31 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial
By: Kyle Rempfer
The Air Force's fleet of F-15 C and D Eagle fighters are aging faster than F-35 joint strike fighters are being fielded, a gap in the transition that some think needs to be filled. And even when more F-35s have been fielded, F-15s could still fill a tactical role to help the Air Force carry out its mission. Boeing's new, single-seat F-15X design may be the Air Force's answer to that issue.
Very little has been made known about the F-15X initiative, which was first reported by Defense One, and the Air Force's Pentagon officials could not provide comment on it, only telling Air Force Times that “there is no acquisition program” with respect to the new platform.
But multiple media outlets still reported this week that the F-15X was being pitched to the Air Force by Boeing. Alternatively, some reports state that the Air Force first solicited Boeing for the new fighter. Regardless, the possibility of a new platform to replace aging the fourth-generation F-15 fighters could alleviate the strain put on F-22 Raptors and make up for the F-35s slow roll-out.
Created during the Cold War, the more than 40-year-old F-15 has been the U.S. Air Force's primary air-to-air fighter jet for decades. The aircraft has been known for its range of operational roles, however, to include close-air support in the Global War on Terrorism.
Dan Grazier, the Jack Shanahan Military Fellow at the Project On Government Oversight, writes extensively on military procurement, to include the F-35 acquisition. He said that while he can't comment on the specific designs of the F-15X, it is generally better to develop weapon systems from “an evolutionary approach.”
“Whenever the military possesses a proven basic design like the F-15, the Pentagon should focus its efforts on maintaining and improving it until the state of technology changes to the point where the basic design is no longer viable,” Grazier told Air Force Times. “Until that happens, there is no reason to continually reinvent the wheel. If it is possible to incorporate improved technology into a design that has already been bought and paid for, then it only makes financial and common sense to do so.”
“There will doubtless be arguments made that the unit flyaway costs of the F-15X and F-35 will be roughly comparable," he said. "When you factor in the development costs of both into the program unit average cost, I bet the F-15X will be much less expensive.”
While the F-35 is a supposed to be a multi-role aircraft — capable of a stealth mode, as well as an air-to-ground combat mode once air dominance is achieved — it has been questioned whether the F-35 can outperform an F-15 in an air-to-air dogfight, or an A-10 Warthog in close-air support missions.
As to what the F-15X includes that separates it from older F-15s, not too much is definitively known.
Citing sources close to the initiative, The War Zone reported the most extensive breakdown so far.
The F-15X reportedly came out of an Air Force inquiry to Boeing and Lockheed Martin about fielding an aircraft that could easily transition into the service's existing air combat infrastructure, specifically to help counter the Air Force's shrinking force.
There were some caveats to the solicitation: it needs to be cost-effective, low-risk and not considered an alternative to the larger F-35 procurement program, The War Zone reported. It seems those requirements were met, based on the reported features.
The F-15X armament would be designed for a mixed air-to-air and air-ground-role, including “eight air-to-air missiles and 28 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs), or up to seven 2,000-pound bombs and eight air-to-air missiles," according to The War Zone.
The F-15X would allegedly be very affordable, as well. The aircraft reportedly costs roughly $27,000 per hour to fly. Meanwhile, the F-35A costs more than $40,000 an hour to fly, according to The War Zone.
Finally, The War Zone said the F-15X will have a 20,000-hour service life, meaning it could be flying for several more decades.
Still, Boeing officials have not outright confirmed they were pitching the F-15X.
“We see the marketplace expanding internationally and it's creating opportunities then to go back and talk to the U.S. Air Force about what might be future upgrades or even potentially future acquisitions of the F-15 aircraft,” Gene Cunningham, vice president of global sales of Defense, Space & Security, told DefenseOne.
The Air Force has been considering retiring its F-15 Eagles for some time. In March 2016, service officials said they were considering a retirement for the more than 230 F-15 C and D fighters, and replacing them with F-16 Fighting Falcons.
Speaking before the Senate Armed Services air land forces subcommittee in April, Lt. Gen. Jerry Harris, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and requirements, said the service was still looking at options for the F-15 fleet.
“There's nothing off the table,” Harris said. “We're looking at, as we bring F-35s in, can we grow our capacity rather than just replace one-for-one? If we can't do that, what's our least-capable asset to retire, based on the value that it would provide for us?”
19 octobre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Hitachi is set to win EU antitrust approval for its 1.7-billion-euro ($1.8 billion) acquisition of Thales' GTS railway signalling business on the condition it sells assets in France and Germany, three people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
12 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Des chercheurs américains spécialisés dans l'Intelligence Artificielle projettent de créer un avion de combat autonome capable d'abattre un avion de chasse piloté par un humain. L'US Air Force devrait organiser un tel combat en juillet 2021, selon Air Force Magazine. L'Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) travaille depuis 2018 sur un système automatisé basé sur des techniques d'Intelligence Artificielle qui puisse prendre le dessus sur un avion de chasse piloté par un humain lors d'un combat air-air. La technologie du projet, baptisé «Bigmoon shot», s'appuie sur le deep machine learning. Air Force Magazine et L'Usine Nouvelle du 12 juin
22 juillet 2020 | International, C4ISR
Mark Pomerleau One of the clearest examples of how the military wants to defeat adversaries using information warfare is by publicly disclosing what those enemies have been doing and what capabilities they have. Information warfare can be abstract, combining cyber, intelligence, electronic warfare, information operations, psychological operations or military deception as a way to influence the information environment or change the way an adversary think. “At our level, the most important thing we can do is to be able to expose what an adversary is doing that we consider to be malign activity, in a way that allows that to be put in the information environment so that now more scrutiny can be applied to it,” Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander 16th Air Force, the Air Force's newly established information warfare organization, told reporters during a media round table in late February. One of the first ways the Department of Defense has sought to test this is through U.S. Cyber Command's posting of malware samples to the public resource VirusTotal. Malware samples discovered in the course of operations by the Cyber National Mission Force are posted to the site to inform network owners. It also helps antivirus organizations of the strains build patches against that code and helps identify the enemies' tools being used in ongoing campaigns. Haugh, who most recently led the Cyber National Mission Force, explained how these cyber teams, conducting what Cyber Command calls hunt forward operations, were able to expose Russian tactics. U.S. military teams deploy to other nations to help them defend against malign cyber activity inside their networks. “Those defensive teams then were able to identify tools that were on networks and publicly disclose them, [and] industry later attributed to being Russian tools,” he said. “That was a means for us to use our unique authorities outside the United States to be able to then identify adversary activity and publicly disclose it.” Officials have said this approach changes the calculus of adversaries while also taking their tools off the battlefield. “Disclosure is more than just revealing adversary intent and capabilities. From a cyberspace perspective, disclosure is cost imposing as it removes adversary weapons from the ‘battlefield' and forces them to expend resources to create new weapons,” Col. Brian Russell, the commander of II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, told C4ISRNET in June. “Disclosure forces the adversary to ask: ‘How were those capabilities discovered?' It causes them to investigate the cause of the disclosure, forcing them to spend time on something other than attacking us. If I can plant a seed of doubt (messaging) that the disclosure might have been caused by someone working on the inside, it makes them question the system's very nature, perhaps spending more time and resources to fix the system.” The NSA has demonstrated a similar tactic when it created its cybersecurity directorate in late 2019. The entity was formed in part, due to the fact that adversaries were using cyberspace to achieve strategic objectives below the threshold of armed conflict. Now, the directorate uses its intelligence and cyber expertise to issue advisories to the network owners of cybersecurity threats so they can take the necessary steps to defend themselves. One recent advisory had direct bearing on a nation state's malicious activity, according to a senior intelligence official. In late May, the agency issued an advisory regarding a vulnerability in Exim mail transfer agent, which was being widely exploited by a potent entity of Russia's military intelligence arm the GRU called Sandworm. “Quickly thereafter, we saw five cybersecurity companies jumped on it and really used that to deepen and expand and publish information about the GRU's infrastructure that they use to conduct their cyberattacks and further information as well,” the official told reporters in early July. “That was terrific because we felt that that had a direct impact on a major nation state in terms of exposing their infrastructure ... and we saw significant patch rates go up on a vulnerability that we knew they were using. That's the kind of thing that we're looking for.” The military has had to think differently to combat for how adversaries are operating. “A central challenge today is that our adversaries compete below the threshold of armed conflict, without triggering the hostilities for which DoD has traditionally prepared,” Gen. Paul Nakasone, commander of Cyber Command, wrote in prepared testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in early March. “That short-of-war competition features cyber and information operations employed by nations in ways that bypass America's conventional military strengths.” These disclosures or efforts to call out malign behavior have also taken the forms of media interviews and press releases. For example, Gen. Jay Raymond, the head of U.S. Space Command and the commandant of Space Force, said in a February interview in which he detailed what he deemed unacceptable behavior by Russia in space, a surprising charge given how tight lipped the U.S. government typically is about its satellites. “We view this behavior as unusual and disturbing,” he said of Russian satellites creeping up to American ones. “It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space.” Or consider that leaders from Africa Command on July 15 issued a press release detailing the activities of the Wagner Group, a Russian security company, as acting on behalf of the Russian state to undermine the security situation in Libya. “U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has clear evidence that Russian employed, state-sponsored Wagner Group laid landmines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in and around Tripoli, further violating the United Nations arms embargo and endangering the lives of innocent Libyans,” the release said. “Verified photographic evidence shows indiscriminately placed booby-traps and minefields around the outskirts of Tripoli down to Sirte since mid-June. These weapons are assessed to have been introduced into Libya by the Wagner Group.” Moreover, Africa Command's director of operations called out Russia, noting that country's leaders have the power to stop the Wagner Group, but not the will. Sixteenth Air Force, at the request of C4ISRNET, provided a vignette of such behavior from Russia in the form of how it covered up the explosion of a radioactive rocket, dubbed Skyfall. According to the service, Russia took extreme steps to curb monitoring of the site where the explosion took place and sought to conceal the true nature of the explosion potentially hindering surrounding civilian populations from receiving adequate medical treatment and guidance. With new forces integrated under a single commander, using unique authorities to collect intelligence and authorities to disclose, 16th Air Force is now better postured to expose this type of malign activity, which previously the U.S. government just didn't do. Top Pentagon leaders have explained that the dynamic information warfare space requires a new way of thinking. “We've got to think differently. We've got to be proactive and not reactive with messaging,” Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds, the Marine Corps' deputy commandant for information, told C4ISRNET in an interview in March. “We have been very risk averse with regard to the information that we have. You can't deter anybody if you're the only one who knows that you have a capability.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/07/20/the-new-ways-the-military-is-fighting-against-information-warfare-tactics/