December 16, 2024 | International, Aerospace
SpearUAV Announces $20 Million Contract for Advanced VIPER 300 AI-Based Loitering Munition Systems
The company is expected to deliver the systems as early as 2025.
September 22, 2020 | International, Naval
US Marines wants to move fast on a light amphibious warship. But what is it?
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Marine Corps is moving as fast as it can to field a new class of light amphibious warship, but it remains unclear what it will do, where it will be based or what capabilities it will bring to the fight.
The idea behind the ship is to take a commercial design or adapt a historic design to make a vessel capable of accommodating up to 40 sailors and at least 75 Marines to transport Marine kit over a range of about 3,500 nautical miles, according to a recent industry day presentation.
While the presentation noted that the ship should have few tailored Navy requirements, that also creates a problem: If the Navy is going to pay tens of millions to develop, build, crew and operate them, should it not provide some additional value to the fleet?
Analysts, experts and sources with knowledge of internal discussions who spoke to Defense News say the answer to that question is a source of friction inside the Pentagon.
The idea of the warship arrived on the scene in 2019 with the ascension of Gen. David Berger as commandant of the Marine Corps. His planning guidance called for a smaller, more agile amphibious force that could operate inside the Chinese anti-access, area denial window in the South China Sea.
In a recent virtual meeting of the Surface Navy Association, the chief of naval operations' director of expeditionary warfare, Maj. Gen. Tracy King, emphasized that above all, the platform must be cheap and come online quickly.
“I see the efficacy of this [light amphibious warship] is really to help us in the phases and stages we're in right now,” King said Aug. 27. “We need to start doing things differently, as an extension of the fleet, under the watchful eye of our Navy, engaging with our partners and allies and building partner capacity: We ought to be doing that right now. I think we're late to need with building the light amphibious warship, which is why we're trying to go so quickly.”
When asked whether the ship should contribute to a more distributed sensor architecture to align with the Navy's desire to be more spread out over a large area during a fight, King answered in the affirmative.
"[But] I really see it benefiting from [that architecture] more,” he said. “We need to build an affordable ship that can get after the ability to do maritime campaigning in the littorals.”
The unstated implication appeared to be that if the ship is loaded up with sensors and requirements, it will slow down the process and increase the cost. Analysts who spoke to Defense News agreed with that, saying the Navy is likely trying to put more systems on the platform that will make it more complex and more expensive.
The Navy has said it wants to keep the price under $100 million per platform and begin purchasing them as early as the latter half of 2022.
“The hardest part is going to be appetite suppression, especially on the part of the Navy,” said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and analyst with The Heritage Foundation. "This is what we saw in the littoral combat ship: It started out as a very light, near-shore, small and inexpensive street fighter. And then people started adding on requirements. You had ballooning costs, increasing complexity of the platform, and you get into all kinds of problems.
“The Marine Corps wants this quickly. It needs it to be inexpensive so you can have 28-30 of them over a three- to four-year period.”
There is the additional challenge of where the ships will be based, since they will probably not be built to the kinds of standards of normal Navy vessels built to last for 30-40 years in service. The minimum service life for the light amphibious warship will be about 10 years, according to the industry day presentation.
Wood said that would be a challenge for the Marines and the State Department to work out in parallel with the effort to get the hulls quickly built.
Jerry Hendrix, a retied Navy captain and analyst with the Telemus Group, agreed with that assessment, saying the Marines are eager to move forward to get something fielded, in part to make sure this transition to a lighter, more distributed force being pushed by Berger actually happens.
"The commandant can't divest of some of the legacy platforms he's building — these big, expensive and vulnerable platforms — until he has something that replaces it in the water. And so he's anxious to get going with something else so he then has a reason to move away from what he has.
“The commandant is well aware he has a four-year clock and its ticking. So if he's going to make changes, he's got to get moving to get those changes in place and commit the Marine Corps to them to make sure it's going to last. And right now I'm not sure there's a lot of high confidence that they are going to last.”
Hendrix acknowledged that the Navy has good reason to want the light amphibious warship to have more capability, but added that the Corps is more interested in something simple than something costly and elaborate.
“What that does,” Hendrix said, “is drive up unit cost and drive down the numbers that can be purchased.”
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October 7, 2024 | International, Aerospace
Space Force to fly two rapid-response demonstration missions in 2026
The missions are slated for summer or fall of 2026 as part of the Space Force's tactically responsive space demonstration series.
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August 28, 2018 | International, C4ISR
SOCOM seeking technologies for war in a post-cyberpunk era
By: Kelsey Atherton The great trick of computers is that they enable people to be more than human. In a new request for information, the United States Special Operations Command is looking for a range of computer and computer-enabled technologies, all designed to make Special Operators function in some way more than human. These technologies range from sensors to nano-drones to biomedical performance enhancements. Taken together, the list of desired capabilities is a preview of what may be possible in the near-future to shape the intimate fights on the edges of wars. Miniature robot scouts, hyper-aware data collection and monitoring riding along low-bandwidth nodes, tailorable hyperspectral imaging sensors, biometric tracking resistance, and go-pills without adverse effects are all on asking, and that's just a handful of the dozens of capabilities sought. The full request for information is available online. To parse through it, here are some of the standout categories. Robots, blood-transporting robots How many pounds of blood is a reasonable amount of blood for a robot to carry? Ten pounds, answers the SOCOM request. Specifically, SOCOM is looking for an unmanned aerial blood delivery system that can do vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), or at least operate without a runway. The 10 pound requirement is a minimum, and roughly approximate to the amount of blood in a person weighing 150 pounds. In order for the blood to be useful, it has to be kept between 35-46 degrees Fahrenheit, ideally through passive means, all the way from loading through transit, delivery, and unloading. That unloading should “minimize shock to the payload for any proposed delivery concept,” because again, this is about making a robot that can deliver blood in a useful and life-saving state. Blood transport drones already exist, and have safely demonstrated blood transport in small amounts and over modest distances. SOCOM wants a blood drone that can transport its cargo over 100 miles and back, while staying in contact and control of human operators. That's an ambitious ask, and it's one of just five named categories of drone technology sought by SOCOM. Another is a platform-agnostic desire for an expeditionary ISR platform, which can operate as individuals, in pairs, or in meshed swarms. These drones will have modular payloads, carry at least two sensors, and require minimum logistics support. One asked-for way to sustain these drones is by “alternative power through environment,” like directly sipping power from power lines or incorporating a way to charge off renewable energy. The other three categories of drone are ambitious, though in more familiar terms. There's a listing for a Nano VTOL drone, with a takeoff weight of 2.6 ounces that can fly autonomously inside and avoid collisions, with a human monitoring but not directly piloting the drone. Ten times the size is the Micro VTOL drone, at about 1.6 pounds, capability of all-weather an autonomous flight, and able to operate both without GPS and in caves. The biggest non-blood-carrying drone SOCOM is looking for is a hand-launched or fixed-wing VTOL vehicle that can be recovered without special equipment, will weigh no more than 7.8 pounds, and can fly for at least 90 minutes at sea level. These drones are familiar machines, mostly, even if some of the payloads are a little unusual. Sensors in a robot are common enough. SOCOM is also looking for a way to increase the sensors carried and used by a person on foot. Hyper-sensors Collecting information is nothing without processing it into a useful form, and this SOCOM RFI seeks information on both. While the specific means are not detailed, there's a desire for “edge computing” to “derive useful information at the point of collection through sensor fusion and forwards processing without reliance on high bandwidth, long haul communications.” That likely means computers and AI already in the field and embedded in equipment carried by the special operations forces. Making that information intelligible is one task a Heads Up Display (HUD), but SOCOM is also open to audio cues and haptic feedback, among other means, for relaying processed information in a useful and immediate form. Collecting that information will be a new suite of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) sensors, designed with the limitations and hard conditions of present and future special operations missions in mind. That means working without “owning the air domain,” a break from decades of assumptions for conventional and counter-insurgent warfare, but a break that acknowledges the likely presence of cheap drones on all sides of future battles. These sensors will include visual spectrum, infrared, hyper-spectral imaging, LIDAR, electronic warfare, can operate autonomously and be mounted on drones or scattered on the ground to work and transmit data remotely. For good measure, SOCOM is also asking for technologies that would allow drones to work as something like a universal translator even in denied connectivity environments. With linguistic expertise, regional dialects, demographic information and cultural sensitivities programmed in, the drones will do the fraught social massaging around war. If there is anything that will convince a local population about the right intentions of the people presently fighting nearby, it's a robot that's hip to the local slang. More than human All this collecting and transmitting information is likely to produce a host of signals, so SOCOM is also looking for technologies that “help avoid physical detection by acoustic, thermal, radar, visual, optical, electromagnetic, virtual, and near infrared means.” Finding a way to remain discreet in an information rich environment is a challenge for everyone in society today, one tacitly acknowledged by an ask for a technology to “help manage digital presence within the realm of social media.” (Step 1 for that is probably not using a jogging app with geolocation turned on.) Biometric technologies (think: facial recognition, etc) are often seen as a tool of the powerful, wielded by governments against vulnerable populations. While they certainly can be that, they can also pose a challenge to individuals in the employ of one military trying to evade the sensors used by another. To that end, SOCOM is looking for technologies that provide resistance to biometric tracking. (While it's not specified, Juggalo-style face paint might work for this exact purpose). Finally, once a special operator has evaded detection, used the sensors on hand, and has an adequate amount of robot-delivered blood to keep going, there is an interest in human performance and biomedical enhancements. These include drugs and biologics that can enhance cognitive performance, increase “peak performance sustainability, including increased endurance, strength, energy, agility, and enhanced senses” and a whole other wish list of capabilities that officers from time immemorial have demanded of the people under their command. Most promising, perhaps, is the ask for “medical sensors and devices that provide vital sign awareness and send alerts,” and “austere trauma treatment,” both of which don't require transformative properties in the people using them. Science fan-fiction It's too early to say how many of the asks in this RFI are realistic, though some are already delivered technologies and others certainly seem near-future plausible. More importantly, the request as a gestalt whole suggests a desire for people that are more than human, and capable of performing everything asked of them in remote battlefields, far from home. As the United States approaches its 17th continuous year of war abroad, asking that science deliver what science fiction promised feels at least as plausible as imagining a future where deployments abroad are scaled back. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/08/28/socom-seeking-technologies-for-war-in-a-post-cyberpunk-era