Defense Department halts F-35 deliveries amid repair bill disagreement with Lockheed

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  21 juin 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Typhoon’s 'Digital Stealth' Can Evolve To Meet Changing Threat

  by Jon Lake Mark Hewer, Leonardo's v-p for the Integrated Mission Solutions Business Area, believes that the company's open/reprogrammable electronic warfare (EW) suite for the Typhoon represents what he calls “digital stealth.” This will confer a high degree of survivability, even in a threat environment whose lethality is growing exponentially, with the emergence of a plethora of high-end, software reprogrammable, multi-spectral threats, including surface-to-air missile systems. These threat systems are being updated more regularly and are frequently networked, allowing them to share intelligence of the air situation. EW systems are able to evolve to deal with this dynamic and rapidly changing threat, in a way that fifth-generation stealthy aircraft cannot. While stealth aircraft are hard to detect, they are not invisible, and counter-stealth technology is developing rapidly. Moreover, the skin, internal structure, and configuration of an aircraft cannot be easily altered. “You cannot easily modify a stealth platform to counter new high-end threats,” Hewer said. Typhoon's EW capabilities are provided by Leonardo's Praetorian Defensive Aids Sub-System (DASS), which incorporates an onboard podded ECM system and off-board ECM, with a towed radar decoy, as well as missile approach, laser, and radar warning systems and a flare and countermeasures dispensing system. These systems will soon be augmented by the new BriteCloud, an active, highly programmable Digital RF Memory (DRFM) decoy that will allow the Typhoon pilot to better counter the highest-end threats. BriteCloud will give a discriminatory capability that is not on any other platform, providing a world-leading expendable active decoy capability on the Typhoon that none of its rivals will have. The MoD's Desidermagazine has predicted that initial operational capability on Typhoon will be declared in late 2019. Arguably more important than the performance of the individual hardware elements within Typhoon's DASS is their ability to be reprogrammed. “What is really important for the high-end customer buying Typhoon is that their EW system is highly programmable,” Hewer said. “There's no point in directing your ECM if it is going to be ineffective against a threat because you're not exploiting its vulnerabilities.” The Typhoon's EW system is undergoing continuous evolution, with regular upgrades to the hardware and a spiral software development process, but the most important factor is getting the right threat intelligence or “mission data” into the system. This is used to interpret the information that the sensors receive, and drives the behavior of the EW system. Mission success will often depend on having the most up-to-date data set to ensure relevance to the environment. This makes the rapidity of the upgrade cycle of paramount importance. Leonardo believes that many customers want a sustainable sovereign mission data capability, and it can offer to provide this as a service or as a fully tailored sovereign solution. The company can help customers to set up a national EW database or an aircraft specific database and has a suite of software tools available to customers. While F-35 naturally incorporates advanced EW systems, there is still a very heavy reliance on the U.S. for mission support, with a relatively cumbersome mission data cycle. Hewer believes that Typhoon is “many years more mature in its operational use of programming for EW.” While Leonardo's emphasis is currently on highlighting its ability to produce robust and agile high-end sovereign mission data generation capabilities for customers, the company is already looking to the future. Greater automation and machine learning promise a solution to the increasing complexity of the threat environment, and the company is also looking at the potential for sharing information across platforms as well as the possibility of reprogramming an EW system in flight. https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2019-06-19/typhoons-digital-stealth-can-evolve-meet-changing-threat

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  4 septembre 2018 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR

  New military drone roadmap ambivalent on killer robots

  By: Kelsey Atherton Drones are everywhere in the Pentagon today. While unpeopled vehicles are most closely associated with the Air Force and targeted killing campaigns, remotely controlled robots are in every branch of the military and used across all combatant commands. The fiscal year 2018 defense authorization contained the largest budget for drones and robots across the services ever, a sign of just how much of modern warfare involves these machines. Which is perhaps why, when the Department of Defense released its latest roadmap for unmanned systems, the map came in at a punchy 60 pages, far shy of the 160-page tome released in 2013. This is a document less about a military imagining a future of flying robots and more about managing a present that includes them. The normalization of battlefield robots Promised since at least spring 2017, the new roadmap focuses on interoperability, autonomy, network security and human-machine collaboration. The future of drones, and of unpeopled ground vehicles or water vehicles, is as tools that anyone can use, that can do most of what is asked of them on their own, that communicate without giving away the information they are sharing, and that will work to make the humans using the machines function as more-than-human. This is about a normalization of battlefield robots, the same way that mechanized warfare moved from a theoretical approach to the standard style of fighting by nations a few generations ago. Network security isn't as flashy a highlight as “unprecedented battlefield surveillance by flying robot,” but it's part of making sure that those flying cameras don't, say, transmit easily intercepted data over an open channel. “Future warfare will hinge on critical and efficient interactions between war-fighting systems,” states the roadmap. “This interoperable foundation will transmit timely information between information gatherers, decision makers, planners and war fighters.” A network is nothing without its nodes, and the nodes that need to be interoperable here are a vast web of sensors and weapons, distributed among people and machines, that will have to work in concert in order to be worth the networking at all. The very nature of war trends toward pulling apart networks, toward isolation. Those nodes each become a point at which a network can be broken, unless they are redundant or autonomous. Where will the lethal decision lie? Nestled in the section on autonomy, the other signpost feature of the Pentagon's roadmap, is a small chart about the way forward. In that chart is a little box labeled “weaponization,” and in that box it says the near-term goals are DoD strategy assessment and lethal autonomous weapon systems assessment. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are of such international concern that there is a meeting of state dignitaries and humanitarian officials in Geneva happening at the exact moment this roadmap was released. That intergovernmental body is hoping to decide whether or not militaries will develop robots that can kill of their own volition, according to however they've been programmed. The Pentagon, at least in the roadmap, seems content to wait for its own assessment and the verdict of the international community before developing thinking weapons. Hedging on this, the same chart lists “Armed Wingman/Teammate (Human decision to engage)” as the goal for somewhere between 2029 and 2042. “Unmanned systems with integrated AI, acting as a wingman or teammate with lethal armament could perform the vast majority of the actions associated with target identification,tracking, threat prioritization, and post-attack assessment," reads the report. "This level of automation will alleviate the human operator of task-level activities associated with the engagement of a target, allowing the operator to focus on the identified threat and the decision to engage.” The roadmap sketches out a vision of future war that hands off many decisions to autonomous machines, everything from detection to targeting, then loops the lethal decision back to a human responsible for making the call on whether or not the robot should use its weapons on the targets it selected. Humans as battlefield bot-shepards, guiding autonomous machines into combat and signing off on the exact attacks, is a possible future for robots in war, one that likely skirts within the boundaries of still-unsettled international law. Like its predecessor, this drone roadmap is plotting a rough path through newly charted territory. While it leans heavily on the lessons of the present, the roadmap doesn't attempt to answer on its own the biggest questions of what robots will be doing on the battlefields of tomorrow. That is, fundamentally, a political question, and one that much of the American public itself doesn't yet have strong feelings about. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/08/31/new-military-drone-roadmap-ambivalent-on-killer-robots

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  21 octobre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, C4ISR

  General Atomics Starts SeaGuardian RPAS Validation Flights In Japan

  General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI), a global leader in Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), kicked off a series of validation flights on Oct. 15 for Japan Coast Guard (JCG) in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, Japan. GA-ASI is working with Asia Air Survey (AAS) in Japan to conduct the flights. Naval News Staff GA-ASI press release “We appreciate Asia Air Survey's support in demonstrating how the MQ-9B SeaGuardian RPAS can provide affordable, long-endurance airborne surveillance of Japan's maritime domain,” said Linden Blue, CEO, GA-ASI. “The system's ability to correlate multiple sensor feeds and identify vessel anomalies provides effective, persistent maritime situational awareness.” The SeaGuardian flights will validate the wide-area maritime surveillance capabilities of RPAS for carrying out JCG's missions, from search and rescue to maritime law enforcement. These flights follow successful “legacy” MQ-9 maritime patrol demonstrations in the Korea Strait in 2018 and the Aegean Sea in 2019. The Hachinohe operation features the MQ-9B configuration, capable of all-weather operations in civil national and international airspace. The SeaGuardian RPAS features a multi-mode maritime surface-search radar with Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) imaging mode, an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver, a High-Definition – Full-Motion Video sensor equipped with optical and infrared cameras. This sensor suite, augmented by automatic track correlation and anomaly-detection algorithms, enables real-time detection and identification of surface vessels over thousands of square nautical miles. GA-ASI's MQ-9B is revolutionizing the long-endurance RPAS market by providing all-weather capability and compliance with STANAG-4671 (NATO airworthiness standard for UAVs). These features, along with an operationally proven collision-avoidance radar, enables flexible operations in civil airspace. https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2020/10/general-atomics-starts-seaguardian-rpas-validation-flights-in-japan/