June 26, 2018 | International, Land
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has awarded Lockheed Martin a $358 million production contract for the Army Tactical Missile System, which allows for a service life-extension program for old missiles, the company announced Monday. The firm will also produce new missiles for a Foreign Military Sales customer, Lockheed added.
ATACMS is the Army's only surface-to-surface, long-range, 300-kilometer missile system. According to a Lockheed spokesperson, the missile system performs well in operations and is highly reliable.
But the Army is burning through a variety of its precision missiles in operations that have been heating up in various theaters, and the service is taking steps to ensure its inventory is refreshed and robust going forward.
The service life-extension program, or SLEP, will allow customers to be able to upgrade existing Block 1 and Block 1A missiles with new technology and double the range, a Lockheed statement notes.
When an old ATACMS comes through the SLEP line, it's “essentially a brand-new missile, and it's reset to [a] 10-year shelf life,” a Lockheed spokesperson told Defense News.
By: Jen Judson
In December 2014, the Army awarded Lockheed a contract to modernize the ATACMS weapon system, and the company embarked on an effort to upgrade and redesign all the internal electronics, developing and qualifying a new capability for a proximity sensor that enables ATACMS to have a height of burst.
ATACMS has a 500-pound class Harpoon warhead intended for point detonation, but giving the missile a height-of-burst capability increases its area effects for imprecisely located targets, the spokesperson said.
As part of the SLEP program for expired or aging ATACMS, Lockheed will clean up the old motors and then go through a remanufacture and final assembly process that incorporates the installation of the upgraded electronics.
Lockheed is set up, under the current contract, to update or build new missiles at a rate of 320 a year at its Camden, Arkansas, Precision Fires Production Center of Excellence, but there is a surge capacity of 400.
Still, the company is posturing to reach a rate of 500 new and upgraded ATACMSs per year based on interest and anticipated orders, the spokesperson said.
Lockheed has produced over 3,850 ATACMS missiles, and more than 600 of them have been fired in combat.
ATACMSs are packaged in a Guided Missile Launch Assembly pod and is fired from the Multiple Launch Rocket System family of launchers.
August 12, 2023 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR, Security
The Space Rapid Capabilities Office is leading an effort to develop and integrate a modernized suite of tools to perform dynamic space operations.
January 23, 2019 | International, Land
By: Jarosław Adamowski WARSAW, Poland — Latvia's public procurement watchdog IUB has stopped the defense ministry from signing a contract worth about €181 million ($206 million) to buy four-wheel-drive armored vehicles from Finland's Sisu Auto after two bidders, AM General from the United States and SouthAfrica's Paramount Group, filed complaints on the tender. Auditors have given the the ministry three months to overhaul the procedure of evaluating all vendors' offers. The development follows another round of controversy surrounding the procurement, as state-run broadcaster LSM reported that an adviser to Defense Minister Raimonds Bergmanis had lobbied for Paramount Group. The aide denied the allegations, saying he was not a member of the tender committee and he had not lobbied for the company since the procedure was launched. Bergmanis said he trusted the source-selection committee and had “no doubt about the persons that implemented the tender”. The defence ministry ranked Sisu Auto's offer as first, followed by the bids submitted by AM General, Turkey's Otokar, and Paramount Group, respectively. Sisu Auto offered its GTP 4x4 vehicle, AM General said it would supply the High Mobility Multi-PurposeWheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), Otokar offered the Cobra, while Paramount Group had offered its Marauder. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/01/22/latvia-halts-206-million-armored-vehicle-contract-amid-controversy
June 19, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Other Defence
By: Seth J. Frantzman and Kelsey D. Atherton Rafael Advanced Defense System's Spice bombs now have a new technological breakthrough as the Israeli company enables its Spice 250 with artificial intelligence alongside automatic target recognition to be used with scene-matching technology. The Spice 250, which can be deployed on quad racks under the wings of warplanes like the F-16, has a 75-kilogram warhead and a maximum range of 100 kilometers with its deployable wings. Its electro-optic scene-matching technology — which involves uploading terrain data onto the bomb and combining it with real-time electro-optic imagery — allows the weapon to work in GPS-denied environments. And the bomb can use this autonomous capability to navigate and correct its location, according to Gideon Weiss, Rafael's deputy general manager of marketing and business development at the company's air and C4I division. With its AI and “deep learning” technologies, the weapon has the ability to identity moving ground targets and distinguish them from other objects and terrain. This is based on 3D models uploaded to the bomb as well as algorithms. As the weapon identifies and homes in on its target, such as a convoy of vehicles, it separates the convoy of interest from other vehicles it has “learned” to ignore. “The deep-learning algorithm is indifferent to the actual data fed to it for modeling targets of interest and embedding their pertaining characteristics into the system," Weiss said. "However, the more the data used for modeling is representative of the target of interest, the more robust the recognition probability will be in real life.” Rafael has completed the development and testing phase of the Spice 250, including flight tests, which have “proven the robustness of the ATA and ATR, so it is mature for delivery,” Weiss said, using acronyms for automatic target acquisition and recognition. Asked if the ATR algorithm will select a secondary target if the computer cannot find the initial human-selected target, Weiss said: “This goes into the area of user-defined policies and rules of engagement, and it is up to the users to decide on how to apply the weapon, when and where to use it, and how to define target recognition probabilities and its eventuality.” Automatically selecting a secondary target may eventually become part of the upgrade profile for the munition, if customers express significant interest in the feature. With a two-way data link and a video-streaming capability, the bomb can be aborted or told to re-target up until a “few second before the weapon hits its target,” Weiss explained. That two-way data-link, enabled by the weapon's mounting on a Smart Quad Rack, or SQR, will enable future deep learning to be based on data extracted from earlier launches. Data recorded will include either live-streaming video or a burst of still images of the entire homing phase up until impact. “These are automatically and simultaneously recorded on the SQR — enabling two functions: (a) real-time and post-mission BDI (Bomb Damage Indication); (b) post-mission target data extraction for intel updates, etc.," Weiss said. "The ATR capability, including its deep learning updates, must be more agile than the enemy's ability to conceal and/or change its battlefield footprint, tactics, appearance or anything else which might impede the ATR from accurately recognizing and destroying targets.” The Spice family of weapons is operational with the Israeli Air Force and international customers. https://www.defensenews.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/06/17/israels-rafael-integrates-artificial-intelligence-into-spice-bombs/