Pakistani firm shows off new drone during Saudi defense show

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  10 janvier 2019 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR

  The Army and Marine Corps are looking at what troops will need to fight in megacities, underground

  By: Todd South A recent Army and Marine war game that included engineers, academics and other defense representatives evaluated how troops could use experimental technologies to fight in dense urban areas and underground. The U.S. Army Subterranean and Dense Urban Environment Materiel Developer Community of Practice is a working group that has conducted three prior workshops that set the challenges of fighting in those environments. “Fighting in dense urban environments and the unique challenges it presents is still not totally understood, and this study was the front-end look at identifying and defining those materiel challenges to drive where investments need to be for this operational environment,” said Bob Hesse, technical lead coordinator for the Community of Practice. The most recent “tabletop” exercise looked at the gear troops might need to get through those intense battle scenarios, according to an Army release. Soldiers and Marines worked as friendly and enemy forces during the exercise, evaluating 48 experimental future technologies. One such piece of tech would be using sensors that attach to the exterior building wall to help troops visualize the interior layout. And every advantage in these terrains can help. “Everything that Marine formations or Army formations have to do is more difficult when you take it into an urban environment,” explained Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Christian Wortman, commanding general of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and vice chief of Naval Research. The Marines recently launched Project Metropolis II, a five-year effort to better prepare Marines for likely future urban battles. “Across the warfighting functions — whether it's intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance, collections, maneuver, force protection, command and control, logistics and sustainment — all of those things are complicated and challenged by the compartmentalized terrain that's present in the urban environment and the three-dimensional nature of the urban environment,” Wortman said. And that multi-dimension challenge grows with the subterranean. For both above ground and underground, robotics will play a major role. The Squad X project by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for example, is blending robots into dismounted formations. Soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division and 101st Airborne Division along with Marines at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, are experimenting with four submissions for the Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport gear mule that will carry fuel, water, ammunition and equipment for a squad through rough terrain over 60 miles on a 72-hour mission. Lt. Col. Calvin Kroeger, battalion commander for the 35th Engineering Battalion, ran one of the blue teams during the tabletop exercise. Participants ran scenarios such as a high-intensity fight, a traditional counter-insurgency and a security force-assisted mission, all under the conditions of a megacity. But the wargaming went beyond simply clearing buildings and attacking objectives. Teams countered enemy social media campaigns, communicated underground, and assessed the second- and third-order effects of engaging the enemy with lethal munitions, which could impact local power, gas and water networks. “How we employ our capabilities changes as you move from a high-rise platform to urban cannons,” Kroeger explained. “But you're also looking at everything under the ground as well, where you can't use a conventional means like a mortar system to shape the battlefield, so that the enemy doesn't shape it for you.” As team members fix on what materiel needs might best serve troops, Hesse said the subject matter experts will assess how well the tech will meet military goals. For example, if there is an aerial technology that might help troops locate enemy forces, even though the troops can't see them because of the skyline, his team would then analyze that technology and determine how well it meets Army standards and if it needs to be modified. “We will now transition from the workshop learning to live experiments and replicate the unique conditions in real venues. We're taking the materiel campaign of learning and now transforming that into action,” Hesse said. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/09/the-army-and-marine-corps-are-looking-at-what-troops-will-need-to-fight-in-megacities-underground/

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  20 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Lockheed slated to miss F-35 delivery target in 2020 as supply chain struggles to keep up

  By: Valerie Insinna   20 hours ago WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin will throttle back the pace of F-35 production on May 23, leaving it anywhere from 18 to 24 jets short of the 141 scheduled for delivery this year. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult for Lockheed's supply chain to make components on time, and as a result the company is moving to an adjusted work schedule where production will slow over the next three months, said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed's vice president for the F-35 program. Ultimately, Lockheed aims to accelerate production as soon as possible and hopes to decrease the number of aircraft that will delivered late. However, Ulmer said there are too many variables to say precisely how long buyers will be left waiting for their F-35s. “If I have the ability to speed up or recover sooner, then I will do so,” Ulmer said. “If there are other unknown COVID-19 impacts that I don't know about that come on the horizon — I don't know that either. ... As we go forward, probably late summer or early fall, we'll have a pretty good sense of where we're going to be.” Beginning on May 23, Lockheed will divide the approximately 2,500 employees who staff the F-35 production line in Fort Worth, Texas, into three groups, moving them to new schedule where each group works for two weeks and then has a week off. After one three-week rotation, the company will determine whether the system is successful and can either alter the schedule or continue until Sept. 4, it said in a statement. Rotating smaller groups of employees on the line allows Lockheed to move to a slower pace of operations while at the same time ensuring that workers retain their expertise and don't need to be retrained when the production rate returns to normal, Ulmer said. “It really maximizes our ability to recover production on the backside and retain our workforce with no loss of learning.” Lockheed Martin executives first disclosed that F-35 deliveries could be delayed during an April 21 earnings call with investors. “There are local distancing requirements that are being more stringently applied across the globe. There is workforce disruption,” Kenneth Possenriede, the company's chief financial officer, said at the time. “We've actually had some issues with shipping constraints.” Most of the supply chain pressure on the program stems from constraints on low-tier suppliers that produce components that feed into larger portions of the F-35. While the production line tries to do as much work on each section as possible, workers are having to slow down and wait for missing parts to arrive, Ulmer said. Lockheed has also had challenges getting connectors for the jet on time — another problem that makes it difficult for the company to merge F-35 sub-assemblies into a finished aircraft, Ulmer said. Once aircraft are completed and go through acceptance testing, the sequence of deliveries will remain the same, he said. The slowdown of the F-35's production rate comes days after President Donald Trump voiced support for moving more of the jet's production to the United States. Currently, international partners who helped fund development of the F-35 can compete for work on the jet, reducing the cost of the aircraft and giving foreign buyers an industrial incentive to support the program. “The problem is if we have a problem with a country, you can't make the jet. We get parts from all over the place. It's so crazy. We should make everything in the United States,” Trump said on Thursday. However, the industrial challenges currently faced by Lockheed do not appear to be caused by the international supply base. Ulmer said European suppliers, who were hardest hit before the United States, are now rebounding from the pandemic. “I really see Europe kind of [on the] leading edge of the recovery side of this,” he said. In particular, northern Italy struggled with high numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases, leading Italian defense firm Leonardo, which runs an F-35 final assembly and check out plant in Cameri, to shut down operations over a two day period in March to clean the facility. With the number of new cases receding, Italy began reopening nonessential businesses this month. “Leonardo today is north of 90 percent manned, fully operating. They're pretty much back to normal operations,” Ulmer said. The ongoing expulsion of Turkish suppliers from the F-35 program is also unlikely to be affected by the production slowdown at Fort Worth, as Lockheed has already identified companies to take over that work, he said. “With the vast majority of those, that alternate sourcing has been accomplished. I really don't see this as an impact to that." Ramping production back up Unless COVID-19 cases spike in the coming months, Lockheed believes it will be able to return workers to a normal production schedule in the late summer or early fall. What will vary is timing for when suppliers can return to their usual production rates, and whether those suppliers have the capacity to expedite the manufacturing of key parts, Ulmer said. Once the supply chain has fully recovered, it will take the Fort Wort line two to three months to resume full rate production. “There are 1,900 suppliers across the program” in the United States, Ulmer said. “So we take all that information in, we determine what rate they can deliver to, we determine if they have any kind of constraints we can help them deal with, and then we have to balance that into the production system to dial in the production rate we can execute.” “I am optimistic that the majority of industry is on the backside. I'm reluctant to say that because there could be a rebound,” Ulmer said, “but we're at the very back end of the impact.” https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/05/19/lockheed-to-slow-f-35-production-as-supply-chain-struggles-to-keep-up

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  3 juin 2021 | International, C4ISR

  Focus sur Athea, la société commune à Atos et Thales qui doit développer un logiciel souverain pour l'analyse de données

  Les Echos se penchent sur le contexte entourant la création d'Athea, la société commune à Thales et Atos visant à développer une plateforme souveraine associant traitement de données massives et intelligence artificielle pour les secteurs de la défense, du renseignement et de la sécurité intérieure, dont le lancement a été annoncé la semaine dernière dans le cadre du programme technologique de la direction générale de l'armement (DGA). Destinée à développer un logiciel souverain dont les états-majors auront la pleine maîtrise, Athea a vocation à devenir un champion européen de l'analyse de données en grandes quantités (Big Data) pour les armées et le renseignement, capable de rivaliser avec l'américain Palantir. « Nous avons énormément de projets à venir car l'intelligence artificielle permise par l'analyse de grandes quantités de données est de plus en plus utile pour les militaires, que ce soit pour le renseignement, la cybersécurité ou la logistique des forces armées », souligne Marc Darmon, le directeur général adjoint de Thales. « Notre ambition est d'être l'outil qui réponde aux besoins techniques des programmes de défense et de sécurité », précise-t-il. Les Echos du 3 juin