American firm to take over Britain’s Meggitt in $8.8 billion deal

Sur le même sujet

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  17 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Updating software in flight? The Air Force may be close.

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force will soon announce that the service can update an aircraft's software while in flight, the Air Force's chief software officer said Tuesday. Nicolas Chaillan, the service's software czar, hinted at the announcement during a wide-ranging interview on a webcast hosted by C4ISRNET, but he declined to share which aircraft could handle the upgrade before the formal announcement is made. The update is part of a larger push by the Air Force to modernize its software practices. However, Chaillan described the news as a “gamechanger” and offered insight into the challenges associated with updating software during flights. “We need to decouple the flight controls, the [open mission systems], all the air worthiness piece of the software from the rest of the mission [and] capability of [that] software so we can update those more frequently without disrupting or putting lives at risk when it comes to the flying piece of the jet or the system,” Chaillan said. A formal announcement could follow in coming days. The Air Force is embracing agile development and DevSecOps in several of its programs to accelerate development time and deploy tools faster. Critical to this effort has been two Air Force environments — Cloud One and Platform One. Platform One, which was recently deemed an enterprise solution by the Department of Defense, is a software development platform that hosts a broad range of DoD components, including the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. The JAIC moved to the Air Force platform as it awaits the results of an ongoing court battle between Amazon Web Services and Microsoft over the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI cloud. Chaillan said the F-35 program is also planning to move to Platform One soon. He added that he wants the platform to serve as a “software factory as a service.” In the next 12 to 18 months, Chaillan said that he sees the service continuing to add artificial intelligence and machine learning into its systems at scale. Both Cloud One and Platform One will be critical to the development of those systems. Cloud One, a multi-cloud environment with Microsoft and AWS, will also be looking to add new vendors “down the road,” Chaillan said. The Air Force's decision to go the multi-award route over the single award structure like JEDI made sense because of the advancement of cloud technology taken by the Air Force, Chaillan said. “When JEDI started, it did make sense to have a single award because cloud is very hard and very complex and it did makes sense to start there. Would I do that now? Probably not. I think technology changed,” Chaillan said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/09/15/updating-software-in-flight-the-air-force-may-be-close/

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  13 juillet 2020 | International, Terrestre

  Russia and US jostle for arms sales to India after tensions with China over border

  India is a top buyer of foreign weapons on the international market and Russia has been its main supplier since the Soviet era The June 15 clash between China and India in the contested Galwan Valley lends an urgency to New Delhi's arms programme Russia and the United States are racing to sell weapons to India as New Delhi seeks to boost arms supplies for its ongoing military tension with Beijing. The Indian government last week rushed to approve a proposal to acquire 33 new Russian warplanes for US$2.4 billion and upgrade 59 more, in addition to an earlier US$5.43 billion deal for S-400 air defence missile systems, after the deadly skirmish with Chinese troops last month on their disputed border. However, Russia's close relationship with China raised questions over Moscow's reliability by some in India, while the US, which has been stepping up ties with New Delhi through the Indo-Pacific strategy, has been pushing for arms sale to India. “Many believe that India must not put all its eggs in one basket, rather continue to follow the middle path by pushing for engagement with both Russia as well as the United States,” said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, a distinguished fellow and head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. India is a top buyer in the international arms market, with billions of dollars of imports every year. In the past 10 years, it has spent more money on foreign weapons than any other country in the world, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Russia has been the main supplier to India since the Soviet era. Since 2000, it has sold about US$35 billion worth of weapons, accounting for more than two-thirds of India's arms procurement of US$51 billion. Most of India's strategic weapons – from its only active aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya with its ship-borne MiG-29 and Ka-31 aircraft, to its only nuclear attack submarine in service, the Chakra II, to its T-90 and T-72 main battle tanks – are from Russia. Additionally, Russia licensed Indian firm HAL to build the Su-30 MKI, the main fighter for the Indian Air Force, and contributed to India's only nuclear-capable supersonic cruise missile – the BrahMos. In comparison, arms deals with the US have totalled just US$3.9 billion over the past 20 years but America has been rapidly catching up since 2010 to rise to number two vendor to India, surpassing Israel and France. India has equipped its military with Boeing C-17 and C-130J airlifters. Earlier this year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to US President Donald Trump to buy US$3 billion worth of US equipment, including helicopters, as the two converged on a course to counter China in the Indo-Pacific region, and gradually formed much closer military ties with a series of strategic military pacts Then the tension between India and China suddenly escalated, culminating in a clash on June 15, in which at least 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the contested Galwan Valley between Indian-administered Ladakh and Chinese administered Aksai Chin. The continued stand-off added urgency to India's arms shopping. “Russians profit from a Sino-India clash. I don't think the Americans would be so happy to see that,” said Zhou Chenming, a Beijing-based military analyst. “The Trump administration has been trying very hard to grab a bigger share in this market of billions every year, which they wouldn't want to miss.” The US has leverage. The 2017 Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) punishes whoever engages in “significant transactions” over US$15 million with the Russian state-owned defence industry. And Washington has remained non-committal despite the constant request for an exemption from the Indian side. “I don't think the US will actually implement the sanction at the end of the day. That was part of the effort to pressure India to choose American arms over Russian,” said Song Zhongping, a military commentator in Hong Kong. “And Russia will not sit by. They will also take action to keep India on.” Other efforts include discussions earlier this year in which the US offered to develop for India a “super F-16”, and even transfer the production line to India as preferred by the Modi government, as well as other air defence missile alternatives to the S-400. The US has delivered Apache and Chinook helicopters now deployed in Ladakh. Song said India's buying spree could increase its strength against the Chinese army but only to a limited extent. “India could buy some advanced weapons but cannot buy real combat capability. A modern military is an organic system,” he said. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3092710/russia-and-us-jostle-arms-sales-india-after-tensions-china

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  16 décembre 2024 | International, Terrestre

  Israel MOD Procures Advanced Communication Systems from Elbit Systems for Approximately $130M

  The contracts include the supply of thousands of advanced communication systems from the SDR family, satellite communication systems, data-links for autonomous platforms.