Lockheed, Pentagon agree on $70.6M settlement over F-35 parts problems

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  9 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial

  SDA a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for supply chain woes: Space Force

  “These challenges are significant and we need to figure out how to get after them," Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said.

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  21 janvier 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  U.S. Military Given Authority To Defend Against Climate Change

  Lee Hudson The U.S. Congress is providing the military with direct responses to the threat of climate change. The passage of defense policy legislation provides the military with new tools to address the effects of the warming globe on strategic security interests, installations and readiness. Congress addresses climate change in defense legislation Climate change negatively affects military training That climate change is a threat to national security has been acknowledged by the military for nearly 30 years. In 1990, the U.S. Naval War College issued a report on “Global Climate Change Implications for the United States.” But in recent years, the issue has become politically charged, with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting in 2016 on an amendment to block Pentagon action on climate change. Now legislative support for addressing the security effects of a warming planet is growing. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) characterized climate change as a direct threat to national security. Two years later, lawmakers are uniting around potential solutions. Last month, President Donald Trump signed into law the 2020 NDAA, which includes 10 provisions related to climate security. The bill made it through the Democrat-controlled House and the Senate, past Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who wrote a book in 2012 calling global warming The Greatest Hoax. The 2020 NDAA mandates creation of a Climate Security Advisory Council within the intelligence community to ensure analysis is informed by the best possible science. Intelligence experts must incorporate the foresight scientists have in projecting stress on various regions to predict potential crises. Establishing a Climate and Security Council is a positive step, John Conger, director of the Center for Climate and Security, tells Aviation Week. “If you know there is going to be a water shortage in some portion of the world, that would inform, for example, the assessment of whether that region is going to go unstable,” Conger says. Another provision in the bill related to climate-security strategic interests for the U.S. revolves around the Arctic. Section 1752 of the 2020 NDAA directs the Pentagon to consider sites for a strategic port in the Arctic and submit a report to Congress no later than June 2020. The document should include a cost estimate for construction and sustained operations at the site. For years, experts have rallied for the U.S. to have a more permanent presence in the Arctic as melting ice caps begin to open sea lanes to vessels from Russia and other nations. As the Arctic continues to warm, extreme weather has hit hard at existing bases in the continental U.S. In 2018, Hurricane Michael decimated Tyndall AFB in Florida. Tyndall was home to the Air Force's fleet of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors. The Air Force is still coping with the aftermath. While Tyndall is undergoing repairs, F-22s assigned to the 43rd and 95th Fighter Sqdns. have moved to other installations. The jets assigned to the 43rd relocated to Eglin AFB in Florida, while the 95th's aircraft are being spread out across F-22 units at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, and Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. The military is not just concerned about its coastal bases. A few months after Hurricane Michael floodwaters reached 7ft. (2.1 m), damaging Offutt AFB in Nebraska and causing personnel to move aircraft and munitions to higher ground. The flooding damaged one-third of the Midwestern base, home to the headquarters of the nation's nuclear arsenal, U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) and the 55th Wing. The 55th Wing is Air Combat Command's largest wing, with an annual budget of more than $477 million, 45 aircraft, 31 squadrons and 7,000 employees. In total, the damage at Tyndall and Offutt will cost the American taxpayer an estimated $5 billion to rebuild. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein and former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson had to beg Congress for $5 billion in emergency funding to begin rebuilding the installations damaged by natural disasters. Section 328 of the 2020 NDAA creates a dedicated budget line item for adaptation to and mitigation of extreme weather on military networks, installations, facilities and other assets. These include loss or obstructed access to training ranges. The bill defines extreme weather as recurrent flooding, drought, desertification, wildfires and thawing permafrost. In 2019, the Air Force submitted to Congress a “Top 10” list of installations at risk of extreme damage from chaging weather. Six of the bases are in Florida—Eglin, Hurlburt Field, Patrick AFB, Homestead Air Reserve Base, MacDill AFB and Tyndall. The base taking the top spot is Vandenberg AFB in California, home to the Space Force's Space Operations Command. The remaining installations at risk are Dover AFB in Delaware and Langley-Eustis in Virginia. “As developed, the above list reflects installations susceptible to the consequences of severe weather events: coastal and inland flooding, wildfires, and/or drought; not necessarily 50-100-year climatic changes,” the submission states. “This list does not look at any specific critical mission implications (i.e., even if the base is subject to flooding because a portion is within a 100-year flood plain, a mission-critical facility may not be impacted because of its location on the base or it is on high ground; e.g. the Stratcom Headquarters Building on Offutt AFB).” The Army assessed six climate vulnerabilities on its military bases in the U.S. The service is most concerned about desertification, or land degradation caused by dry conditions, affecting its installations especially at Yuma Proving Ground and Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Irwin and Camp Roberts in California, Fort Bliss in Texas, White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada, Tooele Army Depot in Utah and Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado. “The analysis is based on climate science only and is not influenced by strategic or mission considerations,” the Army report says. The majority of the measures to defend the military against climate change to date are reactionary, but Section 2801a of the 2020 NDAA is more preventative, directing the Pentagon to incorporate military installation resilience into master plans; it authorizes funding for climate resilience projects. These installation master plans will specifically assess vulnerabilities to the bases and surrounding communities, identify missions affected by those susceptibilities and propose projects to address those weaknesses. “Until you start incorporating these risks into your master planning process, you aren't going to fully appreciate what you have to do at a particular location,” Conger says. “You can't just throw money at a problem not knowing what you're supposed to do.” The Navy paid attention to climate change early on because the service has the most coastal bases and infrastructures in its inventory. Separate from climate change, a few years ago Congress directed the Navy to study the infrastructure requirements of its shipyards. That assessment found that the dry docks at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Virginia were not high enough to deal with sea level rise, Conger says. The 2020 NDAA authorizes $49 million for a project at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to increase the height of the floodwalls around its dry docks. The shipyard's primary mission is the overhaul, repair and modernization of Los Angeles-class fast-attack nuclear-powered submarines. Climate change is also affecting the U.S. military's readiness levels because of an increasing number of Black Flag days, when the temperature rises to 90F or higher, and training is suspended. This affects units being able to complete a training syllabus on time, Conger says. “It's not like we've never done workarounds in training, but these are things where the training experts in all of the services will have to look at trends and figure out how to adjust what they have to do,” he says. “It is not something they're immune from; it's something they're going to have to accommodate and deal with.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/us-military-given-authority-defend-against-climate-change

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  29 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  European Missile Research Paves Way For Collaborative Weaponry

  By Tony Osborne Future conflicts will require weapons that can adapt to different target sets and collaborate to hit harder. As several European nations gear up to begin the development of advanced new combat aircraft, such as the Franco/German/Spanish Future Combat Air System and the British-led Tempest project, and invest in long-range ground-based weaponry, European missile manufacturer MBDA has begun focusing its research programs on delivering these advanced capabilities. The Anglo-French Materials and Components for Missiles Innovation and Technology Partnership (MCM-ITP), led by MBDA and sponsored by the French and UK defense ministries to the tune of €13 million ($14.5 million) a year, has been developing technologies over the last 11 years to help increase the performance and lower the cost of MBDA's British and French weapons. Small to midsize enterprises (SME) and academia have participated in the program, validating technologies with more than 200 projects in eight research domains ranging from rocket propulsion to seekers and fusing, developing them up to a technology readiness level (TRL) of 4. The research program has assisted in development of the French Mica NG air-to-air missile, supporting a small active, electronically scanned array radar module for the seeker of the radar-guided version, while the Spear 3, a network-enabled guided missile being developed in the UK will use a wire-free architecture. In addition, as the Spear 3 family of weapons broadens in the future, it will use an adaptive control system. The ITP is beginning to look at technologies that can speed up the engagement chain, adapt warheads for different kinds of targets and even develop lower-cost air-breathing engines for new families of so-called remote carriers—the attritable unmanned air systems that will support future combat aircraft into theater. “We know that collaborative weapons would be a big advantage to defeat air defenses, but how we do that has not yet been quantified,” says Olivier Lucas, MBDA's director of Future Systems, speaking to Aviation Week at the MCM-ITP Conference in Birmingham, England, on Oct. 15. “We need to demonstrate the benefits you can get from these networked weapons through operational analysis,” he adds. To make collaborative weapons work, Lucas says there will need to be developments in low-cost data links to connect them, and then algorithms that can take advantage of the cooperation and ensure all these systems can still work together in environments where navigation and communication signals could be degraded. Industry has already proved it can make UAVs collaborate and swarm in formations, but as Lucas points out, this is usually done with the aid of satellite-based global positioning systems. The military is unlikely to enjoy such a luxury in a high-end conflict. All four global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)—the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS), Europe's Galileo, Russia's Glonass and China's BeiDou—work around similar frequencies and could be easily jammed. Weapons such as cruise missiles can already operate without GNSS by relying on inertial navigation systems (INS), or if flying over land they can recognize landscapes based on internal terrain databases. But what if a considerable part of their flight is over water, where there are no landmarks? As part of the MCM-ITP, a team from MBDA, Airbus Defense and Space and French aerospace research agency ONERA have developed a means of correcting INS drift using satellite communication signals. The Resilient and Autonomous Satcom Navigation (Reason) system gives the weapon an alternative measurement signal. Many military communication satellites already have the capability of geolocating interference. Using the signals to provide navigation updates employs a reverse of that process, say engineers. They have already proved the theory by linking an INS fitted to a 4 X 4 vehicle that took signals from two of the UK's SkyNet communication satellites and compared the INS track with that of GPS, noting small deviations from course. The team believes the Reason technology will be valuable for future generations of long-range cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles such as the Anglo-French Future Cruise/Anti-Ship Weapon, currently in a concept phase. Another MCM-ITP project is looking at using artificial intelligence (AI) and a process called deep reinforcement, learning to better understand the levels of autonomy that might be needed in the engagement chain. The Human Machine Teaming (HUMAT) project considers the growing complexity and capability of modern missiles and the increasing amounts of data being collected by multilayered intelligence systems. It recognizes that human operators may need to be supported in their analysis and prioritization of threats by artificial intelligence. The two year-long program, started in November 2017, has studied different elements of the engagement chain, as well as the ethical, legal and technological constraints, with the aim of creating “robust engagement decision-making,” and “effective transfer of task responsibilities between the human operator and the machine.” The HUMAT system has benefits for the weapon command-and-control systems, particularly air-to-surface attack, but also multilayered air defense systems, say MBDA engineers. “We have to understand the information we will share with the weapons, what will be split, what is planned and what decisions are left to the group of weapons,” says Lucas. “This process has to be tuned, you can either program the trajectory of each weapon or tell the weapons: ‘Here are your targets, now do your best,'” he says. Collaborative weapons will also need to feature additional low-cost sensors to help them make their targeting decisions, including those that understand radar signal and resolution, so that the most appropriate weapon can be selected to hit a particular target successfully. Mission planning is also being addressed. MBDA engineers and academics from Queen Mary University of London have been exploring the use of deep-learning techniques to speed up the targeting process for weapons such as cruise missiles. Current air-launched cruise missiles such as MBDA's Storm Shadow/SCALP family use an imaging infrared sensor and autonomous target recognition system in the terminal phase of flight. But to recognize the target, a 3D model needs to be developed as part of the mission planning process. This process can be laborious and time-consuming, so engineers have been studying ways to create the models using satellite imagery. Using deep-learning techniques, the system has been fed thousands of daylight and infrared satellite images taken in different conditions at different times of the day. The Fast Targeting algorithms have learned how to match images with the target area despite various geometric and radiometric distortions, allowing a 3D model of the target to be built much faster. The idea is to make such weapons much more flexible and pave the way for them to be used against time-sensitive targets. Lucas says such technologies will help address the issues associated with combat mass, dealing with the challenge of fewer platforms, so the same weapons will have to be adaptable for different missions and targets. “In recent conflicts in Libya and Syria, weapons could not be used to their full effectiveness, because they were too powerful, and there was a risk of collateral damage,” says Lucas. Operators will be able to program future weapons to scale the warhead's effects up or down to deal with different targets and environments, he suggests. Other projects in the MCM-ITP are developing lethality models for different types of targets, including aircraft, ships and structures. Replacing metal parts in warheads with reactive materials could result in more efficient and increased lethality, and if combined with additive manufacturing techniques warhead costs could also be reduced, say engineers. Additive manufacturing processes could lead to new designs for penetrator warheads in particular. Engineers from MBDA and SMEs Impetus Afea and Fluid Gravity Engineering have developed a 3D penetrator warhead case with a smaller mass than the thick casings usually produced through casting. Using the 3D-printed case means less energy is lost during warhead detonation than with the older cast penetrator. Testing has proved the 3D-printed casing can match the survivability of the thicker casing, and reduced collateral effects can also be achieved, MBDA says. The company is now looking to evolve the MCM-ITP to deal with new technologies that may cut across the eight domains of research, with the addition of a new ninth, open-challenge domain that will be more flexible for future program needs. A name change is also in the offing, with MCM-ITP being renamed the Complex Weapons Innovation and Technology Partnership (CW-ITP) from early next year. https://aviationweek.com/defense/european-missile-research-paves-way-collaborative-weaponry