6 avril 2021 | International, Naval
BAE Systems secures Future Maritime Support Programme contracts worth over £1 billion
The contracts, worth up to £1.3 billion over five years, will commence on 1 October 2021 following a transition period
16 novembre 2017 | International, Aérospatial, Terrestre
Training foreign troops will be the ‘flagship’ of Canada's new UN peace strategy, top soldier says
Gen. Jonathan Vance said that despite speculation, there was never a plan in the works to deploy troops on a single UN operation.
OTTAWA—Training foreign troops will be the “flagship” of Canada's newly announced peace operations strategy, says the country's top soldier, who concedes that elements of the plan still require months more work.
Prime Minster Justin Trudeau on Wednesday took the wraps off his government's long-awaited effort to reengage with United Nations peace missions.
Elements of the strategy include $15 million in funding to boost participation by women soldiers in UN operations; an initiative to end the recruitment of child soldiers; and the promise of Canadian personnel to assist with training.
It also pledges up to six helicopters, two transport aircraft and a quick reaction force of up to 200 personnel to support UN missions.
But apart from Trudeau's promise of a single transport aircraft for UN operations based in Uganda, the plan offered no details on possible deployments.
Gen. Jonathan Vance, the chief of defence staff, said it would be “inappropriate” to say when those might start.
“I'm not even going to hazard a guess on that one right now. Step number one is now to get into detailed planning with the UN and find out . . . the what, the where and the when,” he said in an interview.
This week's announcement was months in the making. The Liberals pledged in the 2015 election to “recommit” to UN peace operations, in part by providing specialized capabilities such as medical teams and engineering support. That promise was followed in August, 2016 by a commitment to deploy up to 600 troops and 150 police officers on UN operations.
Canada's contributions to UN peace missions are at their lowest levels in years with just 23 military personnel currently assigned to such operations.
That's not likely to change soon. In the wake of Wednesday's commitments, Vance made clear that it will take many months yet of planning and discussions with the United Nations to determine how Canada's offers of personnel and equipment can best fit with ongoing missions.
“Some of the ‘when' on smart pledges is years away. Some of the ‘when' on other potential operations is sooner than that,” he said.
Some observers criticized the Liberal government for not committing personnel to a single mission, choosing instead to disperse personnel among many possible locations.
But Vance said that despite speculation, there was never a plan in the works to deploy troops on a single UN operation, saying, “I've never received guidance that said do a mission with 600 (troops).”
Suggestions that troops were headed to Mali, for example, or that the announcement had been delayed “didn't match the reality of the work we were doing,” Vance said.
“There were a lot of assumptions made about, ‘hey, we're going to Africa',” Vance said
Instead, he said that Canada was working with the United Nations “to figure out a new way of doing business.” And he said repeated fact-finding trips by bureaucrats and politicians, including visits to African countries, were not about scouting any one particular mission.
“That's us doing research . . . that allowed us to arrive at an approach that government could consider,' he said.
“We've been working for over a year to determine what are the various options available to government in terms of how to improve UN performance overall with Canadian troops,” Vance said.
Yet given that Africa is the location of many UN missions so “it's very likely a place where we would offer contributions,” Vance said.
The peace support strategy calls for a new training and advisory team to work with a nation before and during a deployment to improve their own ability to conduct peace operations. It also says that Canada will contribute to training centres and schools.
Vance said such activities will be the “flagship” of the plan.
“We're going to try and leverage the Canadian expertise, one of the best trained militaries in the world and best equipped, . . . so that UN mission performance can improve,” Vance said.
Defence analyst Dave Perry said elements of the peacekeeping strategy make sense. The problem, he said, is that the government itself had raised expectations with its drawn-out decision-making and rhetoric about its intentions.
“It wasn't just what the government was saying publicly. I think there were also a number of commitments that were strongly intimated to some of Canada's key allies,” Perry said in an interview.
“My sense is that the different options that were put forward by the department of national defence for whatever reasons weren't palatable to the government,” said Perry, a senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
While he said the contributions to UN operations were “modest,” Perry said Canada is better off providing military support to other missions, such as coalition efforts to combat Daesh, or NATO roles.
“Bluntly, there are better ways of achieving Canadian national objectives in the world that through UN missions,” Perry said.
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30 juillet 2018 | International, C4ISR
Rebuilding it ... Better, stronger, faster.
By: Mike Gruss   The long-held thinking in Washington is that if the Department of Defense wants to stay ahead of its adversaries, it will need improved capabilities, many of which are being developed outside of the Beltway. To that end, Pentagon leaders launched the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, commonly referred to in defense circles as DIUx, as a way to attract new companies into the fold and accelerate the pace of acquisition. In fall 2017, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis visited the organization's headquarters and said its influence would grow. A few months later, DIUx's director, Raj Shah, left the organization for the private sector. Capt. Sean Heritage has served as the acting managing partner since then. Heritage spoke recently with C4ISRNET's Mike Gruss. C4ISRNET: What's the status of the DIUx reboot? CAPT. SEAN HERITAGE: The last two years have been largely focused on fielding capability across the department. We like to say we can solve problems faster, better, cheaper using commercial technologies with nontraditional companies that are out there. We've learned that we have some amazing talents on our team and rather than just defaulting to fielding capability, we are creating tailored solutions using organic expertise. We've been able to do this primarily in a suborganization we refer to as the Rogue Squadron — it works in the UAF, counter-unmanned aerial system world. We're sharing our lessons learned across the department. We're coaching people on how we do things so that they can emulate us. So, we'd like to think that if we are the only ones doing CSOs [commercial solutions openings] and OTAs [other transaction authorities], in our image a year or two from now, then we failed. C4ISRNET: How do you know this is working? HERITAGE: We know all our prototypes aren't going to transfer to production. Our target goal is between 40 to 60 percent success rate. The feeling is that if we are more successful than that, then we probably aren't being innovative or creative enough and assuming enough risk on behalf of the department. With regard to our creating line of effort, we're very proud of the [Air Operations Center] Pathfinder project. Kessel Run was a great example of fielding capability and then leveraging organic talent to create tailored solutions and transition to a program of record. Then the coaching effort, we're defining success by creating somebody in other organizations in our image every six months. C4ISRNET: On talent development, is part of that asking leaders to rethink how they're using their people or is it something else? HERITAGE: The best example would go back to Kessel Run. That really started with the Defense Innovation Board. We were able to help the Air Force explore the art of the possible, which made a compelling case for the DIB's original recommendation: you guys need software developers as a core skill at the unit level to solve these problems in real time. They like to use the example that Home Depot has 6,000 software developers to sell you hammers. You can say the same for any service. How many software developers do you have? Well, the answer is we don't know, because we don't have a specialty for software developers, but no doubt once you know people across your team, there are many very capable people who do software development on the side. How do you leverage that? How do you more deliberately recruit to that? And how do you develop them? C4ISRNET: What's one area where you guys have been able to say, “Without us, we're not sure this would've happened as fast?” HERITAGE: We are very proud of the work we are doing in the artificial intelligence world. So, we are doing some projects on predictive maintenance. Again, for the Air Force, focusing on the [E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system] out of the gate. But it's scaling across other platforms. We're already able to deliver value by solving that problem, reducing unplanned maintenance. Another contract was let out that's scaling to the Army with their Bradley Fighting Vehicles. We are going to be doing predictive maintenance with them. Something that may be lost on many people is our involvement in the formulation of the JAIC, the Joint AI Center. That would not have happened without us, but, more specifically, that would not have happened if we weren't here in the Valley and had access to create relationships with some significant talent in the civilian world. C4ISRNET: I wanted to reframe what you were saying. If DIUx wasn't in existence, do you think that there wouldn't be the same level of talent? HERITAGE: The talent we are able to attract to our team, to work through any problems and inform strategic thinking, wouldn't have happened. What we have is very open-minded senior leaders who are yearning for diverse thinking. And, as a career military guy, it's not all that diverse. What we're able to do is reach into a talent pool that has lots of credibility and expertise that isn't resident in the department. C4ISRNET: What's something DIUx is doing now, that it wouldn't have done three years ago? HERITAGE: The biggest difference is the deliberate embracing of our role in creating solutions and scaling ... coaching. Those were things that DIUx didn't do in the past. We have much more support from across the department. We no longer need that direct cover of the Dep. Sec. Def as a direct report. The percentage of our team that is military is higher than at the beginning. That's not necessarily by design. We are attempting to recruit more individuals, commercial executives, to help coach us. We don't want to be a military organization that happens to be in Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin. We want to truly be representatives of the culture. C4ISRNET: You talked about that 40 to 60 percent goal. What are the other ways you measure success? HERITAGE: The first one is the number of customers within the department that are coming our way to ask us to help them solve problems using our relationships, authorities and methodologies. That's one metric and that number continues to go up. The other is the number of nontraditional companies who want to help solve problems. A commercial solutions opening is a honey-pot for all these creative companies to say, ‘Can I contribute?' The number of companies continues to go up. It was 40-plus on the last CSO. The record to date is over 70. Now we're in a position where we have to say no to projects. We're a little more selective. C4ISRNET: What is DIUx's role with AI? HERITAGE: A lot of folks claim to be able to contribute to the AI mission area. There are 593 initiatives across the department that claim to be AI. It's our ability and our connections with Project Maven that have afforded us the opportunity to influence the way ahead for the department and facilitate some conversions. Some of the work that we're able to do with these nontraditional companies is not only shaping understanding of the power of AI across the department, but it's focusing everybody as well. We're able to help make them a bigger part of the conversation or maybe inspire them to a bigger part of the conversation. C4ISRNET: How do you convince a company that working with the Pentagon is the right path, and it's not a quagmire like it has been at Google? HERITAGE: We don't spend time trying to convince companies to do or think anything. There are plenty of folks out here and elsewhere, who are passionate about contributing to the cause, and appreciate what they are learning just through having access to the data that we're able to provide them. But it's a challenging conversation to be a part of because we don't want to turn people off. We're here to provide people with opportunity. C4ISRNET: Where can you help the most in IT? HERITAGE: [Information technology] is an example of how a DoD organization can leverage technology and access to a network that is still secure, yet different than what the rest of the department is using. It's things that you probably take for granted. We have people come to our team for a short period of time, after a career within the department going, “Wow, look at how my productivity has changed since I've been here.” I have access to Slack and the G Suite and a whole host of other tools that are not allowed, and for good reason, on DoD networks. C4ISRNET: One concern is whether new vendors can provide overmatch. Is that the case? HERITAGE: We look at the companies to make sure they're going to be around long enough to provide this capability. When we talk about our responsibility to help navigate the “Valley of Death,” and make sure that these prototypes don't just die, these companies have to have legs underneath them and investors behind them to be viable down the road so that we don't spend our time developing a prototype that they won't be around to deliver. https://www.c4isrnet.com/thought-leadership/2018/07/27/rebuilding-it-better-stronger-faster/
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31 mai 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Exclusive: US set to allow GE to make engines in India for New Delhi's military jets
The Biden administration is poised to sign off on a deal that would allow General Electric Co to produce jet engines powering Indian military aircraft in that country, according to three people briefed on the decision.