4 janvier 2024 | International, Terrestre
The command and control and 30 mm-equipped versions will be ready for unit testing in 2024.
21 septembre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
The Canadian Army has dozens of older troop carriers it plans to send to the scrapheap this year — even though a private company has offered to refurbish them for use in Ukraine.
16 octobre 2018 | International, Terrestre
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. BAE System's CV90 Mark IV is the latest upgrade of a 25-year-old vehicle widely used in Europe; the Rheinmetall-Raytheon Lynx is an all-new design, although individual components have a good track record; but the General Dynamics Griffin III is in the middle, combining a new gun and new electronics with the time-tested chassis from the European ASCOD family. AUSA: General Dynamics looks like the early favorite to replace the Army's 1980s-vintage M2 Bradley troop carrier. That's my personal assessment after talking at length to officers and contractors at last week's Association of the US Army conference, where months of uncertainty finally gave way to some real clarity about both what the Army wants and what industry can offer. In brief, GD's Griffin III demonstrator seems to hit the sweet spot between innovative and proven technologies that the Army wants to start fielding a Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) as soon as 2026. Of the three vehicles on display at AUSA, BAE System's CV90 Mark IV is the latest upgrade of a 25-year-old vehicle widely used in Europe; the Rheinmetall-Raytheon Lynx is an all-new design, although individual components have a good track record; but the General Dynamics Griffin III is in the middle, combining a new gun and new electronics with the time-tested chassis from the European ASCOD family. The competitors do have a lot in common. All offer tracked vehicles with diesel engines — even BAE, which once touted its hybrid-electric drives as a key selling point. All three boast open-architecture electronics to ease future upgrades, an integrated Active Protection System to shoot down incoming anti-tank warheads, modular armor that can be layered on or stripped down depending on the mission, and a turret capable of mounting a 50 mm gun, the Army's preferred caliber. Only the Griffin actually has a 50mm installed right now, however. The others currently have 35mm cannon. It's also the only vehicle that can point its gun almost straight up, at an 85 degree angle, to hit rooftop targets in urban combat, something the Army has worried about extensively. Details like this suggest that General Dynamics has been listening more closely to the Army than its competitors. In fact, even where the Griffin III underperforms its competitors, most notably by carrying fewer infantry, it does so in areas where the Army is willing to make tradeoffs. The End of the Beginning Now, it's still early in the NGCV race. While we only saw three contenders on the floor at AUSA, it's still entirely possible a fourth player could jump in. My money's on the team of SAIC and Singapore-based STK, which is already offering a modified Singaporean army vehicle for the US Army's Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) light tank. The other MPF competitors are BAE, with an update of the Armored Gun Systemcancelled in 1996, and GD, offering a version of the Griffin. By November, the Army will award two of the three companies contracts to build prototypes. If either GD or the SAIC-ST team wins, they'll have at least a slight advantage for NGCV, since buying related vehicles for both roles will simplify training, maintenance, and supply. (BAE's AGS is totally unrelated to its CV90, so an MPF win wouldn't help it on NGCV). By contrast to MPF, the competition for NGCV is only at the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. The Army's still refining its requirements, in part based on discussions with industry at AUSA. What's the timeline? Col. James Schirmer, the program manager, said at the conference that “we are within weeks of having that requirement finalized.” Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, the Army's director of armored vehicle modernization, said a formal Request For Proposal (RFP) based on those requirements will come out no later than January. So there'll be time for the competitors to revise their NGCV designs before submitting them. Even after that, more than one company will get a contract to build prototypes for Army testing. What's the objective that drives both this pace and the technological tradeoffs the Army is willing to make? Fielding the first operational unit in 2026 — nine years earlier than the original plan — to help deter Russian aggression. Deadline 2026 “All options are on the table, but the schedule will be the schedule,” Brig. Gen. Coffman told reporters at AUSA. “We would like to field this vehicle by 2026.” “If someone could develop a clean sheet design that could meet that timeline,” he said, “it'd be great, but I don't know that's doable.” (By contrast, the potential replacement for the M1 Abrams tank is coming later, so the service is looking for radical innovation). Schirmer offered more specifics. “We have a pretty challenging test schedule... very similar to MPF, (so) we really can't afford a clean sheet design,” he said. The more mature the component technologies, the better, he said, but what's best is that those individual components have been proven as an integrated system. Specifically, Schirmer said, “for the Bradley replacement, we are going to be buying vehicles that are based on a mature architecture — powertrain, track, suspension — that's already in service somewhere in the world.” While these remarks leave the door open for the Lynx, or at least ajar, they're not particularly encouraging. By contrast, the CV90 series entered service with Sweden in 1993, with variants now serving in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Holland, Norway, and Switzerland. The Griffin III is the latest member of the ASCOD family — the Spanish Pizzaro, Austrian Ulan, and British Ajax — which debuted in Spain in 2002. While the Army wants a proven hull, however, Schirmer says there is one area where technology is advancing fast enough for it be worth taking some risk: lethality, i.e. the gun and sensors. In particular, while the Bradley has a 25mm chaingun, the Army really wants NGCV to have a 50mm cannon — firing shells about four times as big — that's now in development at the service's Ammunition Research, Development, & Engineering Center (ARDEC). That gun, the XM913, is currently integrated on just one competitor, the Griffin, although both the Lynx and CV90 turrets could accommodate it. All three vehicles, like the Bradley, also have room in the turret to mount anti-tank missiles of various types. The Griffin on the show floor also mounts a launcher for AeroVironment Shrike mini-drones, while the Lynx will have the option to launch Raytheon's Coyote: Both mini-drones can be configured either with sensors to scout or with warheads to destroy. Even on weaponry, however, the Army is willing to make compromises to speed fielding, just as it introduced the original M1 Abrams with a 105 mm gun but with room to upgrade to the desired 120mm when it was ready a few years later. For NGCV, Schirmer said, they want the vehicle to have the 50mm gun eventually but “may settle on the 30 in the near term, just to meet schedule.” Armor & Passengers Besides gun caliber, the other easily measured aspect of an armored vehicle is its weight, which is very much a two-edged sword. There's been no breakthrough in armor materials since the 1980s and none on the horizon, so the only way to get better armor is to make it thicker. So a heavier vehicle is probably better protected, but it also burns more fuel, wears out more spare parts, and has more trouble getting places: Bridges and transport aircraft in particular can only take so much weight. Full article: https://breakingdefense.com/2018/10/general-dynamics-griffin-takes-lead-to-replace-m2-bradley
18 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
FARNBOROUGH, England — The Air Force is still not moving fast enough to recruit the software talent that it needs to harness emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, its acquisition head said Tuesday. "I don't think we're attracting enough people. Whether they're the right people or not, I think that's a separate question. I'm not sure that we'll be able to answer that until we're working with a broader set of the industry base that's working AI,” Will Roper, the Air Force's undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logstics, told reporters at Farnborough Airshow. “I contend that the companies driving AI are a different breed of company than those who drive evolution in hardware, especially companies that drove hardware that have gotten us to today's military. The paces are faster, turnovers are quicker. Software is done in month cycles not year cycles.” Over the past year, the Air Force has charted some successes and some failures in its attempts to integrate tech like AI and big data analytics with legacy hardware systems like fighter jets or air operations center. It has established the Kessel Run Experimentation Lab, a group of industry and airmen in Boston that are iterating new capabilities for air operations centers. Instead of rolling out a large software package, the coders focus on app-like updates that can more rapidly insert new functionality into the AOC. But it's also suffered setbacks — most notably, Google's stated intention to withdraw from future Defense Department projects after some employees objected to the company's work on Project Maven, a program would allow the Pentagon to use AI to review footage from drones. Some have worried that could have a chilling effect on future efforts. Roper said that a big focus of his job is changing how the Air Force approaches software. In the past, software was a product that could be bought in cycles, just like a physical product like a missile or aircraft. Now, it's a service that must be reworked constantly, he said. “You get a good set of coders in, they can push out so much code per month. You put them with the user that's going to use the code and together they're able to collaborate to make sure that the developer is creating something that the operator is using,” he said. “That's working very well for us in Boston, and we're looking to expand that. That's the basic mechanism to move towards AI. We're going to need people that are working with us that are software people that are working, tweaking algorithms with the users that use them, and it's probably a different company than have worked with us over the past 10 years.” The Air Force has to get those companies under contract faster, in weeks instead of months, Roper said. It's looking for opportunities to use contract vehicles specifically delegated for small businesses and to use AFWERX — its outreach arm to nontraditional contractors who are creating promising commercial technologies — to introduce startups to the service. But Roper acknowledged there was no easy answer to the problem. One possible way to inject AI into Air Force programs — although a mundane one — is to use it for predictive maintenance technologies that use sensors to forecast when a component will break, said Air Force Under Secretary Matt Donovan. “It's very exciting for us and I think it holds a lot of potential to reduce our sustainment costs,” he said, noting that sustainment makes up a whopping 70 percent of the life-cycle cost of any given product. Roper agreed that sustainment was a great area to begin employing AI, and that experience could help the Air Force begin to figure out how to use the technology for classified applications. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/farnborough/2018/07/17/air-force-looks-to-accelerate-artificial-intelligence-contracts