23 juillet 2024 | International, Aérospatial
The contract includes upgrades to the Onboard Performance Tool software for expedited mission launch, with specific improvements for efficient cargo loading and takeoff and landing data management for flight planning.
3 décembre 2021 | International, Naval
The Navy and Marine Corps want a Peloton-like training system that lets individual service members see their physical and occupational history, strive to demonstrate improvements -- and be able to log in from anywhere in the globe as they move from assignment to assignment.
19 juin 2019 | International, Autre défense
By: Shawn Snow The weight being humped by grunts into a firefight with a sophisticated adversary like Russia or China could be the difference between mission success or going home in a body bag, according to one Marine officer's award-winning research. Marine Capt. Courtney Thompson said computer simulations she ran showed that just adding 15 pounds to the “bare essential” fighting load carried by Marines resulted in an additional casualty on the battlefield when Marines were pitted against competent shooters. The Corps' fighting load varies between 43 to 62 pounds depending on the level of body armor a Marine wears. Military body armor protection ranges from level II to IV. Thompson's simulations were run with level II body armor — protection capable of stopping a 9 mm round. The weight range includes a carried weapon. She told Marine Corps Times in an interview that the results of the simulations were “eye opening," especially in light of a 2017 government watchdog reported that detailed Marines and soldiers were carrying between 117 pounds to 119 pounds on average. When she ran the simulations and added more weight “casualties just went up,” Thompson said. And “the better the [enemy] shooter got, the more the difference in weight mattered." In a near-peer fight, Thompson said, Marines will need to move faster on the battlefield to survive and win. “The slower they are, the higher the chance they have of getting hit," she said. But it's not just about reducing a Marine's exposure time to being shot, smaller weight loads aid in more precise shooting and quicker target engagement times. A 2018 report from Washington D.C.-based think tank Center for a New American Security, explained that heavy combat loads “not only slows movement and increases fatigue” but decrease “situational awareness and shooting response times.” Moreover, a 2007 report from Naval Research Advisory Committee on Marine combat loads recommended an assault load of just 50 pounds. As the Corps focuses on the near-peer fight, the weight carried by Marines into battle is a topic that will need to be front and center for Marine commanders, Thompson said. Thompson's research, which won the Military Operations Research Society Stephen A. Tisdale Thesis Award at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has the attention of officials at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory — where the Corps has been exploring ways to boost combat power while also reducing the weight burden on grunts. Marine Corps Times has reached out to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory for comments on this research. Marine Corps Systems Command said its “Gruntworks” team spoke with Thompson about her research. The team handles the integration of equipment for Marine rifle squads. Thompson, a combat engineer, said she came up with the idea after seeing how “gassed” her Marines got during training as a result of operations tempo and weight. “I thought if I could quantify weight in terms of casualties and probability of mission success, that's what the Marine Corps understands,” she said. Thompson's computer simulations relied on Australian human subject data and infantry demographics supplied by headquarters Marine Corps. The Australian data was used because of the Australian Defence Department's rigorous study on its tiered body armor system, Thompson explained. The Marine infantry data included physical fitness and marksmanship. The individual Marines within the simulated 13-man rifle squads “represented the average for that rank for all 0311s [Marine rifleman] in the Marine Corps,” she said. Thompson said she ran the simulations nearly a million times. Thompson's research showed that reducing the weight burden carried by grunts could save lives and win battles. But she didn't make any prescriptive adjustments to the Corps' combat gear load outs. She told Marine Corps Times that she didn't want to “limit” a battlefield commander's decision-making. The Corps' various fighting loads are broken down in its infantry training and readiness manual into four different groups, fighting load, assault load, approach march load and sustainment load. The load type is dependent on the mission at hand. Thompson's research was aimed at the fighting and assault loads. The fighting and assault loads include combat gear for the “immediate mission” and the “actual conduct of the assault,” respectively, according to the Corps' infantry manual. The assault load weight varies between 58 pounds and 70 pounds based on level of body armor. The weight range includes a weapon being carried. The training and readiness manual excludes the weight of a weapon in its gear break down. Thompson isn't calling for particular pieces of gear to be thrown off the packing list, but she said commanders should throw the entire list in a pack, wear it, and “see if it is a reasonable amount of weight.” The Corps is already making a number of changes to reduce weight. Some of those include a new lightweight helmet, lighter body armor for counterinsurgency conflicts and polymer ammunition. But Marines also are packing on weight with new tech like tablets and drones, which have been dished out to rifle squads. At the end of the day, Marine commanders have a delicate balance of weighing risk verse capability, and it wont be easy for commanders to forgo pieces of equipment on a mission to lighten packs, Thompson explained. A commander “can't prove the lives they saved” from taking a particular action, Thompson said. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/06/18/15-extra-pounds-of-gear-can-be-the-difference-between-life-or-death-in-a-firefight-this-marine-officers-research-says/
23 avril 2020 | International, Terrestre
While Tesla won't be building heavy tanks, the Army Futures & Concepts Center says moving lighter, wheeled vehicles from fossil fuel to electric drive could streamline supply lines – and save lives. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: In wartime, the cost of gas is often partly paid in blood. Hundreds of US troops have died and thousands have been wounded fighting to move supplies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Against an adversary with long-range missiles like Russia, the carnage among convoys would be worse. The bulkiest cargo and often the most needed (along with bullets and bombs): fuel. If you could dramatically reduce the amount of gas the US military consumes, you could reduce the logistics burden a great deal. Fewer fuel convoys on the road would save money in peacetime and lives in wartime. But how do you get there? With electric vehicles, answers Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, head of the Futures & Concepts Center at Army Futures Command. “Tesla is building large [semitrailer] trucks,” he told reporters in a wide-ranging roundtable yesterday. “Battery costs have gone down precipitously over the last 10 years,” he said, recharge times have dropped, and ranges has grown longer. What's more, electric motors have many fewer moving parts than internal combustion ones, making them potentially easier to maintain and repair. “The entire automotive industry is migrating towards this idea of electrification,” he said. “We're already, I would argue, late to the need.” Not only do electric motors not need gas, Wesley said. They also can generate power for high-tech combat systems – sensors, command networks, even laser weapons and robots – that currently require dedicated auxiliary power units or diesel generators that burn even more fuel. Imagine a squad of soldiers recharging their jamming-resistant radios and IVAS targeting goggles in their vehicle between missions, or a mobile command post running its servers off the same truck that carried them. The Hard Part Electric motors can even help frontline forces sneak up on the enemy, he said. They run much quieter and cooler than internal combustion engines, making it much harder to hear electric vehicles approaching or spot them on infrared. The Army's cancelled Future Combat System would have included a family of hybrid-electric vehicles. Even the ambitious FCS program didn't try to build all-electric tanks. Now, Wesley isn't talking about electric tanks, just trucks. “Right now, we don't see the technology, on the near-term horizon, being able to power heavy vehicles,” he said. That's because even the latest batteries still provide less power per pound than fossil fuel. (Engineers call this “energy density”). So, for example, the replacement for the Reagan-era M2 Bradley troop carrier – likely to weigh about 50 tons — is going to need an internal combustion engine or at least a hybrid diesel-electric one. But the vast majority of Army vehicles are wheeled, from supply trucks to the JLTV, an armored 4×4 replacing many Humvees: That weight class, up to 10 or even 15 tons, can move on electrical power alone. Wesley had planned to kick off his electrification drive with a panel discussion at last month's AUSA Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Ala. (I would've been the moderator). But that conference got canceled due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, so he's rolling it out to the press instead. His staff is working on an in-depth internal study for his boss, the four-star chief of Army Futures Command, Gen. John “Mike” Murray. There are a lot of thorny problems to work out, Wesley acknowledges. The big one: Where do you generate the electricity in the first place? In a war zone, you can't just pull into your garage and plug into a charger overnight. “We can't just go buy an electric vehicle. We have to look at the supply chains,” he said. One option the Army's considering, he said, is miniaturized, mobile nuclear power plants – something the Pentagon is now researching and says should be safe even after a direct hit. While Wesley didn't discuss other alternatives, the fallback option is presumably burning some fossil fuel to run a generator, which then charges batteries or capacitators. “We're writing a draft white paper proposal for Gen. Murray and the Army to look at this holistically,” Wesley said, “[and] we are building up a proposal that we will publish here in early summer that is going to describe a recommendation for how the Army transitions toward the future.” “My expectation is that it's about a 10-year horizon right now to do something like that which I just described,” he said. “If that's true, then we have to have a transition plan for the Army to move in this direction.” Extended excerpts from Lt. Gen. Wesley's roundtable with reporters, edited for length & clarity, follow below. He also discussed how Army units have to evolve for future multi-domain operations: more on that later this week. Q: The Army's been interested in electric vehicles and alternative fuel for some time. What's new here? A: We were going to have a panel on this to kick off [at AUSA Global Force]: a broader look at electrification and alternative fuel sources for the Army. We're writing a draft white paper proposal for Gen. Murray and the Army to look at this holistically. And we are building up a proposal that we will publish here in early summer that is going to describe a recommendation for how the Army transitions toward the future. Tesla is building large [semitrailer] trucks. UPS and FedEx are starting to buy these vehicles to learn how they move into that area. The entire automotive industry is migrating towards this idea of electrification, and there's a lot of good reasons for it. And as the entire industry goes to electrification, the supply of internal combustion engine parts is going to go down and therefore prices are going to go up. Battery costs have gone down precipitously over the last 10 years. Recharge times and range [have improved]. The trajectory that all of that is on, in the next two years, it'll be far more efficient to have an electric vehicle than internal combustion, so we're already, I would argue, late to the need. Q: What's slowed the Army down? A: The problem is bigger for the Army than it is for any corporation, industry, or family, because you have to have a means to move the energy and generate the energy at the right time and place. It's not that the Army is slow to move on this, we just have a bigger problem to solve, and I would argue that's what we have to do now. The issue is not whether we can build hybrid vehicles. That's easy. In fact, any one of us could go out and — as long as there's not a waiting list — buy a Tesla tomorrow and sell our Chevy Suburban. You plug it in at home, we've got the infrastructure. You don't have to change your supply chain or your way of life when you buy a Tesla. The Army, we can't just go buy an electric vehicle, we have to look at the supply chains. How are you going to have [electricity] sources for charging? If technology tells us that safe, mobile nuclear power plants, for example, something that goes on the back of a truck, are realistic, and if you add capacitor technology [to store the electricity], you can distribute that forward in varying ways. Q: Are we talking about electric-drive tanks here? Or just trucks? A: The Army hasn't said, we're going all-electric. Right now, we don't see the technology, on the near-term horizon, being able to power heavy vehicles, it's just too much of a drain on the battery. The Next Generation Combat Vehicle, it's still going to require you to have an internal combustion engine. But if we could reduce the fossil fuel consumption by transitioning our wheeled vehicles [to electric motors], you can reduce the volume of travel on your supply route to only [move] fossil fuels for the much heavier vehicles. Q: Could you make an electric version of something like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle? A: The technology to power a vehicle of that weight exists today. We're talking [up to] about 10-15 tons; that technology exists now. If it exists now, you can anticipate that we're going to have to transition some of this in the next 10 years. And if that's true, then we have to have a transition plan for the Army to move in this direction. It should require a very detailed strategy and step by step pathways. It should include starting to build in hooks into our requirements [for new designs]. And then there are other experimentation efforts where we can learn about enterprise-level supply chain decisions. (Eds. note: We ask all fans of Phillip K. Dick to forgive us for the headline). https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/do-soldiers-dream-of-electric-trucks