31 mai 2019 | International, Naval
By: Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin has decided not to submit a version of its Freedom-class littoral combat ship for the Navy's next-gen frigate design competition.
The contractor's move to abandon its bid to become the prime contractors on the FFG(X) deal leaves four rivals in the running — Huntington Ingalls Industries, Austal USA, Fincantieri and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works.
But the world's largest defense firm still intends to bid on capabilities involved in the FFG(X).
“After careful review, we have decided to focus our attention on the FFG(X) combat system, delivering Lockheed Martin technologies such as the Aegis-derived weapon system, MK 41 Vertical Launching System, anti-submarine warfare processing, and advanced electronic warfare,” the company said in a statement released late Tuesday.
“We will continue to serve as a shipbuilder for the U.S. Navy, and we're exploring opportunities including unmanned surface vessels and the large surface combatant.”
The news was first reported by USNI on Tuesday.
The FFG(X) grew out of a 2014 requirement for an up-gunned frigate that could survive brutal combat at sea, a problem critics raise about the LCS, a vessel that was developed for sneaky missions near shorelines.
The goal of the new frigate design is to both integrate with, and complement, the carrier strike group and operate as a distributed node in a sensor network, officials say.
Planned capabilities include anti-surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, electromagnetic maneuver warfare and air warfare.
The Navy asked for $1.3 billion for the first FFG(X) hull in 2020 but estimates each subsequent frigate will run closer to $800 million.
David B. Larter in Scotland contributed to this story
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/05/29/lockheed-declines-to-bid-for-ffgx-design
10 juillet 2023 | International, C4ISR
Through the Hybrid Space Architecture, DIU and its partners want to create a diverse network of commercial and government satellites and ground systems.
22 juin 2020 | International, C4ISR
Andrew Eversden The Pentagon's primary artificial intelligence hub is already studying how to aim a laser at the correct spot on an enemy vehicle, pinpointing which area to target to inflict the most damage, and identifying the most important messages headed to commanders, officials said June 16. But as part of that work, the Department of Defense needs to carefully implement checks and balances into the development process, experts urged June 16. “Fundamentally I would say there's a requirement ... that there's going to be a mixture of measures taken to ensure the governability of the system from the first stage of the design of the system all the way up through the operations of the system in a combat scenario,” said Greg Allen, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center's chief of strategy and communications at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, at the Defense One Tech Summit June 16. The JAIC is working on several lethality projects through its new joint warfighting initiative, boosted by a new contract award to Booz Allen potentially worth $800 million. “With this new contract vehicle, we have the potential to do even more this next year than we did in the past,” Allen said. Meanwhile, the Army's Artificial Intelligence Task Force is working on an advanced threat recognition project. DARPA is exploring complementing AI systems that would identify available combat support assets and quickly plan their route to the area. Throughout all of the development work, experts from the military and from academia stressed that human involvement and experimentation was critical to ensuring that artificial intelligence assets are trustworthy. The department has released a document of five artificial intelligence ethical principles, but the challenge remains implementing those principles into projects across a department with disparate services working on separate artificial intelligence projects. “We want safe, reliable and robust systems deployed to our warfighters,” said Heather Roff, senior research analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. “We want to be able to trust those systems. We want to have some sort of measure of predictability even if those systems act unpredictably.” Brig. Gen. Matt Easley, director of the artificial intelligence task force at Army Futures Command, said the service is grappling with those exact challenges, trying to understand how the service can insert “checks and balances” as it trains systems and soldiers. Easley added that the unmanned systems under development by the Army will have to be adaptable to different environments, such as an urban or desert scenarios. In order to ensure that the systems and soldiers are ready for those scenarios, the Army has to complete a series of tests, just like the autonomous vehicle industry. “We don't think these systems are going to be 100 percent capable right out of the box,” Easley said on the webinar. “If you look at a lot of the evolution of the self-driving cars throughout our society today, they're doing a lot of experimentation. They're doing lots of testing, lots of learning every day. We in the Army have to learn how to go from doing one to two to three vehicle experiments to have many experiments going on every day across all our camp posts and stations.” Increasingly autonomous systems also mean that there needs to a cultural shift in among all levels of military personnel who will need to better understand how artificial intelligence is used. Roff said that operators, commanders and judge advocate generals will need to better understand how systems are supposed “to ensure that the human responsibility and governability is there.” “We need to make sure that we have training, tactics, procedures, as well as policies, ensuring where we know the human decision maker is,” Roff said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2020/06/18/artificial-intelligence-systems-need-checks-and-balances-throughout-development/
18 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
The International Defence Exhibition and Conference is opening its doors to trade exhibitors and visitors Feb. 21-25, with more than 1,300 vendors as well as five countries participating for the first time.