Feds should stand up for Canadian aerospace and defence industries with CMMA procurement

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  15 juillet 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Can commercial satellites revolutionize nuclear command and control?

  By: Nathan Strout The rapid growth of commercial space makes the use of non-government satellites for nuclear command and control increasingly tempting, according to one official. During a speech June 26, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said that the service — which oversees both the United States' ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as strategic bombers capable of delivering nuclear warheads — was open to the idea of using private sector satellites. “Whether it's Silicon Valley or commercial space, there's unlimited opportunities ahead right now for us in terms of how we think differently on things like nuclear command and control,” said Goldfien. “I, for one, am pretty excited about it.” The military has increasingly turned to the commercial sector to expand its capabilities more cost efficiently. For instance, the National Reconnaissance Office — the agency in charge of the nation's spy satellites — announced that it was looking to expand the amount of satellite imagery it buys from commercial companies. The Air Force has also expressed interest in developing a hybrid architecture for satellite communications, which would see war fighters able to switch between commercial and military satellites as they move through coverage areas. According to Goldfein, there's no reason that commercial capabilities could not similarly be applied to nuclear C2. “The work that we're doing in connecting the force and building a network force around the services in the conventional side has equal applications to the nuclear command and control side, because at the end of the day what we need is resilient capable architecture that keeps the commander in chief connected,” said Goldfien. “So one of the areas that I think we're going to be able to leverage significantly is the rapid and exciting expansion of commercial space in bringing low-Earth orbit capabilities that will allow us to have resilient pathways to communicate.” Currently, the military relies primarily on the Advanced Extremely High Frequency System for the nuclear sector. With four satellites in orbit and a fifth to be launched later this month, AEHF provides highly secure, anti-jamming communications for the military and national leaders like the commander in chief. It wasn't clear in Goldfein's comments whether he was interested in using commercial capabilities to augment, replace or work as a backup to AEHF and other military satellite systems. He did note that the sheer volume of satellites in some commercial constellations provides increased survivability for the network. “We want to get to a point both in conventional and unconventional, or conventional and nuclear, where if some portion of the network is taken out, our answer ought to be, ‘Peh, I've got five other pathways. And you want to take out 1,000 satellites of my constellation, of which I have five? Knock yourself out.' That's what I see is going to be a significant way that we're going to be able to leverage,” said Goldfein. The possibility of lowering costs is another major incentive to turning to the commercial sector to begin providing the communications necessary. “What we want to eventually get to is the reversal of the cost curve. Right now it actually costs us more to defend than it takes to shoot. And we want to reverse that so it actually costs them more to shoot than it takes for us to defend,” explained Goldfien. Goldfein pointed to commercial launches as an area where competition had helped drive down costs. “Increased access to affordable launch and smaller payloads that are more capable has caused this rapid expansion of commercial capabilities in space,” he said. “That may be one of the most exciting developments that we have going forward, because industry is going to help us solve many of these problems.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2019/07/12/can-commercial-satellites-revolutionize-nuclear-command-and-control/

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  16 avril 2020 | International, Autre défense

  Pentagon awards $415M contract for machines to disinfect N95 masks

  The Pentagon on Monday announced a $415 million contract for 60 machines that will stretch the use of dwindling N95 masks, allowing the scarce personal protective equipment to be disinfected and reused up to 20 times. The Defense Department awarded the contract for “Battelle Memorial Institute Critical Care Decontamination Systems (CCDS), that can decontaminate up to 80,000 used N95 respirators per system per day,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Andrews said in a statement. The machines — which will all be available by early May for distribution by FEMA and the Department of Health and Human Services — together could sterilize up to 4.8 million masks per day and almost 34 million per week, according to Andrews. The statement added that two systems had already been delivered to New York, and one each to Boston, Chicago, Tacoma, Wash., and Columbus, Ohio. States are struggling to keep hospitals and medical centers stocked with PPE crucial to fighting the coronavirus outbreak, and the National Guard last week said a shortage of such gear might be hindering its ability to administer coronavirus tests. The Pentagon has highlighted its efforts to provide N95 masks to the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with Defense Secretary Mark Esper in March first announcing that it would give 5 million respirator masks to HHS. Esper later pledged another 5 million from DOD stockpiles. And on Saturday, the Pentagon announced a $133 million project to create more than 39 million masks in 90 days under the Defense Production Act. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/492611-pentagon-awards-415m-contract-for-machines-to-disinfect-n95-masks

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  21 juillet 2020 | International, Naval

  US Navy takes delivery of new, more powerful radar

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has taken delivery of the first AN/SPY-6 radar array for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Jack Lucas, which was designed and built specifically to accommodate the upgraded air and missile defense radar. The Raytheon-built system is about 30 times more sensitive than the SPY-1 arrays on the Navy's cruisers and destroyers, but it requires much more power. That led to a significant redesign of the Flight IIA DDG. Jack Lucas, being built at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, is the first of the new builds. The ship is scheduled to be delivered in 2024, according to Navy budget documents. The delivery of the first SPY-6 marks a significant step for the radar, which looks poised to rapidly become the fleet standard. The Navy plans to install a scaled-down version of the radar on the older Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to keep them relevant, as well as on the future frigate, FFG(X), being built by Fincantieri. Wes Kremer, president of the Raytheon Missiles & Defense business, said in a July 15 interview with Defense News that the radar is designed to simultaneously handle multiple missions without losing fidelity on any individual mission. “SPY-6 is an evolutionary step forward in radar capability, but it was, most importantly, designed with incredibly long range and sensitivity to support all the missions that Navy destroyers do: ballistic missile defense, surface warfare and anti-air missions simultaneously,” Kremer said. “And what's sometimes lost in the noise is that it can do [its job] in the presence of electronic attack or jamming. That's really the magic of that radar.” Kremer is confident the radar has been put through its paces in the acquisition process and that the next major hurdle for the program will be Jack Lucas' sea trials. “These radars are being delivered under the low-rate initial production run,” he said. “For about three years now we've had a test radar in Hawaii and proving out the radar. We've also delivered an array to Navy's [Combat Systems Engineering Development Site] in Moorsetown, New Jersey. This isn't just a radar — it's part of Flight III, which is not just the radar, it's Lockheed Martin's Aegis Baseline 10, and we are fully integrated. So we've already gone through all that, so really the next step is sea trials.” The Navy wants to start backfitting the scaled-down version of SPY-6 in 2021, Capt. Jason Hall, who is the above-water sensors program manager at Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems, said in January. But beyond that, Kremer said Raytheon is looking to Japan and South Korea as potential customers for SPY-6. The Navy's investment in SPY-6 is not without some controversy. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said while the Navy needs a radar like SPY-6 for ballistic missile defense, the service still must figure out how to perform passive detection to avoid giving away its location to adversaries that will be able to electronically sniff out a big, powerful radar. Kremer said he wasn't comfortable discussing concepts of operations surrounding the issue of keeping electronically quiet with SPY-6. But he reiterated that during active electronic attack, the radar would perform. “You have to be able [to] operate around electronic attack, and on the active side we have a lot of capability to do that,” he said. “But when you get into that other stuff, you're really starting to talk about concepts of operations, and I don't think it's appropriate for a contractor to talk about CONOPS.” The Navy is also planning to scale back construction of the Flight III destroyer. In its most recent budget submission, the Navy cut four of the planned 12 Flight IIIs over the next five years as the service tries to juggle the enormous bill for the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/07/20/us-navy-takes-delivery-of-new-more-powerful-radar/