12 août 2020 | International, Naval
By: David B. Larter
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Navy Saturday commissioned its latest littoral combat ship amid a top-level push to fix the ship's nagging reliability issues and forge a path to make the small surface combatants useful in the years ahead.
The monohull Freedom-variant LCS St. Louis was commissioned at a private event in its namesake city, the 22nd LCS and 10th Freedom variant to join the fleet. There will be 35 LCS in the fleet once all are commissioned.
Change is in the wind for LCS once again, which has already seen several shakeups to its system. A high-level effort is underway to address problems with its complicated drive train built for high speeds that have limited the ships availability for tasking as well as to finally field its long-delayed mission packages. Mission packages will make the ships either a surface warfare hull, a mine hunter or an antisubmarine ship.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday told Defense News in a July 16 interview that he was preparing to increase LCS deployments by two-and-a-half times over the next two years to finally shake out how to best employ the ships, as well as develop a plan to finally field the mine and ASW mission modules.
“There are things in the near term that I have to deliver, that I'm putting heat on now, and one of them is LCS,” Gilday said. “One part is sustainability and reliability. We know enough about that platform and the problems that we have that plague us with regard to reliability and sustainability, and I need them resolved.
“That requires a campaign plan to get after it and have it reviewed by me frequently enough so that I can be sighted on it. Those platforms have been around since 2008 — we need to get on with it.
Experts who spoke to Defense News in July said the Navy would most likely need to accept less capability than they had planned for the ships to have if the service is to get the most out of the ships.
24 avril 2022 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
The Pentagon is pursuing the reauthorization and expansion for programs meant to boost small business participation in defense research, set to expire Sept. 30.
14 avril 2022 | International, Naval
L'US Navy s'est entrainée pour la première fois à accueillir un nombre record de F-35B sur l'un de ses navires de soutien aux opérations de débarquement. L'US Navy confirme donc qu'elle peut compter le cas échéant sur deux porte-avions légers au sein de sa flotte de bâtiments de surface.
23 août 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau The Army of the future will be leaner and that means junior officers will have more responsibility and more capability in their hands, a top Army general said Aug. 21. Lt. Gen. Theodore Martin, deputy commanding general of Training and Doctrine Command, said in future wars a platoon or company may be the unit that takes action. Martin, speaking at the TechNet Augusta conference, said that units have become smaller since World War I. Then, the U.S. military fought with huge field armies. World War II was fought with armies and corps, the Korean and Vietnam Wars were fought primarily with divisions, and the modern counterinsurgency wars have been fought with brigades, Martin said. With a potentially smaller, and leaner, structure, the junior officers that will command these units will have have capability within their power. “The type of assets that now reside at the brigade level, my grandfather ... if he were alive today [he] would be totally flabbergasted by what a colonel can bring to bear on the battlefield under his or her own authorities,” Martin said. Brigades today are led by colonels. In the future, Martin envision a lieutenant who will have grown up in a multidomain world with an education in the Army that is much different than that of today, and which prepared him or her for the future fight. Army leaders will expect that a platoon will take advantage of electronic warfare, cyber and information operations. This could mean the platoon will throw an electronic warfare grenade that will blind enemy mission command systems, jam radios and block similar attacks to keep friendly radios online. Then, as the platoon gets closer to its objective, perhaps they will send an email to the enemy commander saying something like their wife is cheating on them or their bank account has been emptied, as a way to create an additional distraction, Martin said. Martin acknowledged this vignette seems a little far-fetched, but in the multidomain battlefield “that's what we're going to be facing and it's a race to capability,” he said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/technet-augusta/2018/08/22/heres-how-one-army-leader-sees-the-future-of-war/