15 octobre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
WASHINGTON — As the Army looks to bring on two future helicopters by 2030, the service is planning to review its entire aviation fleet in fiscal 2023, Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army G-8, told Defense News in an Oct. 8 interview.
Over the past several years, the Army has said it is at “an inflection point” when it comes to prioritizing modernization in order to ensure soldiers can fight in a multidomain environment against near-peer adversaries. Part of that is ensuring the Army is balanced properly when it comes to making sure the current fleet is ready while funding the ambitious development of two new aircraft along with a number of other enablers like a digital backbone, air-launched effects and a new engine, to name a few.
In FY20, the Army took controversial steps to shift funding from the current fleet to the future one when it decided it would not buy Block II CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters for the active force, opting to procure the variant just for special operations.
Congress has pushed back on that decision in both its FY20 and FY21 defense bills, injecting funding into the program to keep the pump primed to build Block II Chinooks for the active component against the Army's wishes.
So far the Army isn't planning on backing down on its decision to scale down and only buy the Block II variant for special operations.
“The Army's position has not changed. I mean, our position is we don't have to make a decision,” Pasquarette said.
“It's based on the age of the fleet and other factors,” Pasquarette said. “Our concern is that if Congress decides that we need to move down the Block II path here ... that starts to push out dollars against our modernization priorities that we're very concerned about.”
The Army “must develop” both the Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) and the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), he stressed.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy also signaled during an Oct. 8 interview with Defense News that tough decisions on the aviation fleet would have to be made as the FLRAA and FARA aircraft begin to fly.
The prototype aircraft for FARA are expected to start flying in the fourth quarter of FY22 and the engineering and manufacturing development phase is expected to begin in FY24.
FLRAA prototypes will be delivered in roughly the summer of 2026.
The last time the Army restructured its fleet was in 2013 to deal with impending budget cuts and reductions that would have been made through sequestration. The effort was a way to take control of what was cut rather than let every program across the board take salami-slice chops.
As a result, the service decided to retire its OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters and use AH-64E Apache attack helicopters paired with Shadow unmanned aircraft systems to fill the armed scout role until future aircraft could come online.
12 juin 2024 | International, Terrestre
On Wednesday (12 June 2024) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg outlined the priorities for the meeting of NATO Defence Ministers on Thursday and Friday (13 and 14 June 2024).
30 mars 2022 | International, Aérospatial
Boeing's current defense CEO, Leanne Caret, will retire later this year.
18 décembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Epirus, a venture-backed startup offering a counter-drone capability, announced Thursday it raised $70 million to speed its technology to market. The round was led by San Francisco, California-based Bedrock Capital, and brings the 2-year-old company's total capital raised to roughly $80 million. The news comes six months after Epirus inked a strategic supplier agreement with Northrop Grumman to provide exclusive access to Epirus' software-defined electromagnetic pulse system Leonidas. Since then, the firm has doubled in size and plans to add 100 jobs in 2021. “We're aggressively hiring and expanding our footprint on the East and West coasts,” Epirus CEO Leigh Madden told Defense News. He added that the firm is shifting its headquarters from the Hawthorne, California, office to its newer offices in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Alongside Bedrock and several other investment firms, L3Harris Technologies is investing in Epirus. Epirus developed a SmartPower power-management technology that underpins its counter-unmanned aircraft system, and the company plans to partner with L3Harris to create greater power efficiencies within some of its existing systems. The technology, which allows the system to deliver a high-power output with a relatively low-power input, has a range of applications across other radio frequency systems, Madden said. (The company's systems involve a combination of high-power microwave technology and, for enhanced targeting, artificial intelligence.) The new funding, “enables us to rapidly build out our counter-UAS system,” Madden said. “We'll be bringing the Leonidas system to market as well as advancing the capabilities of our SmartPower technology ― and working with government customers and partners to expand the application of that technology.” Beyond Bedrock and L3Harris, the new Series B funding came from Piedmont Capital Investments, 8VC, Fathom VC and Greenspring Associates. In 2019, Epirus closed $17 million in Series A funding, which was led by 8VC. (Series A is meant to help a company progress to the development stage, and Series B is meant to help a company market or expand its existing market footprint.) Geoff Lewis of Bedrock Capital said in a statement that investors are “confident Epirus has the capacity to integrate its technology into top tier counter-UAS systems and lead the way in developing new and compelling directed energy applications.” “Epirus counters the weak assumption baked into standard VC models that the economic and cultural gaps of defense-focused investments are too wide to overcome,” Lewis said. https://www.defensenews.com/2020/12/17/counter-drone-startup-epirus-raises-70m-plans-to-hire-100-people/