30 avril 2019 | International, Aérospatial
WARSAW, Poland — As part of efforts to replace Soviet-designed copters with new aircraft, the Polish Ministry of Defence has signed a deal to acquire four AW101 helos from Leonardo for the country's Navy.
The deal is worth some 1.65 billion zloty (US $430 million), and the aircraft are scheduled to be delivered to Poland by the end of 2022, the ministry said in a statement.
The contract was inked April 26 at the European group's Polish subsidiary PZL Swidnik. Leonardo was the only bidder in the tender to supply the copters after Airbus Helicopters decided to pull out of the contest last December.
The "offset requirements defined by the Polish [Ministry of Defence] made it impossible for Airbus Helicopters to submit a competitive offer," the manufacturer said in a statement sent to local news agency PAP.
The new copters, fitted with anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and search-and-rescue (SAR) capabilities, are to replace the Navy's Kaman SH-2G Super Seasprite copters, according to First Deputy Defence Minister Wojciech Skurkiewicz. Local observers have also said the helos could replace the Polish Navy's Soviet-designed Mil Mi-14 copters.
23 octobre 2024 | International, C4ISR
Teledyne FLIR Defense has secured a contract, valued at up to $91m, to provide the US Army with its latest Black Hornet 4 Personal Reconnaissance Systems.
7 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Kelsey Atherton WASHINGTON — A killer robot by any other name is far more palatable to the general public. That may be part of the logic behind the Army Research Laboratory Chief Scientist Alexander Kott's decision to refer to thinking and moving machines on the battlefield as “mobile intelligent entities.” Kott pitched the term, along with the new ARL concept of fully autonomous maneuver, at the 2nd Annual Defense News Conference yesterday, in an panel on artificial intelligence that kept circling back to underlying questions of great power competition. “Fully autonomous maneuver is an ambitious, heretical terminology,” Kott said. “Fully autonomous is more than just mobility, it's about decision making.” If there is a canon against which this autonomy seems heretical, it is likely the international community's recent conference and negotiations over how, exactly, to permit or restrict lethal autonomous weapon systems. The most recent meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems took place last week in Geneva, Switzerland and concluded with a draft of recommendations on Aug. 31st. This diplomatic process, and the potential verdict of international law, could check or halt the development of AI-enabled weapons, especially ones where machines select and attack targets without human interventions. That's the principle objection raised by humanitarian groups like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, as well as the nations that called for a preemptive ban on such autonomous weapons. Kott understands the ethical concern, drawing an analogy to the moral concerns and tradeoffs in developing self driving cars. “All know about self driving cars, all the angst, the issue of mobility... take all this concern and multiply it by orders of magnitude and now you have the issues of mobility on the battlefield,” said Kott. “Mobile intelligent entities on the battlefield have to deal with a much more unstructured, much less orderly environment than what self-driving cars have to do. This is a dramatically different world of urban rubble and broken vehicles, and all kind of dangers, in which we are putting a lot of effort.” Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/smr/defense-news-conference/2018/09/06/fully-autonomous-maneuver-coming-to-the-battlefields-of-the-future
30 octobre 2024 | International, Aérospatial