9 août 2023 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR
US Army mulls multiple versions of tank-killing drone for infantry
LASSO would be carried by troops, use a tube for launches and be strapped with a lethal payload, according to PEO Soldier.
13 août 2020 | International, Naval
Shipyards Not At Risk, Despite DoD Warning It Needs $$ To Save Them
A DoD paper for Congress suggests COVID could shut down shipyards, but Navy officials and analysts say there is little risk.
By PAUL MCLEARYon August 12, 2020 at 4:04 PM
WASHINGTON: A top Navy official today tried to clarify a Pentagon information paper leaked last week which warned that “at least one” of the seven shipyards that churns out ships for the Navy could close unless Congress handed over billions more to the service.
As part of an $11 billion package the Pentagon is requesting from Congress to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the defense industry, the Navy is requesting $4.7 billion in part to ward off the chances “at least one” of the big seven shipyards shutting down. The paper, which has been delivered to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, also warned of over 100,000 lost jobs across shipyards and factories that make aircraft and other weapons for the military.
But the Navy's top acquisition executive told reporters today that the wording continued in the paper might leave too much out.
“The words could be taken out of context,” James Geurts said. “There probably should be the word ‘temporarily' in there.” If a shipyard started to see a significant portion of its workforce test positive for COVID, “we might have to temporarily close down the shipyard for a period of time until we got it under control. Not that we would have to shut down a shipyard permanently.”
The memo contains no such caveats, however. It flatly states a shipyard could close unless the Navy gets the funding boost.
Asked where the paper came from, and who it was intended for, DoD spokesman Christopher Sherwood told me via email the department “provided informational material to our oversight committees when asked about the impacts COVID-19 has had on the Defense Industrial Base and our suppliers.”
The Navy has gone to great lengths to help its shipyards weather the COVID storm, pumping $130 billion into its supplier base this year in upfront payments, spending that is 25% higher than at this point last year.
But some yards have experienced pain keeping to schedule, with uncertain futures ahead as the Navy looks to change its fleet mix in the coming years to better compete with China and Russia.
Mark Cancian, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, acknowledged that all Navy shipyards “have a backlog of work, including Bath Iron Works, which was the subject of speculation about closing.” Bath, already six months behind on building seven destroyers in dock, is stumbling to the conclusion of a six-week strike by 4,300 shipbuilders which will likely make those delays even longer.
Likewise, the Mississippi-based Austal is looking at the end of the road for its contract to build dozens of aluminum Littoral Combat Ships in a few years, which would likely mark the end of the Navy's interest in buying aluminum hulls. That shipyard “would be at more risk” Cancian said.
Neither shipyard is any worse off than the others due to COVID-related shutdowns, however, making the Pentagon's point that yards could shut and require COVID relief funds to keep going, an argument that finds few adherents.
There's little doubt COVID is slowing down both ship construction and repair, “but that doesn't mean the Navy doesn't need the ships anymore,” said Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute. “It just means everything takes longer, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the shipyards are going to close.”
Clark noted that while Bath is in a bad spot with delays to its destroyer work that will be compounded by the strike, the Navy still needs it to build destroyers in the future, since relying on Huntington Ingalls as the nation's only shipyard that can build the ships is too risky.
Add to that the likelihood that the Navy will move toward buying more numerous small cruisers, unmanned ships, and smaller platforms for Marines and away from small numbers of large destroyers and amphibious ships in the future, means there will be more contracts, and work to go around later this decade.
The service is still on track to deliver its much-delayed 30 year shipbuilding plan and force structure assessment this fall, in which several options like a new class of destroyers, a new class of smaller frigates, and smaller hospital ships will all likely find their way into the plans.
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10 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
Anduril hires Pentagon vet Zachary Mears as head of strategy
Mears served as chief of staff to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work.
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10 janvier 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
How tensions with Iran could test a new cyber strategy
Mark Pomerleau In 2018, the Department of Defense began following a new philosophy for cyber operations to better protect U.S. networks and infrastructure. Known as “defend forward,” the approach allows U.S. cyber forces to be active in foreign network outside the United States to either act against adversaries or warn allies of impending cyber activity that they've observed on foreign networks. After the U.S. military killed an Iranian general in a Jan. 2 drone strike and after national security experts said they expect Iran might take some retaliatory action through cyber operations, the specter of increased cyber attacks against U.S. networks puts Cyber Command and its new approach front and center. “This Iran situation today is a big test of the ‘defend forward' approach of this administration,” James Miller, senior fellow at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and former undersecretary of defense for policy, said at a Jan. 7 event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Will [Cyber Command] take preventative action? Will they do it in a way that our allies and partners support and that can be explained to the public?” While Iran fired several missiles Jan. 7 at a base in Iraq where U.S. troops lived as an initial response to the drone strike, many national security experts expect Iran could continue cyber actions as further retaliation for the strike. Iran could also ratchet up its cyber operations in the United States following the collapse of portions of the 2015 nuclear deal between the United States, Iran and five other nations to curb Iran's nuclear weapons capability in return for sanctions relief. Over the past 12 months, the White House and Congress streamlined many of the authorities used to conduct cyber operations to help cyber forces to get ahead of threats in networks around the world. One such provision in last year's annual defense policy bill provides the Pentagon with the authority to act in foreign networks if Iran, among other named nations, is conducting active, systematic and ongoing campaigns of attacks against the U.S. government or people. Cyber Command declined to comment on what, if anything, they were doing differently since the drone strike. Some experts, however, have expressed caution when assessing how well this defend forward approach has worked thus far given it is still relatively new. “The jury is very much still out here,” Ben Buchanan, assistant professor and senor faculty fellow at Georgetown University, said at the same event. “We don't have a lot of data, there's been a lot of hand-wringing ... about these authorities and about how Cyber Command may or may not be using them. I just don't think we've seen enough to judge whether or not ... [it is] meaningfully changing adversary behavior.” Others have also expressed reservations about how effective Iran can even be in cyberspace toward U.S. networks. “Iran is a capable cyber actor, Iran is a wiling cyber actor. That means Iran will conduct cyberattacks,” said Jacquelyn Schneider, Hoover fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “It's not like they have this capability and they've been deterred in the past and maybe now they're going to turn it on. I think they've been trying this entire time.” Complicating matters further could be other actors trying to take advantage of U.S.-Iran imbroglio for their own interests. Priscilla Moriuchi, senior principal researcher and head of nation-state research at threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, said over the past several months, there have been reports of Russian state-affiliated actors hijacking Iranian cyber infrastructure to conduct operations masquerading as Iranians. “That creates its own uncertainty,” she said at the same event. “Another level of potential what we call inadvertent escalation if a country perceives that they are attacked by Iran but in reality, it” wasn't. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2020/01/09/how-tensions-with-iran-could-test-a-new-cyber-strategy/