Marines need to equip defensive cyber teams

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  12 mars 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  U.S. Military Exploring eVTOL Solution to Resupplying Troops

  by Nick Zazulia The U.S. military is stepping up its efforts to enlist autonomous eVTOL aircraft for a variety of missions, especially those that would reduce risk to troops, such as moving cargo in combat zones. In early January, the U.S. Air Force issued a request for information to civil eVTOL developers in a bid to evaluate options for investing in the technology. For 2020 alone, the Pentagon has allocated almost $170 million to investigate options for what it calls unmanned logistic system-air (ULS-A) capability. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces have faced difficulty moving supplies, according to Carmine Borrelli, deputy head for logistics innovation with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. Valuable military aircraft often need to be kept in reserve for higher-priority missions, and even when they are used, high sustainment costs make resupply an inefficient use for them. “They [eVTOLs] have the potential to have a platform that could be cost-effective, that could go far distances and that could carry stuff, potentially, at a lesser cost than what we were doing,” said Borrelli in a press briefing hosted by the Vertical Flight Society on March 10. The Marines are partnering with both the Army and the Air Force on different projects to realize that goal through what it calls small, medium, and large unmanned logistics systems. The Office of the Secretary of Defense is allocating approximately $120 million to the efforts of the Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) with small and medium ULS-A vehicles covered by the program objective memorandum (POM-19). Another $30 million for medium-size ULS-A in combined stakeholder investment and funding from the Office of the Secretary of Defense is being put toward joint capabilities technical demonstrations that need to be completed before the POM funding can be put to use. And the fiscal year 2020 budget from Congress includes $18.5 million to advance autonomous technology, particularly in large aircraft. There is more funding for the smaller ULS vehicles, because the use case is more clearly defined, and the work is further along. Instead of usual rigid requirements, the Marine Corps is now deliberately thinking about possible use cases in terms of range. Borrelli that this approach allows more flexibility in finding the best way to use the burgeoning eVTOL technology. The Department of Defense (DoD) considers “small” ULS to be vehicles with a 60- to 150-pound payload, designed for trips within 10 or 15 miles and a daily throughput of about 1,000 pounds per aircraft. Borrelli said the Marines are finding that it's realistic for vehicles of that size to weigh as much as or less than the payload they're designed to carry. The goal is to use them for squad resupply, leveraging highly automated routines to complete simple operations without requiring much manpower. Early operational capability is scheduled for 2023 with full operational capability on the docket for 2026. A medium ULS carries 300- to 500 pounds anywhere from a 20 to 125-mile combat radius, allowing for carrying up to 5,000 pounds of cargo in a day. As with a small ULS, medium ULS can keep their weight efficient enough that payload about meets vehicle weight, though they will be used for more complicated missions, such as supplying platoons, operations between advanced bases, and more. “We're trying to anticipate the future; potentially that size range could also do casualty evacuation...if these things prove out and they are reliable enough,” Borrelli said. The Marine Corps is working with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory on medium ULS efforts. At the end of January, Navair hosted a tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems fly-off competition in Yuma, Arizona, won by Survice Engineering's TRV-150 system, which is based on the Malloy Aeronautics tactical resupply vehicle drone platform. Other competitors included Bell, Autonodyne, AirBuoyant, Pacific Aerospace Consulting, and Chartis Federal. Borrelli said medium ULS are targeted to enter service during fiscal year 2024 or 2025, with full operational capability in 2030. The category just finished its first year of successful joint-capabilities technical demonstration flight tests as part of a three-year effort. The large ULS category is still a bit more abstract. Initially, DoD conceived of vehicles with a 2,000- to 6,000-lb payload, in some ways a replacement for Bell Boeing V-22 Ospreys or Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallions on shorter trips. However, as the consumer market has defined and taken shape, the military realized that scaling back to vehicles with 1,000- to 2,000-lb payloads will make more sense. “We want to seriously consider and match industry's approach,” Borrelli said. “If the market is moving toward the 1,000-pound platform—a "flying car"—and many [new eVTOL aircraft] are going to be out there, it would be in our best interest to figure out how best we can use that platform to do what we need to do. We look to ride the coattails of industry.” The military is still interested in larger vehicles that can move up to 6,000 lb, but it recognizes that isn't where the bulk of innovation is taking place right now. In the large ULS category, the Marine Corps is working with the Air Force, whose Agility Prime program was started last year to leverage the commercial VTOL industry to find more efficient ways to execute resupply missions than through its high-sustainment-cost aircraft. The military wants to use these larger ULS for company resupply in remote areas with austere landing zones and launched from a new class of small, minimally-manned ships, as well as potentially to transport troops. The vehicles would work in a radius of up to 350 miles, each handling throughputs ranging from 15,000 to 30,000 pounds per day. Early operational capability for large ULS is scheduled for 2023, with full operational capability in 2030. While the military has done less work on large ULS, it hopes to rely more on the investment of the commercial UAM industry. For large ULS, Borrelli said the same weight efficiency won't be possible, so it will take a heavier vehicle to lift 2,000 pounds. Both hybrid and fully-electric propulsion is on the table and, in either case, new propulsion technology brings infrastructure questions with it. “That's something that we have constantly in the back of our minds,” Borrelli said. “So, as we're moving to the rest of the ULS space, the ground and surface and sub-surface, we're considering where those charging stations could be or where a battery inventory would be. If we don't have a charging station, we have to have a battery inventory. It's not going to do us any good to have a considerable amount of inventory unless we can be able to charge efficiently.” https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2020-03-12/us-military-exploring-evtol-solution-resupplying-troops

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  22 novembre 2022 | International, Aérospatial

  Europe’s new warplane program could finally, maybe, take off

  Eric Trappier, the boss of France's industry lead Dassault, plays down progress as a "a pseudo-political announcement."

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  27 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Hypersonics: DoD Wants ‘Hundreds of Weapons’ ASAP

  “We want to deliver hypersonics at scale,” said R&D director Mark Lewis, from air-breathing cruise missiles to rocket-boosted gliders that fly through space. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. WASHINGTON: The Pentagon has created a “war room” to ramp up production of hypersonic weapons from a handful of prototypes over the last decade to “hundreds of weapons” in the near future, a senior official said Wednesday. Those weapons will range from huge rocket-powered boost-glide missiles, fired from Army trucks and Navy submarines at more than Mach 10, to more compact and affordable air-breathing cruise missiles, fired from aircraft at a relatively modest Mach 5-plus. “It isn't an either-or,” said Mark Lewis, modernization director for Pentagon R&D chief Mike Griffin. “It isn't rocket-boost or air-breathing, we actually want both, because those systems do different things.” Right now, however, US combat units have neither. Inconsistent focus and funding over the years means that “we had a number of programs in the department that were very solid technology development programs, but at the end of those programs, we would have prototypes and we'd have weapons in the single-digit counts,” Lewis said during a webcast with the Air Force Association's Mitchell Institute. “If you've got a program that delivers eight missiles and then stops, well, which of the thousand targets in our target set are we going to use those eight missiles against?” With hypersonics now a top priority for both Undersecretary Griffin and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the Pentagon is trying to improve that stop-and-go track record with a new “hypersonic acceleration plan” – no pun intended, Lewis said. Griffin likes to compare the effort to the Cold War, when the US had a massive nuclear weapons infrastructure capable of building complex components by the tens of thousands. “We want to deliver hypersonics at scale,” Lewis said. “That means hundreds of weapons in a short period of time in the hands of the warfighter.” Mass-production, in turn, requires production facilities – but today hypersonic prototypes are basically hand-crafted by R&D labs like Sandia. Lewis and his counterpart in the Pentagon's acquisition & sustainment directorate, Kevin Fahey, are “co-chairing what we're were calling a war room ... looking at the hypersonic industrial base,” he said. “That's not just the primes, but the entire industrial base” down to small, specialized suppliers. Controlling cost is both essential to large-scale production and a huge challenge, Lewis acknowledged. “We don't know what these things cost yet,” he said. “We've asked the primes to consider costs as they're developing.” Which hypersonic weapons the Pentagon buys also makes a major difference. “There are some technology choices we can make that lead us to more cost-effective systems,” he said. “I'm especially enthusiastic about hypersonic weapons that come off the wings of airplanes and come out of bomb bays, [because] I think those are some of the keys to delivering hypersonic capabilities at scale and moderate cost.” Likewise, “[there's] larger investment now in the rocket boost systems,” Lewis said, “[but] one of the reasons I'm so enthusiastic about scramjet-powered systems, air-breathing systems is I think that, fundamentally, they can be lower-cost than their rocket-boosted alternatives.” Why is that? Understanding the policy, it turns out, requires a basic understanding of the physics. Breaking Defense graphic from DoD data Four Types of Hypersonics “Hypersonics isn't a single thing,” Lewis said. “It's a range of applications, a range of attributes, [defined by] the combination of speed and maneuverability and trajectory.” To put it in simple terms – and I'll beg the forgiveness of any aerospace engineers reading this – there are two kinds of hypersonic projectile, based on how they fly: one is an air-breathing engine flying through the atmosphere, like a jet plane or cruise missile; the other is a rocket booster arcing to the edge of space, like an ICBM. There are also two kinds of platform you can launch from: an aircraft in flight high and fast above the earth, or a relatively slow-moving vehicle on or below the surface, like an Army truck, Navy warship or submarine. Combine these and you get four types. Lewis thinks all four could be worth pursuing, although the Pentagon currently has programs – that we know about – for only three: Air-launched boost-glide: Air Force ARRW (Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon). The Air Force also had another program in this category, HCSW (Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon), but they canceled it to focus on ARRW, which the service considers more innovative and promising. Surface-launched boost-glide: Army LRHW (Long Range Hypersonic Weapon) and Navy CPS (Conventional Prompt Strike). Both weapons share the same rocket booster, built by the Navy, and the same Common Hypersonic Glide Body, built by the Army, but one tailors the package to launch from a wheeled vehicle and the other from a submarine. Air-launched air-breathing: HAWC (Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapons Concept) and HSW-ab (Hypersonic Strike Weapon-air breathing). Arguably the most challenging and cutting-edge technology, these programs are both currently run by DARPA, which specializes in high-risk, high-return research, but they'll be handed over to the Air Force when they mature. Surface-launched air-breathing: This is the one category not in development – at least not in the unclassified world. But Lewis said, “eventually, you could see some ground-launched air breathers as well. I personally think those are very promising.” Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages, Lewis explained. Rocket boosters are proven technology, offering tremendous speed and range. The Minuteman III ICBM, introduced in 1970, can travel over 6,000 miles at Mach 23. Their one drawback is that ICBMs can't steer. Once launched, they follow a predictable course like a cannon ball, which is why they're called ballistic missiles. The big innovation of boost-glide weaponry is that it replaces the traditional warhead with an agile glider. Once the rocket booster burns out, the glide body detaches and coasts the rest of the way, skipping nimbly across the upper layers of the atmosphere like a stone across the pond. But boost-glide has some big limitations. First, once the rocket booster detaches, the glide body has no engine of its own so it just coasts, losing speed throughout its flight. Second, precisely because the rocket launch is so powerful, it puts tremendous strain on the weapon, whose delicate electronics must be hardened against shock and heat. Third, the booster is big, because a rocket not only has to carry fuel, it has to carry tanks of oxygen to burn the fuel. Breaking Defense graphic from DoD data An air-breathing engine, by contrast, can be significantly smaller. It just has to carry the fuel, because it can scoop up all the oxygen it needs from the atmosphere. That means the whole weapon can be smaller, making it much easier to fit on an aircraft, and that it can accelerate freely during flight instead of just coasting, making it more maneuverable. But while conventional jet engines are well-proven technology, they don't function at hypersonic speeds, because the airflow pours their intakes far too fast. So you need a sophisticated alternative such as a scramjet, a complex, costly technology so far found only on experimental vehicles, like the Air Force's revolutionary Boeing X-51. Even with a scramjet, you can't fly too high because the air doesn't provide the needed oxygen. That means air-breathing weapons can't reach the same near-space altitudes as boost-glide missiles. They also can't fly nearly as fast. Lewis expects air-breathers will probably top out around Mach 7, half or less the peak speed of a boost-glide weapon. (That said, remember the glider will have slowed down somewhat by the time it reaches the target). Sandia National Laboratories glide vehicle, the ancestor of the Army-built Common Hypersonic Glide Body The platform you launch from also has a major impact on performance. Warships, submarines, and long-bodied heavy trucks can carry bigger weapons than aircraft, but the weapons they carry need to be bigger because they have to start from low altitude and low speed and go all the way to high-altitude hypersonic flight. By contrast, an air-launched weapon doesn't need to be as big, because it's already flying high and fast even before it turns on its motor. All these factors suggest that the big boost-glide weapons are probably best launched from land or sea, the smaller air-breathing ones from aircraft in flight. But since boost-gliders go farther and faster than air-breathers, you still want them as an option for your bombers for certain targets. On the flipside, while a naval vessel or ground vehicle has plenty of room to carry boost-glide weapons for ultra-long-range strikes, it can also use the same space to carry a larger number of the smaller air-breathers for closer targets. “We're interested in basically the full range,” Lewis said. “We've got some ideas of things we want to put into play quickly, but we're also extremely open-minded about future applications, future technologies.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/04/hypersonics-dod-wants-hundreds-of-weapons-asap/