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Four ways US Army’s Pacific chief plans to boost regional land forces
More countries are joining multilateral exercises and training events to strengthen a network to deter aggression in the Pacific.
17 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Terrestre, C4ISR
Army buys $189M counter drone system but already has plans to replace it
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army has invested another $190 million into a counter-small unmanned aircraft system (C-sUAS), but it's determined that the system will need to be replaced by a U.S. Marine Corps alternative.
On July 20, the Army announced it was awarding DRS Sustainment Systems $190 million to develop, produce and deploy the Mobile-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Defeat System (M-LIDS). While the system will be deployed, it doesn't have a long-term future with the military.
Despite the Army investing in the program for years, M-LIDS is a casualty of redundancy. As the Department of Defense has become more concerned by the threat posed by small drones in recent years, the services have each developed their own C-sUAS responses — mobile, stationary and dismounted.
Recognizing the redundancy in that approach, the defense secretary delegated the Army to lead the effort to narrow the number of C-sUAS solutions for use by the joint forces.
On June 25, the Army's Joint C-sUAS announced it had selected eight C-sUAS for future investment and deployment by the joint forces. M-LIDS didn't make the cut. But then, about a month later, the $190 million M-LIDS contract was announced,
“Mobile-LIDS (M-LIDS) was not selected and will be replaced by the next generation mobile system,” said Jason Waggoner, an Army spokesman. In the meantime, “M-LIDS will be deployed with Army units to the CENTCOM area of operations.”
M-LIDS would likely be replaced by the Light-Mobile Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS), a C-sUAS developed by the U.S. Marine Corps and the only mobile solution approved by the Joint C-sUAS Office. L-MADIS has already been deployed for testing and was reportedly used to down a drone off the coast of Iran last year.
The Joint C-sUAS office told reporters in June that the services were conducting an analysis of how many systems would need to be replaced under the new arrangement. However, leaders were not able to provide a timeline for how quickly they expected to replace those systems.
The series of announcements in this market came quickly this summer.
Two days after the M-LIDS award, the Army announced a contract for one of the C-sUAS solutions that was included on the list for future investment: the Expeditionary-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Defeat System (now known as FS-LIDS).
The $426 million contract with SRC Inc. provides for the development, production, deployment and support of FS-LIDS, one of three fixed-site solution approved for the joint forces by the Joint C-sUAS Office.
“Development of FS-LIDS is complete and systems are being deployed to U.S. forces globally, with a focus in the CENTCOM area of operations,” Waggoner said. “FS-LIDS will remain in use until replaced with newer technologies.”
C-sUAS spending hasn't been limited to the Army in recent weeks. On Aug. 10, the U.S. Air Force issued Black River Systems Co. an $89 million contract for an operational C-sUAS open systems architecture.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to show that the Joint C-sUAS Office selected three fixed-site C-sUAS solutions.
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US Space Force to launch more integrated units to boost efficiency
Lt. Gen. David Miller says the service is weeks away from announcing plans to expand the construct beyond its initial pilot phase.
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The US Air Force wants to network all its weapons together. Will simulators be included?
By: Valerie Insinna ORLANDO, Fla. — As the U.S. military prepares for the release of its fiscal 2021 budget request, Air Force leaders have made clear that a massive financial hike is needed for multidomain command-and-control efforts to connect weapon systems across the joint force. As part of that initiative, it will also be critical for the military to link together simulators so service members can replicate combat on a massive scale, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Stephen Wilson said during a speech Tuesday at the Interservice/Industry, Training, Simulation and Education Conference. “I know you spent a lot of time yesterday about how to connect and integrate simulators from across our various weapons systems. I can't overstate how important that is,” he said. “Individual weapon system simulators can help our men and women become proficient tacticians, but it's their ability to integrate and connect that will differentiate us against a peer threat. And no one is going to win alone." Wilson said the Air Force plans to spend “a lot of money in this next five-year defense plan” on multidomain command and control, but he did not detail how much funding the service might ask for, or whether that sum will include investments in technology to network together simulators. The service is still in the earliest stages of identifying how to connect its aircraft and space assets with the joint force to fight advanced, near-peer threats like Russia and China. The same goes for its aircraft simulators, which are largely detached from each other. An Air Force program called Simulator Common Architecture Requirements and Standards, or SCARS, will start to transform the simulation enterprise and make it more interconnected, said Col. Phillip Carpenter, the Air Force's senior materiel leader for the simulators program office. “It's an effort to make the entire portfolio more modular, more open-system,” he told Defense News in an exclusive interview. “I'm not going to say [SCARS] is the solution to all of our problems,” but it will “help lay that groundwork so that we become much more interoperable across the board.” Under SCARS, the Air Force wants to create a common, open architecture for its simulators that will impose stricter cybersecurity standards and make it easier for the service to update simulators with new capabilities or threat information. The goal, Carpenter said, is to have a fleet of simulators that can remotely receive software updates, much like a smartphone. The Air Force released a SCARS request for proposals in December 2018 for a 10-year contract worth up to $900 million, according to Bloomberg. The service intends to award a contract for SCARS in 2020 and has received a lot of interest from industry, Carpenter said. Carpenter was clear that SCARS — at least how it is currently conceived — will not enable the Air Force to carry out the type of scenarios Wilson spoke about: large-scale, simulated air operations involving simulators of many different airframes. To achieve that, “we need to work on some of the security pieces so that we can allow multilevel security or some of these other aspects that would allow totality of these systems to participate and fight like they would actually fight in a real world,” Carpenter explained. But Carpenter believes there is potential for other parts of the Air Force — like its space, cyber and intelligence community — or even the other services to adopt SCARS or an architecture that is compatible with it. “I think there is great potential for SCARS to be more than something for just aircraft simulators,” he said. “If somebody is off building a system outside of our portfolio, if it's built to a common standard, I think that would effectively make all the systems, whether they're in our portfolio or not, more interoperable.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/itsec/2019/12/03/the-us-air-force-wants-to-network-all-its-weapons-together-will-simulators-be-included