9 octobre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
By: Sebastian Sprenger
COLOGNE, Germany – The Dutch government on Tuesday announced plans to purchase nine more of Lockheed Martin's F-35 jets, a move that would bring the country's inventory to 46.
The envisioned €1 billion acquisition will “lay the foundation” for a third F-35 squadron in the Dutch air force, a plan that government officials first floated in late 2018, according to a statement posted on the defense ministry website.
The additional aircraft are expected contribute to the air force's objective of having four jets available for NATO missions while also performing homeland defense operations and accounting for training requirements and maintenance downtime.
Fully rounding out a third squadron would require 15 extra planes, however, alliance officials have previously told the Dutch, prompting talk in the Netherlands last year of a potentially higher number eventually.
The Dutch want the F-35 to replace their legacy fleet of F-16s. Neighbor Belgium selected the fifth-generation aircraft in the fall of 2018, announcing a planned buy of 34 copies.
Dick Zandee, a defense analyst at the Clingendael think tank in The Hague, told Defense News the announced acquisition of nine more F-35s enjoys “broad support” in the Dutch parliament. He said government leaders had already included the new aircraft spending in their annual report to NATO to show momentum in the country's move toward spending 2 percent of gross domestic product on the military.
Government officials have told parliament that they want to give the American program office a formal notice to buy the additional jets before the end of the year, Zandee said. The Dutch want F-35s of the newest configuration, he added, which means any changes in the international delivery schedule caused by the recent Turkish expulsion from the F-35 program likely would play no role.
The Trump administration has kicked Turkey out of the program over the country's purchase of the Russian S-400 air-defense system. American officials fear that co-locating the two systems could enable Russia to glean valuable intelligence about the planes simply by subjecting them to the S-400′s sensors.
1 avril 2024 | International, Terrestre
The Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is taking on the task to create a joint integrated fires architecture to protect Guam.
20 avril 2018 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
By: Brandon Knapp Artificially intelligent systems must be able to explain themselves to operators if they are to be trusted, according to an expert from the Defense Advanced Research Agency, who voiced concern that methods used by current AI systems are often masked by mysterious algorithms. “A lot of the machine learning algorithms we're using today, I would tell you ‘good luck,” Fred Kennedy, the director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office during a panel at Navy League's Sea-Air-Space on April 10. “We have no idea why they know the difference between a cat and a baboon.” “If you start diving down into the neural net that's controlling it,” Kennedy continued, “you quickly discover that the features these algorithms are picking out have very little to do with how humans identify things.” Kennedy's comments were in response to Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Unmanned Systems Frank Kelley, who described the leap of faith operators must make when dealing with artificially intelligent systems. “You're throwing a master switch on and just praying to God that [Naval Research Laboratory] and John's Hopkins knew what the hell that they were doing,” Kelley said of the process. The key to building trust, according to Kennedy, lies with the machines. “The system has to tell us what it's thinking,” Dr. Kennedy said. “That's where the trust gets built. That's how we start to use and understand them.” DARPA's Explainable Artificial Intelligence program seeks to teach AI how to do just that. The program envisions systems that will have the ability to explain the rationale behind their decisions, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and describe how they will behave in the future. Such capabilities are designed to improve teamwork between man and machine by encouraging warfighters to trust artificially intelligent systems. “It's always going to be about human-unmanned teaming,” said Kennedy. “There is no doubt about that.” https://www.defensenews.com/home/2018/04/10/darpa-official-to-build-trust-in-ai-machines-must-explain-themselves/
27 octobre 2022 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense
Along with investments in directed-energy and hypersonics, the strategy would make U.S. a 'fast-follower' in artificial intelligence and autonomy.