Finland launches HX evaluations for F-35A

Sur le même sujet

• 

  13 novembre 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  Bombardier Defense Delivers Seventh Global Aircraft for Saab’s GlobalEye Airborne Surveillance Solution

  The 7 aircraft delivered by Bombardier to the GlobalEye program highlight a successful collaboration and echo Bombardier’s thriving, long-standing reputation manufacturing specialized aircraft for the defense industry.

• 

  22 avril 2020 | International, C4ISR

  COVID-19: Army Futures Command Takes Wargames Online

  While the pandemic's halted field exercises, tabletop wargames can continue long-distance. The catch? Getting classified bandwidth so you can discuss specific military capabilities. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on April 21, 2020 at 7:31 AM WASHINGTON: With Pentagon travel restrictions now extended through June 30th, the Army's in-house futurists can't hold their usual face-to-face brainstorming sessions. So rather than delay their work for months, they're moving seminars and wargames online – but there's a tradeoff. The long-distance collaboration tools available so far aren't secure enough for classified data, which means some scenarios are off-limits. The COVID-19 coronavirus has halted some – but far from all – military training and experimentation. Army Futures Command in particular has had to cancel some high-priority field exercises to try out new tactics and technologies, but a lot of its work is thinking about the future, which you can do long-distance, one of its deputy commanders said in a video town hall last week. “We did have to cancel the Joint Warfighting Assessment [JWA] in Europe,” Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley said, “[but] a lot of the work we do in terms of developing concepts...is moving ahead without significant impact.” Wesley runs one of Army Futures Command's three major subunits, the internal thinktank now known as the Futures & Concepts Center (formerly ARCIC), which brainstorms, wargames, and writes about how conflict will change. Tabletop exercises (TTXs, in Army jargon) can move online. That will include the Futures & Concept Center's annual “capstone exercise” on the Army's concept for future warfare, Multi-Domain Operations, he said. It also included another MDO exercise that had been set to take place in May at the Army War College. Four-Star Orders The May wargame was particularly important because it was the kick-off for a study ordered by the four-star chief of Army Futures Command himself, Gen. John “Mike” Murray, one of Wesley's staff officers told me when I followed up. “We wanted to be able to return to Gen. Murray sooner versus later with initial findings,” Col. Chris Rogers told me, “then continue to experiment throughout the summer and the [fall].” The topic that Murray was so intent on? “It was focused specifically on addressing concerns that Gen. Murray had with calibrated force posture,” Rogers said. In layman's terms, that means what soldiers need to be where, with what equipment, at what time, to handle specific threats. In practice, “calibrated force posture” is a 3-D chess game with a few hundred thousand pieces. You have to figure out what kind of forces need to be forward-deployed on allied territory before a crisis starts, what they should do to deter potential adversaries, what warning you might have of an impending attack, what reinforcements you can send in time, how the adversary can stop those reinforcements, how you can stop the adversary from stopping you, and so on ad infinitum. To start tackling these questions, the plan had been to bring officers and civil servants together from all the Army's “schoolhouses” – the armor and infantry center at Fort Benning, the artillery center at Fort Still, the aviation center at Fort Rucker, and so on – for two weeks at the War College. The scenarios to be examined, focused on a particularly challenging region for military deployments: the vast expanses of the Pacific. Now, this wasn't going to be a wargame in the classic sense, with somber men pushing wooden blocks on big maps or icons battling each other on a big screen. No one can write the rules for a detailed simulation yet because the Army's still brainstorming solutions. Instead, such events are more like highly structured seminars, with teams splitting off to analyze particular aspects of the scenario and reporting back on possible plans, at which point they may get challenged with “well, what if the enemy does this?” But precisely because this wasn't a detailed simulation, the Army didn't need specialized software to run it long-distance – just standard online collaboration tools. (In this case, those tools were provided by DTIC, the Defense Technical Information Center). Rogers described the process as a “guided, threaded discussion.” As he explained it, it sounded a lot like an online discussion board, with moderators posting topics and participants posting replies and replies to replies back and forth. That's actually one of the longest-established applications of the Internet, dating back to the Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that predate the World Wide Web. Modern equivalents are much more sophisticated: You can post graphics like maps and operational diagrams, for instance, which are definitely useful for a military planner. But the systems available to Rogers & co. in May still had definite limits. Limiting Factor The biggest issue? “It's an unclassified network, so there are certain things that we lose,” Rogers told me, like the ranges of specific current and future weapons. The compromise the wargamers made is they'll restrict this first exercise to what's called the “competition phase.” That means everything that happens before – or hopefully instead of — the outbreak of a shooting war — the “conflict phase.” Not simulating actual battles might sound like a major handicap for military planners. But the Army has slowly and painfully come to realize that, while it's really, really good at planning combat operations (what it calls “kinetics”), it really needs to practice the strategic, political and propaganda maneuvering that goes on outside of combat (“non-kinetics”), because you can win every battle and still lose the war. Indeed, from Russia seizing Crimea without a shot to China quietly annexing large portions of the South China Sea, America's adversaries have proven highly capable of accomplishing military objectives without firing a shot. Now, military power still matters in the competition phase: Over all the shadow-boxing there looms the threat of force. But because the competition phase is about deterring war, not waging it, what matters is not the actual capabilities of your weapons, but what the enemy thinks your weapons can do. That, in turn, means you can brainstorm the competition phase in an unclassified discussion, using publicly available information, without ever getting into the classified details of what your weapons could really do when and if the shooting starts. “That's why we felt very comfortable with [changing] from a classified event to an unclassified event, [for] the first iteration,” Rogers told me. Likewise, instead of using classified scenarios depicting potential future crises, he said, they used real crises from recent history, where there's plenty of unclassified information, and then discussed different ways the US could have approached them. At some point, of course, the discussion will have to move on from the competition phase to conflict – from how you calibrate the posture of your forces to how those forces, once postured in the right place, would actually fight. Rogers & co. help to get into those classified details in the next major wargame, scheduled for August. August is after the Pentagon's travel ban expires – at least, in its current form. But given how unpredictable the pandemic has been so far, another extension is entirely possible, Rogers acknowledges, so he and his team are studying alternatives to a face-to-face event. As Lt. Gen. Wesley put it in his town hall: “The real issue is, how long does this last?” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/covid-19-army-futures-command-takes-wargames-online/

• 

  1 mars 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Australia’s C-130J Super Hercules airlifters to get SATCOM upgrade

  By: Mike Yeo Correction: The fuel tanks fitted on the C-130Js are new and not repurposed from the older "H" models, as originally described by the Royal Australian Air Force. MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia is undertaking a series of upgrades to the Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules airlifter, improving connectivity, fuel payload and surveillance capabilities with the addition of new equipment. Working together with industry, the Royal Australian Air Force, or RAAF, has installed a wideband satellite communications system and is planning on fitting Litening pods onto one of its C-130J used as a capability demonstrator aircraft. RAAF is fitting external fuel tanks on its C-130J fleet. Group Capt. Tony Bull, director of capability development and transition at the RAAF's Air Mobility Group, told Defense News at the ongoing Avalon Airshow that these modifications are part of the RAAF's Plan Jericho umbrella, which seeks to transform the service into an integrated and networked 5th-generation Air Force. The SATCOM suite features Honeywell's JetWave Ka-band satellite communications hardware and Inmarsat's Global Xpress satellite network. Since it was fitted onto the Jerich Demonstator C-130J in 2017, the suite has successfully demonstrated its ability to use a number of secure military applications that previous technology couldn't enable due to bandwidth restrictions, including live video streaming and encrypted file transfer. According to Bull, the SATCOM system allows personnel on board to be linked with command elements and forces elsewhere, improving their situational awareness even while in transit and allowing missions to be replanned, to assess the battlefield environment. He said that the SATCOM trials have now proven the concept, and the program has since transitioned into a RAAF minor project with the intention being to eventually fit all of the RAAF's 12 C-130Js with the SATCOM capability. This SATCOM capability has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. Air Force, with personnel from Yokota Airbase in Japan, who also operate the C-130J, saying they were impressed by the capability when they encountered it during their interactions with the RAAF. Bull also added that the plan to fit the Rafael/Northrop-Grumman AN/AAQ-28 Litening pod to the C-130J demonstrator, which was revealed recently, will allow the C-130J to conduct surveillance of a target area. He gave the example of its potential use during disaster relief operation, with the pod being able to provide vision of a target area. Forces could then assess needs from either on board the aircraft, or use the SATCOM to stream video to a command or headquarters element elsewhere, and make decisions based on the situational awareness provided. These capability improvements are meant to enhance the C-130J's primary role as an airlifter, however, and the RAAF has no intention to expand the C-130J's missions into that of a surveillance aircraft, for example. Australia has a number of surplus Litening pods as it starts the withdrawal of its F/A-18A/B Hornet multirole fighters over the next few years. The pods were acquired by Australia in 2008 as part of its program to upgrade its fleet of Hornets. Bull also touched on the installation of external fuel tanks onto the C-130Js, with five sets of external fuel tanks now available for use on the C-130Js. In addition to extending the range of the airlifters, the tanks could also be utilized during the forward arming and refuelling point or FARP operations to offload fuel without having to sacrifice the C-130J's own internal fuel capacity or carry it in its main cabin. This frees up space in the aircraft to carry other cargo. These modifications to the RAAF's C-130Js are being conducted in conjunction with Airbus, which is also responsible for providing through life support for Australia's C-130J fleet. The company, which has supported the fleet since 2009, signed a rolling contract in late 2018 to continue the work for an additional six years through to 2024. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/avalon/2019/02/26/australias-c-130j-super-hercules-airlifters-to-get-satcom-upgrade/