14 janvier 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval

Sink Feeling: The Navy's 7 Big Problems (One Is the F-35)

“The Navy continues to struggle with rebuilding the readiness of the existing fleet due to enduring maintenance and manning challenges,” the report finds. “As the Navy seeks to expand its fleet by 25 percent, these challenges will likely be further exacerbated and the Navy will likely face additional affordability challenges.”

The Navy must fix the teething troubles of a new and complicated aircraft that lacks sufficient spare parts: in 2017, only 15 percent of Marine F-35Bs were rated fully mission-capable. “The Navy and the Marine Corps may have to decide whether they are willing to accept less reliable and maintainable aircraft than originally planned,” GAO warned.

How can the U.S. Navy buy more ships and planes when it can't maintain the ones it has?

That's the question posed by a new Government Accountability Office report .

Auditors point to seven problems that GAO, Congress's watchdog agency, have highlighted over the past several years, but which have yet to solved:

Training:

After a series of embarrassing collisions at sea in 2017, which led to fears that Navy has forgotten basic ship-handling skills, training was revamped along with fewer waivers for required training. Still, “while the Navy has demonstrated its commitment to ensuring that crews are certified prior to deploying, training for amphibious operations and higher-level collective training may not be fully implemented for several years.”

Maintenance backlogs:

Between 2012 and 2018, only 30 percent of maintenance was completed on schedule. In particular, most Navy attack submarines have suffered maintenance delays. The backlog is caused by insufficient capacity in public shipyards as well as shortages of shipyard workers.

Overworked sailors:

In 2017, GAO concluded that the Navy was underestimating how many sailors were needed to man ships, leading to undersized crews and overworked sailors. The Navy says it is aiming for surface ships based overseas to have a minimum of 95 percent of their complement, but GAO auditors who interviewed crews in Japan were told that “the Navy's methods for tracking fit and fill do not account for sailor experience and may be inaccurately capturing the actual presence of sailors onboard and available for duty on its ships. Moreover, sailors consistently told us that ship workload has not decreased, and it is still extremely challenging to complete all required workload while getting enough sleep.”

Unrealistic budgeting:

The Navy wants to boost the number of ships by 25 percent, and is planning to buy 301 new ships between now and 2048 as well as extending the life of older destroyers and submarines. But GAO and the Congressional Budget Office have calculated that the Navy “has consistently and significantly underestimated the cost and timeframes for delivering new ships to the fleet. For example, the Navy estimates that buying the new ships specified in the fiscal year 2019 plan would cost $631 billion over 30 years while the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that those new ships would cost $801 billion—a difference of 27 percent.”

Aging aircraft:

Numerous aircraft models across the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have been plagued by low availability rates due to aging aircraft, lack of spare parts for older planes, and too few mechanics.

Too few pilots:

The shortage of Marine Corps fighter pilots quadrupled to 24 percent between 2006 and 2017, while the Navy has been scrambling to fill pilot vacancies. “Further compounding their pilot shortages, we also found that the services have not recently reevaluated squadron requirements to reflect an increased fighter pilot workload,” said GAO. “As a result, the reported shortage actually could be greater.”

The F-35:

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/sink-feeling-navys-7-big-problems-one-f-35-41502

Sur le même sujet

7 novembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

Bringing Photonic Signaling to Digital Microelectronics
DARPA program seeks to unleash the performance of modern multi-chip modules by integrating optical signaling at the chip-level OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL 11/1/2018 Parallelism – or the act of several processors simultaneously executing on an application or computation – has been increasingly embraced by the microelectronics industry as a way of sustaining demand for increased system performance. Today, parallel computing architectures have become pervasive across all application domains and system scales – from multicore processing units in consumer devices to high-performance computing in DoD systems. However, the performance gains from parallelism are increasingly constrained not by the computational limits of individual nodes, but rather by the movement of data between them. When residing on modern multi-chip modules (MCMs), these nodes rely on electrical links for short-reach connectivity, but once systems scale to the circuit board level and beyond, the performance of electrical links rapidly degrades, requiring large amounts of energy to move data between integrated circuits. Expanding the use of optical rather than electrical components for data transfer could help significantly reduce energy consumption while increasing data capacity, enabling the advancement of massive parallelism. “Today, microelectronic systems are severely constrained by the high cost of data movement, whether measured in terms of energy, footprint, or latency,” said Dr. Gordon Keeler, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “Efficient photonic signaling offers a path to disruptive system scalability because it eliminates the need to keep data local, and it promises to impact data-intensive applications, including machine learning, large scale emulation, and advanced sensors.” Photonic transceiver modules already enable optical signaling over long distances with high bandwidth and minimal loss using optical fiber. Bottlenecks result, however, when data moves between optical transceivers and advanced integrated circuits in the electrical domain, which significantly limits performance. Integrating photonic solutions into the microelectronics package would remove this limitation and enable new levels of parallel computing. A new DARPA program, the Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, seeks to enable future system scalability by developing high-bandwidth optical signaling technologies for digital microelectronics. Working across three technical areas, PIPES aims to develop and embed integrated optical transceiver capabilities into cutting-edge MCMs and create advanced optical packaging and switching technologies to address the data movement demands of highly parallel systems. The efficient, high-bandwidth, package-level photonic signaling developed through PIPES will be important to a number of emerging applications for both the commercial and defense sectors. The first technical area of the PIPES program is focused on the development of high-performance optical input/output (I/O) technologies packaged with advanced integrated circuits (ICs), including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Beyond technology development, the program seeks to facilitate a domestic ecosystem to support wider deployment of resulting technologies and broaden their impact. Projections of historic scaling trends predict the need for enormous improvements in bandwidth density and energy consumption to accommodate future microelectronics I/O. To help address this challenge, the second technical area will investigate novel component technologies and advanced link concepts for disruptive approaches to highly scalable, in-package optical I/O for unprecedented throughput. The successful development of package-level photonic I/O from PIPES' first two technical areas will create new challenges for systems architects. The development of massively interconnected networks with distributed parallelism will create hundreds to thousands of nodes that will be exceedingly difficult to manage. To help address this complexity, the third technical area of the PIPES program will focus on the creation of low-loss optical packaging approaches to enable high channel density and port counts, as well as reconfigurable, low-power optical switching technologies. A full description of the program is available in the Broad Agency Announcement. For more information, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/HR001119S0004/listing.html https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-11-01
9 juillet 2022 | International, Aérospatial

Safran, Hindustan ink deal to develop helicopter engines
The partnership is expected to focus on powering India's 13-ton multirole helicopter in the making, further promoting the country's economic initiative Atmanirbhar Bharat, meant to boost self-reliance for domestic industry.
29 janvier 2021 | International, Aérospatial

Airbus Calls For European Cooperation On Future Military Rotorcraft
Concerns that U.S. industry could muscle in on NATO plans for a medium-lift helicopter for the 2030s and beyond has sparked Airbus to call for a European solution. Airbus Helicopters says it has backing from the French, German and Spanish governments to bid for grants from the European Defense Fund... https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/missile-defense-weapons/airbus-calls-european-cooperation-future-military-rotorcraft

Toutes les nouvelles

Sink Feeling: The Navy's 7 Big Problems (One Is the F-35)

Sur le même sujet

Safran, Hindustan ink deal to develop helicopter engines The partnership is expected to focus on powering India's 13-ton multirole helicopter in the making, further promoting the country's economic initiative Atmanirbhar Bharat, meant to boost self-reliance for domestic industry.

Safran, Hindustan ink deal to develop helicopter engines
The partnership is expected to focus on powering India's 13-ton multirole helicopter in the making, further promoting the country's economic initiative Atmanirbhar Bharat, meant to boost self-reliance for domestic industry.