25 avril 2024 | International, C4ISR
5 août 2020 | International, Terrestre
By: Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — The United States is developing new options for arms customers as a way to ensure allies and partners don't drop planned procurements as the world economy remains in shock from the impacts of COVID 19.
Among the options, according to outgoing Defense Security Cooperation Agency head Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper, are allowing foreign countries to finance arms procurement through U.S. bank loans and altering existing payment schedules to stretch the costs over time.
“The bottom line here is, we are willing to work with our allies and partners, when they raise the challenges that they have, to find ways for them to continue to buy American and to ensure that they can pay for the equipment along a payment schedule that reflects their own economic conditions,” Hooper said.
During an exclusive exit interview with Defense News, Hooper declined to say which countries have already approached his agency about economic impact from the disease, but said that there are “certainly” customer nations that have reached out.
“There are partners that, we're already seeing that they are having challenges. So we're standing ready to work with them. As soon as we can gain an appreciation and the understanding of the challenges, we can find ways to help them,” Hooper said.
Hooper talked with Defense News two weeks before his Aug. 3 retirement. He is succeeded by Heidi Grant, the head of the Defense Security Technology Administration, a move that marks the first time a civilian has led the office since a previous agency was recognized into the current DSCA structure in 1998. The general expressed no concerns over that move, in large part, he said, because of Grant, a fixture in the international security cooperation world.
Grant will have to hit the ground running, given the potential impact from COVID on the world economies. The good news, Hooper said, is that by March, DSCA had concluded that the global economy would be hurt by the disease and set up an interagency working group, called the Operations Planning Group, to study program-level impacts from global trends and develop solutions.
The first step Hooper's team took was to revise the collection process of foreign payment in order to make them “a bit more flexible, to accommodate those partners that may be having some economic difficulties or may have reprioritized their budgets towards for example, economic recovery and away from defense.”
Those options include delaying payments on planned procurements to future years, creating new payment plans for ongoing procurement efforts, and returning funds currently on deposit with the United States to the customer nations as well as new financing strategies.
“One of the things we did is we are allowing our partners to draw on standby letters of credit from foreign banks operating in the United States, according to U.S. banking rules,” Hooper explained. “That offers a nation an opportunity to draw, for example, in that case, a standby letter of credit on one of their banks that operates in the United States, under United States banking rules, which ensures that there's no fiduciary risk to the United States.”
DSCA officials had been considering adding such an option for some time, but the economic downturn pushed the agency to start offering it for customer nations, Hooper added. Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, director of the Arms and Military Expenditure Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said that option sounds different from funding plans that have existed for some time in Europe, where specific entities in countries are responsible for guaranteeing arms-recipient states' loans thanks to the state treasury.
“There are a number of economic factors globally, that we anticipate will likely have an impact on country's abilities to move forward,” Hooper said. “Obviously, energy prices are lower, and those countries all over the world that specialize in energy are going to see a fall in revenue. We see countries that, as a result of the pandemic, are having to shift funds from their defense budgets to more domestic missions like economic recovery and other things.”
In addition to oil-reliant nations in the Middle East, Béraud-Sudreau said to watch the Pacific region, where “many countries have already decided to cut their military spending for this year, and planning decreases for 2021.” Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines are among the nations that have already announced plans to cut defense spending, while Singapore is seeing delays in weapon deliveries due to supply chain issues.
“If there are limited orders in 2020-2021, there will be repercussions later on, as these companies work on long-term projects. Hence the pressure, on both sides of the Atlantic, for the defense sector to be part of economic recovery packages and high levels of military expenditure,” she said.
Over the course of his time at DSCA, Hooper oversaw almost 18,300 Foreign Military Sales actions, including 5,800 new agreements and various amendments and modifications to existing agreements, according to agency figures. He reduced three different surcharges on customers, saving customers millions of dollars as well. Also, timelines shrunk, with DSCA offering 50 percent of all new FMS cases that flow through the process to partner nations in 49 days or less by Hooper's exit.
And while Hooper did not want to preview what weapon sales totals for fiscal 2020 will be, he did say that the United States remains “on a very positive trajectory... We remain the global partner of choice. And I'm very optimistic that we're going to continue to see positive trends in our foreign military sales this year and in the years to come.”
25 avril 2024 | International, C4ISR
6 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force's long-planned test of an airborne laser weapon aboard a fighter jet has been delayed until 2023 due to technical challenges and complications spurred by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, its program head said. The Air Force's Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator program, or SHiELD, had originally planned to conduct its first flight demonstration in 2021, but the test has been pushed two years back, said Jeff Heggemeier, SHiELD program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory. “This is a really complex technology to try to integrate into that flight environment, and that's ultimately what we're trying to do with this program, is demonstrate that laser technology is mature enough to be able to integrate onto that airborne platform,” he told Defense News in a June 10 interview. “But even things like COVID, and COVID shutting down the economy. That has impacts.” Beyond that, the future of using laser weapons aboard fighter aircraft is even more unclear. The goal of SHiELD was to give combat jets a way to counter missiles shot by an enemy aircraft or by air defense systems on the ground. But in May, Mike Griffin, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, noted that he was “extremely skeptical” that an airborne laser could be used for missile defense. Asked what that meant for SHiELD, Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper acknowledged that the service is rethinking how it could best use directed-energy technologies. Perhaps the most optimal use for SHiELD wasn't onboard a fighter, he said. “What I've told that team is, let's have a dialogue,” Roper said during a June 9 event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “Let's understand the different power levels and what they should correspond to, and let's not make the highest power level that we can dream up and the mission that's the sexiest be the thing that drives us.” “What I expect to get laser weapons to the goal line has been the humble, but important and very worrisome small drone threat. They continue to show up, they're difficult to attribute — we don't know who is sending them to our installations and tests and things of that nature, and we can't afford to shoot missiles at them,” he added. “So this is a perfect threat to make laser weapons real, and once they're real, we'll do what the military does. We'll look to scale the power.” Heggemeier said there are many ways the Air Force could spin off laser technologies developed by the SHiELD program, but it's critical the service continue with development so it can gauge the maturity and usefulness of the capabilities. “I think it's important for us to first remember what the whole point of SHiELD is. The whole point of SHiELD is not an acquisition program where we're turning out hundreds or tens of these laser systems for operational use. What we're trying to do with SHiELD is exactly answer those questions of: ‘Is laser technology mature enough to go on an airborne platform? Have we solved enough of those technical challenges that this is now a feasible thing?' Because there is that concern.” He also drew a distinction between the tactical, self-defense capability a SHiELD laser would give combat aircraft versus a more powerful laser capable of intercepting highly-advanced ballistic missiles, as the Missile Defense Agency has proposed. “You're not talking about these really, really long ranges. You're talking about a shorter range and different targets just to protect yourself or your wingman,” Heggemeier said. “Missile defense can mean a lot of things. Some of those missile defense missions are very, very hard, and some of them aren't quite so hard.” For now, at least, the Air Force's investment in directed energy remains stable. The service's budget lays out cash for high-energy lasers in multiple funding lines. For fiscal 2021, it requested $15.1 million for basic research and $45.1 million for applied research for high-energy laser technology, as well as another $13 million for high-power, solid-state laser technology. In FY20, the service received $14.8 million for basic research and $48.2 million for applied research for laser technologies. SHiELD is comprised of three elements: the laser itself, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin; the beam control system made by Northrop Grumman; and the pod that encases the weapons system, from Boeing. Heggemeier said the pod is under construction, with integration of the laser and beam control system planned to start next year. “A lot of the challenge is trying to get all of this stuff into this small pod. If you look at other lasers that are fairly mature, we have other laser systems that some other contractors have built that are ready to be deployed. But these are ground-based systems, and they are much, much more mature,” he said. In April 2019, the Air Force Research Lab conducted a ground test with a surrogate laser system — the Demonstrator Laser Weapon System, or DLWS, now in use by the Army. The demonstration involved the successful downing of several air-to-air missiles. “It turns out the DLWS system, when you take everything into account, is a really good surrogate for the laser power on SHiELD,” Heggemeier said. Because both SHiELD and DLWS generate similar amounts of energy on target — in SHiELD's case, Heggemeier would only say that it amounts to “tens of kilowatts” — the surrogate test gave the lab a good idea how the laser physically affects a target. In 2019, the team conducted a flight test of a pod with the same outer mold line as the one under development by Boeing. The pod was mounted to an aircraft — Heggemeier declined to specify the model — and flown around Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, to help measure how vibrations, the force of gravity and other environmental factors might influence the performance of the weapon. Air Force Magazine reported in 2019 that aerial demonstrations of SHiELD would occur onboard an F-15 fighter jet. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/06/30/us-air-force-delays-timeline-for-testing-a-laser-on-a-fighter-jet/
18 février 2022 | International, Aérospatial
There are also four other Indo-Pacific operators of the C-130J: the air forces of Australia, Bangladesh, India and South Korea.