Pentagon Rethinks Troubled F-35 Logistics System

Sur le même sujet

• 

  1 août 2018 | International, Naval

  France confirms Fincantieri-STX shipyard deal, cautious on defense merger

  ROME (Reuters) - The French government continues to support Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri's (FCT.MI) takeover of STX France, finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on Wednesday, but cautioned against hastening a related defense naval merger. Speaking in Rome after a meeting with the Italian government, he told journalists France had not changed its position on the deal, quelling concerns the takeover could be hampered by tenser relations between Paris and Italy's new anti-establishment government. However, he warned against hastening a merger between Fincantieri and French military shipyards operator Naval Group which has been seen as a possible follow-up to the takeover of STX. “It would not be wise” to discuss a defense merger now, Le Maire told reporters, stressing that this was not part of the deal reached in 2017. Under the terms of that agreement between France and Italy, Fincantieri bought a 50 percent share in STX, but it took effective control of the French shipyards thanks to a 12-year loan of a 1 percent stake by the French state, which is subject to review clauses. Relations between France and Italy have soured in recent weeks over spats on migrants and after the Italian government raised doubts on the TAV French-Italian rail link project which would connect Lyon and Turin. Le Maire said after his meeting on Wednesday with Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio that Paris was still waiting for Italy's position on the project. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-stx-m-a-fincantieri-lemaire/frances-le-maire-confirms-backing-to-fincantieri-stx-shipyard-deal-idUSKBN1KM4E8

• 

  26 juin 2018 | International, Naval

  Future US Navy weapons will need lots of power. That’s a huge engineering challenge.

  David B. Larter WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Navy is convinced that the next generation of ships will need to integrate lasers, electromagnetic rail guns and other power-hungry weapons and sensors to take on peer competitors in the coming decades. However, integrating futuristic technologies onto existing platforms, even on some of the newer ships with plenty of excess power capacity, will still be an incredibly difficult engineering challenge, experts say. Capt. Mark Vandroff, the current commanding officer of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the former Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program manager who worked on the DDG Flight III, told the audience at last week's American Society of Naval Engineers symposium that adding extra electric-power capacity in ships currently in design was a good idea, but that the weapons and systems of tomorrow will pose a significant challenge to naval engineers when it comes time to back-fit them to existing platforms. “Electrical architecture on ships is hard,” Vandroff said. Vandroff considered adding a several-megawatt system to a ship with plenty of power to spare, comparing it with simultaneously turning on everything in a house. “When you turn everything on in your house that you can think of, you don't make a significant change to the load for [the power company],” Vandroff explained. “On a ship, if you have single loads that are [a] major part of the ship's total load, [it can be a challenge]. This is something we had to look at for DDG Flight III where the air and missile defense radar was going to be a major percentage of the total electric load ― greater than anything that we had experienced in the previous ships in the class. That's a real technical challenge. “We worked long and hard at that in order to get ourselves to a place with Flight III where we were confident that when you turned things on and off the way you wanted to in combat, you weren't going to light any of your switchboards on fire. That was not a back-of-the-envelope problem, that was a lot of folks in the Navy technical community ... doing a lot of work to make sure we could get to that place, and eventually we did.” In order to get AMDR, or SPY-6, installed on the DDG design, Vandroff and the team at the DDG-51 program had to redesign nearly half the ship — about 45 percent all told. Even on ships with the extra electric-power capacity, major modifications might be necessary, he warned. “We're going to say that in the future we are going to be flexible, we are going to have a lot of extra power,” Vandroff said. “That will not automatically solve the problem going forward. If you have a big enough load that comes along for a war-fighting application or any other application you might want, it is going to take technical work and potential future modification in order to get there.” Even the powerhouse Zumwalt class will struggle with new systems that take up a large percentage of the ship's power load, Vandroff said. “Take DDG-1000 ― potentially has 80-odd megawatts of power. If you have a 5- or 6-megawatt load that goes on or off, that is a big enough percentage of total load that it's going to be accounted for. Electrical architecture in the future is still an area that is going to require a lot of effort and a lot of tailoring, whatever your platform is, to accommodate those large loads,” he said. In 2016, when the Navy was planning to install a rail gun on an expeditionary fast transport vessel as a demonstration, service officials viewed the electric-power puzzle as the reason the service has not moved more aggressively to field rail gun on the Zumwalt class. Then-director of surface warfare Rear Adm. Pete Fanta told Defense News that he wanted to move ahead with a rail gun demonstration on the JHSV because of issues with the load. “I would rather get an operational unit out there faster than do a demonstration that just does a demonstration,” Fanta said, “primarily because it will slow the engineering work that I have to do to get that power transference that I need to get multiple repeatable shots that I can now install in a ship.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/24/future-navy-weapons-will-need-lots-power-thats-a-huge-engineering-challenge/

• 

  12 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Senate bill promises more funding for space-based hypersonic defense, but mum on details

  Nathan Strout An early version of the Senate's annual defense bill would provide additional funding for space-based sensors capable of detecting and tracking hypersonic weapons, according to a summary released June 11. However, details on the proposal are scant. Congress has become increasingly concerned over the threat posed by hypersonic weapons under development by China and Russia. Too dim to be reliably picked up by current space-based sensors and able to maneuver around terrestrial sensors, hypersonic weapons make much of the current missile warning system obsolete, as it was designed for ballistic missile threats. To counter this threat, the Defense Department has proposed a solution: a proliferated constellation of satellites operating in low Earth orbit. Once a hypersonic threat is detected, the constellation tracks it while passing custody from satellite to satellite as the weapon moves around the globe. This Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, or HBTSS, will be part of the new National Defense Space Architecture, a proliferated constellation that will eventually be made up of hundreds of small satellites operating primarily in low Earth orbit. The Space Development Agency is overseeing this effort and plans to begin placing its first satellites on orbit in fiscal 2022. The Missile Defense Agency listed HBTSS as an unfunded priority during the prior budget cycle, and ultimately Congress did allocate $108 million to the agency for the program in FY20. Now the Senate Armed Services Committee says it will provide additional funding for the program for FY21, but it has yet to say by how much. The summary also does not note where the funding for HBTSS will go. Determining which agency would be in charge of HBTSS was a source of friction between the Pentagon and Congress in 2019, with the latter pushing for MDA to take primary responsibility for the effort, while the White House claimed it was too early to put one agency in charge. Ultimately, legislation passed by Congress in December directed MDA to be the lead agency for the development and deployment of HBTSS. However, the Missile Defense Agency's proposed FY21 budget transfers HBTSS funding responsibility to the Space Development Agency. At the same time, MDA awarded four $20 million contracts to companies to develop HBTSS prototypes in October. The four companies selected were Northrop Grumman, Leidos, Harris Corporation and Raytheon. The SDA recently issued a request for proposals for wide field of view satellites that references medium field of view satellites which are expected to be launched in 2023. According to SDA Director Derek Tournear, those will be the first space components of MDA's HBTSS. Still, it's unclear whether Congress will endorse moving HBTSS funding responsibility to SDA in FY21. When faced with criticism over that move from legislators at a March hearing, MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill assured them that his agency would remain in charge of sensor development for HBTSS, with SDA providing money to MDA for the effort. Hill said the decision to move the funding was made by Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin SDA is asking for $137 million for space technology development in FY21, which includes funding for space sensor technology. The agency expects to begin placing payloads on orbit in FY22. The budget request does not specifically break out funding for HBTSS. MDA has also asked for $207 million for hypersonic defense. That funding will help the agency develop a regional glide phase weapon system and maturing technologies for future hypersonic defense architectures. It does not include funding specifically for HBTSS, as that has transitioned to SDA. CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to show that the medium field of view satellites are not part of the SDA's wide field of view solicitation. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2020/06/11/senate-bill-promises-more-funding-for-space-based-hypersonic-defense-but-mum-on-details/