29 juin 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Are cheap drones the answer to tension in the Taiwan Strait?
Combining old and new technology might frustrate any attempts China may make to invade nearby territory, especially Taiwan.
1 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
SAAB wants to offer Gripen at half of Rafale cost, with full tech transfer, local production
SNEHESH ALEX PHILIP
New Delhi: As India looks to acquire 114 new medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) to shore up its depleting strength, Swedish defence major SAAB has pitched for a complete Transfer of Technology (TOT) and local production of its Gripen fighter jet at “half” the cost of French alternative Rafale.
SAAB India's chairman and managing director (CMD) Ola Rignell made the cost claims in an interview to ThePrint, but added that he wouldn't be surprised if India went in for additional 36 Rafale fighters in the coming years, circumventing the ongoing process to acquire new jets in larger numbers.
“India bought 36 Rafale fighter jets from France off the shelf. SAAB and Brazil also signed a contract in 2015 for the sale and local manufacturing of 36 Gripen. The cost was half of what the value of the Indian deal was,” said Rignell, referring to Brazil's $4.68 billion deal with SAAB to manufacture the Gripen locally.
“We are setting up an entire aviation ecosystem in Brazil. And the experience and knowledge that Brazil is gaining from this manufacturing is being used by them to design their indigenous fighter aircraft,” the SAAB India CMD said.
In 2012, EADS's Eurofighter and Dassault Aviation's Rafale had emerged as the winner of the 2007 MMRCA bid, with the latter being the lowest bidder. But the contract negotiations got stuck over prices. Three years later, the Modi government cancelled the protracted talks and decided to buy 36 Rafale fighters in fly-away condition in a €7.87 billion deal.
Now, France is offering another 36 Rafale fighter jets in a government-to-government deal. But these numbers will not suffice in view of the Indian Air Force (IAF)'s MMRCA requirements.
During the interview last week, Rignell spoke about what the company is offering to India, his expectations, and the issue surrounding its sales to Pakistan.
‘Gripen cheaper than Rafale'
Speaking to ThePrint, Ola Rignell highlighted the efficiency of SAAB's single-engine multirole fighter aircraft vis-à-vis the Rafale, which is being called a game changer for the IAF in the region due to its weapons package.
Gripen has the same weapons package as Rafale including the Meteor air-to-air missile, said Rignell.
“All NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) missiles are integrated with the Gripen. The only one which is missing is SCALP because it is a French missile. But if India wants, we can integrate the SCALP also though Gripen already has a substitute,” said Rignell.
He pointed out that European missile manufacturer MBDA, which makes both Meteor and SCALP, actually found Gripen as the most mature jet to test their missiles on.
“MBDA ‘test beded' the Meteor on a Gripen. They found the Gripen to be the most mature. Eighty per cent of Meteor firing tests took place from a Gripen,” he said.
Rignell added that Gripen will always be cheaper in comparison to Rafale in life cycle costs as well because of its single-engine build.
‘Would not be surprised'
SAAB's India chief said the defence major is offering the best deal to the country, but he won't be surprised if India opted to buy another 36 Rafale jet from France.
“I would not be surprised,” said Ola Rignell. But he noted that the additional 36 jets will not fulfill the IAF's requirement.
“The original 36 Rafale was bought when the IAF needed 126 MMRCA. Now there is an RFI (Request for Information) for 114 aircraft. Additional 36 Rafale would still not fulfill what the IAF actually not just wants but needs,” he said.
India and France have already spoken about the latter's proposal for 36 additional Rafale jets, but New Delhi hasn't disclosed any information about such a move.
No fresh deal with Pakistan
While Saab is offering the Gripen fighters to India, it is also providing the early warning aircraft system to Pakistan — an issue that has upset the IAF.
Pakistan used the SAAB-manufactured early warning aircraft system to coordinate its attack on an Indian military installation in Jammu and Kashmir a day after the Balakot strike earlier in February.
During his visit to Sweden in June this year, Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa had expressed his displeasure with the defence major for supplying Pakistan with early warning systems and also offering Gripen fighters to India.
New Delhi is of the view that it will be difficult to do business with a country that also arms the enemy.
In a bid to pacify the IAF, Ola Rignell persisted that SAAB is not selling any new products to Pakistan.
He also pointed out that every contender has dealt with Pakistan, and other assets were also used in the post-Balakot action.
Pakistan had used French fighters Mirage as well American F-16s.
However, Rignell remained non-committal on future sales to Pakistan, saying the Swedish government decides on such matters and not the company.
“As far as I know, we are not selling any new products to that country (Pakistan). There is an old order and we are fulfilling our contract obligation,” Rignell said.
The Pakistan Air Force had ordered three new SAAB 2000 early warning aircraft in 2017 to supplement the ones that were destroyed in a terror attack on Minhas air base five years before that.
Rignell added that he was part of the meeting in Sweden when Dhanoa raised the issue and this is exactly what he had told him as well.
“We are trying to sell the latest AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) — Golden Eye — to India. We have sold them to UAE. (But) India is already working on its indigenous systems,” he said.
India operates the IL76 ‘Phalcon' AWACS as well as the Embraer ‘Netra' early warning aircraft.
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12 décembre 2019 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR
Marines integrate upgrades to off-the-shelf UTVs
Dec. 11 (UPI) -- The Marine Corps announced Wednesday that its Utility Task Vehicles are undergoing safety and performance upgrades. "We bought the vehicle as a [commercial-off-the-shelf] solution, so it's not going to have everything we want right from the factory," said Jason Engstrom, lead systems engineer for the UTV at PEO Land Systems, in a Marine Corps press release. The changes underway include high clearance control arms, new run-flat tires, floorboard protection, a road march kit, a clutch improvement kit and an environmental protection cover. Mechanics discovered control arms were getting bent due to rocks in areas the Marines were driving, and sticks were puncturing the floorboards. The UTV team is also adding covers for driving on hot days and upgraded tires inspired by the offroad racing industry. UTVs, which the Marine Corps began using in 2017, are equipped with minimal armor to allow infantry to carry ammunition, equipment, provisions or injured personnel. Each UTV is about 12 feet long and can carry up to four Marines or 1,500 pounds of supplies. The vehicles can also fit inside Marine Corps aircraft, like the MV-22 Osprey or the CH-53 helicopter. https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2019/12/11/Marines-integrate-upgrades-to-off-the-shelf-UTVs/4881576101375
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13 février 2020 | International, Terrestre
DARPA wants commanding robots to work like a video game
By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a fake city in Mississippi, DARPA is training robots for war. In December 2019, at a camp southeast of Hattiesburg, hundreds of robots gathered to scout an urban environment, and then convert that scouting data into useful information for humans. Conducted at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, the exercise was the third test of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enable Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSET is explicitly about robots assisting humans in fighting in urban areas, with many robots working together at the behents of a small group of infantry to provide greater situational awareness than a human team could achieve on its own. The real-time nature of the information is vital to the vision of OFFSET. It is one thing to operate from existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movement through the space. Dating back to at least 2017, OFFSET is in part an iterative process, with contractors competing for and receiving awards for various ‘sprints,' or narrower short-turnaround developments in coding capabilities. Many of these capabilities involve translating innovations from real-time strategy video games into real life, like dragging-and-dropping groups units to give them commands. For the exercise at Camp Shelby, the swarms involved both ground and flying robots. These machines were tasked with finding specific items of interest located in buildings at Camp Shelby's Combined Arms Collective training Facility. To assist the robots in the field experiment, organized seeded the environment with AprilTags. These tags, which are similar to QR codes but trade complexity of data stored for simplicity and robustness in being read at difference, were used to mark the sites of interest, as well as hazards to avoid. In practical use, hazards seldom if ever arrive with barcodes explicitly labeling themselves as hazards, but for training the AprilTags provide a useful scaffolding while the robots coordinate in other ways. “As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags,” wrote DAPRA, “human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items.” That information is relayed in various ways, from updated live maps on computer screens to floating maps displayed in real time in augmented reality headsets. As foreshadowed by countless works of cyberpunk fiction, these “human swarm tacticians” interfaced with both the real world and a virtual representation of that world at once. Commanding robots to move in real space by manipulating objects in a virtual environment, itself generated by robots exploring and scouting the real space, blurs the distinction between artificial and real environments. That these moves were guided by gesture and haptic feedback only further underscores how deeply linked commanding robots can be to augmented reality. The gesture and haptic feedback command systems were built through sprinter contracts by Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University, with an emphasis on novel interaction for human-swarm teaming. Another development, which would be as at home in the real-time strategy game series Starcraft as it is in a DARPA OFFSET exercise, is the operational management of swarm tactics from Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology. Their developments allowed the swarm to search and map a building on its own, and to automate resource allocation in the process of accomplishing tasks. For now, the heart of the swarm is as a scouting organism built to provide information to human operators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/02/11/darpa-wants-commanding-robots-to-work-like-a-video-game