18 mars 2024 | International, Terrestre
The tank was first unveiled during a military parade in 2020.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2024/03/18/north-koreas-kim-test-drives-new-tank/
19 octobre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Hitachi is set to win EU antitrust approval for its 1.7-billion-euro ($1.8 billion) acquisition of Thales' GTS railway signalling business on the condition it sells assets in France and Germany, three people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
28 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Robert Burns, The Associated Press WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. — In the topsy-turvy world of U.S. strategic bombers, older and uglier sometimes beats newer and snazzier. As the Air Force charts a bomber future in line with the Pentagon's new focus on potential war with China or Russia, the youngest and flashiest — the stealthy B-2, costing a hair-raising $2 billion each — is to be retired first. The oldest and stodgiest — the Vietnam-era B-52 — will go last. It could still be flying when it is 100 years old. This might seem to defy logic, but the elite group of men and women who have flown the bat-winged B-2 Spirit accept the reasons for phasing it out when a next-generation bomber comes on line. “In my mind, it actually does make sense to have the B-2 as an eventual retirement candidate,” says John Avery, who flew the B-2 for 14 years from Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri. He and his wife, Jennifer, were the first married couple to serve as B-2 pilots; she was the first woman to fly it in combat. The Air Force sees it as a matter of money, numbers and strategy. The Air Force expects to spend at least $55 billion to field an all-new, nuclear-capable bomber for the future, the B-21 Raider, at the same time the Pentagon will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to replace all of the other major elements of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. The Air Force also is spending heavily on new fighters and refueling aircraft, and like the rest of the military it foresees tighter defense budgets ahead. The B-2′s viability suffers from the fact that only 21 were built, of which 20 remain. That leaves little slack in the supply chain for unique spare parts. It is thus comparatively expensive to maintain and to fly. It also is seen as increasingly vulnerable against air defenses of emerging war threats like China. Then there is the fact that the B-52, which entered service in the mid-1950s and is known to crews as the Big Ugly Fat Fellow, keeps finding ways to stay relevant. It is equipped to drop or launch the widest array of weapons in the entire Air Force inventory. The plane is so valuable that the Air Force twice in recent years has brought a B-52 back from the grave — taking long-retired planes from a desert “boneyard” in Arizona and restoring them to active service. Strategic bombers have a storied place in U.S. military history, from the early days of the former Strategic Air Command when the only way America and the former Soviet Union could launch nuclear weapons at each other was by air, to the B-52′s carpet bombing missions in Vietnam. Developed in secrecy in the 1980s, the B-2 was rolled out as a revolutionary weapon — the first long-range bomber built with stealth, or radar-evading, technology designed to defeat the best Soviet air defenses. By the time the first B-2 was delivered to the Air Force in 1993, however, the Soviet Union had disintegrated and the Cold War had ended. The plane made its combat debut in the 1999 Kosovo war. It flew a limited number of combat sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan and has launched only five combat sorties since 2011, all in Libya. The last was a 2017 strike notable for the fact that it pitted the world's most expensive and exotic bomber against a flimsy camp of Islamic State group militants. “It has proved its worth in the fight, over time,” says Col. Jeffrey Schreiner, who has flown the B-2 for 19 years and is commander of the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman, which flies and maintains the full fleet. But after two decades of fighting small wars and insurgencies, the Pentagon is shifting its main focus to what it calls “great power competition” with a rising China and a resurgent Russia, in an era of stiffer air defenses that expose B-2 vulnerabilities. Thus the Pentagon's commitment to the bomber of the future — the B-21 Raider. The Air Force has committed to buying at least 100 of them. The plane is being developed in secrecy to be a do-it-all strategic bomber. A prototype is being built now, but the first flight is not considered likely before 2022. Bombers are legend, but their results are sometimes regretted. A B-2 bomber scarred U.S.-China relations in 1999 when it bombed Beijing's embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, killing three people. China denounced the attack as a “barbaric act,” while the U.S. insisted it was a grievous error. The Air Force had planned to keep its B-2s flying until 2058 but will instead retire them as the B-21 Raider arrives in this decade. Also retiring early will be the B-1B Lancer, which is the only one of the three bomber types that is no longer nuclear-capable. The Air Force proposes to eliminate 17 of its 62 Lancers in the coming year. The B-52, however, will fly on. It is so old that it made a mark on American pop culture more than half a century ago. It lent its name to a 1960s beehive hairstyle that resembled the plane's nosecone, and the plane featured prominently in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove.” More than once, the B-52 seemed destined to go out of style. “We're talking about a plane that ceased production in 1962 based on a design that was formulated in the late 1940s,” says Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think-tank. Rather than retire it, the Air Force is planning to equip the Boeing behemoth with new engines, new radar technology and other upgrades to keep it flying into the 2050s. It will be a “stand off” platform from which to launch cruise missiles and other weapons from beyond the reach of hostile air defenses. In Thompson's view, the Air Force is making a simple calculation: The B-52 costs far less to operate and maintain than the newer but finickier B-2. “They decided the B-52 was good enough,” he says. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2020/07/26/in-a-future-usaf-bomber-force-old-and-ugly-beats-new-and-snazzy/
19 juin 2018 | International, Naval
BY AARON BOYD An accelerated-acquisition office is seeking industry's best ideas for keeping track of parts and repairs ashore and at sea. The U.S. Navy is looking for bleeding-edge technologies to improve its business systems and is using its other transaction authority to solicit ideas. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, or SPAWAR, announced June 14 its intention to use the Training and Readiness Accelerator, or TReX, consortium to manage the solicitation. On or about June 25, TReX will release the full solicitation requirements to its members, which includes “the entire innovation ecosystem including companies from—startups to Fortune 1000—universities, technology incubators, investors, public and private laboratories and non-profits,” according to its website. The solicitation will cover four areas under the Naval Operational Business Logistics Enterprise, or NOBLE, family of systems, with the overall goal of improving the Navy's material and shore readiness—including “reduced failure rate, improved repair time, improved resupply time and accuracy, affordable sustainment, mission capable and secure facilities”—and user experience—including “simplified and expedited decision making, integrated and dynamic work prioritization, digitally enabled training and collaboration and easy and intuitive user experience/interface.” The solicitation focuses on three core areas, with an overarching integrated data environment stretching across the enterprise. The core areas include the Naval Operational Supply System, or NOSS, the Naval Aviation Maintenance System, or NAMS, and the Naval Operational Maintenance Environment, or NOME. According to the solicitation, NOSS will provide planning, requisitioning, procurement, inventory control, logistics services and financial accountability of all material and property across all commodities. NAMS will provide Naval aviation—U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps—with a deployable, scalable and streamlined tactical maintenance solution to maintain the operational availability of deployed and deployable aircraft. NOME will provide the Navy with a deployable, scalable and streamlined tactical maintenance solution afloat to maintain the operational availability of deployed and deployable ships and submarines. Along with the core areas, SPAWAR is also looking for an integrated data environment that can work across platforms. While the data environment will have to work with each individual system, it is being treated as a separate solution area under this solicitation. The data environment will need to be hosted in a government-certified cloud with an impact level rating of 4/5, which cover sensitive controlled unclassified information. “The cloud environment combined with a common IDE will provide a highly available and reliable commercial solution,” the solicitation states. “The environment will also be capable of hosting and integrating applications, data, systems and services planned to be transitioned to modern commercial technologies, and accomplish this migration of government-owned applications with no degradation of services.” SPAWAR will conduct the solicitation in two phases. The first phase consists of submitting white papers for each solution—vendors can bid on any or all of them—with a tentative deadline set for July 24. SPAWAR will then down-select from that pool for Phase II, which will consist of two-hour, in-person demos in Orlando, Florida. Interested parties must be a part of the TReX consortium in order to bid. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/06/us-navy-wants-next-gen-supply-network-and-fast/149082/