Teledyne FLIR Defense Wins $94 Million IDIQ Contract from U.S. Army for Black Hornet 3 Nano-Drones

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  8 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Terrestre

  Boeing, Raytheon missile sales to Saudi Arabia paused by Biden administration

  By: Joe Gould and Aaron Mehta Updated 2/5/2021 at 11:50 am EST to clarify status of the two arms sales WASHINGTON —The Biden administration has paused indefinitely two precision guided munition sales to Saudi Arabia, worth as much as $760 million, as part of a new policy aimed at curtailing violence in Yemen, Defense News has learned. However, that policy, announced Thursday by President Joe Biden, left open the possibility for future sales that are considered vital for Saudi Arabia's national defense, a fine line that would mean some munitions sales will continue. “We are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales,” Biden said during a speech at the State Department. “At the same time, Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks, UAV strikes, and other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries. We're going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people. " The two deals include a foreign military sales case for 3,000 Boeing-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs, which was cleared by the State Department in late December with an estimated price tag of $290 million, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The second is a direct commercial sale for Raytheon Technologies munitions, likely the reported $478 million sale of 7,000 Paveway IV smart bombs. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes foreshadowed the move in a Jan. 26 investor call, when he said the company was backing off the sale of an “offensive weapon system” to an unnamed middle eastern customer because it did not believe a license would be granted by the new administration. Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is possible that further Saudi weapon sales may be paused or outright cancelled in the future, as the Biden administration has announced a wide-ranging review of weapon sales cleared by the Trump administration. According to a White House spokesperson, arms sales to Saudi Arabia will go back to the traditional arms sale oversight process, after the Trump administration pushed multiple weapon sales through over objections by Congress. “All arms sales to Saudi Arabia will return to standard procedures and orders including with appropriate legal reviews at the State Department,” the spokesperson said. “We have reestablished an interagency process for working through the details of individual cases, led by the White House and with all relevant agencies at the table, bringing expertise, discipline, and inclusivity back to our policymaking on these issues.” Added an administration official, speaking on background, “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in Yemen, including relevant arms sales. Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP. “It does include both materiel and terminating our intelligence sharing arrangement with Saudi Arabia regarding the war in Yemen. You've seen that we have already paused two arms sales with Saudi Arabia to ensure while we examine whether they meet our objectives and policies.” Since 2015, the Arab Sunni nations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have led a coalition of states in Yemen against rebel Houthi forces, which are backed by the Shia government of Iran. Aligned with former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Houthis took over Yemen's capital, Sanaa, in September 2014. The armed conflict in Yemen has resulted in the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, according to Human Rights Watch. Citing the Yemen Data Project, HRW says that during the Saudi-led air war in Yemen, more than 17,500 civilians have been killed and injured since 2015, and a quarter of all civilians killed in air raids were women and children. More than 20 million people in Yemen are experiencing food insecurity; 10 million of them are at risk of famine. Howard Altman with Military Times contributed to this report. https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2021/02/05/boeing-raytheon-missile-sales-to-saudi-arabia-canceled-by-biden-administration

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  15 janvier 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  France hires two firms to soup up jets with an electronic warfare capability

  By: Christina Mackenzie PARIS — France has awarded a contract for Archange, its strategic airborne intelligence program aimed at strengthening the country's signals intelligence capabilities, to Thales and Dassault Aviation. The procurement agency DGA awarded the contract on Dec. 30, but it wasn't announced until Tuesday. The program was launched Nov. 18 by Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly. The companies would not specify how much the contract was worth. Thales is expected to install a universal electronic warfare capability on three Dassault-manufactured Falcon 8X aircraft, although the announced deal is only for two aircraft. Another contract is expected to cover a third aircraft at a later date. The first two aircraft should, by 2025, replace the two Transall C-160 Gabriel aircraft that provide the French Air Force which signals intelligence. The electronic warfare system, known by its French acronym CUGE (capacité universelle de guerre électronique), will make use of sigint technologies developed by Thales over the past decade to enable the system to simultaneously detect and analyze radio and radar signals. Thales said in a statement that this is possible thanks to multipolarization antennas and the use of artificial intelligence for automated data processing. The tri-jet Falcon 8X is Dassault's flagship business jet. It has a range of 7,500 miles, but a spokesman for Dassault told Defense News that this did not necessarily mean the sigint version, called Archange (avion de renseignement à charge utile de nouvel génération), would have the same range. The contract also includes the supply of a ground-based training platform, which will be based at Evreux, south of Paris. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2020/01/14/france-hires-two-firms-to-soup-up-jets-with-an-electronic-warfare-capability/

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  14 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Special Ops Budget Crunch Looms, But New Aircraft Demo Coming

  And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform," said SOCOM acquisition czar Jim Smith. By PAUL MCLEARY and THERESA HITCHENSon May 13, 2020 at 4:32 PM WASHINGTON: Like the rest of the Defense Department, Special Operations Command is preparing for flat to declining budgets in the coming years as the national debt spirals to $25 trillion and the economy flattens due to COVID-19 related shutdowns. At the moment, the command that trains, equips and sustains the nation's elite covert operators boasts a $13 billion budget, $7 billion of which goes directly into buying and repairing new gear, with another $800 million pumped into research and development. And that's the unclassified part of the budget. The command wants to protect those investments, Jim Smith, SOCOM's top acquisition executive, told reporters this morning. But fiscal realities being what they are, “right now, our planning assumptions are based on a flat budget out through the next seven years or so,” he said. “And then, if you take into account inflation, you might even have a slightly downward pressure on our overall budget.” Just recently, Defense Secretary Mark Esper suggested that the budget pressure might force his hand in cutting older, legacy systems earlier than planned to pull savings toward priority modernization programs like the $500 billion the DoD plans to spend on the refurbishment of the nuclear triad over the next decade. Earlier this month Esper declared, “we need to move away from the legacy, and we need to invest those dollars in the future. And we have a lot of legacy programs out there right now — I could pick dozens out from all branches of the services” that could be cut or curtailed. Asked by Breaking Defense if pressure on SOCOM budgets could lead to the command walking away from bigger and older systems, Smith said “SOF is a little different. There is a propensity for us to accept a near-[commercial] solution and get it into the fight very quickly. And for that reason, we tend not to sustain equipment or the 20-year, 30-year life cycles that you see in the services.” That's not to say “we don't have the same pressures,” as the services in finding savings, he added. “We're trying to divest in a force that you know likes to hold on to things. And so we have very rich dialogue at the command level, I can assure you, about trying to divest over some of our larger programs going on.” One area commanders want to grow is close air support and ISR in areas without large, improved landing strips via the Armed Overwatch program. Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, said in February at the Air Force Association's annual meeting that the aircraft would replace AFSOC's U-28s — and focus more on plane's close air support, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Smith today explained that effort is standing on the shoulders of the Air Force's defunct Light Attack Aircraft effort. “We are on the backs of the Air Force's effort. We're using the same program managers and engineers,” Smith said. “Everything that was learned by the Air Force in their light attack experiment is being leveraged into ours.” The Air Force's long-running light attack aircraft saga — that at one point was expected to involve procurement of up to 300 airplanes — began way back in 2011, when the Air Force initiated a program to procure what it then called “light air-support” aircraft for use in insurgencies. In 2017, the program morphed into what the service called the Light Attack Experiment, aimed at developing a concept of operations that involved US allies as well as fleshing out an overall acquisition strategy. In 2018, then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service had set aside $2.4 billion in the fiscal year 2019 budget's five-year cycle to acquire agile, armed reconnaissance aircraft — once it had tested out its chosen competitors: Textron's AT-6 and the Sierra Nevada-Embraer team's A-29. In October 2019, facing a threat from Congress to strip the program from its control, the Air Force issued a request for proposal to Textron and Sierra Nevada to buy “two or three of both” companies' turboprops. Finally, in February this year, the Air Force threw up its collective hands and gave up the quest to buy light attack aircraft in quantity — purchasing only two each of the AT-6 Wolverine and A-29 Tucanos for continued experimentation. Several of the companies who originally fought it out way back in the day under the Air Force effort, as well as Textron and Sierra Nevada, are now throwing their hats in the SOCOM ring. Spokespeople for Air Tractor (which had formally protested the Air Force's contract award in the light attack competition), Sierra Nevada and Textron confirmed to Breaking Defense today that they are all in for the live-fly demonstration expected in November. The plan is for SOCOM to buy up to 75 of the aircraft over seven years, beginning with a $106 million request in the 2021 budget to kick things off. The Special Operations community is as interested in what it can put on one of these planes as it is in the aircraft itself. “At the end of the day, I'm going to deliver a weapon system,” Smith said. “And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform. I think the Air Force, you know, there was a lot of focus on the actual platforms. I don't think you'll see that from SOCOM. We are far more interested in the integration capability of our eventual industry partners on the platform.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/special-ops-budget-crunch-looms-but-new-aircraft-demo-coming