Le projet d'un hélicoptère de nouvelle génération (NGRC) avance

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  12 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - May 11, 2020

  AIR FORCE Unisys Corp., Reston, Virginia, has been awarded a $630,000,000 single-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for technology application development and sustainment (TADS) supporting the Air Force weather enterprise. Orders under the TADS contract will support development, delivery and sustainment of an integrated system of weather enterprise hardware and software dedicated to providing accurate, consistent, relevant and timely environmental intelligence. Work will be performed at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska; and Omaha, Nebraska, and is expected to be completed by Oct. 15, 2025. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition and six proposals were received. Fiscal 2020 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $2,182,983 are being obligated at the time of award. The 55th Contracting Squadron, Offutt AFB, Nebraska, is the contracting activity (FA4600-20-D-0002). ApiJECT Systems America Inc., Stamford, Connecticut, has been awarded a not-to-exceed $138,000,000 firm-fixed-price, undefinitized contract action (UCA) for COVID-19 response “Project Jumpstart” and “Project Rapid,” which will dramatically expand production capability for domestically manufactured blow-fill-seal injection devices. Work will be performed throughout the U.S. and is expected to be completed by May 8, 2022. This award is the result of a sole-source acquisition. Fiscal 2020 Air Force other procurement funds in the amount of $69,000,000 are being obligated at the time of UCA issuance and remaining funding will be added at definitization. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, is the contracting activity (FA8726-20-C-0022). (Awarded May 8, 2020) Raytheon Corp., Marlborough, Massachusetts, has been awarded a $20,232,337 firm-fixed-price modification (P00113) to contract FA8705-14-C-0001 to exercise 23 fixed spares for Production Year Two, Option Contract Line Item Number 0008, for a Global Aircrew Strategic Network Terminal. Work will be performed in Largo, Florida, and is expected to be completed by July 2022. Fiscal 2020 other procurement funds in the full amount are being obligated at the time of award. This modification brings the total cumulative value of the contract to $488,205,869. Air Force Materiel Command, Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, is the contracting activity. ARMY Chemring Sensors and Electronic Systems Inc., Dulles, Virginia, was awarded a $200,218,380 modification (P00009) to contract W909MY-18-D-0014 to develop, integrate and produce and deliver Husky Mounted Detection System kits, spare parts, maintenance and training. Bids were solicited via the internet with one received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Aug. 15, 2022. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is the contracting activity. NAVY BAE Systems Land & Armaments L.P., Minneapolis, Minnesota, is awarded a $42,842,169 firm-fixed-price modification to previously awarded contract N00024-20-C-5380 for MK 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS) canister production and ancillary hardware. This modification combines purchases for the Navy (68%); and the governments of Japan (11%); Australia (6%); Norway (6%); Netherlands (6%); and Turkey (3%), under the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program. Work will be performed in Minneapolis, Minnesota (10%); and Aberdeen, South Dakota (90%). This option exercise provides for the manufacture and delivery of MK 13 Mod 0, MK 21 (Mod 2 and 3), MK 21 Mod 1 and MK 29 Mod 0 canisters, ancillary hardware and MK 13 Mod 0 canister renews. The VLS canisters serve as the missile shipping containers and launch tubes when loaded into VLS Modules. Work is expected to be complete by July 2023. Fiscal 2020 weapons procurement (Navy); fiscal 2019 and 2020 defense-wide procurement; and FMS funds in the amount of $42,842,169 will be obligated at time of award and will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington Navy Yard, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity. Cape Environmental Management Inc.,* Honolulu, Hawaii, is awarded an $11,674,808 cost-plus-award-fee task order N62473-20-F-4678 under a single-award small business environmental remedial action contract for removal actions and environmental restoration activities at installation restoration and munition response sites at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, San Diego, California. Work will be performed in San Diego, California, and provides for site maintenance activities at Installation Restoration Site (IRS) 21, time critical removal action at IRS 20 and non-time critical removal action at Munitions Response Site 5. Work is expected to be complete by May 2023. Fiscal 2020 operations and maintenance (Navy) contract funds in the amount of $11,674,808 are obligated on this award and will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. One proposal was received for this task order. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Southwest, San Diego, California, is the contracting activity (N62742-16-D-1807). WASHINGTON HEADQUARTERS SERVICES General Dynamics Information Technology, Falls Church, Virginia, has been awarded a $7,417,730 firm-fixed-price contract. This contract provides case analysts, defense security officers, and program management support for the Office of Military Commissions hearings. Work performance will take place at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Fiscal 2020 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $7,417,730 are being awarded. The expected completion date is May 10, 2023. Washington Headquarters Services, Arlington, Virginia, is the contracting activity (HQ0034-20-C-0082). *Small business https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/2183554/source/GovDelivery/

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  19 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Bombers, fighters and tankers unite: Will the Air Force rebuild composite wings to fight near-peer foes?

  By: Kyle Rempfer The Air Force has spent the past few years gearing up for a near-peer fight against adversaries with high-end air forces that match their own. While new doctrines and technologies occupy much of the planning for such a shift, another type of preparation is needed: reorganizing wings and squadrons. One possibility on the table is a return to composite wings. In the early 1990s, the Air Force organized the 366th Fighter Wing out of Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, into the service's premier “air intervention” composite wing. For roughly a decade, the wing flew fighters, bombers and tankers with the goal of meeting the challenges of a post-Cold War world order — where conflict could arrive anywhere, anytime. “They were ready to pack up and go fight as a unified team,” Lt. Gen. Mark Kelly, commander of 12th Air Force, told a crowd of Air Force leaders Monday at the 2018 Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Washington, D.C. “But that was disbanded, and part of it came down to money," Kelly said. "The cost per flying hour of trying to sustain the small-fleet dynamics there didn't look great on spreadsheets.” But Kelly argues that financial assessment was faulty. The quality of the training airmen were getting was being compared to the day-to-day operations at other bases around the Air Force. In reality, it was more comparable to the day-to-day training at Red Flag — a two-week, advanced air combat training exercise still held several times a year in Nevada and Alaska. “Frankly, the training they were getting compared more to Red Flag daily ops," Kelly said. “And that would be a good problem to have and a good construct to be able to build.” The Air Force is rethinking how it constructs wings and squadrons, as well as how it deploys airmen, as it shifts to better align with the 2018 National Defense Strategy, according to Kelly. As it stands, “airmen only come together to fight at the line of scrimmage," Kelly said. For instance, before airmen arrive at a forward base to fight against insurgents in Afghanistan, they may have a unified command at the squadron level, but a unified command at the wing level is severely lacking. Additionally, airmen preparing to deploy today benefit from a surplus of “spin-up" time. They know when their unit is scheduled to deploy and have the luxury of training to meet that challenge well in advance. “That's a luxury that we cannot rely on in great power competition,” Kelly said. Organizing some aircraft and airmen into composite wings could provide the training and deployment structure necessary for fights against modern militaries, Kelly said. The composite wing concept was heavily pushed in 1991 by then Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak, according to his biography on the Defense Department's website. McPeak wanted to organize wings by their mission-set, not aircraft type. According to his “air intervention” doctrine, a wing deploying for a near-peer fight should have all the aircraft and airmen it needs to accomplish its mission with limited, or possibly no, outside support. This meant one wing could potentially operate electronic warfare aircraft for the suppression of enemy air defenses, bombers to lay waste to enemy fortifications, fighters to engage in air-to-air combat, and tankers to refuel them all. After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, however, the old composite squadron idea was mostly discarded. The 366th Fighter Wing was restored to fly F-16Js, and the consolidation of the Air Force's KC-135 and B-1 forces led to the reallocation of the wing's bombers and tankers to McConnell AFB, Kansas, and Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota, according to Mountain Home's website. But composite wings, and the idea of sustainable fights with more or less autonomous Air Force commanders, is back in vogue. Funding was one of the biggest challenges to composite wings back in the day, but the reasons for that unit structure are better appreciated now as concerns about China and Russia preoccupy defense planners. To fuel a restructuring, steady funding will be key, according to Kelly. He projected the Air Force's shift to great power competition will continue to be a focus of the defense budget into 2021 and 2022. But regardless of the funds Congress ultimately appropriates for the Air Force in the coming years, restructuring for a near-peer fight needs to happen, Kelly said. “This has to happen regardless of if we have the force we have today with only one more airman, or the force we need with tens of thousands more airmen," he added. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/09/18/bombers-fighters-and-tankers-unite-will-the-air-force-rebuild-composite-wings-to-fight-near-peer-foes

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  2 avril 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  U.S. Air Force to Develop AI-Powered Combat UAV

  Author: Mike Rees The U.S. Air Force has announced that its Office of Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation at the Air Force Research Laboratory is working on fielding a prototype Autonomous Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle as an Early Operational Capability as early as 2023. The program, known as Skyborg, and the SDPE office have issued a request for information to industry to conduct market research and concept of operations analysis to learn what is commercially available now as high technology readiness level capabilities which can meet the requirements and timeline of the Skyborg program. Skyborg officially stood up as a fiscal year 2019 funded pathfinder program through SDPE in October 2018, according to Ben Tran, Skyborg program manager. “There was a lot of analysis that determined what was put into the CRFI,” Tran said. “We've been given the overall objective to have an early operational capability prototype fielded by the end of calendar year 2023, so this is our first step in determining what the current state of the art is from a technology perspective and from a systems engineering perspective to provide that EOC capability in 2023.” Low cost, attritable, unmanned air vehicles are one way to bring mass to the fight when it comes to addressing potential near-peer engagements in the future, according to Tran. “We also know there is heavy investment by our near-peer adversaries in artificial intelligence and autonomy in general. We know that when you couple autonomy and AI with systems like low-cost attritables, that can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for our Air Force and so the 2023 goal line is our attempt at bringing something to bear in a relatively quick time frame to show that we can bring that kind of capability to the fight.” Matt Duquette, an AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate engineer, brings a background in UAV control, autonomy, and modeling and simulation of UAVs, especially teams of UAVs to the effort while assisting the Skyborg program with formulating its approach to the autonomy system and some of the behaviors that the UAVs will have. “Skyborg is a vessel for AI technologies that could range from rather simple algorithms to fly the aircraft and control them in airspace to the introduction of more complicated levels of AI to accomplish certain tasks or subtasks of the mission,” Duquette said. This builds on much of the AFRL foundational work with AI shown with programs such as Have Raider and the Auto Ground and Air Collision Avoidance systems, which prove that levels of autonomy in high performance aircraft are not only possible, but also practical. “Part of our autonomy development is building assurance into the system. You can either build assurance by using formal methods or approaches where at design time, as you develop these autonomous capabilities, you guarantee certain behaviors, or a more practical approach is to assess the capabilities of these behaviors at run time, meaning while they're running on the aircraft. So, those are the capabilities that we're interested in looking at from the experimentation level to see what type of assurance you need in the system so you can mix high and low criticality.” “We're looking at a range of vehicle performance parameters – mission analysis will help us determine what the final outcome is and the responses from the CRFI will help us understand what the performance is of currently available systems and whether those will meet the needs or not. Everything from keeping up with combat platforms to slower platforms for sensing. There will be a range of possibilities there,” said Patrick Berry, from AFRL's Sensors Directorate, who is supporting the Skyborg program by conducting modeling, simulation and analysis. Although Skyborg is not scheduled for any particular type of aircraft platform at this time, Tran said the CRFI emphasizes the importance of an open systems architecture, having modularity in the system, not only from a sensing capabilities standpoint, but overall mission systems, as well as the autonomy associated with the mission capability for the platform. “We've partnered with the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and specifically an organization called the Emerging Technologies Combined Test Force and we're working with them beginning with small, fast-moving UAVs to test the current state of the art in AI and autonomy in those airplanes and the ability for them to autonomously team and collaborate in flight,” Tran said. Machine learning has progressed greatly over the last few years and we're very inspired by those results and excited by things that are going on in the gaming industry for instance,” said Maj. Ryan Carr, from AFRL's Aerospace Systems Directorate. “We expect that technology will continue to mature fairly rapidly. What we really need to understand is, ‘How do you take that and do something like bring it to the real world and fly with it for example?' The thing we're trying to get at early on is how to do that safely. We're talking about run-time assurance, working hand-in-hand with the flight test community who have a very long record of safe flight testing. That's really what we want to focus our attention on in this early period,” Carr said. “We want to do this in a way that builds trust in the system as you go along so that when you get to that EOC, you will have established a baseline of trust so that operational youth will believe what the system will do or believe it's safe. It's not just that end-state capability, it's the trust as you go along,” he added. Before operational AI innovation can occur, the Air Force must field an autonomous system that meets an immediate operational need and can serve as an iterative platform to facilitate complex AI development, prototyping, experimentation and fielding, and that system is Skyborg, the CRFI says. https://www.unmannedsystemstechnology.com/2019/03/u-s-air-force-to-develop-ai-powered-combat-uav/