Israelis Worry About CH-53K King Stallion Engines

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  18 septembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Hypersonic weapons could give the B-1 bomber a new lease on life

  By: Aaron Mehta NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — It's been a rough stretch for the U.S. Air Force's fleet of 62 B-1B Lancer bombers, with a pair of fleet shutdowns over safety concerns and the confirmation of plans to start retiring the plane as the new B-21 comes online, even as the much older B-52 remains in service. But speaking at the Air Force Association's annual conference Monday, Gen. Timothy Ray, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, seemed to throw his support behind keeping the B-1 around for quite some time. In fact, in Ray's mind, the B-1′s capabilities might expand. Several times throughout the speech, Ray emphasized that while the B-21 is slowly spinning up, he can't afford to lose any capability. Indeed, Ray seemed to posture toward keeping the B-1 over the long term, according to John Venable, a senior defense fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former F-16 command pilot. “One of the major takeaways [from the speech] is that the B-1 is not going to go away nearly as soon as people thought,” Venable said, “and that's a good thing.” Under the Air Force's stated goal of 386 squadrons, the service's force mix requirement is about 225 bombers. The service currently has 156, Ray said, and even with the B-21 coming online sometime in the 2020s, planned retirements to the B-1 and B-2 would keep the bomber force under 200. Ray's belief in the B-1 spans from two broad assessments. First, freed from the heavy workload of B-1s performing regular close-air support activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fleet will experience less wear and tear, and hence survive longer than projected. “We're just flying the airplane in a way we shouldn't have been flying it, and we did for far too long. The good news is we're resetting that entire team,” Ray said. “What we thought was a very sizable load of structural issues” ended up being a “fraction” of issues to deal with, he added. Those structural issues have become particularly visible in the last 16 months, with the entire B-1 fleet grounded twice for mechanical issues. In June 2018, the fleet was grounded for two weeks following the discovery of an issue with the Lancer's ejection seat; in March 2019, another ejection seat issue grounded the fleet for almost a month. Members of Congress have since expressed serious concerns about the B-1's readiness rates, a number that was just more than 50 percent in 2018. Ray expressed optimism about the mechanical issues, saying that any fallout from the ejection seat shutdowns will be completed by the end of October, which is “must faster” than the service predicted. The second reason Ray believes there's still life in the B-1? The idea that there are modifications to the Lancer that would add new capabilities relevant in an era of great power competition. In August, the Air Force held a demonstration of how the B-1 could be modified to incorporate four to eight new hypersonic weapons by shifting the bulkhead forward from a bomb bay on the aircraft, increasing the size inside the plane from 180 inches to 269 inches. That change allows the loading of a Conventional Rotary Launcher, the same system used inside the B-52, onto the B-1. According to an Air Force release, first reported by Military.com, the bulkhead change is temporary, giving the B-1 flexibility based on its mission. Overall, the internal bay could be expanded from 24 to 40 weapons, per the service. In addition, the testers proved new racks could be attached to hardpoints on the wings. “The conversation we're having now is how we take that bomb bay [and] put four potentially eight large hypersonic weapons on there,” Ray said. “Certainly, the ability to put more JASSM-ER [Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range] or LRASM [Long Range Anti-Ship Missile] externally on the hardpoints as we open those up. So there's a lot more we can do.” Said Venable: “I think it's a great idea. Increasing our bomber force end strength, we're not going to get there just by buying B-21[s] and retiring the B-1s.” “Adding a new rotary [launcher that] he was talking about, just behind the bulkhead of the cockpit of the B-1, freeing up the pylons to actually manifest more longer-range weapons and give it a greater penetrating strike capability — those are great takeaways from this particular event,” the analyst added. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/air-force-association/2019/09/17/global-strike-head-makes-case-of-b-1-survival/

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  18 novembre 2019 | International, C4ISR

  One way for the Pentagon to prove it’s serious about artificial intelligence

  By: Mark Pomerleau Department of Defense officials routinely talk about the need to more fully embrace machine learning and artificial intelligence, but one leader in the Marine Corps said those efforts are falling short. “We're not serious about AI. If we were serious about AI we would put all of our stuff into one location,” Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, said at an AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter lunch Nov. 15. Smith was broadly discussing the ability to provide technologies and data that's collected in large quantities and pushed to the battlefield and tactical edge. Smith said leaders want the ability to send data to a 50-60 Marine cell in the Philippines that might be surrounded by the Chinese. That means being able to manage the bandwidth and signature so that those forces aren't digitally targeted. That ability doesn't currently doesn't exist, he said. He pointed to IBM's Watson computer, noting that the system is able to conduct machine learning and artificial intelligence because it connects to the internet, which allows it to draw from a much wider data pool to learn from. Military systems aren't traditionally connected to the broader commercial internet, and thus are limited from a machine learning sense. “We have stovepipes of excellence everywhere from interagency, CIA, NSA. The Navy's got theirs, Marine Corps' got theirs, everybody's got theirs. You can't do AI when the machine can't learn from one pool of data,” he said. Brown noted that he was not speaking on behalf of the entire department. Pentagon leadership has come to similar conclusions. Top officials have noted that one of the critical roles the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program will do is provide a central location for data. “The warfighter needed enterprise cloud yesterday. Dominance in A.I. is not a question of software engineering. But instead, it's the result of combining capabilities at multiple levels: code, data, compute and continuous integration and continuous delivery. All of these require the provisioning of hyper-scale commercial cloud,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint AI Center, said in August. “For A.I. across DOD, enterprise cloud is existential. Without enterprise cloud, there is no A.I. at scale. A.I. will remain a series of small-scale stovepipe projects with little to no means to make A.I. available or useful to warfighters. That is, it will be too hard to develop, secure, update and use in the field. JEDI will provide on-demand, elastic compute at scale, data at scale, substantial network and transport advantages, DevOps and a secure operating environment at all classification levels.” Overall, Smith said that industry should start calling out DoD when policies or technical requirements hinder what it can offer. “If we're asking for something that is unobtanium or if our policies are keeping you from producing something we can buy, you've got to tell us,” he said https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/11/15/one-way-for-the-pentagon-to-prove-its-serious-about-artificial-intelligence/

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  11 septembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial

  Safran in talks with MBDA over Roxel's stake, La Tribune reports