US Army seeks to compete as OMFV prime, industry unnerved

On the same subject

• 

  August 6, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  How Army network modernization efforts ensure equipment works with allies

  Andrew Eversden A critical piece of the U.S. Army's network modernization push is ensuring its systems work with allies. In future battles, the Army will not fight alone; it will be joined by coalition partners, as well as other U.S. services. As the Army moves to improve its integrated tactical network, it must ensure that its network tools work with coalition and service partners The Army recently completed a critical design review of Capability Set '21 a set of new network tools that will be delivered to soldiers next year. The service is in the first phase of procuring the new capabilities. A “key factor” involved in delivery to soldiers at the battalion level and below is a move to a 75 percent “secure but unclassified” network that provides improved communication between coalition partners, said Col. Garth Winterle, project manager for tactical radios at the Army's Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical. “We're moving off of an all-secret network to one that's a lot more flexible and actually encourages coalition interoperability,” Winterle said. One opportunity to test interoperability was Defender Europe 2020, which was meant to be one of the largest European exercises involving both the U.S. Army and NATO allies, but had to be scaled down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Still, the Army was able to test interoperability There were a series of pre-Defender Europe exercises to assess capabilities “to inform future network design,” according to Justine Ruggio, director of communications for the Network Cross-Functional Team at Army Futures Command. These assessments included several pieces of Capability Set '21, including communications exercises and validation exercises with the Army's fielded Command Post Computing Environment software, Tactical Server Infrastructure and Commercial Coalition Equipment “to enable the use of the Mission Partner Environment, which allowed all participants to share classified information during the exercise, including the Polish and U.K.,” Ruggio said. During the pre-Defender Europe tests, “we were able to bridge the Polish and U.K. unit into an integrated command structure using our secret releasable network and create that common command-and-control picture,” Col. Lesley Kipling, the mission command lead and Army National Guard liaison officer to the Network CFT, said in an interview with C4ISRNET. Secret but releasable information is classified at the secret level and can be released to certain coalition partners who have sufficient clearance from their home country. An exercise scheduled for next year, called Warfighter 21-4, will allow for additional interoperability assessments with U.K. and French forces. According to Ruggio, one focus area will be on interoperability using the Network CFT's DevOps model to iterate the Command Post Computing Environment, continue to assess Commercial Coalition Equipment and evaluate the Mission Partner Environment. The event will be aligned with Capability Set '23, the next iteration of network tools. Kipling added that the cross-functional team and its partners are “continuing” to work on policies and training for properly connecting to a coalition network “so that it's not learning on the fly, but that these procedures and policies are codified in a way that they can be standardized and any user can execute whenever they're put in a situation,” she said. Brig. Gen. Joseph Papenfus, chief Information officer and deputy chief of staff of the G6 of U.S. Army Europe, said that the scaled-back nature of Defender Europe did affect network interoperability testing because soldiers were unable to come over from the United States. That means that U.S. Army Europe will focus heavily on European partners during the smaller exercises, Papenfus said, including validating network integration and establishing a secret but releasable network with NATO. “Every opportunity that we have to see how a piece of equipment works within the larger set of the network, we take advantage of that,” Ruggio said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/yahoo-syndication/2020/07/29/how-army-network-modernization-efforts-ensure-equipment-works-with-allies

• 

  February 28, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Cubic Signs Agreement with US Special Operations for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance R and D

  February 27, 2020 - Cubic Corporation (NYSE: CUB) today announced that its Cubic Mission Solutions business division signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (SOF AT&L) to work on research and development (R&D) for cutting-edge airborne payload technologies for use within the Department of Defense. The effort will primarily be performed by ISR Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cubic Corporation. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200227005246/en/ “We are pleased to join forces with SOF AT&L to support its mission in developing advanced and innovative technologies in support of global special operations,” said Jerry Madigan, president of ISR Systems, Cubic Mission Solutions. “The CRADA agreement offers a great framework for Cubic's autonomous systems team to collaborate and to share information.” Cubic delivers a low risk, robust Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) ISR platform with a highly expeditionary footprint to satisfy and enhance any ISR mission. Cubic's ISR-ONE offers a unique blend of high capability and performance, delivered within a Group III UAS platform. About Cubic Corporation Cubic is a technology-driven, market-leading provider of integrated solutions that increase situational understanding for transportation, defense C4ISR and training customers worldwide to decrease urban congestion and improve the militaries' effectiveness and operational readiness. Our teams innovate to make a positive difference in people's lives. We simplify their daily journeys. We promote mission success and safety for those who serve their nation. For more information about Cubic, please visit www.cubic.com or on Twitter @CubicCorp. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200227005246/en/

• 

  April 14, 2020 | International, Naval

  US Navy should turn to unmanned systems to track and destroy submarines

  By: Bryan Clark Anti-submarine warfare, or ASW, is one of a navy's most difficult missions. Sonars detect submarines with only a fraction of the range and precision possible using radars or visual sensors against ships above the water. Submarines can carry missiles able to hit targets hundreds of miles away, requiring searches to cover potentially vast areas. And the torpedoes that aircraft and surface ships use to sink submarines need to be dropped right on the submarine to have any chance of sinking it. These challenges led the Cold War-era U.S. Navy to rely on a sequential approach for tracking enemy submarines. Electronic or visual intelligence sources would report when an opposing sub was leaving port, and it would hopefully get picked up by sound surveillance, or SOSUS — sonar arrays on the sea floor — as it entered chokepoints, like that between Iceland and the United Kingdom. Patrol aircraft would then attempt to track the submarine using sonar-equipped buoys, or sonobuoys, and eventually turn it over to a U.S. nuclear attack submarine, or SSN, for long-term trail. The U.S. ASW model broke down, however, in the decades following the Cold War as U.S. submarine and patrol aircraft fleets shrank, the Chinese submarine fleet grew, and Russian submarines became quieter. Today, the U.S. Navy devotes enormous effort to tracking each modern Russian submarine in the western Atlantic. During the 2000s, the strategy of full-spectrum ASW started an essential shift in goals, from being able to sink submarines when needed to being able to defeat submarines by preventing them from accomplishing their mission. Full-spectrum ASW and other current concepts, however, still rely on aircraft, ships and submarines for sensing, tracking and attacking enemy submarines to bottle them up near their own coasts or sink them in the open ocean. Although SOSUS has improved since the Cold War and is joined by a family of new deployable seabed arrays, the next link in the U.S. ASW chain is still a P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, or a U.S. SSN. These platforms are in short supply around the world, cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to buy and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a day to operate. With defense budgets flattening and likely to decrease in a post-COVID-19 environment, the U.S. Navy cannot afford to continue playing “little kid soccer” in ASW, with multiple aircraft or ships converging to track and destroy submarines before they can get within missile range of targets like aircraft carriers or bases ashore. The Navy should instead increase the use of unmanned systems in ASW across the board, which cost a fraction to buy and operate compared to their manned counterparts. Unmanned aircraft could deploy sonobuoys or stationary sonar arrays, and unmanned undersea or surface vehicles could tow passive sonar arrays. Unmanned surface vehicles could also deploy low-frequency active sonars like those carried by U.S. undersea surveillance ships that can detect or drive off submarines from dozens of miles away. Although autonomous platforms will not have the onboard operators of a destroyer or patrol aircraft, improved processing is enabling small autonomous sensors to rapidly identify contacts of interest. Line-of-sight or satellite communications can connect unmanned vehicles and sensors with operators ashore or on manned ASW platforms. A significant shortfall of today's ASW concepts is “closing the kill chain” by attacking enemy submarines. Air- or surface-launched weapons have short ranges and small warheads that reduce their ability to sink a submarine, but their cost and size prevents them from being purchased and fielded in large numbers. Unmanned systems could address this shortfall in concert with a new approach to ASW that suppresses enemy submarines rather than destroying them. During World War II and the Cold War, allied navies largely kept submarines at bay through aggressive tracking and harassing attacks, or by forcing opposing SSNs to protect ballistic missile submarines. The modern version of submarine suppression would include overt sensing operations combined with frequent torpedo or depth-bomb attacks. Although unmanned vehicles frequently launch lethal weapons today under human supervision, the small weapons that would be most useful for submarine suppression could be carried in operationally relevant numbers by medium-altitude, long-endurance UAVs or medium unmanned surface vessels. Moreover, the large number and long endurance of unmanned vehicles would enable the tracking and suppressing of many submarines over a wide area at lower risk than using patrol aircraft or destroyers. Today the U.S. Navy uses unmanned systems in ASW primarily to detect submarines. To affordably conduct peacetime surveillance and effectively defeat submarines in wartime, the Navy should increase the role of unmanned systems. Using manned platforms to conduct command and control, and unmanned vehicles to track, deter and engage submarines, could significantly reduce the costs of ASW operations and enable the Navy to scale its ASW efforts to match the growing threat posed by submarine fleets. Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is an expert in naval operations, electronic warfare, autonomous systems, military competitions and war gaming. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/04/13/us-navy-should-turn-to-unmanned-systems-to-track-and-destroy-submarines/