9 octobre 2018 | International, Terrestre
By: Todd South
Army researchers are speeding up development on key conventional munitions, from field artillery to long-range missiles, and making them more deadly when they land.
At a panel hosted by Defense News at the annual Association of the United States Army annual meeting, commanders with the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command, Program Executive Office-Ammunition and the Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team gave a few updates on those efforts.
Brig. Gen. Alfred Abramson III, head of PEO Ammo and Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, told audience members that his researchers are finding the quickest ways to go after extending ranges, saying that the XM1113 round will be “critical” for the conventional artillery in the Extended Range Cannon Artillery program, a centerpiece of artillery modernization.
Abramson noted that the existing M795 High Explosive artillery round, the base of the 155mm munition portfolio, includes about 614,000 rounds in the nation's stockpile. But those rounds only reach out to about 30 kilometers.
The problem developers face in pushing the ranges of conventional rounds is keeping them both accurate and having a real effect when they strike, he said.
“You want to push it out to 70 kilometers and ensure it's not just a long-range paintball,” Abramson said.
The XM1128 pushes those ranges to about 40 kilometers currently. But work with “lithographic fragmentation technology,” Abramson said, makes the round more lethal on target.
Col. John Rafferty, director of the LRPF CFT, said that recent testing has gotten 155mm artillery rounds to the 60-kilometer range at the Yuma, Arizona, testing facility.
Abramson said that his organization has seen a significant spike of about $2.5 billion for fiscal years 2017 to 2022 funding for ammunition and armament systems products.
Another $1.5 billion has been allotted to update the aging ammunition manufacturing plants across the Army, he said.
Recent Overseas Contingency Operations funding for 2019 was marked at about $4.1 billion simply to replenish munitions consumed during combat.
What's being done to advance the science?
Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, commanding general of U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, said that over the past year, $900 million was realigned for science and technology development for the LRPF initiatives, and another $500 million was also realigned for the Air Missile Defense CFT.
His organization just completed a six-month study of energetics propulsion that included a detailed study of adversary capabilities and advancements over the past two decades.
It also looked at how those advances were achieved and what gaps exist in the United States' armaments, he said.
While the study has not yet been released to the public, he said two non-technical gaps that the United States must correct are in their ability to collaborate with global partners and science, chemistry and energy experts within government.
Further down the development pipeline he said was a shortfall in transitioning the research to the PEOs for development and fielding.
One tech challenge is the existing stockpiles. As the developers push the capacities of conventional rounds and their systems they must also maintain “backwards compatibility” with the substantial munition stockpiles, he said.
2 juin 2023 | International, Autre défense
A $16 billion list of lower-priority defense items like tanks, helicopter upgrades and a ship, that would normally be paid for as part of the defense budget, could go unfunded after the U.S. passed a landmark bill that lifts the debt ceiling but curbs federal spending.
17 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
By Editorial Board GOOGLE DECIDED after an employee backlash this summer that it no longer wanted to help the U.S. military craft artificial intelligence to help analyze drone footage. Now, the military is inviting companies and researchers across the country to become more involved in machine learning. The firms should accept the invitation. The Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will invest up to $2 billion over the next five years in artificial intelligence, a significant increase for the bureau whose goal is promoting innovative research. The influx suggests the United States is preparing to start sprinting in an arms race against China. It gives companies and researchers who want to see a safer world an opportunity not only to contribute to national security but also to ensure a more ethical future for AI. The DARPA contracts will focus on helping machines operate in complex real-world scenarios. They will also tackle one of the central conundrums in AI: something insiders like to call “explainability.” Right now, what motivates the results that algorithms return and the decisions they make is something of a black box. That's worrying enough when it comes to policing posts on a social media site, but it is far scarier when lives are at stake. Military commanders are more likely to trust artificial intelligence if they know what it is “thinking,” and the better any of us understands technology, the more responsibly we can use it. There is a strong defense imperative to make AI the best it can be, whether to deter other countries from using their own machine-learning capabilities to target the United States, or to ensure the United States can effectively counter them when they do. Smarter technologies, such as improved target recognition, can save civilian lives, and allowing machines to perform some tasks instead of humans can protect service members. But patriotism is not the only reason companies should want to participate. They know better than most in government the potential these technologies have to help and to harm, and they can leverage that knowledge to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Because DARPA contracts are public, the work researchers do will be transparent in a way that Project Maven, the program that caused so much controversy at Google, was not. Employees aware of what their companies are working on can exert influence over how those innovations are used, and the public can chime in as well. DARPA contractors will probably develop products with nonlethal applications, like improved self-driving cars for convoys and autopilot programs for aircraft. But the killer robots that have many people worried are not outside the realm of technological possibility. The future of AI will require outlining principles that explain how what is possible may differ from what is right. If the best minds refuse to contribute, worse ones will. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/silicon-valley-should-work-with-the-military-on-ai-heres-why/2018/09/12/1085caee-b534-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html
10 avril 2024 | International, Sécurité