French military eyes tech solutions to deal with climate change

Sur le même sujet

• 

  29 juillet 2020 | International, C4ISR

  How COVID-19 affected the Army’s plan for testing new network tools

  Andrew Eversden The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the Army's plans for testing upgrades to its network, according to two top Army generals working on the project. The pandemic has meant fewer soldiers have availability to perform operational testing for new network equipment, known as Capability Set '21. Units are either not training or have implemented safety measures such as social distancing or personal protective equipment. “The COVID-19 has had an impact on our cycle of testing, our access to units, and it's caused us to make some adjustments in our in our time schedule, as we've been trying to take care of the health and safety of our soldiers and our workforce, but still keep our modernization efforts on track,” said Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, director of the network cross-functional team for Army Futures Command, at a C4ISRNET event in May. The Army had to change plans for soldier experiments that were going to play important roles in informing the allocation of new devices across the brigades. “We had to really start with what were we going to learn specifically from those soldier experiments and how are we going to use that information to help make procurement decisions,” said then-Maj. Gen. David Bassett and former leader of Army Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical at the C4ISRNET conference. Bassett has since been promoted to lieutenant general and now leads the Defense Contract Management Agency. He added, “And so in most cases, we weren't really using that to decide whether we were going to buy something or not. [It was] more about the density and the way things were integrated.” Bassett also said that while the Army did lose out on some field testing, the service had already collected sufficient data in labs that could help “inform some of our decision-making.” He also said that the network modernization team was prepared to make adjustments to equipment because of the challenges associated with coronavirus. “We're looking really hard at and when the next opportunities are going to be available to us to get that detailed operational feedback from soldiers either in a training environment or a test environment,” Bassett said. The coronavirus pandemic “hasn't limited” the Army's ability to move forward on procurement decisions because of the large amounts of data it collected in testing for Capability Set '21. “I think the risk of making those procurement decisions at this stage has been exceedingly low. And something that I think is a reasonable balance of risk and rigor and agility,” Bassett said. The testing program was also disrupted at the beginning of the year when the 82nd Airborne Division, a primary partner for testing capabilities, was deployed to the Middle East. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/07/28/how-covid-19-affected-the-armys-plan-for-testing-new-network-tools/

• 

  4 novembre 2021 | International, Aérospatial

  National Reconnaissance Office wants satellite imagery from commercial providers

  A new request for proposals will govern the agency's new commercial imagery contracts.

• 

  1 mars 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  The US Air Force doesn’t want F-15X. But it needs more fighter jets

  By: Valerie Insinna ORLANDO, Fla. — The U.S. Air Force wants more fighters. But it didn't necessarily want the F-15X, and it didn't intend to buy any in the upcoming fiscal 2020 budget, its top two leaders confirmed Thursday. “Our budget proposal that we initially submitted did not include additional fourth-generation aircraft,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters during a Feb. 28 roundtable at the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium. Wilson's comments confirm reporting by Defense News and other outlets who have reported that the decision to buy new F-15X aircraft was essentially forced upon the Air Force. According to sources, the Pentagon's Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office was a key backer of the F-15X and was able to garner the support of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Asked by one reporter, point blank, whether the Air Force wanted new F-15s, Wilson and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein danced around the question. “We want to buy new airplanes,” Goldfein said. “We want to buy 72 aircraft a year,” Wilson added. Air Force leadership has confirmed that, as long as current budget plans don't change, it will request money for new F-15s in FY20. The service plans to purchase eight F-15X planes from Boeing in FY20, with an expected total buy of about 80 jets, Bloomberg reported Feb. 19. It's normal for the Pentagon to be intimately involved with each service's portion of the budget — and even to overrule service leadership and move funding around to better support the White House's aims — something that Wilson herself alluded to in her comments. “The Air Force and each of the services put in their budget proposals, given the top line that we've been allocated, and then there are further discussions that include the potential for some additional funds throughout that process,” she said. “It's not something that is an Air Force decision. Ultimately it's a Defense Department budget, and it goes into an overall presidential budget.” However, the potential F-15X buy has received increased scrutiny for a number of reasons. For one, Wilson has been vocal in dismissing reports that the Air Force had been considering purchasing an upgraded F-15. “We are currently 80 percent fourth-gen aircraft and 20 percent fifth-generation aircraft,” she told Defense News in September. "In any of the fights that we have been asked to plan for, more fifth-gen aircraft make a huge difference, and we think that getting to 50-50 means not buying new fourth-gen aircraft, it means continuing to increase the fifth generation.” Additionally, when Bloomberg broke the news that the Air Force would buy new F-15Xs in December, it reported that the decision was pushed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who has since become acting defense secretary. Shanahan's spokesman has rebutted those reports, stating that “any DoD programmatic decisions impacting Boeing were neither made nor influenced by Mr. Shanahan.” One official alluded to sustainment costs as being a critical factor in the decision to buy the F-15X over additional F-35 fighter jets. Boeing has not disclosed its proposed F-15X unit price, with numbers from $100 million to less than $80 million having been reported by various outlets. Gen. Mike Holmes, head of Air Combat Command, declined to comment on the cost per plane in a later roundtable, but said that some of the value of the F-15X proposal lays in the total ownership cost of the plane, especially when taking into account the expense of sustaining the F-35. “There's more to think about than just the acquisition cost. There's the cost to operate the airplane over time. There's the cost to transition at the installations where the airplanes are — does it require new military construction, does it require extensive retraining of the people and then how long does it take?” he said. “We're pretty confident to say that we can go cheaper getting 72 airplanes with a mix of fifth and fourth gen than we did if we did all fifth gen.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/air-warfare-symposium/2019/02/28/the-air-force-doesnt-want-f-15x-but-it-needs-more-fighter-jets/