7 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
COLOGNE, Germany — The race between Boeing's F-18 jet and the Airbus Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft to replace Germany's Tornado fighter-bombers has tilted toward the American plane, according to a German media report.
That is after German defense officials received information from the Pentagon about the time needed to certify the Eurofighter to carry nuclear weapons, according to an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Getting the Eurofighter approved for that mission would take between three and five years longer than the F-18, which is considered a nuclear weapons-capable aircraft in the U.S. military, the newspaper reported.
Germany has kept a subset of its approximately 80-strong Tornado fleet equipped to carry out the NATO nuclear-sharing doctrine. That means in the case of a hypothetical atomic war, German pilots would load their aircraft with U.S. nuclear bombs and drop them on their intended targets at the behest of the alliance.
While Germany's nuclear mission periodically comes up as a source of controversy here, previous governments have left it untouched, portraying the largely symbolic assignment as a vital element of trans-Atlantic relations.
A spokeswoman for the Defence Ministry in Berlin declined to comment on the SZ report, saying only that American and German defense officials have been in “continuous conversations” on the issue.
The government is expected to announce a winner between the F-18 and the Eurofighter Typhoon early next year. In January 2019, defense officials eliminated the F-35 as a candidate, largely because picking an American plane would weaken the case for having such weapons be made by European companies in the future.
Such is the case with the Future Combat Air Systems program, led by Airbus and Dassault. Airbus says if Germany chooses the Eurofighter as a Tornado replacement, it would be easier for companies on the continent to transition to an eventual development of the German-Franco-Spanish platform.
The German defense minister's visit to Washington last month put the spotlight back on the prospect of an American buy, however. “We want to treat this question jointly,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told reporters in the U.S. capital on Sept. 23. She added that Germany wants a “gap-less” continuation of the Tornado's capabilities, adding that she envisions a “tight schedule” for the replacement.
Airbus, meanwhile, doesn't see the need to rush. With 10 years or so left before ditching the Tornado, the reported nuclear-certification time seems to still fit into the overall replacement schedule, spokesman Florian Taitsch told Defense News.
Plus, he argued, it should be expected that, when given a choice, the Trump administration with its “America First” doctrine would be keen to push American-made weapons over European ones.
“For us, the situation hasn't changed,” Taitsch said.
22 mars 2021 | International, Terrestre
Amid fears about the strained industrial base for energetics, a key part of munitions and other conventional weapons, the Navy has awarded a six-year contract to accelerate tech breakthroughs over the next six to ten years.
18 août 2020 | International, Naval
By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Navy pushes forward with developing its large unmanned surface vessel, envisioned as a kind of external missile magazine that will tag along with larger manned surface combatants, a growing consensus is forming that the service needs to get its requirements and systems right before making a big investment. Congress has, for the second year in a row, slowed the development of the large unmanned surface vessel, or LUSV, in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The language in this year's bill would essentially force the Navy to have a working prototype with all systems tested and fully integrated before using procurement dollars for the boats. In an exclusive July 16 interview with Defense News, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said that while the marks were frustrating, he agreed with Congress that requirements must be concrete right up front. “The approach has to be deliberate,” Gilday said. “We have to make sure that the systems that are on those unmanned systems with respect to the [hull, mechanical and electrical system], that they are designed to requirement, and perform to requirement. And most importantly, are those requirements sound? “I go back to: Do I really need a littoral combat ship to go 40 knots? That's going to drive the entire design of the ship, not just the engineering plant but how it's built. That becomes a critical factor. If you take your eye off the ball with respect to requirements, you can find yourself drifting. That has to be deliberate.” Gilday has called for the Navy to pursue a comprehensive “Unmanned Campaign Plan” that creates a path forward for developing and fielding unmanned systems in the air, on the sea and under the water. Right now, the effort exists in a number of different programs that may not all be pulling in the same direction, he said. “What I've found is that we didn't necessarily have the rigor that's required across a number of programs that would bring those together in a way that's driven toward objectives with milestones,” Gilday told Defense News. “If you took a look at [all the programs], where are there similarities and where are there differences? Where am I making progress in meeting conditions and meeting milestones that we can leverage in other experiments? “At what point do I reach a decision point where I drop a program and double down on a program that I can accelerate?” ‘A lot of risk' According to the Congressional Research Service, the Navy's approach is to adapt a commercial design and put a bare-bones crew onboard while the service figures out how to move toward a fully unmanned system. “The Navy wants LUSVs to be low-cost, high-endurance, reconfigurable ships based on commercial ship designs, with ample capacity for carrying various modular payloads — particularly anti-surface warfare (ASuW) and strike payloads, meaning principally anti-ship and land-attack missiles,” the report read. But some very basic questions still need to be answered about how a large unmanned, or lightly manned, surface vessel might work, said Matthew Collette, an associate professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan. “One of the biggest challenges people are realizing now is the machinery systems and keeping the systems operational for six months [over a deployment],” Collette said. “If you think about a ship today, there are daily machinery rounds and constant preventative maintenance. The Navy has its casualty reporting system, and the commercial world has something very similar. And over six months, that's a lot of work that's not getting done on the autonomous ship. “And there are two approaches to this that I've seen: One is you design it essentially like a space craft where you really limit what you do with the ship to make it as robust as possible and really accept that today that means less capability. We're just not going to be able to throw all the bells and whistles on that kind of a ship today. And for the smaller size ships, that's a good approach. “But the other approach is to try and monitor it and put in a lot of redundancy and figure out how we get this system reimagined so it can do a six-month deployment. And I can't really assess where we are with that at this point, I just don't have enough insight to know if that's six months away. Is it six years? Is it never reachable?” It's unclear that adapting an existing design will get the Navy where it needs to be, in large part because the Navy is going somewhere radically different from what the commercial offshore oil and gas or ferry industry is going, Collette said. “It's important to note that where the commercial industry is going is different from where the Navy wants to go,” Collette said. “In the commercial marine industry, you have a licensed captain ashore who is able to teleport to the ship whenever it needs human intervention. And we're really talking about short runs, like inter-European runs of six hours, 12 hours, and working their way out from there. “The Navy has really asked for a much harder, much more difficult problem. And you could see how something like the [extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle] as a technology trail that works toward this direction, but jumping toward something like large unmanned surface vessel, is a big, big step with a lot of risk.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/08/17/in-developing-robot-warships-us-navy-wants-to-avoid-another-littoral-combat-ship/
22 juin 2020 | International, C4ISR
Andrew Eversden The Pentagon's primary artificial intelligence hub is already studying how to aim a laser at the correct spot on an enemy vehicle, pinpointing which area to target to inflict the most damage, and identifying the most important messages headed to commanders, officials said June 16. But as part of that work, the Department of Defense needs to carefully implement checks and balances into the development process, experts urged June 16. “Fundamentally I would say there's a requirement ... that there's going to be a mixture of measures taken to ensure the governability of the system from the first stage of the design of the system all the way up through the operations of the system in a combat scenario,” said Greg Allen, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center's chief of strategy and communications at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, at the Defense One Tech Summit June 16. The JAIC is working on several lethality projects through its new joint warfighting initiative, boosted by a new contract award to Booz Allen potentially worth $800 million. “With this new contract vehicle, we have the potential to do even more this next year than we did in the past,” Allen said. Meanwhile, the Army's Artificial Intelligence Task Force is working on an advanced threat recognition project. DARPA is exploring complementing AI systems that would identify available combat support assets and quickly plan their route to the area. Throughout all of the development work, experts from the military and from academia stressed that human involvement and experimentation was critical to ensuring that artificial intelligence assets are trustworthy. The department has released a document of five artificial intelligence ethical principles, but the challenge remains implementing those principles into projects across a department with disparate services working on separate artificial intelligence projects. “We want safe, reliable and robust systems deployed to our warfighters,” said Heather Roff, senior research analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. “We want to be able to trust those systems. We want to have some sort of measure of predictability even if those systems act unpredictably.” Brig. Gen. Matt Easley, director of the artificial intelligence task force at Army Futures Command, said the service is grappling with those exact challenges, trying to understand how the service can insert “checks and balances” as it trains systems and soldiers. Easley added that the unmanned systems under development by the Army will have to be adaptable to different environments, such as an urban or desert scenarios. In order to ensure that the systems and soldiers are ready for those scenarios, the Army has to complete a series of tests, just like the autonomous vehicle industry. “We don't think these systems are going to be 100 percent capable right out of the box,” Easley said on the webinar. “If you look at a lot of the evolution of the self-driving cars throughout our society today, they're doing a lot of experimentation. They're doing lots of testing, lots of learning every day. We in the Army have to learn how to go from doing one to two to three vehicle experiments to have many experiments going on every day across all our camp posts and stations.” Increasingly autonomous systems also mean that there needs to a cultural shift in among all levels of military personnel who will need to better understand how artificial intelligence is used. Roff said that operators, commanders and judge advocate generals will need to better understand how systems are supposed “to ensure that the human responsibility and governability is there.” “We need to make sure that we have training, tactics, procedures, as well as policies, ensuring where we know the human decision maker is,” Roff said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2020/06/18/artificial-intelligence-systems-need-checks-and-balances-throughout-development/