Lockheed To Migrate F-35 Backbone To Cloud Architecture

Sur le même sujet

• 

  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/

• 

  29 juin 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  T-7 Red Hawk trainer jet takes its first flight

  Its flight marks the beginning of the T-7′s final development phase before Boeing starts producing military-ready jets.

• 

  6 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Study finds these gaps in Army’s small unit counter-drone capabilities

  Army units at and below the battalion level are unprepared to defeat aerial drones and current plans can't keep up with rapidly evolving technology, according to a recent study. Back in 2016, the Army Research Office asked an outside organization, The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, to evaluate their counter drone capabilities for battalion and below operations. The report they published earlier this year notes some significant gaps and threats to soldiers with this technology. “Contrary to the past, when U.S. warfighters may have found (improvised explosive devices), now the IEDs will find our warfighters,” according to the report. While the Army and Marine Corps, which also included representatives in the study, are throwing resources at the small drone problem, they are not keeping pace with the threat. “Army time frames are significantly out of sync with the rapidly advancing performance capabilities of individual (small Unmanned Aerial Systems) and teams of sUASs,” according to the report. The report noted that most of the service's counter drone asset work was focused on heavy vehicle platforms or on fixed sites, which leaves smaller units most likely to first encounter the threat more exposed. “Significant quantities of man-portable” counter-drone systems have been fielded, Army spokesman Maj. Chris Ophardt told Army Times in an email. The Army will continue to pursue those capabilities based on emerging threats. Based on his response, which did not include details of capabilities, the Army is pursuing other ways to defeat drones. A large portion of the study was classified, due to operational security concerns. “Future Army C-UAS systems will encompass a variety of potential platforms to include fixed, mobile, and Soldier-portable capabilities,” Ophardt wrote. But beyond the types of systems employed, what they're targeting or attacking also came under fire in the report. The Army and other branches have invested significantly in counter-drone technology, “often focusing on detecting radio frequency transmissions and GPS signals of individual sUASs. However, today's consumer and customized sUASs can increasingly operate without radio frequency (command and control) links.” Drones now available can use automated target recognition, tracking, obstacle avoidance and other software-enabled activities instead of traditional RF and GPS. Ophardt did not divulge specifics of how the Army is addressing this, but responded that the service's counter drone capabilities, “include multiple methods in order to detect, identify and defeat enemy UAS.” A new school began last month at Fort Benning, Georgia to give basic trainees familiarity with small drones. The drone school gives infantry and scouts the ability to fill out a seven-line report when they encounter a drone then relay that info to their headquarters. The students use both fixed-wing and helicopter small drones. They also learn defensive tactics such as how to use dispersal and hiding tactics to minimize casualties from drone-coordinated fires, according to an Army release. Those introductory tactics can help even brand-new soldiers start thinking about how to deal with drone threats. But, at the same time, the low-level tactics currently used for counter drone work have tried to use “kinetic effects,” basically shooting down the drone by interfering with its signals or overheating its circuits. The report noted that method isn't practical on a wide scale for large numbers of troops, especially dismounted units. That path only adds more gear from the equipment to the batteries, to an already overloaded soldier, not to mention the “cognitive load” of training and using another piece of equipment, according to the report. Ophardt responded that the Army's counter-drone strategy included “multiple methods” to detect, identify and defeat” enemy drones. The major provided a similar response when asked about Army efforts at counter-drone tactics, capabilities against swarming drones and collaboratively acting drone groups, which the report remarks will be more prevalent and sophisticated as soon as 2025. Report authors urge Army leaders to adjust their timelines for matching tech development, which are woefully inadequate for the exponential changes in software, hardware and drone capabilities. Current Army time frames consider near-term planning to run from now until 2025; mid-term planning in the 2026 to 2035 window and far-term at the 2036 to 2050. Those efforts mirror vehicle acquisition strategy timelines, not the drone arena. The report pushes for a near-term planning of one to two years, mid-term at the three- to five-year level and far term in drone tech at the six- to eight-year range. The advances are happening so quickly, authors point out, that it is “impossible to predict performance capabilities beyond eight years.” https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/07/05/study-finds-these-gaps-in-armys-small-unit-counter-drone-capabilities