20 décembre 2023 | International, Terrestre
25 mai 2021 | International, Terrestre
Industry gathered last week to show the Army what is in the realm of the possible to field an electric light reconnaissance vehicle as the service grapples with the challenge of incorporating alternative power into its future fleet.
26 mars 2020 | International, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau In late January, Arlington, Virginia-based BAE Systems Inc. announced two acquisitions to bolster its electronic systems sector, a move that reflected a combined investment of $2.2 billion. The purchase included $1.9 billion for Collins Aerospace's GPS receivers business and $275 million for Raytheon's tactical airborne radios. Company leaders saw an opportunity. GPS receivers could provide secure and resilient position data that would help precision-guided munitions become more accurate. Airborne tactical radios, typically installed on rotary, fixed-wing aircraft and drones, would create a new business for BAE's electronic systems sector. The properties became available because of a proposed merger between United Technologies and Raytheon, and BAE's two top executives said they see the purchase as a way to more closely hew their businesses toward the Pentagon's long-term needs. Specifically, they point to the 2018 National Defense Strategy. A closing is dependent on the Raytheon-United Technologies merger and is expected in the first half of 2020. C4ISRNET's Mark Pomerleau spoke recently with Jerry DeMuro, BAE's chief executive, and Tom Arseneault, company president and chief operating officer, about the thinking behind the investment. C4ISRNET: How do you see these acquisitions fitting into BAE overall? What opportunities could this create? Jerry DeMuro: As we look at the National Defense Strategy and we look at the service modernization priorities and where we think customers are headed in our core markets, we think that these two businesses are very relevant. We have capabilities in those areas that these properties complement very well. Both of them happen to be very mature, well-established, strong technology-based businesses that are on the cusp of significant growth because of the relevance to the service priorities. [It's a] unique opportunity [that] only came about because of the UTC-Raytheon merger. We were very pleased to see it [and we were] opportunistic in going after them. Tom Arseneault: Precision and autonomy are two key things that run through the Defense Strategy and priorities in the services and the technologies that [Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering] Dr. [Mike] Griffin talks about. With autonomy, you need to know where you are. Position data is important. Secure, resilient position information. Military GPS is a critical underlying technology. With Collins, you've got a company that's been doing this for 40-plus years and a million and a half of these devices are out there going to M-Code [a new military signal used for GPS]. Autonomy, ditto. You need to know where you are ... certainly with precision-guided munitions. You're also relying on secure communications. You need to know where you are, and you need to be able to communicate with the systems around you. C4ISRNET: How do you see these new businesses complementing what you already have and allowing you to pursue contracts that you couldn't before? DeMuro: We've been working for a number of years now — most people don't know — but we have a precision-guided munitions business. We provide the seekers for the THAAD [Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense]; we provide all the smarts in terms of combining EW, precision locating and navigating in the LRASM [Long-Range Anti- Ship] missile. We just won the [Precision Guidance Kit] contract — precision-guided mortar. We are also the provider of the high-velocity projectile and putting these kinds of capabilities in there. It's a great fit for that business, but also in many of the other things that we produce. Combining this kind of capability gives us a whole new market that we can bring their capabilities to. And the same thing applies in the radio world, software-defined radios. We can take some of those waveforms and incorporate them in devices that we have today in our C4ISR portfolio. It's not about cost synergies; it's really about market synergies in those places where we're headed already. C4ISRNET: Obviously, some of those capabilities, such as THAAD, are dependent on a lot of disparate systems. Does this acquisition help BAE become more interoperable with a lot of other systems? DeMuro: Think about a product that we make today, the Link 16 [military tactical data link network]. Arseneault: We own the Link 16 waveform as part of the fundamental portfolio of our current communications business. Now we'll be able to add that family of waveforms, we'll be able to use it on these acquired radios and then vice versa. There's a number of waveforms — software-defined radio waveforms — that come with this portfolio, that we will be able to then market out through our existing communication devices. THAAD was more on the precision side. While THAAD, itself, is a seeker of a type, I think this is more applicable to some of the new next-generation seekers that will want to be multimodal. So it's [electro-optical/infrared], it'll be radio frequency and GPS. [We want to] have as many opportunities to get a really good sense of what's driving precision. With a million-and-a-half devices out there, there is a whole wide set of customers that these will continue to supply. But this will also be a good opportunity for us to incorporate that technology into some of our roadmaps. SECTR [Seeker Cost Transformation] is a DARPA program, a next-generation multimodal seeker. So, GPS will be a piece of that. The idea being where seekers are more modular and so you can use a seeker on multiple weapon types and reduce costs and have greater efficiency. C4ISRNET: Are you thinking of a card you can plug in? Or more software adaptable? DeMuro: Chip sets, right. Combined functionality ... because it's all about size, weight and power and cost as you get out there. But the presence of these two product families, and what has to happen to upgrade them in and of itself, supports the business case. We didn't really include a lot of synergies in the business case, but we see some real opportunity there. C4ISRNET: Can you expand on the autonomy side? I see how the GPS, and linking GPS to radio, can lead to greater precision, but where do you see opportunities on the autonomy side? Arseneault: Autonomous systems need to know where they are. Secure, resilient position information is critical ... DeMuro: Anti-spoofing. Arseneault: These sorts of devices are going to find their way into many if not all of the modern autonomous systems. Likewise, you need to be able to communicate with things around you. As we're headed to swarms, they want to know where they are. They want to know where all of their surrounding platforms are. Manned-unmanned teaming is another version of autonomy where you want to know, and you want to be able to communicate with your wingman as they call it. DeMuro: If you think about anti-access/aerial denial, doing all of this in a contested environment — it's got to be secure. M-Code is absolutely essential to that. These waveforms, low probability of intercept, low probability of detection and also software-defined radios are very agile in moving around to enable that in contested environments. Both of these properties help accomplish that. C4ISRNET: You mentioned the National Defense Strategy; what role do these non-kinetic capabilities play in future conflicts? DeMuro: They're foundational. If you don't have them, you can't operate in the future environment. https://www.c4isrnet.com/industry/2020/03/23/bae-execs-explain-the-thinking-behind-their-latest-acquisition
18 septembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a nondescript parking lot in Andover, Massachusetts, outside an aggressively generic office building, I am piloting an InstantEye quadcopter gently over the Merrimack River. At around 300 feet above the ground, I can no longer hear its rotors or make out its roughly basketball-sized body against the bright sky. With a press of a button and a slight change in angle, the InstantEye MK-2 turns and moves its camera to the porch where I am standing. The shade hides us a little, but after pressing another button the infrared camera identifies several bodies. If I was not piloting the drone, I would have no idea it was out there, looking at me. In recent years, the quadcopter has moved from a hobbyist toy that might see battlefield use to a dedicated family of drones at hobbyist, commercial and military levels. They all aim to provide roughly the same advantage: an unobtrusive eye in the sky, priced cheaply enough to replace easily if lost. That hobbyist drones have been adapted by uniformed militaries and nonstate actors into bomb-dropping threats is a natural outgrowth of technology cheap enough to make expendable. Now the Army wants to take advantage of this paradigm shift. “The UAS asset should be designed to be a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that is rapidly deployable in austere, harsh environments,” read an Army solicitation posted in April 2019 to the FedBizOpps website. Besides VTOL, the Army wanted a drone with a camera payload, providing electro-optical/infrared radar video on a stable gimbal. It is the kind of capability that an officer could likely pick up for a few hundred dollars at the Pentagon City Mall. The future of tactical war likely looks like what happened with quadcopters: commercial technology cheap and useful enough to be adapted to military ends. But the drone market is compounded by one fact: the majority of hobbyist drones and their components are built in China, and working outside that market means foregoing much of the cost savings that make quadcopters so attractive. “We paint a large portion of the intelligence picture with minimal risk to men and equipment. What may take a scout team a day to do, may only take three hours for us,” Sgt. Christopher Curley, an Army SUAS master trainer, said in 2018. “The quadcopter is a great tool for quick recon. I relate it to fishing; you cast your reel, check that area and then move on.” Curley's suite of drones included the longer-range fixed-wing Ravens and Pumas, built to military specifications. Combined, the set of small drones can gather up to 60 percent of intelligence in training exercises. When it came to the quadcopters, Curley's unit relied on off-the-shelf drones. The Army is already training for a future where military quadcopters are ubiquitous. But to get there, it's had to rely heavily on commercial products. The phantom of the ops era “We don't market our products toward military use, nor we do sell direct to commercial or industrial users,” said Michael Oldenburg, a spokesman for DJI North America. DJI's drones have become ubiquitous in the civilian world and ever-present in military use, both formal and informal, as one of the simplest, cheapest ways to put a camera in the sky. All this even though DJI never intended to be a military contractor, and largely shies away from that role. Formally Da Jiang Innovations, the China-based firm was founded in 2006 as a company that made components for remote-control hobbyists. The DJI as we know it today starts in 2013, with the release of the ready-to-fly out of the box Phantom quadcopter. In the six years since the Phantom's release, DJI-produced drones have shown up on battlefields in Ukraine and Iraq. None of this was intended; after footage was released of a DJI Mavic releasing bombs in Ukraine, the company said “DJI strongly deplores any attempts to use our drones to cause harm; we build our products for peaceful purposes.” That DJI looms so large over the military quadcopter market is a second-order effect of the company's market share in the civilian world. A 2018 survey by Skylogic Research (funded, in part, by DJI) estimated that the company owned 74 percent of the hobbyist drone market, a figure that climbed to 86 percent when considering drones that cost $1,000 - $1,999. How extensively has the Pentagon used these drones? DJI said it only offers its products through resellers and so doesn't track what gets purchased by who and only learns about any military acquisitions after the fact. But it is possible to infer the extent of DJI drone use by the agencies within the Pentagon that have explicitly banned the company's products. Consider the fact that the Army issued an order in August 2017 for soldiers to stop using DJI-made drones, which hit communities as diverse as public affairs officers and special operators. Acquisition requests from 2017 show that the Army purchased everything from Phantom 3 quadcopters to Mavic quadcopters to Matrice 600 hexacopters, all made by DJI. A 2018 memo from the Deputy Secretary of Defense suspended all purchases of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) drones, with an exception available by waiver. In May, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., boasted of a provision in the annual defense policy bill that specifically bans the Pentagon from purchasing drones made by a designated “strategic competitor,” primarily China. “We are okay with our products not meeting all of the needs of the DoD,” Oldenburg said. “They're not MilSpec; they're not designed to be used in the field of war or by any military organization that is conducting sensitive missions. We've never made that claim.” Robotic boom, robotic bust To understand how the Pentagon repeatedly found itself buying drones made outside the United States, consider another company: 3DR, a U.S.-based and venture-backed company that started making drone parts, transitioned to a retail quadcopter, and is now a software company for drones. “In 12 months,” Forbes wrote in 2016, “the company has gone from an industry leading U.S. drone startup to an organization struggling to survive – the result of mismanagement, ill-advised projections and a failed strategy that relied on a doomed flagship drone.” Still, there was one area where 3DR could reliably claim an advantage over DJI: the fact it was based in the United States. In August 2018, the Department of the Interior contracted 3DR for a modest purchase of 109 Solo quadcopters. This followed an earlier 2016 contract for the Solo, but by 2017, with 3DR transitioning from the hardware to the software business, Interior still needed a quadcopter that could meet its specific needs. So, the department turned to the makers of the quadcopters that kept showing up in the military. “Market research ... indicated the remaining UAS available from U.S.-based companies were up to 10x less capable for the same price, or up to 10x more costly than similarly capable DJI aircraft,” wrote the Department of the Interior in an evaluation of its DJI systems. In collaboration and consultation with the Interior Department, DJI created a more cyber-minded firmware and software suite for its existing drone hardware, dubbed “Government Edition.” That includes security features like the drone never needing to go online, and being unable to pair with regular, out-of-the-box commercial remotes. Government Edition drones come at a premium, but one of those quadcopters costs less than two retail models. Interior Department testing of the Government Edition hardware/firmware package, done in conjunction with NASA Kennedy Space Center, found “there was no indication that data was being transmitted outside the system and that they were operating as promised by DJI,” which largely matches the independent cybersecurity assessment DJI commissioned from Kivu Consulting. While not designed for military use, the Interior Department's evaluation of DJI quadcopters left an opening: the Pentagon could learn to work with the off-the-shelf drones it has, rather than buy the off-the-shelf drones it wants. Instant eye for the battlefield sky It is easy to assume the military is limited to hobbyist quadcopters built abroad. That's not the case. Most small uncrewed aerial systems used by the military are fixed-wing drones like the Raven, Dragon Eye and Wasp. Specialized quadcopters — such as the Canada-made Aeryon Scout, a high-end military quadcopter — were supplied to anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya in 2012. The problem is that the military version of Aeryon Scout is the $100,000 price tag. Commercial quadcopters — such as the DJI Phantom, Parrot drones and even 3DR Solo — were all available at a fraction of the price, and in many cases they were more than adequate to do the job. Pairing the lower cost in the civilian space with the capability and security expected from a product built to military specifications is tricky, but not impossible. But it is happening, for example, in Andover, Massachusetts. InstantEye is a product of Physical Science Inc. Developed with funding from, among other sources, the Army and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the InstantEye Mk-2 GEN3 quadcopters became a program of record for Special Operations Command in 2014. The InstantEye Mk2 and Mk3 quadcopters look like they could be sold on a shelf alongside hobbyist products, with the soft military gray casing slotting in between the bright whites and matte blacks of consumer models. Physical Science said the Pentagon has roughly 2,000 InstantEye kits across all combatant commands. (Each kit has two quadcopters, which means that's roughly 4,000 individual drones). These drones have seen action in Syria and the horn of Africa. A heavy-lift model can carry up to a 44-ounce payload, making it an ideal tool for clearing explosive ordnance with explosives of its own. Code in the drone allows it to maintain the same hovering position while releasing the payload, rather than the sudden loss of weight sending it rocketing upwards. Within the military specification drone market, PSI sees the InstantEye family as a direct competitor with the Black Hornet drone used by the U.S. Army, a sparrow-sized remote-control helicopter that fits into pockets and comes with a hefty price tag. PSI was vague on the cost but said it came in significantly less than the Black Hornet, which costs roughly $60,000 apiece. PSI officials said the drones are Buy American Act compliant, certified through the Defense Logistics Agency. At present capacity, PSI's Andover production facility makes about 50 two-drone kits a month. With greater demand and staffing, the company estimates it could produce between 80 and 100 such kits per month, if needed. In 2018, the Army requested roughly 1,700 small drones. Should FY2021 see a similar quantity of drones requested, it's possible that PSI's Andover facility could, with a modest increase in staffing, supply the whole lot. The Army can presently roll out quadcopters as a specialized piece of kit. But it might not be ready to provide quadcopters to every unit that wants one. Market forces, forces market The durability and use of InstantEye shows that the Pentagon can, if so determined, fund a quadcopter company into existence. It means that, in the face of concerns about the cybersecurity of off-the-shelf drones, the Pentagon still largely has access to the simple utility of an easy-to-fly aerial camera. What remains to be seen is if Pentagon investment can produce a drone made in the United States, priced at a point close to consumer drones and assembled abroad with parts sourced from across the globe. Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord announced in May the launch of the “Trusted Capital Marketplace,” a partnership to facilitate private and public capital going to investment in companies deemed critical to the defense industrial base and national security. At an August briefing, Lord announced that the first project for the marketplace would be the development of a small UAS. Why start with quadcopters? “It's because where we are right now in terms of having our entire U.S. marketplace eroded,” said Lord. “Essentially, we don't have much of a small UAS industrial base because DJI dumped so many low-price quadcopters on the markets. And we then became dependent on them, both from the defense point of view and the commercial point of view, and we know that a lot of the information is sent back to China from those.” DJI disputes Lord's claims, highlighting the Kivu Consulting cybersecurity audit that found no evidence of data automatically sent back to China, and stating that DJI's “market-leading position in the drone industry” is because it “continued to research, develop and deliver the most capable products to the market.” Lord gave other reasons for the focus on small drones as the marketplace's first project. One is that small drones are easy for the public to understand. There is also the possibility that, by funding military quadcopter development, the work could rebound into commercial market. “Plus, if we meet our defense needs, we feel that there are simpler versions that would be very, very attractive for the commercial market, as well,” said Lord. “So, there was a great pathway there for industry.” Matrice reloaded Ultimately, the present state of military and domestic quadcopter markets appears guided far more by happenstance than anything else. DJI, which fell into the off-the-shelf drone market following demand from the hobbyist market, has inadvertently found its products repeatedly sanctioned as inappropriate for roles they were never designed to fill. Companies like 3DR stumbled as much because of errors in execution as stiff competition. Through it all, the Pentagon has been able to foster and develop its own quadcopters built to military specifications, specifically by contracting for exactly what it needs. It just has yet to capture the same price point as commercial models. It remains to be seen if new initiatives such as the Trusted Capital Marketplace can balance stated goals of low-cost, military specifications and domestic production. But it is a problem the Army needs to solve. As one product manager for the service told Popular Science earlier this year, “There's no organic quadcopter capability in the Army.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2019/09/17/can-the-army-secure-an-american-made-quadcopter/