31 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval
Navys Next Generation Air Dominance Program to be Family of Manned Unmanned Systems
24 juillet 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Australia said on Monday it would spend A$9.8 billion ($6.60 billion) to buy 20 new Super Hercules military transport aircraft, ahead of a visit later this week by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
3 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
AIR FORCE ViaSat Inc., Carlsbad, California, has been awarded a $50,800,000 cost-plus-fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for development on prototype space systems. The contractor will provide studies, design, manufacturing, integration, performance qualification, network space segment elements, launch, flight and demonstration of prototype space systems. This also includes the development, integration and demonstration with ground terminals in conjunction with the government ground segment to reduce risk and assess performance and functionality for future protected service. Work will be performed in Carlsbad, California, and is expected to be completed May 2, 2028. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition and one offer was received. Fiscal 2021 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $754,337 will be obligated when the first task order is awarded. Air Force Research Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, is the contracting activity (FA9453-21-D-0029). NAVY ACTS-Meltech JV1 LLC,* Virginia Beach, Virginia (N00178-21-D-4403); Athena Construction Group Inc.,* Triangle, Virginia (N00178-21-D-4404); Cremer Global Services Inc.,* Melbourne, Florida (N00178-21-D-4405); Encon Desbuild JV2 LLC,* Bladensburg, Maryland (N00178-21-D-4406); HSU EGI JV LLC,* Gaithersburg, Maryland (N00178-21-D-4407); Matos Builders LLC,* Baltimore, Maryland (N00178-21-D-4408); New Dominion Construction LLC,* Dumfries, Virginia (N00178-21-D-4409); Signature Renovations LLC,* Capitol Heights, Maryland (N00178-21-D-4410); and Trinity USA Contracting Inc.,* White Stone, Virginia (N00178-21-D-4411), are awarded a combined $30,000,000 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for facility repairs and renovations in multiple buildings, trailers and labs. This contract was competitively awarded among HUBZone small businesses. It provides standard maintenance, sustainment, repair and minor construction as well as field surveying of sites, mapping of new site conditions, soil boring sampling, sampling and testing of potential existing hazardous construction materials, performing and providing engineering analysis and evaluations for purposes of structural and electrical capacities and providing energy computations for infrastructure solutions. Operation and execution are primarily focused in repairing, upgrading and nonstructural construction in accordance with and not exceeding Category II of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command Engineering & Construction Bulletin Issue No.2006-04. Each awardee will be awarded $500 (minimum contract guarantee per awardee) at contract award. These contracts do not include options and consist of a cumulative value of $30,000,000 over a five-year period to the nine vendors combined. Work will be performed in Dahlgren, Virginia (85%); Wallops Island, Virginia (5%); Virginia Beach, Virginia (5%); and Washington, D.C. (5%), and is expected to be completed by February 2026. Fiscal 2021 sustainment, restoration and modernization funds in the amount of $4,500 will be obligated at the time of award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. All other funding will be made available at the delivery order level as contracting actions occur. This contract was competitively procured via the beta.SAM.gov website, with 11 offers received. The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, Dahlgren, Virginia, is the contracting activity. Huntington Ingalls Industries, Newport News Shipbuilding division, Newport News, Virginia, is awarded a $12,500,000 cost-plus-fixed-fee modification to previously awarded contract N00024-16-C-4316 to continue performance of the repair, maintenance and upgrade efforts on the USS Helena (SSN 725) Dry-Docking Selected Restricted Availability. Work will be performed in Newport News, Virginia, and is expected to be completed by April 2021. Fiscal 2021 operation and maintenance (Navy) funding in the amount of $12,500,000 will be obligated at time of award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Conversion and Repair, Newport News, Virginia, is the contracting activity. DEFENSE LOGISTICS AGENCY Federal Prison Industries Inc.,** doing business as UNICOR, Washington, D.C., has been awarded a maximum $21,978,000 modification (P00009) exercising the first one-year option period of a one-year base contract (SPE1C1-20-D-F057) with four one-year option periods for various types of coats. This is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract. Locations of performance are Illinois, Texas, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., with a Feb. 5, 2022, ordering period end date. Using military services are Army and Air Force. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2021 through 2022 defense working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency, Troop Support, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Delavan Inc., West Des Moines, Iowa, doing business as Collins Aerospace, has been awarded a maximum $9,999,999 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-quantity contract for T700 aircraft engine fuel injector assemblies. This was a competitive acquisition with one response received. This is a five-year contract with no option periods. Location of performance is Iowa, with a Feb. 2, 2026, performance completion date. Using military services are Army, Navy and Air Force. Type of appropriation is fiscal 2021 through 2026 defense working capital funds. The contracting activity is the Defense Logistics Agency Aviation, Richmond, Virginia (SPE4A721D0099). ARMY Weeks Marine Inc., Covington, Louisiana, was awarded an $11,791,200 modification (P00001) to contract W912P8-20-C-0059 for maintenance dredging of the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico. Work will be performed in Venice, Louisiana, with an estimated completion date of June 30, 2021. Fiscal 2020 civil construction funds; and fiscal 2020 non-federal sponsor, state of Louisiana funds in the amount of $11,791,200 were obligated at the time of the award. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans, Louisiana, is the contracting activity. *Small business **Mandatory source https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/2490862/source/GovDelivery/
31 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
Steve Trimble As the U.S. Air Force comes within weeks of the first operational laser weapons, the Defense Department is hatching new concepts to address the power and thermal management limits of the state-of-the-art in the directed energy field. In a largely secret dress rehearsal staged last week at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Air Force performed another round of tests of the deploying Raytheon High Energy Laser Weapon System (HEL-WS), as well as other directed energy options, such as the Air Force Research Laboratory's Tactical High Power Microwave Operational Responder (THOR), says Kelly Hammett, director of AFRL's Directed Energy Directorate. “All I can say is there were multiple systems. From my reading of the reports, it looked like a very successful exercise,” says Hammett, who addressed the Association of Old Crows annual symposium Oct. 29. The Fort Sill experiment was intended to put the weapons through their paces in a realistic operational environment. AFRL's Strategic Development, Planning and Experimentation (SDPE, which, despite its spelling, is pronounced “Speedy”) office called on the HEL-WS and THOR to engage swarms of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The experiments also demonstrated new diagnostic tools, allowing AFRL testers to understand the atmosphere's effect on energy propagation in real time. SDPE awarded Raytheon a contract in August to deliver a “handful” of systems to the Air Force for a one-year deployment scheduled to conclude in November 2020. The HEL-WS will be used to defend Air Force bases from attacks by swarming, small UAS and cruise missiles, Hammett says. The Air Force is not releasing the location of the deployed sites for the HEL-WS. AFRL also is grooming THOR for an operational debut. Instead of blasting a UAS with a high-energy optical beam, THOR sends powerful pulses of radio frequency energy at a target to disable its electronics. Hammett describes THOR as a second-generation directed energy weapon. It is designed to be rugged for operational duty and compact enough to be transported inside a single container loaded into a Lockheed Martin C-130. Upon unloading from the aircraft, THOR can be activated within a couple hours, or broken down and moved within the same period, he says. Despite decades of basic research on directed energy systems, such operational capabilities have evolved fairly rapidly. The Air Force finally consolidated its strategy for developing directed energy weapons in the 2017 flight plan, Hemmett said. The document narrowed a once-fragmented research organization that attempted to address too many missions. “Directed energy zealots like myself have been blamed, rightly so, of saying directed energy can do almost anything you want it to do. And we pursued multiple applications to the effect that we were diffusing some of our efforts,” he says. The 2017 flight plan selected three initial use cases: Air base defense, precision strike and self-protect. The HEL-WS and THOR are addressing the first mission. The Joint Navy-Air Force High Power Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike (Hijenks) program is developing a missile to address the precision strike requirement, as a follow-on to the Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (Champ) that concluded five years ago. In the long-term, AFRL also plans to demonstrate the Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (Shield), a podded defensive weapon for aircraft. Although such technology has come far, researchers are still grappling with fundamental issues to make them practical. Namely, the power generation and thermal management requirement for high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves remains a challenge. “If you're willing to have very limited duty-cycle, very limited magazine, the power and thermal management aren't very challenging,” Hemmett says. “Of course, that's not what we want from directed energy weapons. We want deep magazines. We want to be able to handle wave attacks as favorably or more favorably that kinetic weapons.” The “rule of thumb” for a high-energy laser is an efficiency of about one-third, meaning a 300-kW generator is necessary to create a 100-kW laser beam, resulting in 200 kW of waste heat that must be dealt with in some way, says Frank Peterkin, a senior technologist on directed energy for the U.S. Navy who spoke at the same event. On Navy ships, that puts the laser in competition with the electronic warfare and radar subsystems for power and thermal management loads, he adds. “The challenge for the directed energy community is we don't really own the solution,” Peterkin says. “It does need to be a more holistic solution for the Navy. We are a customer, but we're not driving the solution, per se.” Although directed energy researchers cannot design the power grids for bases, ships and aircraft, they can help the requirement in other ways, says Lawrence Grimes, director of the Directed Energy Joint Transition Office within the Defense, Research and Engineering directorate of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The development of special amplifier diodes for fiber optic lasers are breaking the “rule of thumb” for high-energy systems, Grimes says. “They actually operate at higher temperatures and higher efficiency, so they can reduce the requirement necessary for the prime power and thermal management, and we're not throwing away 200 kW.” Other Defense Department organizations are pursuing more ambitious options. The Strategic Capabilities Office is selecting suppliers to demonstrate small, 10 MW-size nuclear reactors, as a power generation option for directed energy weapons at austere forward operating bases. Meanwhile, AFRL also is considering space-based power generation. Under the Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research program, AFRL will investigate using high-efficiency solar cells on a spacecraft to absorb the solar energy. The spacecraft then would convert the solar energy into a radio frequency transmission and beam it to a base to supply energy. AFRL has awarded Northrop Grumman a $100 million contract to begin developing the technology. If those seem like long-term options, the Air Force is not immediately concerned. The HEL-WS and THOR are designed to use “wall-plug” power or the military's standard electric generators, Hammett says. https://aviationweek.com/defense/era-laser-weapons-dawns-tech-challenges-remain