major infrastructure works at two Royal Australian Air Force bases. The total cost of the deal, including whole of life sustainment costs, is estimated to be AU$6.9 billion Australian dollars (U.S. $5.1 billion). The first aircraft will be delivered in 2023 and the last in 2025. They will be based at RAAF Base Edinburgh in South Australia and at Tindal in the Northern Territory, but are also likely to be forward-deployed to other airfields around the continent, including a string of bare bases to the north and north-west. The announcement marks the Gate 2 milestone in the Australian Defence's Force's Air 7000 Phase 1B program, which seeks to acquire a high altitude, long endurance maritime surveillance platform to complement its eventual fleet of 12 Boeing P-8A Poseidon manned maritime patrol aircraft. Australia's Triton program earlier achieved Gate 1 approval in 2014, and the 2016 Defence White Paper affirmed the government's commitment to the acquisition of the capability, subject to the successful completion of the U.S. Navy's Triton development program. At that time the requirement was for seven Tritons , one less than the six announced yesterday, and was initially capped at AU$4 billion, although this did not include through-life sustainment costs. “The Triton will complement the surveillance role of the P-8A Poseidon aircraft through sustained operations at long ranges as well as being able to undertake a range of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tasks,” according to a joint statement by Prime Minister Turnbull, Minister for Defence Marise Payne and Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne. “Together these aircraft will significantly enhance our anti-submarine warfare and maritime strike capability, as well as our search and rescue capability.” Minister Pyne said that the Triton will be responsible for surveillance of Australia's areas of maritime responsibility, which represents over 10 percent of the world's surface. “They will provide surveillance and reconnaissance across the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Ocean as far as Antarctica,” he said. “Triton provides unprecedented endurance and 360-degree coverage through its unique sensor suite,” commented Doug Shaffer, Northrop Grumman's vice president of Triton programs. “Australia has one of the largest sea zones in the world over which it has rights to use marine resources, also known as an Economic Exclusion Zone. As a flexible platform, Triton can serve in missions as varied as maritime domain awareness, target acquisition, fisheries protection, oil field monitoring and humanitarian relief.” The Australian Defence Force estimates Triton is capable of establishing a ten-hour orbit in the Southern Ocean, south of Heard Island, or similar efforts to the north of Guam and to the East of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean, from bases around the country. Australia is interested in the multi-intelligence (MULTI-INT), also known as integration functional capability 4 version of the Triton. This features several enhancements over the baseline aircraft and includes a signals intelligence payload which, in U.S. Navy service, is intended to replace the Lockheed EP-3E Aries surveillance platform. The cooperative development program Australia has signed with the U.S. Navy is similar to the agreement it has with the Navy regarding P-8A spiral development and will seek to influence the further development of the MULTI-INT Triton to meet Australia's specific needs. Items of interest are understood to include the integration of a weather radar system, for prolonged operations in tropical conditions where daily thunderstorms are a fact of life, and a ground moving target indicator to facilitate overland ISR missions in addition to the blue water maritime surveillance role. “This cooperative program will strengthen our ability to develop advanced capability and conduct joint military operations,” Prime Minister Turnbull said. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2018/06/27/australia-commits-to-triton-in-5-billion-deal/

All news