10 juin 2022 | International, Aérospatial

MBDA-led team to demo new European anti-tank kit this summer

The idea is for a new anti-tank missile that can take cues from a variety of sensors on the battlefield or in the air.

https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2022/06/07/mbda-led-team-to-demo-new-european-anti-tank-kit-this-summer/?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dfn-ebb

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  • Build a fleet, not a constituency

    12 mai 2020 | International, Naval

    Build a fleet, not a constituency

    By: Bryan Clark and Timothy A. Walton The U.S. Navy's long-awaited award of a contract to design and build a new class of frigates has brought with it calls to dramatically expand the planned class of 20 ships to a fleet of 70 or more hulls. Like recent congressional efforts to build more of today's amphibious ships or destroyers, these recommendations risk putting the Navy on an unsustainable path and could fail to influence Chinese or Russian adversaries the U.S. fleet is intended to help deter. The Navy clearly needs guided-missile frigates. By bringing comparable capability with less capacity, frigates will provide a less expensive alternative to Arleigh Burke destroyers that are the mainstay of today's U.S. surface fleet. Freed of the requirement to conduct almost every surface combatant operation, destroyers would have more time to catch up on maintenance and training or be available to conduct missions demanding their greater missile capacity like Tomahawk missile strikes or ballistic missile defense. However, the frigate's size — less than a destroyer, more than a littoral combat ship or corvette — also limits its ability to support U.S. Navy wartime operations. Frigates like the Franco-Italian FREMM can conduct the full range of European navy operations such as local air defense, maritime security and anti-submarine warfare, or ASW. But the American FREMM variant will not have enough missile capacity for large or sustained attacks like those conducted by the U.S. Navy during the last several years in the Middle East, or like those that would be likely in a conflict with China. And although they could defend a nearby ship from air attack, the planned U.S. frigates could not carry enough longer-range surface-to-air interceptors to protect U.S. carrier and amphibious groups, or bases and population centers ashore. Proponents argue frigates' capacity limitations could be mitigated by buying more of them, better enabling distributed maritime operations and growing naval presence in underserved areas like the Caribbean and Arctic. In a post-COVID-19 employment environment, accelerating frigate construction could also create jobs by starting production at additional shipyards. Although they cost about $1 billion each to buy, the money to buy more frigates — at least initially — could be carried in the wave of post-pandemic economic recovery spending. But after a few years, that spigot will likely run dry, leaving the Navy to decide whether to continue spending about half the cost of a destroyer for a ship that has only a third as many missiles and cannot conduct several surface warfare missions. The more significant fiscal challenge with buying more frigates is owning them. Based on equivalent ships, each frigate is likely to cost about $60 million annually to operate, crew and maintain. That is only about 25 percent less than a destroyer. For the U.S. Navy, which is already suffering manning shortages and deferring maintenance, fielding a fleet of 70 frigates in addition to more than 90 cruisers and destroyers will likely be unsustainable. Instead of simply building more frigates to create jobs and grow the Navy, Department of Defense leaders should determine the overall number and mix of ships it needs and can afford within realistic budget constraints. The secretary of defense recently directed such an effort, which continues despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This commentary's authors are participating in the study. As recommended in a recent study, instead of buying more frigates to expand the fleet's capacity, the Navy would be better served by adding missile-equipped corvettes like those in European or Asian navies. These ships could carry as many missiles as the Navy's planned frigate but would not incorporate capabilities for area air defense or ASW. The smaller size and reduced capability of corvettes would reduce their sticker price to about one-third that of a frigate, and their sustainment cost to about a quarter that of destroyers. The lower price for corvettes would allow more of them to be built and deployed, where they could team with other surface forces to provide additional missile magazines that could be reloaded by rotating corvettes to rear areas. In peacetime, corvettes would enable the Navy to expand presence and maritime security to underserved regions and provide more appropriate platforms for training and cooperation. Frigates will still be needed, even with a new corvette joining the U.S. fleet. Frigates would replace destroyers in escort operations to protect civilian and noncombatant ships, like supply vessels. They would also conduct maritime security operations in places such as the Persian Gulf or South China Sea, where piracy, trafficking and paramilitary attacks occur. Most importantly, frigates would lead ASW operations, where their towed sonar systems could be more capable than the systems used by current destroyers. Although ASW is an important naval mission, buying more frigates than planned to expand the Navy's ASW capacity is unnecessary and counterproductive. The Navy could gain more ASW capacity at lower cost and with less risk to manned ships by complementing its planned 20 frigates with unmanned systems including fixed sonars like SOSUS, deployable sonar systems that sit on the ocean floor, unmanned surface vessels that tow sonars and trail submarines, and unmanned aircraft that can deploy and monitor sonobuoys or attack submarines to suppress their operations or sink them. The U.S. Navy is at the beginning of a period of dramatic change. New technologies for autonomy, sensing, weapons and networking are enabling new concepts for naval missions at the same time fiscal constraints and pressure from great power competitors are making traditional approaches to naval operations obsolete or unsustainable. The Navy's frigate award is a great start toward the future fleet, but the Navy needs to take advantage of this opportunity and assess the best mix of ships to field the capabilities it needs within the resources it is likely to have. Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where Timothy A. Walton works as a fellow. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/05/11/build-a-fleet-not-a-constituency/

  • Lockheed successfully tests multiple-launch rocket system

    5 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial

    Lockheed successfully tests multiple-launch rocket system

    Lockheed Martin recently ran a successful test of its next-generation Extended-Range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

  • After COVID delay, high-stakes test of Army’s critical battle command system underway

    3 août 2020 | International, Terrestre

    After COVID delay, high-stakes test of Army’s critical battle command system underway

    By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — A high-stakes test of the U.S. Army's battle command system expected to control air and missile defense shooters and sensors is underway following a delay due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kenn Todorov, Northrop Grumman's vice president for missile defense solutions, told Defense News in a recent interview. Northrop Grumman is the developer of the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS. The system's development and its fielding is the Army's top air and missile defense modernization priority. IBCS has had a long and marred history due to struggles in previous tests as well as increasing requirements causing a plethora of challenging software changes. But recent successful tests over the past several years have resulted in a deeper confidence of the system, and the Army has been racing to move through a limited-user test, or LUT, at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, to reach a production decision. The test will decide the fate of the program. The program was supposed to reach initial operational capability last year, but those plans slipped in 2017 by four years following software problems in the system's first LUT in 2016. IBCS was originally meant to serve as the command-and-control system for the Army's future Integrated Air and Missile Defense system against regional ballistic missile threats, but now the service sees a much more expansive future for the technology, with plans to tie it to sensors and shooters capable of defeating complex threats like unmanned aircraft. According to Todorov, the Army and Northrop had to take a “COVID pause” to ensure the safety of all of the participants of the LUT before proceeding. Originally, the IBCS test was scheduled for earlier in the spring as COVID-19 was spreading quickly across the United States. Precautions are taken to ensure participants stay healthy, Todorov said, but he doesn't believe those measures will sacrifice any of the rigor within the test. The LUT will have a broader range of threats to counter than the original, from ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and air-breathing threats, and this test will include the integration of some joint air assets, Brig. Gen. Brian Gibson, the head of the Army's missile defense modernization effort, told Defense News last year. Northrop took the extra time from the pause caused by the pandemic to improve the system's readiness and develop policies and procedures to ensure employees take precautions to avoid the spread of the virus during the LUT. The test is expected to go through the month of August and include endurance runs as well as two major flight tests. In Northrop's second-quarter fiscal 2020 earnings call on July 30, CEO Kathy Warden said that “successful completion of this [engineering and manufacturing development] milestone will support IBCS production, deployment and fielding to execute the Army's [IAMD] modernization strategy,” adding that the program is on track to reach a production decision later this year. Warden also noted that success with the IBCS program and the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System puts the company on a path to contribute heavily to an anticipated “next-generation” program called Joint All-Domain Command and Control. JADC2 is expected to provide an information architecture across all service and domains of warfare. Northrop's IBCS development efforts are seen as a springboard into work it could do to develop JADC2, Todorov said. He added that the IBCS system in particular has gone through “tremendous advances,” as it has adapted to maturing and changing threats. One of the reasons the system has been able to quickly evolve is due to its designation by Congress — among just a few Defense Department programs — to adopt an agile software-development process that allows the system to be frequently updated with software upgrades or patches, as opposed to big software drops that potentially happen only once a year. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/07/31/after-covid-delay-high-stakes-test-of-armys-critical-battle-command-system-underway/

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