Armée américaine | Près d’un milliard de dollars débloqués pour se réapprovisionner en munitions

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  22 mai 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense

  BAE Makes Big Bet On Small Companies: FAST Labs

  By THERESA HITCHENS BOSTON: BAE Systems, the third-largest defense contractor in the world, is funding innovative small startups to get innovative technology quickly to its Defense Department customers. Through an initiative called FAST Labs, BAE is both providing seed capital directly to startups and funding a number of accelerators to widen the potential market. The standard tactics include simply buying a smaller company to gain its technology or investing in a startup in order to control the direction of its research. Instead, BAE's FAST Labs is attempting to serve as a middle man connecting startups with DoD customers and BAE's various units. “By giving [the startups] the feasibility money, we can expose them to those harsh requirements that exist in the aerospace and defense world, but we can also in turn do social engineering inside our company,” Jerry Wohletz, the vice president and general management of BAE FAST Labs, told me. The idea is to introduce the startups' designs to BAE's factory and engineering work force, he said, “because we need to get it out of R&D land and get it into those products and services” that BAE knows its defense customers are looking for. FAST Labs is focused on research related to next-generation electronics, intelligent autonomous systems, cyber, electronic warfare, and sensors and processing. Wohletz explained that BAE does in-house research on capabilities that are solely of interest to DoD and the Intelligence Community, but it is reaching out to startups in order to partner on products and services based on commercial market needs. “A lot of aerospace and defense companies have venture capital funds,” Wohletz said. “That's not what we are trying to do. This is not an equity play to drive bottom line performance. We talk here about innovation velocity. We want speed to market.” Therefore, BAE is also putting its money — but more importantly its time — into a number of technology accelerators, such as Techstars in Boston, Capitol Factory in Austin, Texas, and MASSChallenge with hubs in both cities. FAST Labs has a team of scouts whose job is to attend pitches all across the country. “This is not based on ownership. We leave them their freedom,” Francesca Scire-Scappuzzo, who heads the scout team, told me. “We want innovation not just to support our market, we want to support their own innovation” for the commercial market. “Other defense contractors are trying to get involved with venture capital, but they for the most part don't really get it. BAE was in early, and they had the benefit of being linked with us,” Lt. Col. Dave Harden, chief operating officer of AFWERX, the Air Force's innovation hub, told me during the Techstars Air Force Accelerator Demo Day here last Thursday. Indeed, BAE cosponsored the event, and put upfront investment in at least three of 10 start-up companies participating. Neither Wohletz or Scire-Scappuzzo would tell me the size of BAE's budget for startup investment, but Wohletz said “it's getting bigger every year.” Further, the company is using accelerators not just to help itself innovate, Wohletz said, but also to find foreign companies to partner with in bids where the buying country requires offsets, such as India. “It's a completely different way of looking at this than we have done in the past,” he summed up. https://breakingdefense.com/2019/05/bae-makes-big-bet-on-small-companies-fast-labs/

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  6 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Opinion: Why Interest On Federal Debt Matters For Defense

  Byron Callan June 30, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic has stoked consternation that U.S. defense spending is going to be significantly pressured in the 2020s. Congress will likely stick to the $740.5 billion defense discretionary top line agreed to in last year's budget deal for fiscal 2021. But the combination of trillions more in federal debt from higher spending and lower tax receipts this year and next and the probability that there will be future federal spending to better prepare for pandemics raise a higher probability of defense spending pressure. “Flat” was already the new “up,” but “flat” now may be a budget that does not keep pace with annual inflation. The fears may be that defense spending will decline in the 2020s after a couple of good years of largesse from Congress and the White House. Despite trillions in additional deficits and federal borrowing in 2020-21, there is one bright spot that indicates less dire defense spending pressures than now perceived—the interest on the federal debt. U.S. federal debt is comprised of debt held by the public and intragovernmental debt, which is owned by different federal trust funds, the largest of which is Social Security. As of May, total debt held by the public was $19.8 trillion, and intragovernmental debt was another $6 trillion. Often, these two sums are lumped together, but they should be treated separately. The interest paid on debt held by the public is dispersed by the Treasury in the form of outlays to the owners of that debt. The interest paid on intragovernmental debt is, in essence, interest the federal government pays itself. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in its annual projections of outlays, breaks out these two components of interest outlays to show net interest outlays. This is mandatory spending, and so it has been paid along with the other mandatory and discretionary funding the U.S. federal government provides. One of the silver linings of the pandemic has been the Federal Reserve's aggressive lowering of interest rates. This makes federal debt more affordable, much in the way that a lower interest rate on a home mortgage can make a place to live more affordable. The OMB projections released in February showed net interest outlays of $378 billion for fiscal 2021 rising to $665 billion by 2030. One could take issue with the deficit projections behind these outlay projects, as they may have rested on GDP growth expectations that were too optimistic and nondefense spending cuts that were not going to be realized. However, dividing interest outlays on debt held by the public by debt projections implied an interest rate of 3% or more over the forecast period. The pandemic has trashed those rate projections. Federal debt held by the public is offered in different maturities. Treasury bills, which mature in a year or less as of May, were 23% of the total debt held by the public. Treasury notes that mature in 1-10 years were 51%, and bonds that mature in 10-30 years were 12%. (There is another 10% of other Treasury instruments.) Rates now are much lower, although clearly that would only matter for new debt that is issued by the Treasury. The rate on a 90-day Treasury bill is currently 0.13%. On a five-year note, it is 0.33%, and on the 10-year note, 0.69%. The 30-year note rate is 1.4%. This implies that interest outlay projections should be declining, although new projections may have to wait until the White House releases its 2022 fiscal budget request and out-year projections, presumably in February-March 2021. Net interest outlays could be at least $100 billion less in 2022-23 than the February 2020 projections on higher debt but lower rates. In the scheme of total federal outlays, which the OMB projected to be $4.8 trillion for 2021, $100 billion is not a lot, but it indicates there is a bit more headroom for defense spending and other nondefense discretionary spending than a focus on federal debt alone might suggest. Federal infrastructure spending could be one area of more traction in the 2020s, and the issue of social justice may also spur more demand for federal resources. One outcome of the pandemic, however, will be to make defense expectations more sensitive to interest rate expectations. It is not too difficult to project scenarios with rising debt and interest rates that increase to more “normal” levels. The pandemic also underscores that the unthinkable should be given a bit more room on long-term projections. It is quite conceivable that a major military conflict, a massive natural disaster or another economic contraction could further add to federal debt in the 2020s. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/opinion-why-interest-federal-debt-matters-defense

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  30 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  BREAKING: Air Force to Fly New Skyborg Drones Next Year

  7/28/2020 By Jon Harper The Air Force plans to conduct operational experiments in 2021 with new unmanned aerial system prototypes for the Skyborg program, according to officials. Skyborg is one of the service's top three “Vanguard” science-and-technology initiatives aimed at delivering game-changing capabilities for the future force. The aim of the effort is to integrate attritable drone technologies with open missions systems to enable manned-unmanned teaming. The project is expected to lay the foundation for building a family of UAS that can adapt and make decisions at machine speeds. The autonomous platforms are expected to operate as robotic wingmen for manned aircraft, perform dangerous tasks and serve as low-cost force multipliers on the battlefield. The Air Force announced July 23 that it had awarded indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts to Boeing, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Kratos Unmanned Aerial Systems and Northrop Grumman Systems that will enable the four companies to compete for up to $400 million in subsequent delivery orders in support of the Skyborg program. The contractors were down-selected after a competition with 18 participants. However, no funds were obligated at the time of the award; they will come with each individual order. The four companies are about to square off again as the Air Force prepares to make an order for the initial tranche of prototype aircraft. “Basically we'll look at the four options, what the pricing is, and so forth. There will be a lot that goes into deciding ... how many different vehicles we choose, how many we buy from each vendor,” Brig. Gen. Dale White, program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, told reporters July 28 during a teleconference. “There's a lot of variables that are unknown in terms of what we get back from industry on that.” The service wants to buy as many different types of prototypes in the highest quantities it can afford with the pool of money that has been allotted, he added. It plans to place a delivery order in the next 60 to 90 days and "get the prototypes hopefully in the field by next year for some operational experimentation” with warfighters, White said. Vendors who didn't survive the recent down-select won't be completely shut out of the Skyborg program. “We are actively looking at how we use those vendors to increase the vendor pool over time because there's still a significant amount of work to be done getting to a production [system] and an operational vehicle,” White said. “We're going to keep the aperture open and we're going to maintain flexibility throughout this process.” The government-mandated open architecture will allow different organizations to come in and add technology to the platforms, noted Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory. “We will have that ability technically to add as we need to, and to increase the operational relevance,” she told reporters. “As the warfighter develops new ideas that would make it more operationally relevant, we'll be able to pull those pieces in as we conduct the operational experimentation campaign." AFRL is partnering with the Life Cycle Management Center on the Skyborg initiative and is bringing its own technologies to the table. “If there are opportunities on the autonomy side or developing the sensors that need to plug and play, or anything else that will help us achieve the operational goals that we have with our partners who are the warfighters. We're open to anybody ... that would make that happen,” she added. White said the Air Force envisions about 15 different potential mission sets that the drones could perform. The results of next year's operational experiments will help shape decisions about production and moving to a program of record. “We do have some timelines that we're looking at out there for making decisions, which I don't really want to share right now, but we believe we're going to be in a great position probably by the end of next year to be able to really decide which way we want to go with this,” White said. White was asked when the service aims to equip units with a Skyborg system that has initial operational capability or final operational capability. “We have plans that we think we'll [eventually] be ready to go do those things. But I think in a larger sense we still have to figure out how we bring this program together, put it in the overall corporate system in the Air Force and make sure ... we put the Air Force in a position to make a good decision point with when we go into production, how we produce it, what are the other things we have out there that it might partner with or it might complement,” he said. “We're still too early” in the project to say when systems will fielded, he added. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/7/28/air-force-to-fly-new-skyborg-drones-next-year