Airbus US pivots business strategy away from selling big platforms to the Pentagon

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  29 octobre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  US Army’s top uniformed IT official lays out priorities for new office

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army's new top military IT official has its eyes on several priorities to ensure that the service is prepared for multi-domain operations. Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army's first deputy chief of staff for the G-6, a new position created after the Army announced it would be splitting its CIO/G-6 office over the summer, told reporters Tuesday that his new office will focus on strategy, network architectures, and implementation of command, control, communications, and cyber operations efforts. To achieve that, Morrison laid out four pillars that will shape the role of the new G-6 office, which reached initial operating capability after he took over in August. The four pillars are establishing a unified network, positioning cyber and signal forces for multi-domain operations, reforming the cybersecurity process, and driving efficient and effective investments across the network and cyber. The unified network pillar is focused on vertical integration of the tactical network and enterprise networks to create a unified network that can meet the globally dispersed warfighting operations of the service. Right now, Morrison said, the enterprise network is focused on modernizing bases, posts, camps and installations, while the tactical network is centered around brigade combat teams. The unified network will be “imperative” for multi-domain operations, Morrison said. His office will work with Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems; PEO Command, Control, Communications-Tactical; and the Network Cross-Functional Team to establish the unified network he said the Army needs to enable Joint All-Domain Command and Control. “We break down the individual theater architectures, and we make it easy for formations that are actually in [the contiguous United States] to rapidly deploy to any area of operations and immediately plug in and start conducting operations, whether that's in competition or conflict,” Morrison said. “That needs to be ... our goal.” As for aligning cyber and signal forces for multi-domain operations, Morrison said that he will be looking at the training, talent management and operational frameworks while adjusting them over time to ensure those soldiers are used effectively during future battles. “That means making sure that we have signal and cyber, underpinned by intelligence, operating in a combined arms fashion in cyberspace to include electromagnetic spectrum,” Morrison said. The three-star also wants to take a “hard look” at the service's risk management framework (RMF) as part of reforming and operationalizing its cybersecurity process. He wants to move the Army away from a bureaucratic system with intermittent reviews to a system where cybersecurity is baked into a system before it's added to the network, then going back “periodically” to make sure there are no new vulnerabilities to the system. As the service works toward enabling multi-domain operations, Morrison is also focused on ensuring that the service is making effective and efficient investments in its network and cyber infrastructure so that it can make the JADC2 concept a reality. For example, Morrison said, his team is looking at what the joint force is doing with cyber so the Army makes investments to develop cyber capabilities that the service needs while ensuring it has links back to the joint force. It's especially important for the Army to be meticulous with its cyber and network investments as the Department of Defense as a whole prepares for flat budgets as the government funds are increasingly directed toward recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, Morrison said. “We are probably entering into a time where budgets may not be all that they have been in the past,” he said. “And quite frankly, we owe it to taxpayers to force ourselves to be efficient and effective.” Before former Army CIO/G-6 Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford retired, he told reporters that the Army split the CIO/G-6 office to take better advantage of technology, saying that the way his office was structured had become outdated as technology advanced. The Army has yet to nominate a new CIO, but Morrison will work closely with the next official named to that position, he said. “Think of it in this way, the CIO establishes the policies," Morrison said. "We're responsible for the planning and the actual implementation of those policies, and then supporting Army organizations worldwide as they go out and actually execute the policies.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/10/27/us-armys-top-uniformed-it-official-lays-out-priorities-for-new-office/

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  16 mars 2023 | International, Autre défense

  India approves purchase of military equipment worth $8.5 bln

  India on Thursday approved purchases of missiles, helicopters, artillery guns and electronic warfare systems worth $8.5 billion as it sought to add more teeth to its military.

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  31 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  As Era Of Laser Weapons Dawns, Tech Challenges Remain

  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