Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - July 25, 2019

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  5 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  DOD Seeking More COVID-19 Stimulus Funding, Esper Says

  Lee Hudson The Pentagon intends to request additional stimulus funding from Congress to support the defense industrial base in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Defense Secretary Mark Esper says. The funding would go to small suppliers that have been hit hard by the spread of the novel coronavirus, Esper said May 4 during a Brookings Institution event. In recent weeks, Congress has passed about $3 trillion in emergency funding bills related to COVID-19. The Senate is in session this week, but the House has postponed votes. It is unknown when the next stimulus package will wrap up. “We anticipate the likely need for additional monies ... because we see again greater demand with regard to medical supplies and equipment,” Esper said. But House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said the Pentagon should not receive stimulus funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act because the public health sector needs it more. Last week, Pentagon acquisition executive Ellen Lord said the Pentagon may have wiggle room to use some of its own operations and maintenance funding to pay for COVID-19-related efforts. Lord cautioned that the Pentagon may not have the fiscal flexibility to pay for new demands on the agency to battle COVID-19. “I will say that we continue to look at gaps in funding we have for specific issues. We continue to work with [the Office of Management and Budget] on that, and we will continue to talk to Congress about what we assess as our needs to really carry out our missions,” Lord said. The Defense Department (DOD) wants to continue supporting the defense industry by issuing progress payments to help with cash flow, Esper said. “DOD is not an island. We really rely heavily on the private sector, and so many of our private sector workforce has been affected by COVID-19,” Esper said. Some defense contractor personnel are infected with the virus, while others are working in states with shutdown orders and management does not want them coming into work because of tight quarters, he said. Separately, Esper is concerned the nation's additional debt incurred due to COVID-19 may result in smaller defense budgets during a critical time when China and Russia are strategic competitors of the U.S. The U.S. must recapitalize the nuclear triad and invest in hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, space capabilities and directed energy, Esper said. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/dod-seeking-more-covid-19-stimulus-funding-esper-says

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  31 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  As Era Of Laser Weapons Dawns, Tech Challenges Remain

  Steve Trimble As the U.S. Air Force comes within weeks of the first operational laser weapons, the Defense Department is hatching new concepts to address the power and thermal management limits of the state-of-the-art in the directed energy field. In a largely secret dress rehearsal staged last week at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Air Force performed another round of tests of the deploying Raytheon High Energy Laser Weapon System (HEL-WS), as well as other directed energy options, such as the Air Force Research Laboratory's Tactical High Power Microwave Operational Responder (THOR), says Kelly Hammett, director of AFRL's Directed Energy Directorate. “All I can say is there were multiple systems. From my reading of the reports, it looked like a very successful exercise,” says Hammett, who addressed the Association of Old Crows annual symposium Oct. 29. The Fort Sill experiment was intended to put the weapons through their paces in a realistic operational environment. AFRL's Strategic Development, Planning and Experimentation (SDPE, which, despite its spelling, is pronounced “Speedy”) office called on the HEL-WS and THOR to engage swarms of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). The experiments also demonstrated new diagnostic tools, allowing AFRL testers to understand the atmosphere's effect on energy propagation in real time. SDPE awarded Raytheon a contract in August to deliver a “handful” of systems to the Air Force for a one-year deployment scheduled to conclude in November 2020. The HEL-WS will be used to defend Air Force bases from attacks by swarming, small UAS and cruise missiles, Hammett says. The Air Force is not releasing the location of the deployed sites for the HEL-WS. AFRL also is grooming THOR for an operational debut. Instead of blasting a UAS with a high-energy optical beam, THOR sends powerful pulses of radio frequency energy at a target to disable its electronics. Hammett describes THOR as a second-generation directed energy weapon. It is designed to be rugged for operational duty and compact enough to be transported inside a single container loaded into a Lockheed Martin C-130. Upon unloading from the aircraft, THOR can be activated within a couple hours, or broken down and moved within the same period, he says. Despite decades of basic research on directed energy systems, such operational capabilities have evolved fairly rapidly. The Air Force finally consolidated its strategy for developing directed energy weapons in the 2017 flight plan, Hemmett said. The document narrowed a once-fragmented research organization that attempted to address too many missions. “Directed energy zealots like myself have been blamed, rightly so, of saying directed energy can do almost anything you want it to do. And we pursued multiple applications to the effect that we were diffusing some of our efforts,” he says. The 2017 flight plan selected three initial use cases: Air base defense, precision strike and self-protect. The HEL-WS and THOR are addressing the first mission. The Joint Navy-Air Force High Power Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike (Hijenks) program is developing a missile to address the precision strike requirement, as a follow-on to the Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (Champ) that concluded five years ago. In the long-term, AFRL also plans to demonstrate the Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (Shield), a podded defensive weapon for aircraft. Although such technology has come far, researchers are still grappling with fundamental issues to make them practical. Namely, the power generation and thermal management requirement for high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves remains a challenge. “If you're willing to have very limited duty-cycle, very limited magazine, the power and thermal management aren't very challenging,” Hemmett says. “Of course, that's not what we want from directed energy weapons. We want deep magazines. We want to be able to handle wave attacks as favorably or more favorably that kinetic weapons.” The “rule of thumb” for a high-energy laser is an efficiency of about one-third, meaning a 300-kW generator is necessary to create a 100-kW laser beam, resulting in 200 kW of waste heat that must be dealt with in some way, says Frank Peterkin, a senior technologist on directed energy for the U.S. Navy who spoke at the same event. On Navy ships, that puts the laser in competition with the electronic warfare and radar subsystems for power and thermal management loads, he adds. “The challenge for the directed energy community is we don't really own the solution,” Peterkin says. “It does need to be a more holistic solution for the Navy. We are a customer, but we're not driving the solution, per se.” Although directed energy researchers cannot design the power grids for bases, ships and aircraft, they can help the requirement in other ways, says Lawrence Grimes, director of the Directed Energy Joint Transition Office within the Defense, Research and Engineering directorate of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The development of special amplifier diodes for fiber optic lasers are breaking the “rule of thumb” for high-energy systems, Grimes says. “They actually operate at higher temperatures and higher efficiency, so they can reduce the requirement necessary for the prime power and thermal management, and we're not throwing away 200 kW.” Other Defense Department organizations are pursuing more ambitious options. The Strategic Capabilities Office is selecting suppliers to demonstrate small, 10 MW-size nuclear reactors, as a power generation option for directed energy weapons at austere forward operating bases. Meanwhile, AFRL also is considering space-based power generation. Under the Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research program, AFRL will investigate using high-efficiency solar cells on a spacecraft to absorb the solar energy. The spacecraft then would convert the solar energy into a radio frequency transmission and beam it to a base to supply energy. AFRL has awarded Northrop Grumman a $100 million contract to begin developing the technology. If those seem like long-term options, the Air Force is not immediately concerned. The HEL-WS and THOR are designed to use “wall-plug” power or the military's standard electric generators, Hammett says. https://aviationweek.com/defense/era-laser-weapons-dawns-tech-challenges-remain

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  16 février 2018 | Local, Naval

  MDA to provide unmanned aircraft systems to Royal Canadian Navy

  MDA, a Maxar Technologies company (formerly MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.), announced it has signed a contract valued at approximately $8 million with Canada's Department of National Defence (DND) to provide maritime miniature unmanned aircraft systems (MMUAS). The contract also includes services to support training, resource and equipment development activities and development and validation of naval tactics and new capability development. The MMUAS will play a critical role by extending the reach of the communication and sensor capability over contentious or hostile areas during maritime security operations. MDA's solution is based on the Puma AE (All Environment) unmanned aircraft built by Aerovironment. The Puma AE system will provide the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) with enhanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. The Puma has the ability to carry additional payloads as required for specific missions. The MMUAS is the first UAS project that will see the RCN operate and maintain its own capability and provide a sustainable shipborne, near real-time, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) ISR capability with an expected introduction to the fleet in the summer of 2018 onboard Kingston-class ships. Capable of both ground and water landings, Puma AE's innovative fuselage offers an operational flexibility never before available to the RCN. The Puma AE is operated from the same control station as the Raven UAS which has been provided by MDA to the Canadian Army since 2013. MDA's Canadian-based UAS services group has been providing UAS systems and services to Canada's DND since 2009. Mike Greenley, group president for MDA, said: “We are very proud to once again, expand our unmanned aircraft systems and services to support Canada's Department of National Defence needs. https://www.skiesmag.com/press-releases/mda-provide-unmanned-aircraft-systems-royal-canadian-navy/