8 mai 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense
By: Martin Banks
The European Union will launch a call for a new batch of proposals as part of Europe's new Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) initiative this week.
At the same time, officials said that the 34 existing PESCO projects are still considered to be at a very initial “incubation phase,” meaning they have yet to come to fruition.
The PESCO defense pact – a show of unity and a tangible step in EU integration – was set up in December 2017 between EU governments and involved two phases of joint initiatives, each consisting of 17 projects.
The third and latest phase, to be launched this week, is for an unspecified number of new projects. The founding PESCO members, including France, Germany and Italy, have been asked to table proposals by the summer with a view to these being approved by the end of 2019.
The new batch of projects is likely to be smaller than the previous two, the second of which was launched last November, and is expected to be more “mature” when it comes to the projects' setup, including support by member states, one official said.
EU members are responsible for developing and implementing PESCO projects. An EU defence source said, “They are still at an initial stage, or incubation phase.”
Twelve of the existing 34 schemes are expected to reach initial operational capability by 2022, with four of these due to be implemented later this year, according to the source.
The 34 schemes include a harbor and maritime surveillance and protection (HARMSPRO) project, designed to deliver a new maritime capability with the ability to conduct surveillance and protection of specified maritime areas, from harbors up to littoral waters.
Another is the Training Mission Competence Centre which aims to improve the availability and professionalism of personnel for EU training missions. The list also includes a European armoured infantry vehicle and cyber rapid response teams.
Other projects involve developing new equipment, such as infantry fighting vehicles, amphibious assault vehicles, light armored vehicles, indirect fire support, strategic command-and-control systems for EU defense missions, minesweeping drones, upgrading maritime surveillance and developing a joint secure software defined radio.
Long blocked by London, PESCO, is one of the most tangible steps in EU integration since Britons voted to leave the bloc, as militaries begin to plan, spend and deploy together.
The eventual aim of PESCO is to develop and deploy forces together, backed by a multi-billion-euro fund for defense research and development. The idea aims to bring together European countries with a military capacity and political desire to collaborate on planning, carry out joint analyses of emerging crises and to react to them quickly.
Speaking recently in the European parliament in Brussels, Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipilä welcomed the establishment of PESCO as a “step in the right direction” but said PESCO members “should now concentrate on implementation and reaching results.”
The EU source said, “Some might find it surprising that the 34 projects are still at the ideation phase but you have to remember that the PESCO project was launched only recently so the record is not bad. We are not talking about a ‘project factory' but a commitment on the part of participating members to work more closely in the area of security and defence.”
EU defence expert Paul Taylor wrote, “It is worth noting that the PESCO effort is still at a relatively early stage of development.”
Jamie Shea, a senior fellow at Friends of Europe, a leading Brussels think tank, commented, “It is welcome news that the number of PESCO projects is likely soon to grow still further beyond the current 34. But to sustain political and public interest in this initiative it is important that we see soon the first deliverables to show that the good intentions are being followed with real and new European military capabilities.”
Shea added, “Moreover the key test for the success of PESCO will not just be to generate more multinational efforts but also to produce capabilities that plug the current shortfalls in the EU's most urgent requirements and move it towards its goal of strategic autonomy.”
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26 décembre 2019 | International, Naval
By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON – The Department of Defense has sent a plan to the White House that would cut the construction of more than 40 percent of its planed Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers in in fiscal years 2021 through 2025. In total, the proposal would cut five of the 12 DDGs planned through the so-called future years defense program, or FYDP. In total, the plan would cut about $9.4 billion, or 8 percent, out of the total shipbuilding budget, according to a memo from the White House's Office of Management and Budget to the Defense Department obtained by Defense News. The memo also outlined plans to accelerate the decommissioning cruisers, cutting the total number of Ticonderoga-class cruisers in the fleet down to nine by 2025, from a planned 13 in last year's budget. The Pentagon's plan would actually shrink the size of the fleet from today's fleet of 293 ships to 287 ships, the memo said, which stands in contrast to the Navy's goal of 355 ships. The 355 ship goal was also made national policy in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. The memo comes on the heels of a wave of rhetoric from the Navy and the highest levels of the Trump Administration that the goal remains 350-plus ships, and the memo directs the Pentagon to submit a “resource-informed” plan to get to 355 ships, though its unclear how that direction might affect the Navy's calculus with regards to destroyer construction. The document gives the Navy a degree of wiggle-room to try and redefine what counts as a ship. “OMB directs DOD to submit a resource-informed plan to achieve a 355-ship combined fleet, including manned and unmanned ships, by 2030,” the memo reads. “In addition to a programmatic plan through the FYDP and projected ship counts through 2030, DOD shall submit a legislative proposal to redefine a battleforce ship to include unmanned ships, complete with clearly defined capability and performance thresholds to define a ship's inclusion in the overall battleforce ship count.” Destroyers are built by General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Maine and by Huntington Ingalls in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Each destroyer costs an average of $1.82 billion based on the Navy's 2020 budget submission, according to the Congressional Research Service. A Trump Administration official who spoke on background said the Navy's proposed plan to shrink the fleet is being driven primary from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and that OMB is strongly behind the President's goal of 355 ship. “OMB strongly supports 355 [ships] and is working with the Navy on it,” the official said. “OSD seems to be the most opposed to it.” A Navy spokesman declined to comment on the contents of the memo, saying it was related to a budget still in development and was “pre-decisional.” The military has a policy of refusing to comment on budget matters before they've been submitted to congress. The fate of the cruisers has been a nearly annual fight on Capitol Hill, as the Navy has tried desperately to divest themselves of the troublesome class, though this year's proposed cancellation of six cruiser modernization plans did not make a stir on the Hill. The cruisers themselves are the largest surface combatants in the Navy's inventory but have become increasingly difficult to maintain. Cruisers have 26 more vertical launch system, or VLS, cells per hull than their Arleigh Burke Flight IIA destroyer counterparts, and 32 more than the Flight I Burkes. Cruisers act as the lead air defense ship in a carrier strike group but as they have aged, the fleet has managed everything from cracking hulls to aging pipes and mechanical systems. The ships' SPY-1 radars have also been difficult to maintain, as components age and need constant attention from technicians. Last year, the Navy proposed canceling the modernization of Bunker Hill, Mobile Bay, Antietam, Leyte Gulf, San Jacinto and Lake Champlain in 2021 and 2022. The new proposal would accelerate the decommissioning of the Monterey. Vella Gulf and Port Royal to 2022, which would cut between three and seven years off each of their planned lives. The plan would also advance the decommissioning of the Shiloh to 2024, three years earlier that previously planned. The service's past efforts to shed the cruisers to save money repeatedly drew the ire of former House Armed Services Committee sea power subcommittee Chairman Randy Forbes, R-Va., who didn't trust the Navy to keep the ships in service and therefore wrote clear language into several National Defense Authorization Act bills prohibiting the move. The Navy ultimately agreed to the so-called 2-4-6 plan in 2015, which allowed the service to lay up to two cruisers a year, for no more than four years and allow no more than six of the ships to undergo modernization at any one time. 'Making a Case' The 2030 deadline for 355 ships as mentioned in the OMB memo was first laid out earlier this month by acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly in a speech at USNI's Defense Forum. “[Three hundred and fifty-five ships] is stated as national policy,” Modly told an audience on Dec. 5. “It was also the president's goal during the election. We have a goal of 355, we don't have a plan for 355. We need to have a plan, and if it's not 355, what's it going to be and what's it going to look like? “We ought to be lobbying for that and making a case for it and arguing in the halls of the Pentagon for a bigger share of the budget if that's what is required,” The speech was followed by the President's National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien at the Reagan National Defense Forum saying that Trump was serious when he committed to a 350-ship Navy. “When President Trump says a 350-ship Navy, he means a 350-ship Navy, and not decades from now,” O'Brien said. Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer captain and analyst with the defense consultancy The Ferrybridge Group, said the plan to reduce the size of the fleet is a sign that the Defense Department isn't willing to put the resources required toward growing the fleet. “If what you are reporting is true, this is a sign of the tension between the grand desires for a much larger fleet and the modest resources being applied to the problem,” McGrath said. “There simply is no way to grow the fleet as it is currently architected while maintaining the current fleet at a high state of readiness with the given resources." McGrath said if 355 is still the goal, the Pentagon has to either dramatically restructure the fleet to switch out large surface combatants such as cruisers and destroyers with smaller, less expensive ships, or it has to change what's counted as a ship – both moves that have been signaled by the Navy in recent years. “This is why it's so hard to grow a Navy,” McGrath said. “You have to decide it's a national priority, you have to devote a lot of resources and you have to do it over a period of years. None of that has happened.” Dan Gouré , an analyst with the Arlington-based think tank The Lexington Institute and former Bush Administration Pentagon official, said trading existing force structure for unproven technologies such as unmanned ships that may pan out down the road is a classic Pentagon trap that rarely pans out. “It sends a bit of a chill up my spine to hear that the Navy may be considering cutting a bird in the hand for a theoretical eagle down the road,” Goure said. “That almost never works. I've been doing this long enough, 40 years of this, tell me when that's ever really worked.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/24/pentagon-proposes-big-cuts-to-us-navy-destroyer-construction-retiring-13-cruisers/