9 décembre 2019 | International, Naval
By: Christina Mackenzie
PARIS — France has ordered six 70-meter-long (230-feet-long) offshore patrol vessels from Socarenam, a shipyard in Boulogne-sur-Mer on the country's northern coast, to patrol its vast economic exclusive zone.
The announcement was made earlier this week by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Maritime Economy Congress in Montpellier, southern France. These kinds of announcements are usually either made by the minister for the armed forces or by the DGA procurement agency.
Following the president's announcement, the Armed Forces Ministry said in a statement that the ships had been ordered “in a context of increasing threats to our fishing resources, biodiversity and international maritime rules."
"France intends to fully exercise her sovereignty and responsibilities both in her metropolitan and overseas territories,” the statement continued. France has the largest economic exclusive zone in the world, at about 4,514,000 square miles. By comparison, the United States's EEZ comes in at about 4,383,000 square miles.
Each vessel's draft is no more than 3.8 meters, has a maximum speed of at least 22 knots that it can hold for 24 hours but with a normal cruising speed of between 12 to 14 knots, and has a range of 5,500 nautical miles. This enables the ships to stay at sea for a month.
French media reports the ships are likely to carry a 20mm remotely controlled gun and machine guns, but no official weapons specifications have been published. The tender and the technical specifications, issued by the DGA in 2018, called for the ships to be able to deploy a 700-kilogram-class rotor-blade drone, and to be able to keep it under cover. The tender also said the ships should be able to deploy divers and two high-speed intervention boats, as well as keep six prisoners secure.
The ships will be delivered to the French Navy between 2022 and 2025. That time frame is two years ahead of the schedule laid out in the 2019-2025 Military Program Law. The value of the order has not been disclosed.
“I have decided, as is specified in the Military Program Law, to further strengthen the protection of our maritime spaces. The order for six new overseas patrol boats was officially launched last week by the armed forces minister,” Macron said. “With these ships we will acquire a capacity that we have never yet had on the maritime front to protect our spaces and take on this mantle as a balance of power in the maritime sector.”
“We are building a European maritime capacity,” he added, noting that he assumed “responsibility for France taking the leadership.”
The ships, known in France as POM (patrouilleur outre-mer), will be based in France's Pacific Ocean territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia, and the French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, Réunion. Some of the ships will join the Pacific fleet at the Nouméa naval base in New Caledonia and at Fare Ute Papeete in Tahiti. Others will join the Indian Ocean fleet at Port Réunion.
A naval spokesperson told Defense News that the exact destination for each ship had not yet been officially announced.
The order for these six ships is a continuation of a program to bolster France's protection of its maritime regions. Three patrol vessels were delivered between 2016 and October 2019 to the Caribbean region and Guyana on South America's northeastern coast. The three vessels were also built by Socarenam, which has sites in Calais, Dunkirk, Étaples and Saint-Malo.
1 avril 2021 | International, Terrestre
Strategic relations between the US and UAE remain clear and stable. “We may sometimes disagree, but the UAE will not yield to any decision that contradicts its vision and plans,” retired Staff Maj. Gen. Abdullah A.Al Hashmi told me in an interview. “We have our own plans and strategies, and the US is interested in preserving the relations with the Gulf states.”
5 août 2021 | International, Aérospatial
U.S.A.F. to Upgrade Two-decade-old Modified F-16 to Support Automomous Testing
19 novembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
By: Sebastian Sprenger BERLIN — The U.S. Air Force is taking its time to settle on a next-generation fighter design, awaiting instead lessons learned from the F-35 jet and playing the field with promising technologies, according to a senior service official. Options being kicked around are still in the conceptual stage, as America's newest fighter, the fifth-generation F-35, is only now “coming off the line,” according to Lt. Gen. David Nahom, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for plans and programs. “We're not in a hurry,” Nahom told Defense News on the sidelines of the International Fighter Conference, an air power-themed confab of industry and government officials held in Berlin, Germany. He noted that expected deliveries of the F-35 and the relatively young age of the F-22 fleet enables the service to be picky about moving forward with the envisioned Next Generation Air Dominance weapon. In short, the Air Force wants to keep its options open for as long as possible for a weapon whose combat punch will lie not in a single aircraft but rather in the amalgamation of hardware and software, an airborne concerto of data clouds, artificial intelligence, and boundless interconnectivity. “We don't want to get too stuck into a platform,” Nahom said. “It's a very different way to approach it.” Still, the service plans to lay the groundwork for boosting the domain of information and data — organizing it, analyzing it, sharing it — as a key element for future aerial warfare. To that end, officials will include a “significant investment in the digital backbone” in the next budget request, Nahom said. As the Air Force studies its options, service analysts have shied away from the term “sixth-generation” aircraft as a successor to the F-35 because it's unclear what breakthrough technology will be created next. “What are the characteristics of sixth-generation? I don't know,” Nahom said. “Stealth is important,” he added, referring to one of the advertised features of the F-35. “But speed is important, too.” The service aims to develop a new capability quickly once the theoretical legwork is done. That is why there is a renewed emphasis now on engineering processes and algorithm development that Nahom said will have to unfold much faster than under previous aircraft programs. Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper has put down a marker to develop an aircraft within five years. “Based on what industry thinks they can do and what my team will tell me, we will need to set a cadence of how fast we think we build a new airplane from scratch. Right now, my estimate is five years. I may be wrong,” he told Defense News in an interview in September. The service's information-heavy tack on future aerial warfare echoes two European projects aimed at building a next-generation weapon: the British-led Tempest and the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System. Both programs also lean on the the premise that data clouds, driven by artificial intelligence, can turn flying pieces of metal into breakthrough weaponry. In the case of the continental program, an envisioned “combat cloud” will be “the ocean between the islands of the platforms,” French Maj. Gen. Jean-Pascal Breton said at the conference. But Nahom noted a difference in the American way of thinking when it comes to piercing contested airspace — a key skill required of all future warplanes. While the Europeans seem to perceive the task as popping dispersed bubbles of ever-improving air defense systems, the U.S. view is that any airspace may be contested at any given time. That means a next-generation aircraft will be constantly engaged in the mission of punching its way through enemy defenses, like finding the holes in a never-ending series of Swiss cheese, Nahom said. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/11/18/the-us-air-force-is-in-no-hurry-to-commit-to-a-next-gen-fighter-design/