Critical flight-safety feature up for grabs in planned Eurodrone

Sur le même sujet

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  4 août 2023 | International, Aérospatial, Sécurité

  Allies continue to safeguard NATO skies on the Baltic Sea together

  NATOs Allied Air Command delivers Air and Space Power for the Alliance. It is in charge of all Air and Space matters from northern Norway to southern Italy and from the Azores to eastern Turkey. All missions support NATO’s strategic concepts of Collective Defence, Crisis Management and Cooperative Security.

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  17 janvier 2019 | International, C4ISR

  US considers new ways to detect and track enemy missiles

  By: Robert Burns, The Associated Press WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering ways to expand U.S. homeland and overseas defenses against a potential missile attack, possibly adding a layer of satellites in space to detect and track hostile targets. Details on how far the administration intends to press this in a largely supportive Congress are expected to be revealed when the Pentagon releases results of a missile defense review as early as Thursday. The release was postponed last year for unexplained reasons, though it came as President Donald Trump was trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. A review might have complicated the talks. The Trump approach is expected to include emphasis on stopping missiles either before they are launched or in the first few minutes of flight when their booster engines are still burning. Congress already has directed the Pentagon to push harder on this "boost-phase" approach, which might include the use of drones armed with lasers. Any expansion of the scope and cost of missile defenses would compete with other defense priorities, including the billions of extra dollars the Trump administration has committed to spending on a new generation of nuclear weapons. An expansion also would have important implications for American diplomacy, given longstanding Russian hostility to even the most rudimentary U.S. missile defenses and China's worry that longer-range U.S. missile defenses in Asia could undermine Chinese national security. Senior administration officials have signaled their interest in developing and deploying more effective means of detecting and tracking missiles with a constellation of satellites in space that can, for example, use advanced sensors to follow the full path of a hostile missile so that an anti-missile weapon can be directed into its flight path. Space-based sensor networks would allow the U.S. to deal with more sophisticated threats such as hypersonic missiles. "I think that makes a lot of sense," said Frank Rose, a former Pentagon and State Department official and now a senior fellow for security and strategy at the Brookings Institution. "This could make a real improvement in our missile defense capabilities." Current U.S. missile defense weapons are based on land and aboard ships. Republican presidents starting with Ronald Reagan, who proposed a "Star Wars" system of anti-missile weapons in space, have been more enthusiastic about missile defense than Democrats. In recent years, however, both parties have argued that better defenses are needed, if only against emerging nuclear powers such as North Korea. Trump's detailed views on this are not well-known. The national security strategy he unveiled in December 2017 called "enhanced" missile defense a priority, but it also said it was not intended to disrupt strategic relationships with Russia or China, whose missile arsenals the U.S. sees as the greatest potential threat. John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said last year that a space-based layer of missile-tracking sensors would not mark a big shift in American policy or as a security threat to others like Russia or China. "It watches, it detects what others are doing. I don't regard it as a provocative act to observe the missile flights of missiles that are potentially threatening to the United States," Rood said in September. "I don't think having a sensor capability is a sea change for the United States," he added, without stating directly that the Trump administration will pursue this. Such a system is different than the more provocative idea of putting missile interceptors aboard satellites in space, which is not expected to be part of the Trump strategy. Congress has ordered the Pentagon to study it and some senior Pentagon officials have said recently that space-based interceptors are feasible and affordable. However, Rood in September strongly suggested that that Pentagon is not ready to move ahead with that. "Those are bridges yet to be crossed, some time away," he said. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said he expects the missile defense review to endorse an expanded role for missile defenses to counter certain Russian and Chinese missiles, especially those that could threaten U.S. allies in Asia and Europe. “This is likely to stimulate them to accelerate offensive missile programs, like hypersonic vehicles, that can evade our missile defense,” Kimball said. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/01/16/us-considers-new-ways-to-detect-and-track-enemy-missiles

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  15 octobre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Army to conduct thorough review of aviation fleet in FY23

  Jen Judson WASHINGTON — As the Army looks to bring on two future helicopters by 2030, the service is planning to review its entire aviation fleet in fiscal 2023, Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army G-8, told Defense News in an Oct. 8 interview. Over the past several years, the Army has said it is at “an inflection point” when it comes to prioritizing modernization in order to ensure soldiers can fight in a multidomain environment against near-peer adversaries. Part of that is ensuring the Army is balanced properly when it comes to making sure the current fleet is ready while funding the ambitious development of two new aircraft along with a number of other enablers like a digital backbone, air-launched effects and a new engine, to name a few. In FY20, the Army took controversial steps to shift funding from the current fleet to the future one when it decided it would not buy Block II CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters for the active force, opting to procure the variant just for special operations. Congress has pushed back on that decision in both its FY20 and FY21 defense bills, injecting funding into the program to keep the pump primed to build Block II Chinooks for the active component against the Army's wishes. So far the Army isn't planning on backing down on its decision to scale down and only buy the Block II variant for special operations. “The Army's position has not changed. I mean, our position is we don't have to make a decision,” Pasquarette said. “It's based on the age of the fleet and other factors,” Pasquarette said. “Our concern is that if Congress decides that we need to move down the Block II path here ... that starts to push out dollars against our modernization priorities that we're very concerned about.” The Army “must develop” both the Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) and the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), he stressed. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy also signaled during an Oct. 8 interview with Defense News that tough decisions on the aviation fleet would have to be made as the FLRAA and FARA aircraft begin to fly. The prototype aircraft for FARA are expected to start flying in the fourth quarter of FY22 and the engineering and manufacturing development phase is expected to begin in FY24. FLRAA prototypes will be delivered in roughly the summer of 2026. The last time the Army restructured its fleet was in 2013 to deal with impending budget cuts and reductions that would have been made through sequestration. The effort was a way to take control of what was cut rather than let every program across the board take salami-slice chops. As a result, the service decided to retire its OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters and use AH-64E Apache attack helicopters paired with Shadow unmanned aircraft systems to fill the armed scout role until future aircraft could come online. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/14/army-to-conduct-thorough-review-of-aviation-fleet-in-fy23/