Le suédois Saab va s'impliquer dans le programme de drone MALE européen conduit par Airbus - Zone Militaire

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  25 mai 2020 | International, C4ISR

  UK nears final stage of Skynet competition

  LONDON — Britain's Ministry of Defence is about to launch the final stage of a competition to manage ground station capabilities for the armed forces Skynet satellite communications network by early June, say industry executives. Release of the invitation to negotiate documents to several industry consortia had been expected last week. Although the date appears to have slipped a little, industry executives, who asked to not be identified, say they still expect the MoD to trigger the final stage of the competition “imminently.” The documents are expected to be issued to selected bidders within the next two weeks. Four bidder groups are in line to be selected for the next stage of negotiations, said people with knowledge of the competition. The ground control elements of the MoD's existing Skynet 5 network are currently managed by Airbus Defence & Space as part of a long running private finance initiative deal with the MoD originally awarded in 2003. Part of that deal is now coming to a close with Airbus's hold on the ground control management of Skynet finishing in August 2022. A one year transition period is expected to kick off in 2021, if Airbus has to handover the role to a challenger. The new competition, for a program known as the service delivery wrap, aims to compete management of the ground control stations until a new generation of communication satellites are launched around 2028. That phase is being called the enduring capability element of the Skynet 6 program. Together the service delivery wrap and the enduring capability competitions are the main parts of a Skynet 6 program, which is aimed at taking Britain's satellite communications into a new era at a cost in the vicinity of £6 billion ($7.3 billion). A new satellite, known as Skynet 6A, is being acquired from Airbus to ensure communication capabilities are not compromised ahead of the new generation of satellites becoming available later in the decade. Negotiations on that deal have been dogged by delays. A new satellite, known as Skynet 6A, is being acquired from Airbus to ensure communication capabilities are not compromised ahead of the new generation of satellites becoming available later in the decade. Negotiations on that deal have been dogged by delays. Airbus were named preferred contractor for Skynet 6A as far back as 2017 but the full contract for that deal has yet to be signed. The company, Britain's biggest space contractor, has been working on long lead components of the satellite in order to stay on track. A contract for the manufacturing of long lead items and preliminary design work was signed, but not announced by the MoD and Airbus in March. A second phase of the Skynet 6A deal covering build, test, launch and deployment is currently working its way through the MoD and wider government approvals process. A spokesman for Airbus told Defense News “We are working on elements of 6A. We are hoping for a full contract mid-year.” With one exception, it's not clear who the runners might be in the final stages of the service delivery wrap competition, as the MoD has insisted all contenders sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing all communication with the media and others. Competing teams are not even allowed to publicly acknowledge they are interested in bidding. The exception is a team made up of service provider Serco, satellite operator Inmarsat, IT specialist CGI UK and the U.K. arm of defense giant Lockheed Martin. It announced its teaming arrangement late last year, just ahead of the MoD bringing the shutters down with its non-disclosure order. The four companies reinforced their bid credentials May 19, announcing they were forming a team known as Athena, after the Olympian god of war and wisdom, to bid for upcoming U.K. and overseas military and civil space capability programs. Kevin Craven, the CEO for Serco UK & Europe, called Athena an “exciting new team that will deliver enhanced space-based technologies and services from the U.K. Athena will boost British capabilities, as well as the economy, via growth in this fast-moving, developing sector. The launch of Athena also ensures diversity and choice in the U.K. space sector for future sustainable development.” There was no mention of Skynet 6 in the Athena announcement. It did however say that Athena will “work on a number of opportunities that leverage space-based technologies, their ground-based systems and end-to-end services as they arise, both in the U.K. and internationally.” A spokesman for Athena declined to comment on whether they were bidding for the service delivery wrap program, but it's clear they are a contender given the announcement of their interest last December when industry prequalification questionnaires had to be returned to the MoD. It remains a matter of speculation for the moment who the other bidders are. Previously Airbus, Babcock, Boeing, BT and Viasat have all been unofficially linked with having an interest in the competition. Companies Defense News tried to contact either declined to comment or didn't return calls. For Serco, who already provide some of the manpower for the current Airbus Skynet ground station operation, the Athena teaming is the latest in a string of announcements over the last few week that have reinforced its position as a space sector services provider here. In short order the company has secured separate contract extensions to continue to operate and maintain key ballistic missile defense radars at Fylingdales, northern England and as part of the Skynet 5 program providing support to the U.S. Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) at Oakhanger, southern England. The U.S. division of the company announced early April it had been awarded a deal to manage and maintain the U.S. Space Force ground-based electro-optical deep space surveillance (GEODSS) system. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2020/05/22/uk-nears-final-stage-of-skynet-competition/

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  26 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  FARA: Five-Way Fight For Army’s Future Scout

  By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: After four decades of failed attempts to replace its Vietnam-vintage OH-58 Kiowa scout, next month the Army will choose two of five competing teams to build prototypes for a new Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. Those prototypes, in turn, will compete for a mass-production contract in a 2023 “fly off,” with deliveries no later than 2028. A new scout is urgently overdue as the US faces ever-more-sophisticated Russian and Chinese air defenses that can keep traditional aircraft at bay. But with limited budgets, the Army will have to pick and choose high-priority units to get FARA first, and the rest of the force will have to wait. “We've got to look at, where are the most critical spots to bring capability,” said Brig. Gen. Michael McCurry, director of aviation for the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for operations and plans. The priority is the cutting-edge combat units that must break open sophisticated anti-aircraft defensives for the rest of the force to follow, he told me: “That penetrate force, that's where FARA is going to go.” Learning From the Past Now, the Army has made its job easier in a couple of important ways. Perhaps most important, instead of the traditional dozens or hundreds of detailed technical specifications that hem in designers' ingenuity, Future Vertical Lift director Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen told me, “we have very few critical attributes within our FARA spec.” One huge thing that the Army is not asking for: stealth. Unlike the costly Boeing Comanche cancelled in 2006, the FARA won't have to be shaped and coated to be impervious to radar – which is largely irrelevant to low-flying helicopters hiding behind hills, trees, or buildings, which are most often detected by the sound of their rotors, not by radar. Like the Comanche, advertised as a “digital quarterback,” FARA will act as an electronic hub for battlefield intelligence, collecting target data from drones and passing it to Army artillery, hypersonic missiles, and Air Force strike fighters – but network tech has come a long way since 2006, the year before the iPhone went on sale. Finally, unlike the Comanche, FARA won't be a conventional helicopter with a single main rotor and a small tail rotor for stability. The speed and range required to survive the future battlefield are greater than that classic set-up can achieve. That's driven all four firms who've discussed their designs in public – Boeing has not revealed anything – to adopt innovative configurations the Army's never fielded before. Only one of the designs, Sikorsky's, is based on an existing aircraft that's done actual flight tests. But the Army is confident the competitors can deliver. In detailed modeling, Rugen said, “all those offerings are beating those [minimum] mission critical attributes that we're trying towards.” Congress actually cut the FARA budget for 2020 by $34 million. That won't slow the program down, the Army has said, but it will reduce the amount of Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) the service can provide the contractors to build their prototypes around: weapons systems including a 20-millimeter autocannon and a missile launcher, Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) electronics, and the GE Improved Turbine Engine. To simplify and speed up development, all the competitors are required to include these standard-issue systems in their design — but the aircraft they build around them are radically different. Design shop AVX has proposed an aircraft with two helicopter-style main rotors for vertical takeoff, wings for extra lift, and a pair of their characteristic ducted fans for speed. AVX, founded by Bell alumni, has never built an actual aircraft. But it's backed by the manufacturing might of the much larger L3Harris, a firm created by the merger of the 18th and 26th-largest defense contractors in the world (as per their 2019 rankings on the Defense News Top 100). By contrast, Bell – part of Textron, No. 34 on the Top 100 – is a major builder of both military and commercial helicopters, as well as the revolutionary V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, from which the company's contender for the Army's future transport aircraft, the V-280, derives. Ironically, the Bell 360 Invictus is the most conservative-looking of the four known FARA designs: It's a streamlined single-main-rotor helicopter (looking kind of like Comanche) with the addition of two short wings for extra lift. Inside the aircraft, though, Bell is using new fly-by-wire flight controls and other technologies developed for its civilian Bell 525. Aerospace giant Boeing – No. 2 of the top 100, counting its defense contracts alone – builds the Army's current mainstay armored gunship, the AH-64 Apache; its heavy lifter, the CH-47 Chinook; and, with Bell, the V-22 tiltrotor. But Boeing, which built the stealthy Comanche, is so far in public-relations stealth mode on FARA, declining to discuss its design. Karem Aerospace is another design shop with an excellent pedigree – its founder is the father of the Predator drone – but no track record of actually building an aircraft. However, it's partnered with Northrop Grumman (No. 3 of the top 100) and Raytheon (No. 4) for this program, giving it serious manufacturing heft. The Karem AR-40 design has a unique combination of a single main rotor on top, a propeller at the tail that can swivel to act either as a tail rotor for stability or a pusher propeller for thrust, and wings that can tilt for the optimum aerodynamic angle in different modes of flight. Last in the alphabet, comes Sikorsky, the helicopter division of the world's biggest defense contract, Lockheed Martin. While Sikorsky's Raider-X design hasn't flown yet, it's essentially a 20 percent larger version of the two S-97 Raiders the company built and flight-tested at its own expense. (One of them was totaled in the process, thankfully with no loss of life). And Sikorsky already knows how to upscale its compound helicopter technology, because there's already an even bigger member of the family, the Sikorsky-Boeing SB>1 Defiant, now in flight tests for the Army's Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). All these aircraft derive from the Collier Trophy-winning X2 and share its configuration: two main rotors on top, using ultra-rigid blades to provide maximum lift with minimum vibration at high speeds, and a single pusher propeller at the tail. Between the X2, the S-97, and the SB>1, Sikorsky's configuration has been through far more flight testing than any of its competitors on FARA. So which team has the best combination of innovative design, proven technology, and the manufacturing muscle to build it at a price the nation can afford? That's a call the Army will make, and soon. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/fara-five-way-fight-for-armys-future-scout

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  31 décembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Air Force begins to roll out special cyber defense teams

  By: Mark Pomerleau The Air Force is beginning to build specialized cyber teams across the service whose primary mission is to defend local installations and critical mission tasks from cyberattacks. These teams will ensure that a particular wing or smaller organization can complete their mission from a cyber perspective, Maj. Gen. Robert Skinner, commander of 24th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, told Fifth Domain in a November interview. For example, Skinner said if a wing has an F-16 unit that's responsible for offensive counter air or defensive counter air support, mission defense teams will understand those weapon system and everything that goes into making those air sorties successful as a way to defend that mission from a cyber standpoint. As an example, an eight-man team at the 2nd Weather Group within the 557th Weather Wing monitors the network and recently discovered several “bogus” account requests. The commander, Col. Patrick Williams, said the team was able to figure out that many of the requests were either bots or foreign requests that “had no business being on that network.” By working with the Network Operations and Security Center to eliminate that activity, the number of requests dropped by 80 percent, a huge win, Williams said. He added this was done with just a nascent mission defense team given that the teams are just being filled out across the major commands now. Skinner said each major command is at a different point in activating the teams. In addition, Air Force leaders said the service hopes to achieve efficiencies within its entire IT and cyber defense enterprise. The officials pointed to the Air Force's “enterprise IT as a service” pilot, which examines what efficiencies can be gained by having commercial companies conduct the IT services as opposed to having airmen maintain the IT infrastructure. One benefit of such a move could be that it frees up personnel to spend more time on cyber defense. “Our core strategic theme is moving from IT focused delivery into mission defense teams,” Bill Marion, deputy CIO of the Air Force, said during a keynote presentation in early December. Skinner said the service will likely be able to “re-mission” workers from their IT positions and assign them to these more active defensive roles such as mission defense teams. These mission defense teams are different from cyber protection teams that the Air Force, and other services, provide to U.S. Cyber Command. “In my eyes the [mission defense team] is a [cyber protection team] lite,” Skinner said. "We're very proud of our cyber protection team training and I think that the more of that I can get with our mission defense teams, the more successful they'll be and then our cyber protection teams can be really focused on the high end, the big threats that we'll run into in a peer competition and peer adversaries.” https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/air-force/2018/12/27/air-force-begins-to-roll-out-special-cyber-defense-teams