Tempest future fighter worth £25bn to UK economy

Sur le même sujet

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  27 décembre 2023 | International, Sécurité

  Russian frigate enters service, with plans for hypersonic armaments

  Russia has commissioned the frigate Admiral Golovko, the country’s first ship that will regularly carry Zircon hypersonic missiles.

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  22 mai 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Autre défense

  Where do special forces fit in the National Defense Strategy?

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The most valuable role for U.S. special operations forces within the National Defense Strategy is to build relationships with countries in hot spots around the globe to keep Russia and China at bay. But that effort can't be at the expense of its counterterrorism mission, which remains the No. 1 priority of special forces, according to leadership within U.S. Special Operations Command. SOCOM plans to issue a report to Congress on a comprehensive review of its roles and missions this month, according to Mark Mitchell, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, who was speaking during a recent hearing with the House Intelligence and Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee. One of the main priorities for SOCOM is to carry out counterterror missions, but the National Defense Strategy focuses on great power competition against near-peer adversaries Russia and China, so House lawmakers wanted to know how special forces fit in a strategy that focuses less on counterterrorism and more on powerful adversaries. “We've been the tip of the spear on the [counterterror] fight,” SOCOM Commander Gen. Richard Clarke said during the hearing. “However, moving forward, particularly in great power competition, our special operations forces are not necessarily going to be in that fight because the whole idea of the strategy is to avoid a kinetic” confrontation, he added. Clarke said he's examining SOCOM relationships with U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Transportation Command as well as the global combatant commanders to see “how we can best integrate our forces and provide support to those in other domains.” “I think the special operations community is uniquely suited to build networks of partners and allies around the globe to put us in a position, first of all, to compete for that influence and legitimacy in peacetime,” Clarke added. Special forces also have an important role to play within the military information support operations center in Tampa, Florida, which is aligned with the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which “allows us to compete in the space ahead of time and make sure that we're countering some of the vitriol that's coming out of Russia at this time and the falsehoods,” Clarke said. According to Clarke and Mitchell, it's unlikely the reach of special forces around the globe will wane. “A [counterterror] deployment to Africa is also a part of that great power competition against the Russians and Chinese,” Clarke noted as an example. “We are trying to look at our employment of the SOF force from a holistic view to ensure that we're maximizing the return on that investment to our counterterrorism mission and our great power competition.” The relationships that U.S. special forces develop with other countries is also unique, Clarke noted. “A small team, a small element of Special Operations forces, can bring a significant impact working with foreign forces.” “Remember,” Mitchell added, “Chinese and Russian threats are global, and that's part of the reason why we're in 80 countries.” For example, Mitchell added, SOCOM received recent congressional approval to move forward with an important counterterror effort in the Philippines, but that is also a critical component of building influence within the country and “keeping Chinese at arm's length.” While the NDS is focused on great power competition, the strategy still recognizes the need to combat violent extremist organizations, which “is not going away, and we've got to balance that,” Mitchell said. So some new concepts for employment of special forces will likely emerge, according to Mitchell. “We're working with the services to ensure that we are integrated with their development efforts,” he added. But there are a few tasks where, if given the chance, SOCOM would take off its plate, particularly to improve its deployment ratio with double the time spent at home compared to overseas. Clarke said special forces in Africa could be better optimized. “That's not necessarily ‘take away the mission,' but I see reduction internal to some of these missions,” he said. Additionally, the mission to counter weapons of mass destruction is also an increasing burden on the force, Clarke said: “I think it's a right-sizing in the mission internal to make sure we have the right force allocation against it.” And SOCOM is looking at how the Army's security force assistance brigades might be better suited for certain security force assistance-type missions. “SOF should be in places where it's a light footprint, it's politically sensitive, with a small team, that is training other special operations forces primarily,” Clarke said. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/05/17/where-do-special-forces-fit-in-the-national-defense-strategy/

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  11 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Sikorsky ratchets up robotic control of Black Hawk in runup to pilotless flight

  Sikorsky has dialed up the autonomous flight control system on an experimental UH-60A Black Hawk to where a pilot can “set it and forget it” during long surveillance missions, another step toward flying the aircraft remotely from the cabin or from the ground without pilots on board. To date, Sikorsky has put 54.5 flight hours on its optionally piloted vehicle (OPV) flight control system, which is designed as a kit that replaces all legacy mechanical controls in existing aircraft with its MATRIX autonomous fly-by-wire controls. It has also run about 30 hours on the ground in the UH-60A, one of the oldest Black Hawks in the Army's inventory, according to chief test pilot Mark Ward. During the first of MATRIX in a Black Hawk in May, Sikorsky focused on the direct mode control scheme, which means the fly-by-wire controls should fly and respond to pilot input like a conventional UH-60 Black Hawk, Ward said. Technically, the mode is “direct stick-to-head with stability augmentation in the loop.” “Direct mode is supposed to be, more-or-less the service mode or an emergency mode, but we found the aircraft behaved quite well throughout all the speed regimes in that mode,” he said. Sikorsky briefly paused the flight test program to “fine tune” some of the pilot control augmentation modes, “so that when we go to autonomy we're going to have a very mature system that goes from full-spectrum of pilot 100 percent in the loop, to autonomy 100 percent in the loop and everywhere in between,” he said. Test pilots have since ratcheted up computer control of the aircraft and expanded the flight envelope out to 150 knots indicated airspeed. Most interestingly, the test team is beginning to increase the level of flight control augmentation beginning with “direct mode.” In “rate command attitude hold” mode, the fly-by-wire system takes over more control of the aircraft, Ward said. That mode was tested through low-speed hover maneuvers out to 150 knots. “When you put a control input, you're controlling a rate or an attitude change and when you release the control, you're capturing that attitude,” he said. From there, test pilots increased autonomous control of the aircraft to the full authority control scheme, or FACS, in which “rather than commanding a rate, you're actually commanding a parameter, such as airspeed or altitude or heading using the control stick,” Ward said. “To change from one mode to the next is simply a button push away to go from direct to rate command, up to FACS and back down,” he said. “Think of full authority as being an ultra-stable ISR platform that is going to be holding flight parameters for very long periods of time,” he said. “You kind of want to set it and forget it. You're not turning knobs on a flight director. You are actually flying the aircraft with the control stick.” “Rate command is when you kind of want to . . . throw it around a little bit, you want to do some low-and-slow or low-and-fast maneuvering where you're going from stop to stop to complete a mission.” Sikorsky uses the phrase “optimally piloted vehicle” as well as “optionally piloted vehicle” when discussing OPV and MATRIX because the ultimate goal is to develop a system that can act as an autonomous co-pilot quietly but constantly aiding human operators during specific missions. The OPV kit is tailored to the UH-60, but is retrofittable onto the Army's entire helicopter fleet and Sikorsky's commercial S-92 and S-97 rotorcraft, according to Igor Cherepinsky, the company's director of autonomy. Sometime in 2020, Sikorsky will demonstrate that the system can be remotely piloted from both inside and outside the aircraft, he said. “We will show the world this system is capable of being operated from the ground,” he said. Sikorsky continues to demonstrate MATRIX on a modified S-76B called the Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA). The aircraft, which has been in test since 2013, has more than 300 hours of autonomous flight. The company announced in March that its S-92 helicopter fleet update will include the introduction of phase one MATRIX technology, which will allow for autonomous landing. The U.S. Army has plans to outfit a UH-60M with the system but is about six months behind Sikorsky's OPV test program. “Our vision is, obviously, not to replace the pilots, but to augment the pilots,” Cherepinsky said. “Once we field the technology, we never want to see another controlled flight into terrain or degraded visual environment issue accident ever happen with any of our aircraft.” https://www.verticalmag.com/news/sikorsky-ratchets-up-robotic-control-of-black-hawk-in-runup-to-pilotless-flight/