5 octobre 2023 | International, Naval
Can the US Navy save money by accepting the LCS as a sunk cost?
Decommissioning these ships early amounts to a loss of almost $7 billion based on analysis by Defense News.
26 juin 2018 | International, Naval
Future US Navy weapons will need lots of power. That’s a huge engineering challenge.
WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Navy is convinced that the next generation of ships will need to integrate lasers, electromagnetic rail guns and other power-hungry weapons and sensors to take on peer competitors in the coming decades.
However, integrating futuristic technologies onto existing platforms, even on some of the newer ships with plenty of excess power capacity, will still be an incredibly difficult engineering challenge, experts say.
Capt. Mark Vandroff, the current commanding officer of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the former Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program manager who worked on the DDG Flight III, told the audience at last week's American Society of Naval Engineers symposium that adding extra electric-power capacity in ships currently in design was a good idea, but that the weapons and systems of tomorrow will pose a significant challenge to naval engineers when it comes time to back-fit them to existing platforms.
“Electrical architecture on ships is hard,” Vandroff said.
Vandroff considered adding a several-megawatt system to a ship with plenty of power to spare, comparing it with simultaneously turning on everything in a house.
“When you turn everything on in your house that you can think of, you don't make a significant change to the load for [the power company],” Vandroff explained. “On a ship, if you have single loads that are [a] major part of the ship's total load, [it can be a challenge]. This is something we had to look at for DDG Flight III where the air and missile defense radar was going to be a major percentage of the total electric load ― greater than anything that we had experienced in the previous ships in the class. That's a real technical challenge.
“We worked long and hard at that in order to get ourselves to a place with Flight III where we were confident that when you turned things on and off the way you wanted to in combat, you weren't going to light any of your switchboards on fire. That was not a back-of-the-envelope problem, that was a lot of folks in the Navy technical community ... doing a lot of work to make sure we could get to that place, and eventually we did.”
In order to get AMDR, or SPY-6, installed on the DDG design, Vandroff and the team at the DDG-51 program had to redesign nearly half the ship — about 45 percent all told. Even on ships with the extra electric-power capacity, major modifications might be necessary, he warned.
“We're going to say that in the future we are going to be flexible, we are going to have a lot of extra power,” Vandroff said. “That will not automatically solve the problem going forward. If you have a big enough load that comes along for a war-fighting application or any other application you might want, it is going to take technical work and potential future modification in order to get there.”
Even the powerhouse Zumwalt class will struggle with new systems that take up a large percentage of the ship's power load, Vandroff said.
“Take DDG-1000 ― potentially has 80-odd megawatts of power. If you have a 5- or 6-megawatt load that goes on or off, that is a big enough percentage of total load that it's going to be accounted for. Electrical architecture in the future is still an area that is going to require a lot of effort and a lot of tailoring, whatever your platform is, to accommodate those large loads,” he said.
In 2016, when the Navy was planning to install a rail gun on an expeditionary fast transport vessel as a demonstration, service officials viewed the electric-power puzzle as the reason the service has not moved more aggressively to field rail gun on the Zumwalt class.
Then-director of surface warfare Rear Adm. Pete Fanta told Defense News that he wanted to move ahead with a rail gun demonstration on the JHSV because of issues with the load.
“I would rather get an operational unit out there faster than do a demonstration that just does a demonstration,” Fanta said, “primarily because it will slow the engineering work that I have to do to get that power transference that I need to get multiple repeatable shots that I can now install in a ship.”
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21 octobre 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense
Lockheed sees earnings growth in space business
Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Space emerged as Lockheed Martin's business area with the highest growth, driven by hypersonic weapons programs and an anticipated next-generation interceptor award, CEO James Taiclet said Tuesday on the company's third-quarter earnings call. Though F-35 fighter jet deliveries and classified programs drove growth in Lockheed's aeronautics segment, and demand for Hellfire missiles drove the missiles and fire control segment, low single-digit increases were largely Lockheed's norm for the quarter. “When we speak of hypersonics, I think there's a very big upside there because there's a very big threat. It's getting worse out of Russia and China, and the U.S. and its allies are going to have to meet it both on offensive and defensive hypersonic systems,” Taiclet said, adding that classified space systems are a “wide-open field.” Taiclet also said he expects the government will work with industry to counter emerging kinetic and non-kinetic threats to space assets, ground stations and the links between them. He pointed to the Space Development Agency's selection of Lockheed, which is one of the firms building its “transport layer” — a low-Earth orbit constellation of satellites that can transfer data globally through optical intersatellite links. Taiclet touted the satellite constellation's eventual ability to transmit data at high speeds to aircraft, ground troops, and surface and undersea vessels as synergistic with Lockheed's push into 5G networking, which Taiclet calls “5G.mil.” A telecom executive before he joined Lockheed in June, Taiclet speculated that the company's toehold will give it an advantage as competition in this business area heats up. SDA Director Derek Tournear previously stated that the transport layer will be the space component of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, a Pentagon effort to connect any sensor to any shooter across domains and services. The effort now has a “C” at the beginning — CJADC2 — for “Combined.” Lockheed reported Tuesday that its space segment's net sales in the third quarter of 2020 increased $163 million, or 6 percent, compared to the same period in 2019. The segment earned $90 million for government satellite programs due to higher volume (primarily Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared satellites), and about $60 million for strategic and missile defense programs due to higher volume (primarily hypersonic development programs). Space's operating profit in the third quarter of 2020 decreased $61 million, or 20 percent, compared to the same period in 2019. There was a decrease there of $50 million due to lower equity earnings from the corporation's investment in United Launch Alliance ― a joint venture with Boeing. Lockheed announced last week it will partner with Aerojet Rocketdyne to compete for the Next Generation Interceptor program, which is run by the Missile Defense Agency. The MDA plans to downselect to two companies, with an eventual winner expected to have a system ready in 2028. On Tuesday's call, Taiclet said Lockheed's acquisition of Integration Innovation Inc.'s hypersonics portfolio this month was to provide a new capability in thermal management for hypersonic glide bodies. The deal with i3 of Huntsville, Alabama, was part of a broader mergers and acquisition strategy, that includes joint ventures and commercial partnerships, to add to the company's “technological firepower” in areas like mission systems, he said. “We plan to be active, but we plan to be very, very prudent,” he noted. It was disclosed last week that the Pentagon's nascent hypersonic missile, during a March 19 test in Hawaii, hit within 6 inches of its target. The Army is developing a ground-launched capability and plans to field a battery-sized hypersonic weapon to soldiers by 2023. Lockheed executives were upbeat about space launch. Under a recent Pentagon award, potentially worth billions of dollars, to launch national security payloads over the next five years, ULA will receive 60 percent of the contracts and SpaceX will get 40 percent. Asked Tuesday about competition between ULA and SpaceX, Lockheed Chief Financial Officer Ken Possenriede acknowledged SpaceX as “more than an emerging threat right now.” “Of the recent competitions we've had with them, we've been pleased with where ULA landed relative to SpaceX,” Possenriede said. “We also think we now have a price point that is compelling to customers that will allow ULA to get its fair share of awards over SpaceX.” https://www.defensenews.com/2020/10/20/lockheed-sees-earnings-growth-in-space-business/
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7 décembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Les atouts des Rafale Marine pour l'opération Chammal
Le Dassault Rafale Marine déploiera la GBU-16 de 500kg à l'occasion de ce cinquième mandat de l'opération Chammal. CINQUIEME MANDAT Dans un mois et demi, le groupe aérien embarqué du porte-avions Charles-de-Gaulle sera à nouveau mobilisé au profit de l'opération Chammal, offrant une capacité appréciable, avec une vingtaine d'avions de combat Dassault Rafale Marine (quatre fois plus que d'habitude sur la base H5 avec l'Armée de l'Air et de l'Espace, (AAE) et E-2C Hawkeye. Ces Rafale Marine assurent le cinquième mandat sur place depuis 2014 : quatre ont été menés depuis le Charles de Gaulle et le cinquième à terre, durant l'arrêt technique majeur du porte-avions. Bombe GBU Cette fois, les chasseurs embarqués vont déployer une série d'atouts nouveaux. Ce sera le cas dans le domaine munitionnaire, ils pourront emporter la bombe GBU-16 de 500 kg offrant ainsi un spectre plus large qu'avant, à base de 250 kg (GBU-12, AASM) ou 1000 kg (GBU-24). Cette avancée est symptomatique du travail permanent de la chasse embarquée pour trouver les munitions les plus adaptées aux réalités opérationnelles. Rappelons que ses SEM avaient, en leur temps, déployé la GBU-49 sur le thé'tre afghan avant qu'elle n'apparaisse sur Mirage 2000D. De même, les ATL-2 disposent des GBU-12, GBU-51, GBU-58. Ciblage pour le missile MBDA Meteor Les Rafale Marine vont aussi pour la première fois déployer la nacelle de ciblage Talios le missile air-air à longue portée Meteor. L'AAE, qui vient de déployer ses premiers Rafale F3R en Jordanie, doit aussi, a priori avant la Marine, mettre en service le Talios sur ce thé'tre irako-syrien. Le Meteor de MBDA est, évidemment, dans le contexte troublé de la Méditerranée orientale, un game changer que les pays alliés pourront voir de près, notamment les Grecs, futurs clients du Rafale. https://www.air-cosmos.com/article/les-atouts-des-rafale-marine-pour-lopration-chammal-23945