Nouveau contrat pour le Gripen... et pour MBDA

Sur le même sujet

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  20 septembre 2018 | International, Naval

  NAVSEA: New Pentagon Strategy Putting Pressure on Private, Public Maintenance Yards to Deliver Ships on Time

  By: Sam LaGrone VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — The Pentagon's new focus on high-end warfare with sophisticated adversaries will put increased emphasis and pressure on Navy readiness, and the service's maintenance infrastructure needs to better in fixing ships on time, the head of Naval Sea Systems Command said on Tuesday. Taking cues from Secretary of Defense James Mattis' new National Defense Strategy, all the services are focused on dialing up readiness to meet a higher-level threat, Vice Adm. Tom Moore said during a keynote speech at the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) Fleet Maintenance and Modernization Symposium. “The last year has had the biggest focus on readiness that I have seen in the 37 years I've been in the Navy, and that's on all levels. Navy leadership is talking about readiness every single day, from the [chief of naval operations] on down,” Moore said. “Right now we're not delivering on everything we need delivered, and going forth we really need to deliver, and the pace of change is only going to get faster.” According to Moore, the Navy's public yards are delivering ships on-time about 45 to 50 percent of the time, while private shipyards are getting ships out on time about 35 percent of the time. “It's important to keep in mind that I have 55 ships coming into maintenance availabilities in the private sector in 2019, and in 2018 only 35 percent ships I have in availabilities are expected to move on time,” he said. “Thirty-five percent is just not going to be good enough moving forward to meet the demands that fleet has today.” He indicated that the four public shipyards are improving. “We're starting to see some results. Last year we delivered all four carriers all on time. We stubbed our toe a little bit on Ike,” Moore said referring to the maintenance availability of carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower(CVN-69) that has almost doubled in length. Work on nuclear submarines has also lagged in public yards, he said. “All I have to do is look at Ike, Rhode Island and Ohio and Seawolf and some of the ships that are in the yard today to know that's still a challenge for us.” NAVSEA has a plan on the books to retool and refresh its four public yards over the next 20 years and has now turned its attention to the private yards: it needs to contract in a way that promotes more efficient work, and it needs more capacity through more drydocks. “There are people who argue with me that whether we have a capacity challenge or not, but all I do is look that only 35 percent of the ships are delivered on time, and the conclusion I draw is there are not enough people working on ships,” he said. “If we're going to be successful, we have to be able to provide a stable and predictable workload for industry, and we're going to have to be competitive.” NAVSEA is taking yet another look at how it contracts with private shipyards for maintenance, with a plan to modify the Multiple Award Contract/Multi-Order (MAC-MO) contract strategy that was meant to optimize cost for the Navy. “The consensus was, after two years of running with MAC-MO, I think we agree that strategy isn't delivering the results that we need,” Moore said. To improve the process, NAVSEA is working a pilot program that would bundle availabilities on each coast that would allow companies a more predictable set of work. “We'll get bids from industry and we'll be able to lay [our] chips on the table. We'll be able to look at the bids. We'll be able to look at who has capacity and who doesn't. We'll be able to look at, hey, it's important to keep an industrial base, and we'll be able to make decisions that are not solely based on price that will allow us to deliver our ships on time and give you a little more stable and predictive work,” Moore said. “My goal is eventually that we will eventually – on each coast – bundle availabilities six months at a time... so you can know at least what work you can have in the next six months and beyond.” The Navy is set to test the scheme with a three-ship pilot program for repairs of guided-missile destroyers USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) and USS Bulkeley (DDG 84) and amphibious warship USS Gunston Hall(LSD-44). With the increase in predictability for bundled MAC-MO contracts, the Navy hopes private industry will invest in infrastructure to handle the planned 355-ship Navy. “The acquisition strategy we have today doesn't incentivize industry to hire and make investments that I think they need to make,” Moore said. “I think that acquisition strategy is the root cause of what I would say was a lack of capacity in the private sector today.” In another bid to expand capacity, the NAVSEA is looking to certify drydocks to Navy standards. Moore said NAVSEA has been in touch with 12 shipyards who mostly don't do work on warships that are interested in having their drydocks certified for use for repair work. Moore said he's also looking to increase private industries ability to work on nuclear submarines. Currently, there are four submarines in repairs at public yards. Overall, Moore stressed the need to improve maintenance is growing as the Pentagon strives to be more dynamic and the service grows. “We're putting strain on the ships, we're putting strain on the men and women out there wearing the uniform that are out there at the tip of the spear, and it's up to us to figure out how to generate the readiness for the force that we have: 287,” he said. “As we go up to 355, if we can't generate the readiness with 287 in terms of delivering ships on time – as you know there's a lot of skepticism that we can do that as we head to 355.” https://news.usni.org/2018/09/19/navsea-new-pentagon-strategy-putting-pressure-private-public-maintenance-yards-deliver-ships-time

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  11 mai 2023 | International, Autre défense

  How ‘digital twins’ make defense supply chains more resilient

  A combination of enabling technologies and analytic capabilities produce a virtual model of a process, system, or object, informed by real-time data.

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  10 août 2020 | International, Terrestre

  Heavy robotic combat vehicles put to test in the Colorado mountains

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army grappled with the challenge of incorporating heavy robotic combat vehicles into its formations during a monthlong experiment at Fort Carson, Colorado, coming away with a clearer path to bringing robots into the fold. Still, the service is years away from ground robots seamlessly fitting in with units. The Army has been evaluating the performance and possible utility of heavy RCVs for more than a year through the use of robotic versions of M113 armored personnel carriers, but the experiment at Camp Red Devil on Fort Carson is the most complex to date. “We're taking a lot of technology, we're experimenting and this experiment was 100 percent successful,” Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, who is in charge of the Army's combat vehicle modernization efforts, told reporters in an Aug. 6 briefing. “The whole purpose was to learn where the technology is now and how we think we want to fight with it in the future.” Coffman said that doesn't mean all of the technology was successful or that everything performed perfectly. “Some [technology] knocked our socks off, and some we've got a little bit of work to do. But that is why we do these things, so we can do it at small scales, so we can learn, save money and then make decisions of how we want to fight in the future.” Going the distance In part, the Army is tackling a physics problem as well as a technology challenge involving the distance between the robot and the controller, Coffman said. But the service has found companies that can create waveforms to get the required megabytes per second to extend the range in the most challenging environments like dense forested areas, he added. During the experimentation, Coffman said, the Army tested the waveforms. “We went after them with [electronic warfare], we saw they were self-correcting, so that if they're on one band, they can switch to another,” he said, “so we have a really good idea of what is in the realm of the possible today.” The service was also able to almost double the range between controller and robot using the waveforms available, he explained. “If you could extend the battlefield up to 2 kilometers with a robot, then that means that you can make decisions before your enemy came, and it gives you that trade space of decisions faster and more effectively against the enemy.” The Army was also very pleased with the interface for the crew. The soldiers were able to located themselves and the robots, communicate among themselves, and see the graphics that “just absolutely blows us away,” Coffman said. The software between the robot and control vehicle — a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle — “while not perfect, performed better than we thought it would,” Coffman said. The software also allowed the robot move in front of the control vehicle by roughly 80-1,000 meters as well as identify hotspots and enemy locations. “I didn't know how that was going to work,” Coffman said. “There were some challenges that we had, like getting exact granularity at distance, but the ability that we could identify hotspots and enemy positions I thought was absolutely exceptional.” As a side experiment, the Army also tested a robotic version of the Stryker Dragoon infantry combat vehicle, which is equipped with a 30mm cannon and uses the same software and hardware in control vehicles, Coffman noted. The experiment included live fire. In the heavy RCV surrogates, the target recognition worked while stationary, but part of the challenge the Army is tackling is how to do that on the move while passing information to a gunner, he added. Work on stabilizing the system for multiple terrains also needs performed, but that was indicative of using clunky, old M113s and turning them into robots rather than having a purpose-built vehicle like the RCV Medium and RCV Light. The Army awarded contracts to a Textron and Howe & Howe team to build the RCV-M, and a QinetiQ North America and Pratt & Miller team to build the light version late last year and early this year. Those are being built now. Training on the system also proved to be much easier than anticipated. Coffman said he asked how long the operators need to train, and was surprised to hear they need roughly 30 minutes to learn. “I thought it was going to take them days, but our soldiers are so amazing and they grew up in this environment of gaming.” What's the Army's next step? Now that the first major experiment is done, the Army plans to build up to a company-level operation in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 at Fort Hood, Texas. The experiment will also include four medium RCV prototypes and four light RCVs. While the experimentation at Fort Carson was focused on cavalry operations where the robots served more in a scout mission and proved they could be effective in a reconnaissance and security role, the experiment in FY22 will move the robots into more of an “attack and defend” role, according to Coffman. A new radio will be added to increase range as well as a tethered UAV and more leap-ahead target recognition capability that uses algorithms trained on synthetic data that is “truly cutting-edge,” Coffman said. After each of these experiments, he added, the Army reaches a decision point where it decides how to proceed, whether that is more experimentation or a fielding decision. “We have enough information tactically and technically that I believe we can move forward to the second experiment,” he noted. Following the second experiment, the Army will reach a decision point in FY23 on whether to move the effort into an official program of record. Once that is decided, an acquisition strategy would be identified if the decision is to move forward, according to Coffman. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/08/07/heavy-robotic-combat-vehicles-put-to-test-in-the-colorado-mountains/