27 octobre 2020 | International, Naval
David Pugliese,
Two reports by the parliamentary budget officer looking into the costs of major Canadian naval equipment projects have been delayed.
The Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates had unanimously passed a motion in June to request the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer undertake a costing analysis of the Royal Canadian Navy's new joint support ships as well as the leasing of the Asterix supply ship from a private firm. The PBO study was to also look at the cost of building the joint support ships in Canada at Seaspan shipyard in Vancouver. The committee asked that the PBO report be provided by Oct. 15.
Another motion from the committee, passed later in June, asked the PBO to examine the $60 billion price tag of Canada's proposed new fleet of warships – the Canadian Surface Combatant or CSC. Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux was tasked to investigate the cost of the CSC as well as examine the cost of two other types of warships: the FREMM and the Type 31. That study was supposed to be presented to the committee by Oct. 22.
But those original motions from the committee expired when Parliament was prorogued. So new motions have to be provided to the PBO.
The Commons committee passed a new motion on Oct. 19 on the Asterix and Joint Support Ship analysis. That analysis is to be delivered by Nov. 30, PBO spokeswoman Sloane Mask told this newspaper. A date for the analysis to be made public has not yet been determined.
“Currently, we are also in the process of confirming the revised timelines for the CSC report,” she added.There is particular interest in the defence community about what the PBO determines is the current price-tag of the Canadian Surface Combatant project.
Last year the Liberal government signed an initial deal on CSC that is expected to lead to the eventual construction of 15 warships in the largest single government purchase in Canadian history. Lockheed Martin offered Canada the Type 26 warship designed by BAE in the United Kingdom. Irving is the prime contractor and the vessels will be built at its east coast shipyard.
Construction of the first ship isn't expected to begin until the early 2020s.
But the Canadian Surface Combatant program has already faced rising costs. In 2008, the then-Conservative government estimated the project would cost roughly $26 billion. But in 2015, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, then commander of the navy, voiced concern that taxpayers may not have been given all the information about the program, publicly predicting the cost for the warships alone would approach $30 billion.
The overall project is currently estimated to cost around $60 billion. “Approximately one-half of the CSC build cost is comprised of labour in the (Irving) Halifax yard and materials,” according to federal government documents obtained by this newspaper through the Access to Information law.
But some members of parliament and industry representatives have privately questioned whether the CSC price-tag is too high. There have been suggestions that Canada could dump the Type 26 design and go for a cheaper alternative since the CSC project is still in early stages and costs to withdraw could be covered by savings from a less expensive ship.
Canada had already been pitched on alternatives. In December 2017, the French and Italian governments proposed a plan in which Canada could build the FREMM frigate at Irving. Those governments offered to guarantee the cost of the 15 ships at a fixed $30 billion, but that was rejected by the Canadian government.
The other type of warship the PBO will look at is the Type 31, which is to be built for the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Those ships are to cost less than $500 million each.
In 2017, then Parliamentary Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette estimated the CSC program would cost $61.82 billion.
The entry of the BAE Type 26 warship in the Canadian competition was controversial from the start and sparked complaints that the procurement process was skewed to favour that vessel. Previously the Liberal government had said only mature existing designs or designs of ships already in service with other navies would be accepted on the grounds they could be built faster and would be less risky. Unproven designs can face challenges if problems are found once the vessel is in the water and operating.
But the criteria was changed and the government and Irving accepted the BAE design, though at the time it existed only on the drawing board. Construction began on the first Type 26 frigate in the summer of 2017 for Britain's Royal Navy.
27 août 2023 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
The agreement was finalized during Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto’s visit to the U.S. to meet with defense and industry officials in support of Indonesia’s military modernization and interoperability efforts.
5 mars 2019 | International, Aérospatial
Helen Chachaty Le processus de remplacement des F-5 Tiger et des F/A-18 Hornet de l'aviation de chasse helvète bat son plein. Suite au lancement de l'appel d'offres en juillet 2018, l'agence d'acquisition d'armement armasuisse a réceptionné le 25 janvier dernier les offres de cinq industriels : Airbus, Boeing, Dassault Aviation, Lockheed Martin et Saab. Le contrat est estimé à 6,5 milliards d'euros et prévoit la livraison de 30 à 40 appareils entre 2025 et 2030. Prochaine étape : l'évaluation des aéronefs proposés, sur simulateur, au sol et en vol. Si l'évaluation sur simulateur se tiendra « chez les candidats », les essais au sol et en vol seront effectués directement en Suisse, sur la base aérienne de Payerne, au sud-ouest de Berne, entre le mois d'avril et le mois de juin prochain. Ils comprendront un total de huit missions « avec un ou deux avions », « sur quatre journées de vol », ainsi qu'un vol de nuit. «Ces essais permettront de vérifier les capacités de avions et les données fournies dans les offres soumises », précise le Département fédéral de la défense, de la protection de la population et des sports(DDPS). Le calendrier des évaluations a également été publié par le DDPS. C'est l'Eurofighter d'Airbus qui ouvrira le bal en avril, suivi du F/A-18 Super Hornet de Boeing fin avril-début mai. Dassault Aviation présentera le Rafale entre la mi-mai et la fin du mois. Le F-35A de Lockheed Martin volera les deux premières semaines de juin, suivi immédiatement après du Gripen E de Saab. Une synthèse des données collectées sera ensuite réalisée, un second appel d'offres est prévu en 2020, le choix final devrait être fait en 2022. https://www.journal-aviation.com/actualites/41963-la-suisse-organise-les-essais-d-evaluation-pour-son-futur-chasseur
18 février 2019 | International, C4ISR
Current AI systems excel at tasks defined by rigid rules – such as mastering the board games Go and chess with proficiency surpassing world-class human players. However, AI systems aren't very good at adapting to constantly changing conditions commonly faced by troops in the real world – from reacting to an adversary's surprise actions, to fluctuating weather, to operating in unfamiliar terrain. For AI systems to effectively partner with humans across a spectrum of military applications, intelligent machines need to graduate from closed-world problem solving within confined boundaries to open-world challenges characterized by fluid and novel situations. To attempt this leap, DARPA today announced the Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning for Open-world Novelty (SAIL-ON) program. SAIL-ON intends to research and develop the underlying scientific principles and general engineering techniques and algorithms needed to create AI systems that act appropriately and effectively in novel situations that occur in open worlds. The program's goals are to develop scientific principles to quantify and characterize novelty in open-world domains, create AI systems that react to novelty in those domains, and to demonstrate and evaluate these systems in a selected DoD domain. A Proposers Day for interested proposers is scheduled for March 5, 2019, in Arlington, Virginia: https://go.usa.gov/xEUWh “Imagine if the rules for chess were changed mid-game,” said Ted Senator, program manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences Office. “How would an AI system know if the board had become larger, or if the object of the game was no longer to checkmate your opponent's king but to capture all his pawns? Or what if rooks could now move like bishops? Would the AI be able to figure out what had changed and be able to adapt to it?” Existing AI systems become ineffective and are unable to adapt when something significant and unexpected occurs. Unlike people, who recognize new experiences and adjust their behavior accordingly, machines continue to apply outmoded techniques until they are retrained. Given enough data, machines are able to do statistical reasoning well, such as classifying images for face-recognition, Senator said. Another example is DARPA's AI push in self-driving cars in the early 2000s, which led to the current revolution in autonomous vehicles. Thanks to massive amounts of data that include rare-event experiences collected from tens of millions of autonomous miles, self-driving technology is coming into its own. But the available data is specific to generally well-defined environments with known rules of the road. “It wouldn't be practical to try to generate a similar data set of millions of self-driving miles for military ground systems that travel off-road, in hostile environments and constantly face novel conditions with high stakes, let alone for autonomous military systems operating in the air and on sea,” Senator said. If successful, SAIL-ON would teach an AI system how to learn and react appropriately without needing to be retrained on a large data set. The program seeks to lay the technical foundation that would empower machines, regardless of the domain, to go through the military OODA loop process themselves – observe the situation, orient to what they observe, decide the best course of action, and then act. “The first thing an AI system has to do is recognize the world has changed. The second thing it needs to do is characterize how the world changed. The third thing it needs to do is adapt its response appropriately,” Senator said. “The fourth thing, once it learns to adapt, is for it to update its model of the world.” SAIL-ON will require performers and teams to characterize and quantify types and degrees of novelty in open worlds, to construct software that generates novel situations at distinct levels of a novelty hierarchy in selected domains, and to develop algorithms and systems that are capable of identifying and responding to novelty in multiple open-world domains. SAIL-ON seeks expertise in multiple subfields of AI, including machine learning, plan recognition, knowledge representation, anomaly detection, fault diagnosis and recovery, probabilistic programming, and others. A Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) solicitation is expected to be posted in the near future and will be available on DARPA's FedBizOpps page: http://go.usa.gov/Dom https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-02-14