Contracts for May 13, 2021

Sur le même sujet

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  2 octobre 2020 | International, Terrestre, Sécurité

  General Dynamics gets $1.2 billion to build short-range air defense systems for US Army

  Jen Judson WASHINGTON — General Dynamics Land Systems has secured a $1.2 billion contract at the close of the fiscal year to build and deliver the U.S. Army's Interim Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense system, or IM-SHORAD. The Stryker combat vehicle-based system includes a mission equipment package designed by Leonardo DRS. That mission equipment package includes Raytheon's Stinger vehicle missile launcher. The estimated completion date of the contract is Sept. 30, 2025, according to a Defense Department contract announcement. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order. GDLS officials told Defense News on Oct. 1 that the initial order for the contract, worth $230 million, is for 28 vehicles, and that the company has begun ordering material and laying out production for those vehicles. The first vehicle under this contract will roll off the line in roughly 18 months, but the first platoon will be fielded in March 2021 and the first battalion (of 32 vehicles) will be fielded in September 2021 using prototypes already built to fill it out. A second battalion will be fielded in 2022. The Army wrapped up developmental testing for the SHORAD system after experiencing a minor “hiccup” that, when paired with complications due to the coronavirus pandemic, set the program back by a few weeks, Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch, the service's program executive officer for missiles and space, said Aug. 5. The production contract award came on time. It took just 19 months from the time the service generated the requirement to the first delivery of a platform for testing, answering an urgent call in 2016 from U.S. Army Europe to fill the short-range air defense capability gap. The service received the requirement to build the system in February 2018. After a shoot-off in the desert of White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, and subsequent evaluations of vendors, the Army selected a Stryker combat vehicle-based system with the Leonardo DRS mission equipment package. Training has already begun at White Sands in preparation for an early user assessment in the latter part of the year. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/10/01/general-dynamics-gets-12-billion-to-build-short-range-air-defense-systems-for-us-army/

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  7 décembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Saab puts marketing effort for Swordfish maritime plane on hiatus

  By: Valerie Insinna BANGKOK — Over the past two years, Swedish aircraft manufacturer Saab has put its advertising muscle into promoting a maritime patrol aircraft it called Swordfish. But in the absence of a launch customer and no immediate sales prospects, the company is ending its marketing campaign — at least for now, the head of its Asia-Pacific business said Thursday. “From a product perspective, we are no longer marketing it. So it was a concept. It was an opportunity that we looked at on the back of GlobalEye, and we're just concentrating on GlobalEye,” Dean Rosenfield said in a roundtable with journalists in Saab's Bangkok office. Defense News traveled to Thailand the week of Nov. 26 to learn more about the country's air warfare capabilities, accepting airfare and accommodations from Saab. Swordfish was initially conceived as a derivative of Saab's GlobalEye airborne early warning aircraft. Both are based on Bombardier's Global 6000 airframe and contain a suite of cutting-edge sensors, with Swordfish also adding torpedoes, sonobuoys, anti-ship missiles, an acoustics processor and a magnetic anomaly detector. But while GlobalEye has landed a launch customer in the United Arab Emirates, Swordfish is still looking for a buyer. Saab hoped to position Swordfish as a lower-cost alternative to Boeing's P-8 Poseidon, which is used by the U.S. Navy to hunt submarines and conduct surveillance over open waters. The firm targeted a handful of international countries who had expressed interest in upgrading their legacy maritime surveillance inventories. One such country was South Korea, which was looking for up to six additional aircraft to augment its fleet of Lockheed Martin P-3 Orions. In March, one Saab official told Defense News that — should South Korea chose Swordfish as its future maritime patrol aircraft — the company was prepared to allow South Korea to have a hand in producing the aircraft, with the first few aircraft being produced in Sweden and the rest assembled in South Korea. Saab had responded to South Korean requests for more information about Swordfish, Rosenfield said. But in June the country decided to award a sole-source contract valued at about $1.7 billion to Boeing for the P-8 Poseidon, eschewing the Swordfish and Airbus' C295. In July, another sales opportunity for Swordfish was dashed, when New Zealand announced that it would buy up to four P-8s to replace its P-3s. Rosenfield said that even if Saab wasn't successful in the Korean competition, the company's efforts may still prove fruitful as it goes forward marketing its GlobalEye early warning plane. “But the good thing about what we did there is that it gave us great recognition — brand recognition — particularly as we were marketing a GlobalEye capability like what we are delivering to the UAE,” he said. “That's where we see it going.” Rosenfield said there may be opportunities in the future to resurrect the Swordfish sales initiative. “If there is a customer who has a need for a maritime patrol aircraft, like Singapore for example, and they are prepared to invest in the technology to take something that hasn't been delivered before to a first customer, then we're happy to entertain that discussion,” he said. But currently, “the product, per se, doesn't exist in the Saab portfolio,” he added. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2018/11/30/saab-puts-marketing-effort-for-swordfish-maritime-plane-on-hiatus

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  2 août 2018 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

  Air Force’s future ISR architecture could feature drone swarms and hypersonics — with AI underpinning it all

  By: Valerie Insinna POZNAN, Poland — The Air Force's ambitious new ISR strategy calls for a sensing grid that fuses together data from legacy platforms like the RQ-4 Global Hawk, emerging technologies like swarming drones, other services' platforms and publicly available information. And deciphering all of that data will be artificial intelligence. Such a system may sound like something out of a sci-fi book, but the service believes it could be in service by 2028. In a July 31 interview, Lt. Gen. VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for ISR, explained the Air Force's new “Next Generation ISR Dominance Flight Plan,” which lays out the service's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance goals for the next 10 years. In the past, “when we fielded a sensor, we fielded a sensor to answer a question,” Jamieson said. What the ISR flight plan tries to accomplish is far more extensive: “How do I get the data so I can fuse it, look at it and then ask the right questions from the data to reveal what trends are out there?" “We have to do all of that at the speed of relevance — meaning at warfighting speed — so that our decision cycle has shrunk,” she added. “We get our effects in and out, and we create chaos and confusion in the adversary. Once he gets behind, it is extremely difficult to actually catch up.” Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2018/08/01/air-forces-future-isr-architecture-could-feature-drone-swarms-and-hypersonics-all-with-ai-underpinning-it-all/