La Suède aurait proposé à l’Arménie la vente de 8 avions de chasse suédois JAS-39 Gripen

Sur le même sujet

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  14 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Special Ops Budget Crunch Looms, But New Aircraft Demo Coming

  And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform," said SOCOM acquisition czar Jim Smith. By PAUL MCLEARY and THERESA HITCHENSon May 13, 2020 at 4:32 PM WASHINGTON: Like the rest of the Defense Department, Special Operations Command is preparing for flat to declining budgets in the coming years as the national debt spirals to $25 trillion and the economy flattens due to COVID-19 related shutdowns. At the moment, the command that trains, equips and sustains the nation's elite covert operators boasts a $13 billion budget, $7 billion of which goes directly into buying and repairing new gear, with another $800 million pumped into research and development. And that's the unclassified part of the budget. The command wants to protect those investments, Jim Smith, SOCOM's top acquisition executive, told reporters this morning. But fiscal realities being what they are, “right now, our planning assumptions are based on a flat budget out through the next seven years or so,” he said. “And then, if you take into account inflation, you might even have a slightly downward pressure on our overall budget.” Just recently, Defense Secretary Mark Esper suggested that the budget pressure might force his hand in cutting older, legacy systems earlier than planned to pull savings toward priority modernization programs like the $500 billion the DoD plans to spend on the refurbishment of the nuclear triad over the next decade. Earlier this month Esper declared, “we need to move away from the legacy, and we need to invest those dollars in the future. And we have a lot of legacy programs out there right now — I could pick dozens out from all branches of the services” that could be cut or curtailed. Asked by Breaking Defense if pressure on SOCOM budgets could lead to the command walking away from bigger and older systems, Smith said “SOF is a little different. There is a propensity for us to accept a near-[commercial] solution and get it into the fight very quickly. And for that reason, we tend not to sustain equipment or the 20-year, 30-year life cycles that you see in the services.” That's not to say “we don't have the same pressures,” as the services in finding savings, he added. “We're trying to divest in a force that you know likes to hold on to things. And so we have very rich dialogue at the command level, I can assure you, about trying to divest over some of our larger programs going on.” One area commanders want to grow is close air support and ISR in areas without large, improved landing strips via the Armed Overwatch program. Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, said in February at the Air Force Association's annual meeting that the aircraft would replace AFSOC's U-28s — and focus more on plane's close air support, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Smith today explained that effort is standing on the shoulders of the Air Force's defunct Light Attack Aircraft effort. “We are on the backs of the Air Force's effort. We're using the same program managers and engineers,” Smith said. “Everything that was learned by the Air Force in their light attack experiment is being leveraged into ours.” The Air Force's long-running light attack aircraft saga — that at one point was expected to involve procurement of up to 300 airplanes — began way back in 2011, when the Air Force initiated a program to procure what it then called “light air-support” aircraft for use in insurgencies. In 2017, the program morphed into what the service called the Light Attack Experiment, aimed at developing a concept of operations that involved US allies as well as fleshing out an overall acquisition strategy. In 2018, then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service had set aside $2.4 billion in the fiscal year 2019 budget's five-year cycle to acquire agile, armed reconnaissance aircraft — once it had tested out its chosen competitors: Textron's AT-6 and the Sierra Nevada-Embraer team's A-29. In October 2019, facing a threat from Congress to strip the program from its control, the Air Force issued a request for proposal to Textron and Sierra Nevada to buy “two or three of both” companies' turboprops. Finally, in February this year, the Air Force threw up its collective hands and gave up the quest to buy light attack aircraft in quantity — purchasing only two each of the AT-6 Wolverine and A-29 Tucanos for continued experimentation. Several of the companies who originally fought it out way back in the day under the Air Force effort, as well as Textron and Sierra Nevada, are now throwing their hats in the SOCOM ring. Spokespeople for Air Tractor (which had formally protested the Air Force's contract award in the light attack competition), Sierra Nevada and Textron confirmed to Breaking Defense today that they are all in for the live-fly demonstration expected in November. The plan is for SOCOM to buy up to 75 of the aircraft over seven years, beginning with a $106 million request in the 2021 budget to kick things off. The Special Operations community is as interested in what it can put on one of these planes as it is in the aircraft itself. “At the end of the day, I'm going to deliver a weapon system,” Smith said. “And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform. I think the Air Force, you know, there was a lot of focus on the actual platforms. I don't think you'll see that from SOCOM. We are far more interested in the integration capability of our eventual industry partners on the platform.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/special-ops-budget-crunch-looms-but-new-aircraft-demo-coming

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  4 avril 2023 | International, Naval

  Landing Ship Medium requirements in final approvals with Navy, Marines

  The Navy and Marines are back on the same page about a low-cost Landing Ship Medium, following negotiations over survivability and capability of the craft.

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  10 octobre 2019 | International, C4ISR

  The data challenge of space-based hypersonics defense

  By: Nathan Strout Managing data is the biggest challenge to developing a new space-based sensor layer that would help detect hypersonic weapons, the director of the Missile Defense Agency said Oct. 7. The agency is working toward building the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, a layer of sensors on orbit that would be capable of detecting and tracking hypersonic weapons that the nation's current missile defense architecture was not designed to handle. The new system will be built into the Space Development Agency's constellation of low earth orbit satellites. For Vice Adm. Jon Hill, the director of the agency, designing the sensors for the system is a surmountable engineering issue and evolving commercial launch capabilities mean it will be easy to get the technology to space once its ready. The real challenge is “the passing of track data between different space vehicles and maintaining track and dealing with clutter.” Hypersonic weapons are dimmer than traditional ballistic missiles, making them harder to detect. The sensors will have to be able to remove that clutter, detect the threat and then pass their data to the next LEO sensor, which will pick up the object as it travels around the globe at hypersonic speed. Allowing for that data flow from sensor to sensor is essential to the effective operation of the system. Hill compared the complexity of that data transfer to his time in the Navy, where information had to go between moving vessels, but the data issue with satellites is magnitudes of order more difficult. “When you put yourself on a moving body that's moving, not at 30 knots but at a much higher speed, you know, maintaining the stability of that track, being able to pull the clutter out of it, determining how much you want to process up on orbit versus how much you want to feed down and process on the ground, then how you distribute. Do you distribute directly from the sensor? Do you control the weapon from space? Or do you take it to the ground station and do it there? There [are] different trades, and we'll probably do it differently in a lot of different ways because that adds to the overall resilience of the system,” Hill said speaking at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event October 7. Finding the right answers to those questions will be a priority for the MDA as it works to works to get the system on orbit quickly. “It's going to be a great capability. We just need to get it up there as soon as we can and rapidly proliferate,” Hill said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2019/10/09/the-data-challenge-of-space-based-hypersonics-defense/