How high-speed drone racing could aid struggling Air Force recruitment

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  9 novembre 2018 | International, Naval

  Navy Creating Attack Sub Aggressor Unit to Train to Fight Against Russia, China

  By: Megan Eckstein ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Navy submarine force is creating an aggressor squadron as one initiative to ensure all subs are combat-ready as the service trains to take on China and Russia, the commander of Naval Submarine Forces said on Wednesday. Vice Adm. Charles Richard, who took command in August, drew attention during the change of command ceremony by telling the force to “prepare for battle.” He has backed up those words with actions in the months since, moving ahead with a plan – updated in March to reflect the National Defense Strategy – that includes refocusing training and certification on combat and developing new tools and concepts to support high-end warfighting. The plan – called the Commander's Intent for the United States Submarine Force and Supporting Organizations – led to an overhaul of training for the attack submarine force, Richard said today while addressing the Naval Submarine League at its annual conference. “We have restructured and retuned the fast attack training period to ensure that we're ready for that high-end fight, including restructuring what we used to call the Tactical Readiness Evaluation, and it is now a Combat Readiness Evaluation to ensure we're focused on warfighting,” he said. “We've updated the deployment certification process to eliminate duplication, put the right focus in the right place. I'll tell you that I am driving to put competition in everything we do inside the submarine force. I want to produce winners and losers just like we do in battle; it does you no good to be at standards if your opponent is more at standards than you are. You still lose, and in this competition, you may not come home.” The new aggressor squadron fits in with the desire to create more high-end sub-on-sub competitions and ensure the Navy is ready to win. Richard said the plan mimics what the naval aviation community has at “Top Gun.” Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Sarah Self-Kyler told USNI News at the event that, unlike Top Gun, the squadron won't have its own submarines dedicated to training the squadron and fighting other submarines in training events. Instead, the squadron will include a yet-to-be-determined number of personnel – which Richard said would include active and reserve sailors and civilians – and that personnel would get to work with submarines and sub crews as allowed by operational and training schedules. Richard, calling the new group “a cadre that does nothing but emulate red in all of our training and certification exercises, said “we're taking a page from naval aviation and we're establishing an aggressor squadron with a team that will become experts in employing our adversaries' potential capabilities and then set them up to be able to go head-to-head with our units so that we're always training against what we think is the highest fidelity simulation I can give them in terms of what they might be able to expect when they go into combat.” The Commander's Intent plan also outlines an Undersea Rapid Capability Initiatives (URCI) program that Richard said not only delivers “stuff” but also concepts of operations, tactics, maintenance strategies and more. “I can't go into a lot of detail given the nature of the work – it is classified – but I am able to tell you that we are working on 26 major future projects, including the Navy's number-one priority of strategic deterrence; 13 URCIs; 11 operational initiatives; and a series of advanced workshops and military exercises designed to expand our capabilities in the undersea domain. We are pursuing next-generation weapons, multi-domain sensors, comms systems, navigation aids, and unmanned and autonomous technologies. In some cases, these capabilities are revolutionary and will inform future programs of record.” Full article: https://news.usni.org/2018/11/08/submarine-forces-china-russia

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  26 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  USAF Launches Effort To Speed Up Commercial EVTOL Market

  Graham Warwick The U.S. Air Force has detailed its plans to accelerate the emerging advanced air mobility market, and potentially become an early adopter of electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) vehicles, but is making clear it does not intend to set requirements or fund development. Instead, the service wants to help developers along the way to commercial certification and volume production by providing testing resources and possibly enabling a near-term government public-use market for their vehicles in advance of FAA certification. The Air Force's Agility Prime program office published its “innovative capabilities opening” (ICO) on Feb. 25, establishing a contracting framework for prototyping projects designed to show whether, as their developers claim, eVTOL vehicles can revolutionize mobility, particularly logistics. Under the ICO framework, which will remain open until Feb. 28, 2025, the service plans to release a series of solicitations for different “areas of interest” (AOI). The first of these—AOI #1, or the “Air Race to Certification”—was also released on Feb. 25. Other AOIs could range from autonomy to manufacturing. Under AOI #1, the Air Force office plans to issue contracts to produce test reports that will substantiate company claims for their eVTOL vehicles. Based on a test report, the service could proceed to the next step, potentially an early procurement, says Col. Nathan Diller, Agility Prime integrated product team lead. “They can leverage that test report to get military certification that would allow near-term government use cases that would accelerate commercial certification, potentially providing revenue and data that accelerates the broader adoption of the technology,” he says. The Air Force has not established explicit requirements for an eVTOL. Instead, it has launched studies into potential missions in which commercial vehicles—both passenger-carrying and larger unmanned aircraft—could be used. These could include distributed logistics, medevac, firefighting, search-and-rescue, disaster relief and facility security. The Air Force is aiming for an initial operating capability (IOC) in fiscal 2023 with a “handful-plus” of vehicles in a squadron. “We have begun a series of studies to look at the business case associated with these different missions, and we have started looking at some basic constructs for what these units [operating the aircraft] might look like,” Diller says. “They may be very different units to what we are doing now.” To qualify under the first AOI, companies must have flown their vehicles by Dec. 17, 2020. Diller says some eVTOL developers are ready to submit test reports and move on to the next step, while others will take longer. “That gives us a year to see which companies are ready, but we feel we are in a position to award contracts quickly.” Agility Prime was provided with $10 million in funding in fiscal 2019 and $25 million in 2020. This is not money requested in the Air Force's fiscal 2021 budget, but Diller says there is a “strong desire and intent to fund” the program in fiscal 2022 and future years to get to an IOC in fiscal 2023. The AOI calls for vehicles that can carry three to eight people, with a range greater than 200 mi., speed faster than 100 mph and endurance of more than 60 min. As well as passenger-carrying eVTOLs, Diller says Agility Prime is looking at unmanned cargo aircraft heavier than 1,320 lb. because the other services are focusing below that weight. The Agility Prime ICO is structured to encourage participation by smaller companies and nontraditional defense contractors, but not exclude traditional Pentagon suppliers that are innovating, he says. Bidders are required to cover at least a third of the cost of the prototype project themselves. The objective of Agility Prime is to “catalyze the commercial market by bringing our military market to bear,” Air Force acquisition chief Will Roper said at a roundtable on Feb. 21. “It's equally important to make sure that commercial market catalyzes first in the U.S.,” he added. “That's equally as important as providing the capability to the warfighter. What we don't want to happen is what happened with the small drone migration to China,” he said. “It was a commercial technology, the Pentagon didn't take a proactive stance on it, and now most of that supply chain has moved to China.” U.S. government agencies have banned the use of Chinese-made drones, citing security concerns. “If we had realized that commercial trend and shown that the Pentagon is willing to pay a higher price for a trusted supply-chain drone, we probably could have kept part of the market here and not had to go through the security issues we have now,” he said. “Agility Prime is saying we are not going to let that happen again,” Roper said. Diller says the Air Force is not imposing military requirements on eVTOL developers because it wants to benefit from the low acquisition and operating costs and potentially high production volumes that could come out of the commercial market. “Since we are not putting research and development money in this, we are going to fall into accordance with what the industry partners want to do,” he says. “Our intent is that any testing they do with us will be something that takes them along the path to commercial certification and is not diverting them.” If the Air Force were to set requirements and fund development, “we would feel we are putting at risk a very large market that would allow us to eventually capitalize on that affordable quantity based on potential mass production at an automobile rate,” he says. https://aviationweek.com/shows-events/air-warfare-symposium/usaf-launches-effort-speed-commercial-evtol-market

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  3 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Will the F-35 beat out ‘the usual suspects’ in Singapore’s search for F-16 replacement?

  By: Mike Yeo MELBOURNE, Australia ― Singapore will decide in the next few months on a new fighter to replace its fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16 multirole fighters, with the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter from the same manufacturer seen as the prime candidate. In an interview with media ahead of the southeast Asian island nation's Armed Forces Day, Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen said that despite ongoing upgrades, the F-16s face obsolescence beyond 2030. He added the country will make a definitive decision on its replacement in the next few months based on interoperability with Singapore's current systems and platforms as well as the price. Ng refused to be drawn into further details as to which fighter platforms Singapore is looking at, only saying that the BAE Systems Typhoon, the F-35, Russia's Sukhois, and Chinese-made stealth fighters are “the usual suspects that you have to look at” when air forces are choosing a new combat platform. However, Singapore has been evaluating the F-35 since 2013 and Ng had previously suggested that the type was suited to be the replacement for Singapore's F-16s. Earlier reports suggested Singapore is keen on acquiring the F-35B short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing variant, with the B-model's STOVL capability seen as useful for Singapore, whose main island has an area of a mere 277 square miles and whose air bases are seen as vulnerable to a first strike. Nevertheless, former head of the F-35 program Christopher Bogdan, said Singapore requested information on all three variants of the F-35, and the possibility of Singapore opting for the conventional takeoff and landing F-35A variant cannot be ruled out. Singapore is a security cooperative participant of the F-35 program and is believed to have an eventual requirement of between 40 and 60 new fighters to replace its F-16s. The Republic of Singapore Air Force, or RSAF, currently operates a fleet of 60 F-16C/D Block 52 and Advanced Block 52 aircraft delivered between 1998 and 2005. Twelve aircraft are currently assigned to a joint continuation training unit between the U.S. and Singapore air forces at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, while the remaining are split between three Singapore-based squadrons. Singapore's F-16s are currently being upgraded by Lockheed Martin with the upgrade program, which started in 2016 and is expected to be completed in 2022, including the addition of Northrop Grumman's AN/APG-83 active electronically scanned array radar, an improved identification, friend or foe system, as well as Link 16 data links. During the interview, Ng also outlined some of the other upcoming procurement programs Singapore is looking at. These include new multirole combat vessels to replace six corvettes and new joint multimission ships to replace four amphibious ships in Singapore's Navy, while the Army will replace its towed 155mm howitzers with a new self-propelled high-mobility artillery system in the 2020s. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2018/07/02/will-the-f-35-beat-out-the-usual-suspects-in-singapores-search-for-f-16-replacement/