Armée française : une remontée en puissance entamée, mais « à mi-chemin »

Sur le même sujet

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  1 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  How The Pentagon Is Reaching Small Suppliers

  Jen DiMascio The Pentagon is employing new ways to track and funnel dollars to small- and medium-sized aviation suppliers hit hard by a drop-off in their commercial business since the novel coronavirus took hold. One way has been to accelerate up-front progress payments to prime contractors. Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's acquisition chief, announced April 30 that in this week alone, the Defense Department processed more than $1.2 billion out of $3 billion to defense contractors in accelerated payments. The acceleration was enabled by a March 20 memo which lifted the amount that large contractors could receive before delivering a contracted item from 80%-90% and for small contractors from 90%-95%. Lord singled out Lockheed Martin for praise for committing to speed $450 million to its supply chain. As those payments are being released, the U.S. Air Force is studying the needs of small suppliers and charting the flow of those progress payments through the industrial base, service officials said during an April 29 Aviation Week MRO webinar. After the first COVID-19 stimulus package was released, Col. Kevin Nalette, vice director, 448th Supply Chain Management Wing, Air Force Sustainment Center, said his office was asked to find out how much money small companies would need to maintain a constant flow of work to continue to support the defense sector. They had two days to ask contractors–the third- and fourth-tier “mom-and-pop shops” whose work becomes an end item purchased somewhere up the stream. The majority of defense vendors do more work–55% or more–for commercial aviation businesses. “As soon as the commercial sector shut down, we had an amazing ability. We now had their full attention,” Nalette said. “When you come to their attention with basically free cash, it's amazing what you can get done.” Tony Baumann, director of contracting for the Air Force Support Center, is capturing data about where the money and progress payments are going. And he is tracking some 2,700 contracts to find out the COVID-related constraints they are operating under. “My guys talked to all of them,” Baumann said, and they stay in contact so that the Air Force knows when a supplier needs to shut down to clean a business. Then Nalette's group is looking at whether that closure might impact deliveries of critical supplies or inventory. That has caused the Air Force to rewrite service contracts using new authorities granted by the CARES Act COVID-relief bill passed by Congress to keep multiple teams of service personnel on contract so that one group can work and another can be ready to backfill so that no group would experience a 14-day interruption, Baumann said. All of those changes are being tracked and coded based on COVID-19, he added. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/how-pentagon-reaching-small-suppliers

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  21 octobre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR

  With artificial intelligence, every soldier is a counter-drone operator

  Todd South With the addition of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the aim is to make every soldier, regardless of job specialty, capable of identifying and knocking down threatening drones. While much of that mission used to reside mostly in the air defense community, those attacks can strike any infantry squad or tank battalion. The goal is to reduce cognitive burden and operator stress when dealing with an array of aerial threats that now plague units of any size, in any theater. “Everyone is counter-UAS,” said Col. Marc Pelini, division chief for capabilities and requirements at the Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO. Pelini and Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, JCO director, who spoke Thursday at the virtual Association of the U.S. Army conference, told reporters that the original focus was on smaller Tier I and II threats. But that has now extended to Tier III threats, traditionally covered by the Army's air defense community, such as Avenger and Patriot missile batteries. Some of that work includes linking the larger threat detection to the smaller drones that now dot conflicts across the world, including the hot zone of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. In June, the Department of Defense conducted a “down select” of existing or in-the-pipeline counter-drone systems from 40 to eight, as Military Times sister publication C4ISRNET reported at the time. That was an effort to reduce redundancy in the flood of counter drone programs taken on in the wake of a $700 million funding push in 2017 to get after problems posed by commercially available drones being used more frequently by violent extremist organizations such as the Islamic State to harass, attack and surveil U.S. and allied forces. Those choices, in the down select, included the following, also reported by C4ISRNET: Fixed/Semi-Fixed Systems * Fixed Site-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Defeat System (FS-LIDS), sponsored by the Army * Negation of Improvised Non-State Joint Aerial-Threats (NINJA), sponsored by the Air Force * Counter-Remote Control Model Aircraft Integrated Air Defense Network (CORIAN), sponsored by the Navy Mounted/Mobile System * Light-Mobile Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS), sponsored by the Marine Corps Dismounted/Handheld Systems * Bal Chatri, sponsored by Special Operations Command * Dronebuster, no sponsor, commercial off-the-shelf capability * Smart Shooter, no sponsor, commercial off-the-shelf capability * Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control (FAAD-C2), sponsored by the Army (includes FAAD-C2 interoperable systems like the Air Force's Air Defense System Integrator (ADSI) and the Marine Corps' Multi-Environmental Domain Unmanned Systems Application Command and Control (MEDUSA C2)) The four areas evaluated to determine which systems stuck around for use or further development were effectiveness, integration, usability and sustainment, Gainey said Thursday. A kind of virtual open house with industry is planned for Oct. 30, in which JCO will evaluate what options are out there. Some of what they're learning is being gathered through a consortium, of sorts, that involves regular meetings between service branch representatives during monthly sessions at the two-star level, Gainey said. That goes into a real-time, updated “common threat library” that helps those in the field identify trends and changes that can be met across forces. They use those sessions to share what each component is seeing in theater as far as drone use and changes. But it's more than simple intelligence gathering, he said. They also form rapid response teams. "My operations team works with the warfighters, [the] intelligence community” and others, he said. They “triangulate” common problems with drones and send the rapid response teams to the area of operations most affected. https://www.armytimes.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/17/with-artificial-intelligence-every-soldier-is-a-counter-drone-operator/

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  8 novembre 2023 | International, Naval

  Navy surface drone fires its first missile during Middle East exercise

  The mini missile fire was part of an exercise by a unit working to develop the Navy's drone and artificial intelligence technologies.