US offers helicopters to Slovakia for giving jets to Ukraine

On the same subject

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  November 5, 2018 | International, Aerospace, Naval, C4ISR

  Italy spends $5.7 billion on military procurement in 2018

  By: Tom Kington ROME — Italy has spent slightly more than €5 billion (U.S. $5.7 billion) on defense procurement in 2018 and launched a series of new programs, a newly released spending document has revealed. Published months behind schedule, the Defence Ministry document also states that the ministry's overall budget, which includes its contribution to procurement as well as funds for personnel and maintenance and operations, stood at €13.8 billion this year, up from €13.2 billion the year before. The total budget for procurement combines a €2.3 billion contribution from the Defence Ministry funding with a €2.8 billion top-up from Italy's Ministry of Economic Development, which has long shored up acquisition funding. A chart published in the document shows that procurement funding from the defense ministry has risen 83 percent from €1.5 billion in 2008, and overtook Defence Ministry procurement in 2016 for the first time. The figures are contained in Italy's annual defense spending document, which is due to be examined by the Italian parliament's defense commission next week and has been seen by Defense News. The document breaks down spending per program in 2018 and lists new programs receiving funding for the first time, including four new Chinook helicopters for special forces troops, which will cost €528 million over nine years. Launch funding is also allotted for the purchase of a third pair of U212 submarines for the Italian Navy, a program due to cost a total of €2.35 billion. There is also launch funding for a second pair of Cosmo Skymed Second Generation radar satellites which will cost a total of €212 million. Also included in the budget is funding to launch the purchase of a new submarine rescue vessel which will cost a total of €424 million. Usually published in the spring, the release of the budget overview has been held up by a change of government, which saw a center-left administration replaced in June by a populist coalition. The new government's defense budget plans are yet to be finalized as the overall state budget is still being worked on, but a source has already told Defense News that €450 million are to be trimmed from planned spending to help fund social welfare programs. The programs to be put on ice during 2019 are NH-90 helicopter acquisitions and the CAMM-ER missile program, while plans to move the headquarters of individual military services in Rome under one roof in premises on the outskirts of the capital have been scrapped. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2018/11/02/italy-spends-57-billion-on-military-procurement-in-2018

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  December 11, 2024 | International, Land

  Army secretary fires four-star general for promotion board meddling

  Army Secretary Christine Wormuth fired Gen. Charles Hamilton, the first Army four-star to be fired in nearly 20 years.

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  January 14, 2021 | International, Land, C4ISR

  Army issues $17 million in contracts for TITAN development

  Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The Army has issued agreements to Palantir Technologies and Raytheon Technologies in support of the design and software maturation of a new next-generation ground station. The Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) is intended to be a key piece in the sensor-to-shooter chain, connecting sensors from all domains to war fighters and systems in the field to enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting. The system will be capable of downlinking data from multiple domains, processing it with artificial intelligence to create targeting data, and then delivering those solutions directly to the Fires networks, which can then determine the best available shooter to respond with. Palantir and Raytheon will each receive an $8.5 million other transaction authority (OTA) agreements for 12 months of work in the project's first phase. That early stage will include a series of design reviews, software demonstrations and soldier touchpoints as the vendors mature the TITAN software and work on system-level design. The Army will eventually move to a single vendor for complete system prototyping for phase 2. The next stage will cover refinement of prototype capabilities, and the fourth and final phase will prepare a prototype that is ready to integrate future sensors and technology advancements. The Army has been practicing with TITAN surrogates, most notably during its Project Convergence learning campaign last year. During that event, the Army was able to take overhead tactical satellite imagery and downlink it to a TITAN surrogate located at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. The TITAN surrogate then used the Prometheus artificial intelligence program to create targeting solutions from that data. Next, those solutions were transported to the main demonstration area at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, where another AI program determined the best shooter to receive that targeting solution. “We found the threat rapidly. We were able to identify it as the real threat. We were able to put hit-grade coordinates on it in very near real time and then digitally send that from the TITAN surrogate unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, down to the firing units that were located down at Yuma via tactical satellite communications. And all of that happened within seconds,” Willie Nelson, director of Army Futures Command's Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Cross-Functional Team, told C4ISRNET following the exercise. Northrop Grumman has been tapped to build two TITAN prototypes. Those are expected to be delivered in 2022. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2021/01/13/army-issues-17-million-in-contracts-for-titan-development/