US Navy creates innovation center, advisory board to focus investments

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  2 décembre 2020 | International, Terrestre

  BAE Systems awarded £2.4 billion munitions contract to equip UK Armed Forces

  November 30, 2020 - BAE Systems has been awarded a new 15-year contract for the supply of munitions to the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD). The contract, worth £2.4bn, will sustain approximately 4,000 jobs across the UK. This new agreement, which will supersede the current contract due to conclude at the end of 2022, will guarantee the delivery of munitions products and engineering support to the UK Armed Forces. BAE Systems directly employs 1,260 people who are involved in either munitions manufacturing or test and evaluation at five sites across the UK; Glascoed in Monmouthshire, Radway Green in Cheshire, Washington in Tyne & Wear, Bishopton near Glasgow, and Ridsdale in Northumberland. It is anticipated that the contract will also help sustain a further 1,500 jobs in the UK supply chain and support a further 1,300 jobs induced by consumer spending in economies local to sites. The agreement enables BAE Systems to invest £70 million on the refurbishment and upgrade of manufacturing lines, with 75% of this value being invested by 2026. The Company will also spend up to £350m with UK-based companies on raw materials and machine components. Charles Woodburn, Chief Executive, BAE Systems, said: “This contract secures the future of a highly technical and critical industry which supports thousands of manufacturing jobs in several areas throughout the UK. By investing in new technology and skills to further develop our expertise, we can continue to deliver essential sovereign capability to the Armed Forces at competitive prices.” Defence Minister Jeremy Quin said: “This vital multi-billion pound contract will provide our service men and women with fire power on the front line for years to come whilst investing in British industry, British jobs and British infrastructure. Defence underpins hundreds of thousands of jobs across all four corners of the nation, and ongoing investment is crucial as we work together to build back better and stronger from the Covid-19 pandemic.” The contract, called the ‘Next Generation Munitions Solution' (NGMS), is due to commence in January 2023 and will succeed the current ‘Munitions Acquisition, the Supply Solution' (MASS) contract, which commenced in 2008. It represents the enduring partnership between BAE Systems and the UK Armed Forces, particularly the British Army. Contact Default Profile ImagePhilippa Mason Media Manager Head Office Corporate Communications +44 (0)7384 249518 View source version on BAE Systems: https://www.baesystems.com/en/article/bae-systems-awarded-gbp-2-4-billion-munitions-contract-to-equip-uk-armed-forces

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  28 juillet 2020 | International, C4ISR

  US Army begins experimenting with new network tools

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army's combat capabilities development team kicked off a monthslong experiment last week to test emerging technologies that could be added into the service's tactical network. The third annual Network Modernization Experiment at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey started July 20 and ends Oct. 2. NetModX provides an opportunity for the Combat Capabilities Development Command's C5ISR Center — or Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Center — to perform field tests with emerging capabilities that have largely been tested in the lab. Field tests with simulated threat environments, as opposed to lab tests, are important because technologies react in unexpected ways due to realities like different types of trees or terrain. This year's theme for NetModX is mission command and command-post survivability, which means participants will focus on technologies that could be fielded in the Army's Integrated Tactical Network Capability Set '23 and Capability Set '25 — future iterations of network tools that the Army plans to deliver to soldiers every two years. In this year's test, the C5ISR Center is testing communications capabilities that allow for distributed mission command systems across the battlefield “and wider area,” said Michael Brownfield, chief of the future capabilities office at the C5ISR Center. “We've learned by watching our enemies fight, and we know that to survive on the battlefield, No. 1, they can't be able to see us,” Brownfield told C4ISRNET in an interview. “And No. 2, we have to distribute our systems across the battlefield to give them multiple targets and multiple dilemmas in order to survive.” NetModX is also testing network resiliency capabilities that could be delivered as part of Capability Set '23. Preliminary design review for the capability set is scheduled for April next year. To test the effectiveness of the resiliency projects the center developed in the lab, the C5ISR Center created a “state-of-the-art red cell” that attacks the network using enemy's tactics, techniques and procedures, according to Brownfield. The goal is to make sure the technology can withstand electronic attacks and allow for continuous operations in contested environments when in the hands of deployed soldiers. “What resiliency means to us is the network bends, it doesn't break,” Brownfield said. “And the commanders have the information they need and the coordination that they need to fight the battle.” A modular radio frequency system of systems is undergoing tests, and Brownfield says it will “revolutionize” the fight on the battlefield. The system automatically switches between primary, alternate, contingency and emergency, or PACE, radios by sensing if radio frequencies are being jammed. The system then responds by automatically switching radio channels to allow for seamless communications in a contested environment. Currently, “it's kind of hard to switch to alternate comms when the person you're talking to is on their primary, not their alternative comms,” Brownfield said. “And the process is very slow. It's human-driven.” Now, the automatic PACE system senses the environment in milliseconds, he said. At last year's experiment, which focused on network transport capabilities to support precision fires for multidomain operations, the center experimented with radios that could flip to new channels on their own, while launching brute force and other more sophisticated attacks against the radios to see how much stress they could handle before passing data became impossible. This year will be a little different. “This year, we're pairing different radios together and see how they can work to actually change the type of modulation schemes that we use to maneuver in cyberspace around for continuous operations while under enemy attack and under contested electronic warfare conditions,” Brownfield said. One of the top priorities for this year's experiment is allowing for projects leaders to bring their technology into to the field, no matter what stage of development they are in, to be tested in an “operationally relevant environment,” Brownfield said. The team then collects data on how the technology performs and puts it into a database where it can be queried to answer specific performance questions. “So we can ... ask the database questions like, ‘What was my latency with these two radios at this point in time,' and start to understand the true metrics of how the systems performed in the field,” Joshua Fischer, acting chief of systems engineering, architecture, modeling and simulation at the C5ISR Center, told C4ISRNET. He added that those involved are also looking at network throughput. https://www.c4isrnet.com/yahoo-syndication/2020/07/24/us-army-begins-experimenting-with-new-network-tools/

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  25 janvier 2021 | International, Naval, C4ISR

  Navy Awards Contract for P-8A Poseidon Protection

  1/20/2021 By Mandy Mayfield The Navy recently awarded BAE systems a $4 million contract for a “quick turnaround” demonstration of a new radio frequency countermeasures system for the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, the company announced in January. “Its primary mission is twofold. First, it's to prevent an enemy radar from locking” onto U.S. aircraft, said Don Davidson, director of the advanced compact electronic warfare solutions product line at BAE Systems. However, “if they do get a radar lock and fire a missile, its ultimate purpose is to seduce the missile away from the platform.” The system will be pod-mounted and include a small form factor jammer, a high-powered amplifier and BAE's AN/ALE-55 fiber-optic towed decoy. The decoy has been used on board other Navy aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. “Right now on the P-8A, they don't have any of the equipment required to support a self-protection system,” Davidson said in an interview. “We had to put all that equipment within a pod that can be mounted on the aircraft without requiring anything on the aircraft itself.” The company will design, build and integrate the systems at its Nashua, New Hampshire, facility. Following the integration, they will be tested for two months in early 2021 on the P-8A. “This need for speed is even more prevalent today than it has been in years past,” Davidson said. The Navy issued a white paper identifying concerns about emerging threats with regard to surface-to-air missiles and asked for a self-protection capability to be delivered quickly, he noted. “Since we do this for a living, we had a lot of products and capabilities that we had developed for other applications that we were able to leverage,” he said. “We could take these existing capabilities, integrate them together — they're small enough to fit in this pod — and we could bring this capability to bear in what has essentially been five months.” The completed pod was slated to be delivered at the end of January, he said. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/1/20/navy-awards-contract-for-p-8a-poseidon-protection