20 avril 2023 | International, Terrestre
The German military will end its Patriot anti defence units in fellow NATO members Slovakia and Poland this year, a spokesperson for the defence ministry was quoted as saying, as Berlin tries to make the best use of its limited military resources.
18 juillet 2023 | International, Autre défense
The United States will announce a new pledge to buy $1.3 billion worth of military aid for Kyiv in its conflict with Russia in the coming days, two U.S. officials said.
13 février 2020 | International, Terrestre
By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a fake city in Mississippi, DARPA is training robots for war. In December 2019, at a camp southeast of Hattiesburg, hundreds of robots gathered to scout an urban environment, and then convert that scouting data into useful information for humans. Conducted at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, the exercise was the third test of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enable Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSET is explicitly about robots assisting humans in fighting in urban areas, with many robots working together at the behents of a small group of infantry to provide greater situational awareness than a human team could achieve on its own. The real-time nature of the information is vital to the vision of OFFSET. It is one thing to operate from existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movement through the space. Dating back to at least 2017, OFFSET is in part an iterative process, with contractors competing for and receiving awards for various ‘sprints,' or narrower short-turnaround developments in coding capabilities. Many of these capabilities involve translating innovations from real-time strategy video games into real life, like dragging-and-dropping groups units to give them commands. For the exercise at Camp Shelby, the swarms involved both ground and flying robots. These machines were tasked with finding specific items of interest located in buildings at Camp Shelby's Combined Arms Collective training Facility. To assist the robots in the field experiment, organized seeded the environment with AprilTags. These tags, which are similar to QR codes but trade complexity of data stored for simplicity and robustness in being read at difference, were used to mark the sites of interest, as well as hazards to avoid. In practical use, hazards seldom if ever arrive with barcodes explicitly labeling themselves as hazards, but for training the AprilTags provide a useful scaffolding while the robots coordinate in other ways. “As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags,” wrote DAPRA, “human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items.” That information is relayed in various ways, from updated live maps on computer screens to floating maps displayed in real time in augmented reality headsets. As foreshadowed by countless works of cyberpunk fiction, these “human swarm tacticians” interfaced with both the real world and a virtual representation of that world at once. Commanding robots to move in real space by manipulating objects in a virtual environment, itself generated by robots exploring and scouting the real space, blurs the distinction between artificial and real environments. That these moves were guided by gesture and haptic feedback only further underscores how deeply linked commanding robots can be to augmented reality. The gesture and haptic feedback command systems were built through sprinter contracts by Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University, with an emphasis on novel interaction for human-swarm teaming. Another development, which would be as at home in the real-time strategy game series Starcraft as it is in a DARPA OFFSET exercise, is the operational management of swarm tactics from Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology. Their developments allowed the swarm to search and map a building on its own, and to automate resource allocation in the process of accomplishing tasks. For now, the heart of the swarm is as a scouting organism built to provide information to human operators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/02/11/darpa-wants-commanding-robots-to-work-like-a-video-game
18 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre
“Replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic," Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger writes in a forthcoming paper. "Our industrial base has shrunk while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity. In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race.” By PAUL MCLEARYon June 17, 2020 at 4:44 PM WASHINGTON: The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. David Berger, dismisses current Marine and Navy plans for amphibious ships as “obsolete,” and worries that in any conflict, China could replace damaged ships faster than the US in a draft operating concept obtained by Breaking Defense. The warnings are the latest in a campaign waged by the reform-minded Berger to overhaul how the Marine Corps trains and equips to meet the challenges of China and other advanced nations, while working more closely with the other armed services and allies around the globe. In the sharply-worded 22-page document, Berger rejects war plans anticipating a Cold War-style confrontation in which huge ships can creep close to shore free from the threat of precision-guided munitions being launched from batteries deep inland. He calls the current configuration of amphibious ships “the most obvious manifestation of this obsolete paradigm” in a draft document obtained by Breaking Defense. In an unsigned draft of the unreleased report, “Naval Campaigning: The 2020 Marine Corps Capstone Operating Concept,” Berger underlines the need for new thinking about how the Marine Corps and Navy will fight an advanced Chinese military that can control islands, coastlines, and vast swaths of the sea with aircraft carriers, a swelling blue ocean fleet and long-distance precision munitions. The old way of thinking “is also exemplified by our current amphibious warships and maritime prepositioning ships, which are large and built for deployment efficiency rather than warfighting effectiveness,” he writes. “These superb, multipurpose ships are extremely expensive—meaning we've never had the desired number.” Berger also raises significant concerns about the United States' ability to replace any combat losses, even in a short, sharp conflict. “Replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic, inasmuch as our industrial base has shrunk, while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity. In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race—reversing the advantage we had in World War II when we last fought a peer competitor.” The stark admission comes as the Navy's shipyards struggle under the disruptions caused by COVID-19, leading the service to order an emergency call up over 1,600 Reservists to fill labor shortages to do repair work on aircraft carriers and submarines in a desperate effort to get them back out to sea as soon as possible. Berger takes care not to blame the Navy for building expensive, relatively slow amphibious ships to carry Marines across the globe. “These issues should not be construed as a criticism of our Navy partners who built the fleet—to include the types of amphibious warfare and maritime prepositioning ships the Marine Corps asked for—that was appropriate to the security era within the constraints of finite resources.” But that era is now over the Corps wants to build a more dynamic “inside force” of smaller ships that can operate within range of Chinese and Russian weapons and pack a potent offensive punch while offering more and smaller targets than the current amphibious fleet. But these small ships won't replace their bigger cousins — they'll come in addition to them, creating new issues for both Navy budgets and the limited number of shipbuilders who can produce hulls for the sea service. The ships will also need ports to call home. “One can think of basing forces and lots of smaller vessels in theater, but this raises the issue of where to put everything and doesn't seem to be a ready solution that replaces divestiture of large ships,” said Dakota Wood, senior research fellow for defense programs at The Heritage Foundation. In recent weeks, the Navy met with shipbuilders to talk about plans for a new class of logistics ship that can operate under fire and resupply Marines deep within the range of enemy precision weapons. The Next Generation Medium Logistics Ship would resupply both ships at sea, as well as small, ad hoc bases ashore. The ship fits within plans Berger has made to stand up several Marine Littoral Regiments designed to move fast and have their own integrated anti-air and possibly anti-ship weapons. The Corps and Navy are also looking to buy as many as 30 Light Amphibious Warships in coming years, which would be much smaller than the current amphibious ships. The draft document doesn't include any those specifics. But Berger has already done that work in previous statements and documents, where he outlined plans: to rethink the role that large amphibious ships play in future; divest of M1 Abrams tanks; cut artillery units; slash helicopter squadrons; and reassess the role F-35s might play in future operations. Berger has admitted he realizes he needs to undertake this transition within existing budgets, leading him to call for cutting tanks, helicopters, and even some end strength. But for the Navy, Wood said, “I think much of this will be added cost because it must maintain current capabilities (types of ships) while developing new capabilities. It does not have the luxury of getting rid of current before new replacements are ready.” A significant omission in all of these plans is the absence of a larger, coherent naval strategy. The 30-year shipbuilding plan, due to Congress in February, continues to be missing in action. A major Navy force structure review was rejected by Defense Secretary Mark Esper earlier this year. The force structure review, currently being taken apart by Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist, is expected this fall. The Navy's plans are in such a fluid state that Vice Adm. Stuart Munsch, head of the service's Warfighting Development office, cited Chinese attention as a reason to decline to give a progress report in a call with reporters earlier this month. “I'm not going to divulge our intentions,” he said. “I'm very conscious that, if I say anything public, I'm an authoritative source and the Chinese will key on what I say, and likewise any kind of public-facing document that we put out as well.” Pressed to explain what the Navy's strategy for operating in a world with competing great powers looks like, Munsch said, “I'm not sure how you would see that keeping our intentions for warfighting classified is something you would want as an American citizen.” While Berger continues to push out papers and strategies for pushing the Marines into the future, the Navy, which will provide much of the lift he needs, is still at the drawing board. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/06/in-war-chinese-shipyards-can-outpace-us-in-replacing-losses