US Air Force logistics officer talks basing, drones in the Pacific

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  December 1, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  European Union’s defense arm urges work on common counter-drone weapon

  By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — The European Defence Agency has completed its first-ever deep dive into member nations' defense plans, recommending that the bloc invest in six capabilities, including weaponry for fighting aerial drones. The finding is wrapped up in the agency's “Coordinated Annual Review on Defence” submitted to defense ministers Nov. 20. The report represents the first time analysts went through national defense programs in search of gaps in the European Union's overall military capability. The document “recommends developing a European capability to counter unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to improve force protection, as well as contributing to establish a European standard for Anti Access/Area Denial (A2/AD),” according to a summary released by the European Defence Agency. The analysis “concludes that European capability approaches towards A2/AD are clearly at a crossroads, whereby the capability is either developed in a collaborative manner or the capability will not be developed for European forces,” the summary read. Recent combat operations in the Middle East, Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh have shown an advantage for forces employing sophisticated aerial drones. In those conflicts, drones were used to spy on enemy formations and destroy tanks and vehicles with such precision that defense analysts have called them gamechangers in modern warfare. The EDA report also recommends member states band together on a new main battle tank that could enter service in the 2030s. The call speaks to the much-cited finding that European nations operate too many different models of tanks and other combat equipment. “If member states cooperate in upgrading or collaborate when introducing new ones, a 30 percent reduction of types and variants can be obtained by the mid-2030s,” the document stated. Eleven countries have already expressed an interest in cooperating, it added. The recommendation raises the question of how — and if — EU officials plan to consider existing industrial partnerships in judging progress on defense cooperation. For example, France's Nexter as well as Germany's Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall are working together on a Main Ground Combat System that would eventually replace the two countries' Leclerc and Leopard fleets. In addition, there is a project involving France, Italy, Spain and Greece to build a European patrol corvette that could count toward another recommendation of the new EDA report: development of a “European Patrol Class Surface Ship.” Jiří Šedivý, the agency's chief executive, told reporters he expects to see clusters of member states form around each of the six recommended focus areas — which also include soldier systems, defense in space and enhanced military mobility — following a series of workshop meetings early next year. Existing cooperative projects, including those toward a new battle tank and tank modernization more broadly, would be taken into account, Šedivý told reporters. Some of the review's findings are simply reiterations of known truths that have animated attempts at defense cooperation across the continent for years. “The review also finds that the European defense landscape is characterized by high levels of fragmentation and low investment in cooperation,” the document read, reflecting more or less a diagnosis of the status quo that has plagued the bloc for years. Šedivý said the development of new capabilities and improved cooperation aims to influence the member nations' 2025 budget cycle, as most countries' near-term spending plans are already too far along in their implementation. French officials, however, have offered to incorporate EDA recommendations sooner, he added. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/11/30/european-unions-defense-arm-urges-work-on-common-counter-drone-weapon/

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  July 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  Epirus, a venture-backed startup, inks deal with Northrop for counter-drone tech

  By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Epirus, a venture-backed startup offering a counter-drone capability, launched quietly enough two years ago, but it's making noise by bringing together key veterans of Microsoft, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon ― and by landing its first deal with a name-brand defense prime contractor. Epirus chief executive Leigh Madden was general manager for Microsoft's national security business before he joined the Hawthorne, Calif.,-based firm two months ago, and its chief financial officer, Ken Bedingfield, is a former chief financial officer at Northrop. The former chairman of Epirus is Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the Silicon Valley data-analytics company Palantir Technologies. Epirus, this week, is expected to announce a previously undisclosed strategic supplier agreement with Northrop to provide exclusive access to Epirus' software-defined electromagnetic pulse system, called Leonidas. The dollar value of the deal isn't being disclosed. Northrop said Leonidas would augment its own kinetic and non-kinetic solutions to counter small drones. The Army recently selected Northrop's Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control software, or FAAD-C2, as the interim C2 system to counter small drones. (DoD's FY21 budget request included $18.7 million for counter-drone enhancements for the system.) “UAS threats are proliferating across the modern battlespace,” said Kenn Todorov, vice president and general manager of Northrop Grumman's Combat Systems and Mission Readiness division. “By integrating the Epirus EMP weapon system into our C-UAS portfolio, we continue maturing our robust, integrated, layered approach to addressing and defeating these evolving threats.” Many companies have jumped into the $2 billion counter-UAS market, anticipating a boom as commercial drones have grown cheaper and more commonplace, posing an asymmetric threat on the battlefield as well as a threat to airports, sports stadiums, government buildings and urban areas. So many companies are in the field the Pentagon has been working to streamline the number of systems available across the department. Epirus executives said the company's technology is unique because its use of solid-state commercial semiconductor technology makes it lighter and smaller ― and because it can have narrow effects or be “adjusted to sanitize a volume of terrain or sky, creating a forcefield effect.” The company's systems involve a combination of high-power microwave technology and, for enhanced targeting, artificial intelligence. Epirus Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Bo Marr was a radio frequency engineer and technical lead on Raytheon's next-generation jammer program, under development by the U.S. Navy. Madden, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who spent eight years at Microsoft, and Bedingfield, who spent five years as Northrop's CFO, both said they joined Epirus because they were impressed by the technology and its potential. “Northrop and Microsoft are both multibillion-dollar defense businesses, and I think we bring a knowledge of how to operate around some of the larger opportunities and to make outsized impacts in the market,” Madden said. “We're taking that experience to a smaller, innovative company. I think that will allow us to really accelerate the pace of growth and have a more rapid and greater impact for our customers.” The Pentagon has attempted to shift toward working with smaller, more innovative companies to supplement its work with larger firms, which continue to dominate the marketplace. Flexible, non-traditional contact vehicles called “other transaction authorities” have grown more popular as the Pentagon has turned to Silicon Valley for cutting edge technologies. “One of the things that attracted me to come to Epirus is the ability to work in an agile enterprise that is trying to take some of the approaches of Silicon Valley and apply them to the defense world―to iterate quicker and to field faster, and to be able to respond to the urgent needs of the customer,” Bedingfield said. Bedingfield said the company is growing fast and generating revenue from working with customers on studies and technology demonstrations, but it's as yet unclear when it will begin to deliver products. The coronavirus pandemic has slowed its hiring, but the firm is looking to double in the next year, adding more than 50 employees in Hawthorne, and a planned office in Northern Virgina. Formed in 2018 and named after the magical bow of the Greek hero Theseus, Epirus was raising $17.8 million in new funding last November, according to its public filings. With Lonsdale and Marr, its co-founders include its previous CEO; current Vice Chairman John Tenet, from venture capitol firm 8VC; Chief Operating Officer Max Mednik, a Google veteran; UnitedHealthcare Chief Digital Officer Grant Verstandig is the current chairman. Palantir, which Lonsdale founded with billionaire Peter Thiel in 2005, appeared as an upstart when the Defense Department hadn't opened its arms as wide to Silicon Valley. Last year, Palantir beat Raytheon in a head-to-head competition to provide the Army a new version of its intelligence analysis system ― after a years long saga in which the Army rejected Palantir's offering and Palantir sued. In September, Epirus won a Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center as part of its AFWERX technology accelerator. The contract was for the company's novel architecture for using commercial off-the-shelf field programmable gate arrays, which are semiconductor devices commonly used in electronic circuits, as ultra-wideband radio frequency transceivers. While traditional systems use large vacuum tubes, Madden said Leonidas is based in microchips and software. “We believe there is no other solution on the market that allows for fully software defined precision targeting at digital speeds, enabling both precision targeting as well as large-area, counter-swarm targeting of many drones at the same time,” he said. Northrop and Epirus are expected to announce their partnership this week. “We're not just solving today's swarm threat, we're also looking to the future to understand how asymmetric threats will evolve,” Marr said in a statement. “Epirus is an agile startup, Northrop Grumman has defense prime contractor resources, and through this partnership we intend to deliver the best technology to the warfighter as fast as possible.” https://www.defensenews.com/2020/07/20/epirus-venture-backed-startup-inks-deal-with-northrop-for-counter-drone-tech

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  September 6, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  The US Army faces struggles working with small businesses

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army faces problems on multiple fronts when it comes to sending business to small companies, the head of Army Futures Command said Wednesday. Gen. John Murray said small businesses struggle under a procurement system that can take years, and then struggle to scale their businesses to meet the Army's needs. “There is a lack of trust [on the part of small businesses] that the government can sustain [a] small-business model,” Murray told the audience at the third annual Defense News Conference. “The way we do budgeting, [program objectives memorandum] POM cycles and all that — a small business can't survive. We're going to have to prove to small businesses that we can adjust our POM cycles to meet their needs. “And from the small business perspective, there are only a few ways that they can scale to the size we are talking about in terms of production. One of those ways is partnering with a traditional [defense contractor], so that's going to be a challenge going forward.” Murray's comments come as the Army tries to engage with a range of partners — from universities and small businesses to the traditional prime contractors such as Raytheon and General Dynamics — to find ways to integrate new technologies into the force. The outreach to small businesses at Army Futures Command is about finding new ways to get after the challenges the service faces, Murray said, but that in and of itself comes with challenges. “This outreach to small business is not because there is anything wrong with traditional defense primes, it's really an outreach to find new ways to solve our problems,” he said. “I've been in the Army 37 years, and I think about solving our problems a certain way. I guarantee a lot of these small businesses think about how to solve problems a different way. “Part of the challenge I have with small business is comfortably describing our problem to them. I can't talk in acronyms, I can't talk with 37 years of experience, I need to talk very clearly and very plainly.” Murray said his teams have staged events aimed at the private sector, such as a recent one where startups gathered to figure out how to move artillery shells 250 meters using autonomous unmanned systems. Such events have been instructive, he noted. Ultimately, however, the Army will choose the business that best meets the service's requirements, he said. “What it really comes down to is what are our problems and where is the best place — whether that's small business or a university or a traditional prime — where is the best place to solve that problem,” Murray said. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/defense-news-conference/2019/09/04/the-us-army-faces-struggles-working-with-small-businesses/