Le Canada réintègre le programme du système aéroporté d’alerte et de contrôle de l’OTAN

Sur le même sujet

• 

  4 décembre 2024 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Europol Dismantles Criminal Messaging Service MATRIX in Major Global Takedown

  Europol shuts down MATRIX, a criminal messaging service, seizing servers and €500K in cryptocurrency.

• 

  7 mai 2020 | International, Naval

  Navy Wants Robot Boats But Will Still Need Sailors To Fix Them

  "We need to find a balance of vehicle designs that enables the cost to be cheap enough that we can afford them, but it's not so highly optimized towards the purely unmanned spectrum that it's cost prohibitive to maintain them." By PAUL MCLEARYon May 06, 2020 at 3:27 PM WASHINGTON: The Navy needs to comb through a host of thorny issues before deploying a new fleet of unmanned ships to confront China, Russia, and Iran. “You don't hear me talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning and things like that just yet,” said Capt. Pete Small, the Navy's program manager for Unmanned Maritime Systems at a C4ISRnet conference this morning. “Those aren't my first concerns. My first concerns are about the field stability and sustainability of these systems right now.” The Navy just isn't equipped to deploy or sustain a new fleet of unmanned vessels yet. “Our infrastructure right now is optimized around manned warships,” Small said. “We're gonna have to shift that infrastructure for how we prepare, deploy, and transit” over large bodies of water before large numbers of unmanned vessels can be effective, he said. It's not clear where that planning stands, but the service has already invested tens of millions in the early work of developing a family of large and medium unmanned vessels, and is looking to vastly ramp that up in the 2021 budget, asking for $580 million for research and development. In 2019 an unmanned Sea Hunter prototype autonomous vessel sailed from San Diego to Hawaii, but it needed to repair several broken systems along the way, forcing sailors to board the ship. It was the first experiment of its kind, one the Navy has not repeated. Those mechanical problems point to work the Navy must do to reconfigure its logistics tail to meet the needs of a new class of ship. “We're going to have to transition from a [system] more optimized around our manned fleet infrastructure to a more distributed mix of these large manned platforms to smaller platforms,” Small said, “we're gonna need to talk about things like, tenders for heavy lift ships, or forward operating bases, things like that.” The early thinking is the service will use the ships as sensors deployed well forward of manned ships and carrier strike groups, which could be at risk if they maneuvered too close to contested waters. But the Navy isn't going to pin everything on a nascent fleet of robot boats — a new class of manned frigates is also being built to operate inside the range of enemy precision weapons. The frigates are going to be smaller and faster than current destroyers, with the ability to generate much more power so they can use lasers and other weapons for both offensive and defensive missions. The Navy is considering several sizes of USVs, including a large variant between 200 and 300 feet in length and having full load displacements of 1,000 tons to 2,000 tons. The ships should be low-cost, and reconfigurable with lots of room capacity for carrying various payloads, including mine hunting and anti-surface warfare. The 2021 budget submission proposes using research and development funding to acquire two more prototypes and another in 2022. Plans then call for buying deployable LUSVs at a rate of two per year. Medium unmanned ships will likely come in at between 45 to 190 feet long, with displacements of roughly 500 tons. The medium ships are thought to skew more toward mission modules revolving around intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance payloads and electronic warfare systems. The first MUSV prototype was funded in 2019, and the Navy wants to fund a second prototype in 2023. Fundamental issues need to be sorted out before the Navy buys one of these ships. “We need to find a balance of vehicle designs that enables the cost to be cheap enough that we can afford them, but it's not so highly optimized towards the purely unmanned spectrum that it's cost prohibitive to maintain them,” Small said. If the maintenance is too complicated and time consuming, and “we have to take the whole vehicle out of the water and take it apart in some explicit manner to replace the parts, it's not gonna really support what we need in the field. So really, the sustainability of the technology is as important — if not more important — in the near-term than the technology itself.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/navy-wants-robot-boats-but-will-still-need-sailors-to-fix-them/

• 

  4 novembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Defense aerospace primes are raking in money for classified programs

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Two months after disclosing the existence of a next-generation fighter jet demonstrator, the U.S. Air Force is staying mum on which company may have built it. But one thing is for sure: Classified aviation programs are on the rise, and opportunities abound for the three major American defense aerospace primes — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. During an Oct. 20 earnings call with investors, Lockheed Martin Chief Financial Officer Ken Possenriede revealed the company's Aeronautics division recently won a classified contract that would necessitate the construction of a new building in Palmdale, California, where the company's Skunk Works development arm tests and creates prototypes of secret aircraft. Sales for the division were up 8 percent in this year's third quarter compared to the same period in 2019, with about $130 million of the $502 million boost attributed to classified work. But Possenriede alluded to even more growth on the horizon. “For Aeronautics, we do anticipate seeing strong, double-digit growth at our Skunk Works, our classified advanced development programs. We continue to execute on those recent awards,” he said, adding that there were a “multitude of opportunities” still out there. Classified work also increased at Northrop Grumman's Aeronautics Systems unit, with “restricted activities” in the autonomous systems and manned aircraft portfolios helping bolster sales by 5 percent for the quarter and 4 percent year-to-date when compared to 2019, Chief Financial Officer Dave Keffer told investors Oct. 22. It's tempting to draw a line from these contract awards to the recent flight of a demonstrator for the Next Generation Air Dominance program — the Air Force's effort to field a suite of air superiority technologies that could include drones, high-tech weapons and what some have termed as a sixth-gen fighter, although service officials have said any warplane in the mix might not resemble a traditional fighter. Even though the Air Force announced in September that at least one NGAD demonstrator exists, it's unclear which companies are involved. Still, there are plenty of other longstanding and emerging Air Force requirements that could be the source of this classified work, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group. “It's pretty clear that there's more prototyping activity going on out there than was generally known. I had assumed that most of the work related to NGAD was happening at the systems level. It's clearly happening at the airframe level too," he said. "And then of course there are a lot of potential drone developments that are certainly worth watching,” from the MQ-9 Reaper replacement to strategic reconnaissance requirements, “which is fundamentally a very expensive activity.” The wild card in this situation is Boeing. Because of investors' focus on the commercial side of the business — including plans for the return of the Boeing 737 Max to flight, as well as the continued downward spiral of sales caused by the global pandemic and its chilling effect on air travel — executives did not speak about Boeing Defense, Space and Security's classified activities during the company's Oct. 28 earnings call. “Overall, the defense and space market remains significant and relatively stable, and we continue to see solid global demand for our key programs,” a Boeing spokesman said in response to questions about the company's classified business. “We project a $2.6 trillion market opportunity for defense and space during the next decade, which includes important classified work.” After years of lost competitions, there are signs that the company's combat aircraft production facilities in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as its advanced projects division, Phantom Works, are returning to health. Over the past two years, the company has banked major awards, including the Navy's MQ-25 tanker drone and the T-7A trainer jet, both of which were developed by Phantom Works. Boeing's work on the T-7 received praise from Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper for its use of digital engineering, which involves simulating the design, production and life cycle of a product in order to drive down costs. The company has also started selling the advanced F-15EX fighter jet to the Air Force, breathing a second life into that aircraft with this latest variant. But Aboulafia worried that pressure on Boeing's commercial business — combined with its strategy of leveraging the work of other aircraft makers on projects like the T-7, where Swedish manufacturer Saab had a heavy influence in shaping the design — may have led to a loss of resources and engineering talent at Phantom Works. “Either they're sitting it out now because their focus is elsewhere, or they don't have the capabilities and the commitment that the others do, or we're just not hearing about it now,” he said. Boeing is not the only company investing in digital engineering and advanced manufacturing processes. Northrop CEO Kathy Warden pointed to her company's use of digital engineering in the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, which the company won in September to build the Air Force's next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles. “The work that we have done with the customer already, even under the tech maturation and risk reduction phase of the program, was done in a digital environment,” she said. “We delivered artifacts for review in a fully digital environment where they were actually looking at things in a model, not documents produced. This is the first time on a program of this size where that's been the case.” “Those investments that we're making for GBSD are being utilized across our entire portfolio,” she added. “So as we think about Next Generation Air Dominance and the programs that are part of that overall campaign ... they too will benefit from a full digital engineering thread as being required by our customers.” https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/11/03/defense-aerospace-primes-are-raking-in-money-for-classified-programs/