Canadian aviation company manufacturing air sanitizers to fight COVID-19

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  28 décembre 2022 | International, Aérospatial

  Lockheed challenges US Army’s helicopter award

  Lockheed Martin officially objects to the U.S. Army's decision to choose Bell to build its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, to be fielded in the 2030s.

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  10 mars 2020 | International, Naval

  Navy Needs Bigger Budget Than Other Services: Rep. Wittman

  “You can have the greatest brigade combat team in the world," Rep. Wittman said, "but if they can't get to the fight because we don't have a robust ready reserve fleet, that's pretty shortsighted.” By PAUL MCLEARY ]WASHINGTON: A prominent lawmaker waded into the inter-service money wars today by calling for the Navy receiving a larger share of the budget than the other branches of the armed forces. The Army, Rep. Rob Wittman emphasized, can't even deploy abroad without the Navy's help. “We need to look at the one-third, one-third, one-third allocation of defense dollars to all the different service branches,” said Wittman, the top Republican on the Democratic-controlled House Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee. (The actual allocation is a bit trickier than that, but it's close). “No offense in any way, shape, or form to the other service branches, but we're going to need capability in certain areas and we're going to need those at a faster pace than in other areas.” Wittman represents the shipbuilding powerhouse of Virginia — home to massive naval bases and Newport News Shipbuilding, which makes all the nation's nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and half its nuclear submarines. He appeared at the Hudson Institute today alongside Rep. Joe Courtney, who chairs the subcommittee and who represents Connecticut, where the other half of the nation's nuclear subs are built at Electric Boat. But it wasn't any of these high-tech, high-cost warships that Wittman singled out today. Instead, the congressman was referring to the major shortfalls in allocating money to modernize the nation's sealift fleet, humble but essential transports. A recent exercise showed the sealift fleet would be unable to haul military equipment overseas quickly in the event of a national security emergency. The snap drill found that of the 33 ships activated, only 22 were ready enough to leave port, according to a December paper from US Transportation Command. Shifting more money to the Navy would be a tough sell in Congress, with its hundreds of parochial interests, but Courtney added that his committee might take up the sealift shortage in its markup of the 2021 budget request in a few weeks, a move that could have wide-ranging implications for the Navy's budget. Wittman didn't lay out plans for shifting money to the Navy, but said “a great example” of why sealift needs to be a priority is “you can have the greatest brigade combat team in the world, you can have the greatest Stryker brigade in the world, but if they can't get to the fight because we don't have a robust ready reserve fleet, that's pretty shortsighted.” Splitting the budget roughly in thirds between the services “is not letting the strategy drive the budget, it's letting the budget drive the strategy,” added, which “creates a strategic vulnerability.” Wittman's comments come in the wake of a earlier dust-up between the services over their share of the budget, after Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told a navy conference in January “we need more money,” in order to modernize. Budgeting as usual, he said, which means “a one-third, one-third, one-third cut, does not reflect the strategy,” laid in in 2019's National Defense Strategy, Gilday said. “It isn't necessarily aligned with where we need to go against the pacing threat that we face.” The Navy is in many ways faced with the trickiest path to modernizing among all the branches of the military. Even as the service continues to struggle to get ships out of repair availabilities on time, it has also committed to building a new class of aircraft carriers, and has to overhaul its Virginia-class submarines. On top of all that comes the biggest-ticket item — a new class of nuclear-powered submarines about to begin construction, which will eat up over 30 percent of Gilday's budget in a few years. The first of the 12 Columbia subs is scheduled to begin construction in 2021 and enter service in 2031. Once completed they'll carry a staggering 70 percent of the country's nuclear arsenal. To clear space, and the chart a path toward a planned 355-ship fleet, the Navy is scrambling. Last week, plans leaked of Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly's intent to stand up a Future Carrier 2030 Task Force, which will take six months to study how carriers stack up against new generations of stealthy submarines and long-range precision weapons being fielded by China and Russia. The study likely won't be ready until after Defense Secretary Mark Esper wraps up his assessment of the Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan and its new force structure assessment, however. Esper took control over both studies last month. The Navy is also looking to speed up the acquisition of a new class of 20 frigates, which would be a relative bargain of about $900 each if the service can stick to its plans and things work out the way they envision. In an attempt to clear some budgetary space for all of this, Modly has kicked off a new ‘Stem to Stern' review of back office functions to try and wrong more money out of existing accounts, which he's hoping to find about $8 billion a year in savings. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/navy-needs-bigger-budget-than-other-services-rep-wittman/

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  2 octobre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  US Army to upgrade bigger units with new electronic warfare gear

  Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — In what some observers might view as back to the future, the U.S. Army is altering the way it fights to keep up with sophisticated adversaries, which means shifting from the brigade-centered focus of the last decade to bringing the division and corps levels into the fold. As a result, new capabilities are under development to increase range, fight deeper and bolster presence on the nonphysical battlefield, such as the electromagnetic spectrum. Officials said a fight against a nation-state like Russia or China must begin at the corps level, where the focus is destroying high-priority systems to lay the groundwork for lower echelons. They added that the corps level must eliminate these targets first, passing them to the lower echelons to include division and brigade, which are both designed for a closer fight to move the enemy back. “We have got to be able to see deep. If we don't have the ability to sense at the corps level, really what we're doing is we're deferring that fight down to the brigade level,” Col. Clint Tracy, III Corps cyber and electromagnetic activities chief, said during a Sept. 29 virtual panel hosted by the Association of Old Crows. “If we build the other way up, from the brigades to corps ... they may not necessarily be equipped without additional enablers to kill those things in the battlespace.” Enter what officials are calling the Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade, or TLS-EAB, formerly referred to as TLS-Extended Range. Army leaders this week detailed the first initial notional concepts and timeline for the new capability, which will be mainly a division and corps asset capable of reaching and prosecuting targets that the TLS system at the brigade combat team level cannot. “TLS-EAB is intended to provide commanders at echelons above brigade the ability to sense, provide improved precision geolocation, conduct non-kinetic fires and support kinetic targeting for a broad coverage of targets ... [that] are unreachable by TLS at BCT,” Col. Jennifer McAfee, Army capability manager for terrestrial layer and identity, said during the same event. TLS-BCT, or Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team, is the Army's first brigade-focused, integrated signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber platform. “TLS-EAB also provides defensive electronic attack to protect our critical nodes, i.e., our command posts and other critical nodes vulnerable to the adversary's precision fires,” McAfee added. She also said TLS-EAB will address several gaps in large-scale combat operations to include deep sensing to help target enemy systems in anti-access/area denial environments, and to conduct reconnaissance and security at long ranges. It will also provide capabilities for signals intelligence and electronic warfare teams within the Multidomain Task Force's Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space (I2CEWS) battalion, as well as signals intelligence and electronic warfare battalions at the division and corps levels. How is TLS-EAB different from existing capabilities? The key difference between TLS-EAB and other electronic warfare, intelligence and cyber platforms — both airborne or ground-based — is that the former protects static assets from enemy missiles and unmanned systems that use radar fusing and homing. Officials said the new system will be broken into two broad threat categories: the aforementioned protection against precision-guided munitions dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum; and theater, corps and division targets to include ISR, command and control, low- and mid-altitude beyond-line-of-sight comminutions, navigation, and air and ground radars. The service will achieve these effects through advanced electronic attack techniques, radio frequency-delivered cyber effects, military information support operations (formerly called psychological operations), and the deception of adversary sensors. More granularly, TLS-EAB will be broken into two subsystems for those two missions: one for long-range collection, electronic support and effects; and one for defensive electronic attack. Each will include a trailer attached to the eventual vehicle the Army determines for TLS-EAB. While a specific platform hasn't specifically been identified for TLS-EAB, officials said they are eyeing something wheeled from the family of medium tactical vehicles. Interoperability and long range Moreover, the system will connect with other reconnaissance systems in an attempt to shorten the sensor-to-shooter timeline, which involves rapidly delivery sensitive data from sensors to the platforms or individuals who take action. These include the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node, or TITAN; the Multidomain Sensing System; TLS-BCT; the Electronic Planning and Management Tool; the Multifunction Electronic Warfare-Air Large; and the integrated tactical network. TLS-EAB is one of the top priorities of the Army's ISR Task Force, which is modernizing the service's ability to see across huge ranges through a layered approach that involves the ground, air and space domains. U.S. adversaries have invested in capabilities that aim to keep forces at bay, such as advanced missiles and radars. To allow American forces to penetrate those capabilities and move back ground-based adversaries, larger echelons such as the corps must be able to see and understand these regions in full, which could be over thousands of miles. This also means sifting through all the noise in the congested electromagnetic spectrum to understand and prioritize specific targets. As such, the corps level must see more of the spectrum than the brigade, said Tracy of III Corps, because if the higher echelons did their jobs right, there shouldn't be a whole lot left for brigades to deal with in the non-kinetic realm when they are eventually deployed. Timeline Units aren't expected to first receive TLS-EAB until at least fiscal 2022, the same year as TLS-BCT. The current plan outlined by officials, which they stressed is all notional, is to have a total of 67 TLS-EABs: four per I2CEWS equaling 16; three per corps equaling nine; four per division equaling 40; and two at training locations. The sketch provided by Army leaders is an industry day in January, with a draft request for proposals set for February and bids in October. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2020/10/01/us-army-to-upgrade-bigger-units-with-new-electronic-warfare-gear/