Egypte : vers une modernisation d'hélicoptères Apache

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  6 août 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Contracts for August 5, 2021

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  21 octobre 2020 | International, Terrestre, Sécurité

  BAE Offers Truck-Mounted Howitzer For Army Stryker Units

  Already fielded in Sweden — and mounted on a Volvo truck — BAE's 155 mm Archer will compete in a US Army “shoot off” early next year. SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: The Army is seeking a self-propelled replacement for its venerable towed artillery pieces. The old ones can't keep up with mechanized Stryker units and lack armor protection. BAE Systems says its Archer armored howitzer is the quickest cannon on the draw — a life-or-death factor in fast-moving future combats. The US is experimenting intensely in how to speed the process from detecting a potential target to sending accurate target coordinates to a specific gun. Once Archer receives such target coordinates, it can come to a stop and open fire within 20 seconds, said Henrik Knape, a BAE exec based in Sweden, where the gun is already in service. Within two minutes from that first shot, Knape went on, the truck-mounted 155mm howitzer can fire another five to seven rounds, get back underway, and put 500 meters (a third of a mile) between itself and the location it fired from. That's a long enough distance in a short enough time that retaliatory fire from the enemy's artillery is probably going to miss. Even for an advanced adversary (pronounce that “Russia”), which uses specialized counter-battery radars to track the trajectory of incoming rounds and calculate the precise position of the unit firing them, it will take multiple minutes to bring its own guns or drones to bear. In US operations, the time from detecting a target to firing on it is typically “tens of minutes.” Experimental artificial-intelligence systems can cut that to tens of seconds, but those are years from being battle ready. Archer has other advantages as well, Knape and his US-based colleague Chris King told a small group of reporters: It's been in Swedish service since 2016, with the Defense Ministry asking Parliament to fund another 24 guns, so it's already extensively field-tested. It's armored against shrapnel and small arms, in case the enemy does get close. Its long barrel – 52 calibers, a third longer than the standard US howitzer – gives it extended range, comparable to the tracked ERCA howitzer entering service with US armored units in 2023. That gun is already qualified in US testing to fire precision-guided projectiles like Raytheon's Excalibur and BAE's own BONUS. And it's mounted on a six-wheel-drive, articulated Volvo chassis with enough cross-country mobility to keep up with the Army's 8×8 Strykers, which currently have only towed guns to accompany them.There are smaller wheeled artillery vehicles on the market than Archer, which doesn't fit on the standard C-130 turboprop transport, Knape and King acknowledged. (We check out a Humvee-mounted 105 mm cannon here).But none of them, they argue, has Archer's combination of firepower, protection, and quickness. The secret to that speed is automation, BAE says. While the US Army's current systems – both towed howitzers and the armored M109 Paladin – still rely largely on human muscle to manhandle heavy shells into the gun, Archer has a built-in autoloader. While well-trained human crews can actually fire faster than autoloaders for brief periods, the mechanical systems don't get tired or injured, and they allow for a much smaller gun crew. Archer can theoretically operate with a single soldier aboard, although it's designed for a crew of three – all of whom can stay inside the armored cabin while the weapon fires and reloads.https://breakingdefense.com/2020/10/bae-offers-truck-mounted-howitzer-for-army-stryker-units/

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  16 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Japan highlights F-35 acquisition, military ops amid pandemic in new whitepaper

  By: Mike Yeo MELBOURNE, Australia — In its latest whitepaper, Japan has discussed its impending acquisition of F-35B fighter jets and highlighted efforts by regional militaries to expand their influence and activities despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The full document, released July 14 in Japanese, contains a section on the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing variant of the Lockheed Martin aircraft, noting that with regional countries making “remarkable progress” in air power modernization, the country needed to respond in kind.. The whitepaper highlighted the operational flexibility of the F-35B, noting the jet's ability to operate without the need for long runways, which would enable the Japan Air Self-Defense Force to significantly expand the number of locations from whence the service can conduct air superiority operations. The whitepaper noted there are currently 20 airports and air bases throughout Japan that have runways sufficiently long enough to support JASDF air superiority operations. Operating the F-35B would theoretically allow the JASDF to expand that number to 45, which would include some of the runways on Japan's far-flung southern islands. Japan has plans to eventually acquire 42 F-35Bs to operate alongside its planned fleet of 105 conventional-takeoff-and-landing F-35As, making it the top customer of the F-35 outside the United States. The 42 F-35Bs include 18 to be contracted over the next five years, with Japan setting aside approximately $795 million in its current defense budget to acquire six. It is also converting the helicopter destroyer Izumo, which has a 245-meter flight deck and was originally designed to carry helicopters primarily for anti-submarine warfare, to operate the F-35B. The air defense challenge facing the JASDF was also highlighted in April this year, when the Ministry of Defense said the service scrambled its fighters a total of 947 times over the past year to intercept and monitor foreign military aircraft operating in the country's air defense identification zone. Chinese aircraft accounted for 675 intercepts, and Russian aircraft Russian made up 268. (The remaining four were not identified.) The whitepaper also noted a continuing pattern of operations conducted by military vessels and aircraft primarily from China and, to a lesser degree, Russia in the waters and airspace surrounding Japan. The government pledged to continue to closely monitor such activities. It also noted that such activities have continued despite the COVID-19 pandemic, warning that a prolonged global pandemic “may exert various impacts on countries' military capability.” The government added that another potential effect of the pandemic was the likelihood that it may “expose and intensify strategic competition among countries intending to create international and regional orders more preferable to themselves and to expand their influence.” The whitepaper also accused China of spreading disinformation “amid growing social uncertainties and confusion due to the spread of infection.” https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/07/15/japan-highlights-f-35-acquisition-military-ops-amid-pandemic-in-new-whitepaper/