11 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on June 10, 2020 at 4:18 PM
WASHINGTON: The Army Secretary and Chief of Staff approved a draft spending plan for 2022-2026 yesterday that funds all 34 of the service's top-priority programs, the Army's modernization chief said this morning.
But with the ever-growing cost of COVID looming over the economy and the Pentagon alike, Gen. John “Mike” Murray says he's already made a mental list of which of the 34 the service might have to slow down or sacrifice and which ones it absolutely has to save.
“I have a one-to-N list in my mind” of the 34 programs, Murray told an Association of the US Army webcast this morning.
“That's only in my mind, right now,” he emphasized. “It's pre-decisional.”
In other words, it's not final, it's not official, and it's not ready to share with the public. All that said, however, it's still a telling sign of uncertain budget times that the four-star chief of Army Futures Command not only has such a list, but is willing to say he has it.
Meanwhile, Murray's chief civilian partner, Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Bruce Jette, has launched a long-term study of the Army's economic prospects. In effect, Jette's looking at the supply side, asking how tight the budget will be, and Murray is looking at the demand side, asking what the Army should prioritize within that tight budget.
Beyond The 34: “Critical Enablers”
Gen. Murray is also looking at the Army's 684 other programs, he said, to determine which of them can be cut – while some have been slashed already to free up funding for the 34, others are so far unscathed – and which are essential to the top-34's success.
“We can come up with, you know, the most impressive Next Generation Combat Vehicle in the world,” Murray said. “If you can't get fuel to it, then you're wasting your time.”
Fuel is just one, particularly knotty logistical problem. Ultimately, Murray wants to reduce Army fuel demands by moving to hybrid diesel-electric motors. While electric power by itself might work for civilian cars, he said, he's skeptical the Army can charge batteries in combat, or that any practical amount of batteries can store enough energy to move, say, a 70-ton main battle tank. Likewise, while civilian quadcopters can run off batteries, the Army's new scout helicopter, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, requires a high-powered turbine.
So for decades to come, the Army will need fuel trucks, storage bladders, pumps, drums, hoses, and so on. And that's just for the gas. Both current and future combat systems require a staggering array of spare parts, repair tools, maintenance facilities, and more.
Logistics is historically a US strength, but it's not a major focus of the 34 priority programs, which range from hypersonic missiles to smart rifles, from tanks to aircraft to robots. Besides weapons, the 34 do include a lot of high-tech information-age infrastructure, both to train the troops in virtual and augmented reality, and to share tactical data like target locations across the battlefield. There has not, however, been nearly as much emphasis on supporting functions such as fuel, maintenance, and transport.
Murray now aims to fix that. Starting with a study by the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, he said, the Army has come up with a list of “18 key critical enablers that are getting funded,” Murray said, again without naming them. Murray's calling the 34 priority programs “Tier One” and the 18 enablers “Tier Two,” he said. “Then tier three is ammo,” he added.
The general didn't elaborate, but certainly a high-tech tank or aircraft can't fight without ammunition, just as it can't move without fuel. The catch is that, in modern warfare, you're not just buying rifle bullets and cannon shells, but a host of precision-guided munitions that are much more expensive to stockpile in bulk for a major war.
Even once the Army has figured out which weapons, support systems, and ammunition it can afford to buy, it still won't be able to buy enough of them to equip every unit at once. The service's recent AimPoint study, Murray said, focused on figuring out which units around the world need to be modernized first and which will have to wait.
“The whole point behind AimPoint was an understanding that you can't modernize the entire army overnight, or in a year, or really even in a decade,” Murray said. As a young officer, he recalled, his unit had M60 tanks and M113 transports “while the rest of the Army was running around in M1s and Bradleys.” While he doesn't to return to the extreme disparities of the past, he said, “somebody has to be first and somebody has to be last.”
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/06/army-ponders-what-to-cut-if-budget-drops-gen-murray/
30 juillet 2024 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
Can workflow automation solve your security team's biggest challenges? Our guide explores what's next for workflow automation and shares best practices.
16 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial
Lockheed Martin's new sustainment support facility in Greenville, S.C., received its first F-16 fighter plane for maintenance, the company announced on Monday.
3 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial
By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany – Airbus and Dassault executives hope to finalize their offer for the next phase of the Future Combat Air System by the end of the week, putting to rest a dispute over the handling of intellectual property rights that has been simmering between partner nations Germany, France and Spain. At issue is whether countries participating in the development of mainland Europe's futuristic weapon system are free to use the technology to make adjustments of their own later on, said German Air Force Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz. “It should be clear that if we're developing a European system, there can be no black boxes,” he said at an virtual press conference organized by German aerospace industry association BDLI. The term “black box” refers to technology purchased as-is, with no means by customers to understand, replicate or modify it. “It must be possible to hand intellectual property rights from branch of industry to another so that it's possible for all partners to make their own developments in the future,” Gerhartz added. The tri-national FCAS program aims to replace the German Eurofighter and French Rafale fleets by 2040. As envisioned, it will consist of a next-generation manned jet and a series of drones, dubbed remote carriers, that can be tasked to work in concert on anything from reconnaissance to strike missions. Germany's Airbus and France's Dassault are the primary contractors for the program. As Europe's most ambitious weapons project ever, it is estimated to have a price tag in the hundreds of billions of euros. Spain is meant to be a full participant, with Indra as national lead, getting access to a third of the overall work share. Next up for the program is additional development work culminating in the presentation of a demonstrator aircraft and remote carriers by 2026 or 2027. Those could be simple, throw-away drones or more elaborate unmanned planes in the style of a “loyal wingman” to the human pilot, said Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space, at the same event. An agreement on intellectual property usage is needed both on the government and industry level before submitting an offer for the upcoming program stage. The idea is to find a compromise by Feb. 5, have the Berlin government submit the documentation to the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, for approval over the next few months, and get the green light to spend additional money before the summer break, Hoke said. While Airbus is used to sharing its intellectual property rights when selling to the German government, partner nations, France and Spain handle those occasions differently. “I'm confident that we can find a common solution,” Hoke said. Reinhard Brandl, a lawmaker of Bavaria's Christian Social Union who sits on the Bundestag's appropriations committee, said he shared the optimism but singled out IP rights as a continuing sticking point. “We will look at the agreement very carefully,” he said. “We don't want to see unfavorable concessions just for the sake of an agreement.” Brandl belongs to a faction of German lawmakers who fear that domestic companies could lose out in a cooperative program with France. That is especially the case, following that logic, because Airbus, as the German lead contractor, is partly French to begin with. The French, meanwhile, have at times become frustrated with Germany's piecemeal approval process for FCAS funding, a dynamic that could become even more pronounced if money gets tight as a result of the coronavirus crisis. Thomas Jarzombek, the point person for aerospace policy at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, said the program remains crucial for German industry, describing it as a recovery activity for companies post-COVID. “It's become even more important than before,” he said. Brandl said he still worries about spending cuts in the future, especially during development, as the defense ministry may seek opportunities for more near-term fixes to lagging readiness rates across the force. He proposed anchoring FCAS funding elsewhere in the federal government other than under the auspices of the Bundeswehr, at least until the program gets close to showing actual military utility. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2021/02/01/companies-seek-end-to-haggling-over-fcas-rights-with-fresh-offer-this-week