17 avril 2024 | International, Terrestre
U.S Army awards L3Harris ENVG-B production order
This is the first order for the ENVG-B’s Program of Record full-scale production IDIQ, which will total nearly $1 billion over 10 years.
10 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Ensuring Future Air Power Capability - Key to European and National sovereignty
June 9, 2020 - Contested environments: Threat levels are rising due to the increasing development and dissemination of Anti Access/Areal Denial means. European air forces and navies need to prepare themselves for potential large scale high tempo operations in contested environments. To maintain air superiority and minimize attrition levels, Europe's Future Combat Air System (FCAS) will be a system of systems leveraging manned and unmanned collaborative combat, bringing the next level of Air Power.
Decisive tactical edge: FCAS will ultimately require a New Generation Fighter in 2040, which will be more sophisticated with very low observability, cutting edge passive and active sensors, on board smart applications and human machine collaboration. Such a New Generation Fighter will be a battle management platform capable of operating deep within enemy space. When teaming with unmanned modular platforms, named Remote Carriers, New Generation Fighters will have the needed scalable and flexible force multipliers to open new fields of tactics based on deception and numeric superiority.
Accelerated operational tempo: European air forces and navies will need to accelerate the operational tempo to complete OODA (Observe Orient Decide Act) loops faster than the adversary and take control of the situation. The interoperable Air Combat Cloud will provide common situational awareness by instantaneously capturing, sharing, merging and processing massive amounts of data from all connected manned and unmanned platforms. The Air Combat Cloud's warfare analytics and real-time coordination will provide better situational awareness, tactical options, decisions and collaborative effects to speed-up the OODA loop.
Better effects paths: Operating as a system of systems orchestrated by an Air Combat Cloud, FCAS will allow the OODA loop to be distributed across platforms allowing the dynamic combination of sensing, shooting and battle management capabilities. With a distributed OODA loop, FCAS will provide European air forces and navies with better, faster and more resilient effects paths under human supervision.
Incremental journey: FCAS will be an incremental journey. In a world with increasing threats, Airbus and its industrial partners need to start providing from 2025 the first capabilities to maintain European and National sovereignty. FCAS will lead to a doctrinal and technological change. Using such new capabilities will be a huge challenge for European air forces and navies, which cannot be instantaneously achieved. New doctrines, processes and skills need to be gradually developed in alignment with the planned arrival of FCAS capabilities and meeting the related technological challenges. FCAS will require a step by step approach to be jointly tackled by European air forces, navies and industry.
More on FCAS here
View source version on Airbus: https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/stories/Ensuring-Future-Air-Power-Capability.html
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15 novembre 2021 | International, Aérospatial
US Air Force will buy E-7 Wedgetail in 2022, Boeing exec claims
“I’m very confident that the Air Force is choosing the E-7 to replace its E-3 fleet,” Mike Manazir, Boeing’s vice president for defense business development, said during a news conference ahead of the Dubai Airshow.
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10 mars 2020 | International, C4ISR
Pentagon Seeks New SatCom Tech For ‘Fully Networked C3’
"Our fully networked C3 [Command, Control, & Communications] will look completely different" from current satellites and terminals, said OSD's Doug Schroeder. By THERESA HITCHENS SATELLITE 2020: The Pentagon wants industry ideas on how to craft a “fundamentally new architecture” for command, control and communications (C3) that will allow “any user using any terminal to connect to any other user using any other terminal,” says Doug Schroeder, who oversees the effort under the Office of Research and Engineering (R&E). This kind of omnipresent, all-service connectivity across land, sea, air, and space is essential for the Pentagon's rapidly evolving of future war, known as Joint-All Domain Operations. “Our Fully Networked C3 communications will look completely different. We have a new vision. We're crafting it with the help of industry,” he said. “We're relying on very heavily on industry, starting with this Broad Agency Announcement dated March 6,” which asks for companies to submit white papers in short order. According to Schroeder, the Space Development Agency (SDA) will be the funding authority. Vendors whose short, 10 to 15 page white papers are chosen will be invited at the end of April to a Pitch Day. Winners then will be given three months to develop a proposal; contracts for prototypes will be granted 24 months later. Speaking to a relatively sparse audience here at the annual commercial satellite industry conference, Satellite 2020 — which is underway despite the threat of the COVID-19 Coronavirus — Schroeder stressed: “We are going to take our new direction from you.” The new strategy, called Fully Networked C3 (FNC3), is being spearheaded by R&E director Mike Griffin and his assistant director for FNC3, Michael Zatman. According to the BAA, the first issued under the effort, the new strategy is being designed to “enable the DoD to reliably communicate with all its tactical and strategic assets.” C3 is one of Griffin's Top Ten areas of technology innovation for which DoD is developing an agency-wide development strategy. Specifically, DoD now is looking for “Beyond-Line-Of-Site (BLOS) communications systems for airborne, surface, and subsurface systems that is [sic] compatible with both FNC3 enabled systems and legacy systems,” the BAA states. The BAA calls for White Papers to be submitted by March 30 for three different types of BLOS technologies: 1. Protected Radio Frequency (RF) BLOS Communications. 2. Multi-User/Multi-Point High-Data-Rate Laser Communications. 3. Communications with submerged assets. R&E intends to “develop, prototype, and demonstrate each innovative communications capability with the goal of transitioning the technologies into programs of record,” the BAA said. To ensure speedy results, DoD will use Other Transaction Authority (OTA) for prototyping (found under 10 U.S. Code § 2371b.) Much of the detail about the effort is contained in classified annexes. What we do know: Beyond-Line-Of-Sight communications relayed through satellites generally require equipping platforms — such as aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles — with high-throughput voice and data links, capabilities all of the services have expressed interest in. In particular, after years of little progress, Griffin has reinvigorated DoD interest in optical communications via laser links, in large part due to fears about Russian and Chinese RF jamming. Commercial industry has been rushing to develop optical links to enable satellite-to-satellite data transmission, and the Space Development Agency is interested in that capability for its so-called transport layer of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit. Radio-frequency communications with submarines when underwater are generally limited to terse text messages, transmitted at very low frequencies (three to 30 kilohertz) and extremely low frequencies (three to 300 hertz) and requiring very large antennas to receie them. Research work is ongoing at MIT on how to link traditional underwater sonar to airborne RF receivers, a methodology called Translational Acoustic-RF) communication. Research also is ongoing, including at MIT's Lincoln Lab, on using narrow-beam lasers to allow one underwater vehicle to communicate with another. BLOS communications can also be accomplished without using satellites. Alternative method include tropospheric scatter using microwave radiation, high frequency (HF) wireless, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relays, and passive reflector systems. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/pentagon-seeks-new-satcom-tech-for-fully-networked-c3