14 octobre 2020 | International, Naval

US Navy eyes new design for next-generation destroyer

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy is looking to build a new generation of destroyers from a clean-sheet design, following the model of one of its most successful ship classes, the Arleigh Burke-class DDG, the service's top officer said Tuesday.

The idea, colloquially referred to in-house as DDG Next, is to build a new hull smaller than the nearly 16,000-ton Zumwalt-class destroyer but still big enough to accommodate a larger missile magazine, Adm. Michael Gilday told a virtual audience at Defense One's State of the Navy event.

“I don't want to build a monstrosity. But I need deeper magazines on ships than I have right now,” the chief of naval operations said. “I'm limited with respect to DDG Flight IIIs in terms of what additional stuff we could put on those ships. ... So the idea is to come up with the next destroyer, and that would be a new hull. The idea would be to put existing technologies on that hull and update and modernize those capabilities over time.”

The Navy is supposed to start buying the new ship in 2025, according to the service's 2020 30-year shipbuilding plan, though it's unclear how its forthcoming force structure assessment will affect those plans. In his recent speech on the Defense Department's plan for a 500-plus ship Navy, Defense Secretary Mark Esper made no mention of the future large surface combatant.

To avoid another costly failure, such as the canceled next-generation cruiser or severely truncated DDG-1000 program, the service is harkening back to its successful Arleigh Burke program, the mainstay of the Navy's surface combatant program for the past 30 years, Gilday said. Much like on the forthcoming Constellation-class frigates, the service plans to install fielded systems on the new ship and upgrade them over time.

“So think DDG-51 (that's exactly what we did): We had a new hull but we put Aegis on it,” Gilday said. “We put known systems that were reliable and were already fielded out in the fleet. That's kind of the idea. I call it DDG Next to kind of right-size it. Smaller than a Zumwalt but packing some heat nonetheless.”

The Navy estimates it would need $22 billion annually in constant year 2019 dollars to execute its old shipbuilding plan, though the Congressional Budget Office put the estimate more than 30 percent higher. A major driver in the difference between the CBO and Navy estimate was the cost of a future large surface combatant, according the Congressional Research Service.

The emergence of hypersonic missiles has been a driving factor in the Navy's desire to field a new large surface combatant since such weapons wont fit in the current vertical launch system cells on Burke-class destroyers and existing cruisers. They will, however, fit in the Virginia Payload Module being built into the Block V Virginia submarines awarded last year.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/10/13/the-us-navy-is-eyeing-a-next-generation-destroyer-from-a-new-design/

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22 avril 2021 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

L’alliance entre SDTS et SECAERO donne naissance à ARES (Advanced Redair European Squadron), un nouveau leader européen des services aériens de plastronnage et de simulation
Implantée sur l'aéroport de Nîmes-Garons, SDTS est spécialisée dans l'entraînement opérationnel et les missions de type « REDAIR – Aggressor Squadron ». Entreprise partenaire notamment de la Marine nationale, elle dispose d'une flotte de 9 avions MB-339 (Aermacchi) auxquels s'ajoutent un Cessna et un ULM. Quant à SECAERO, l'entreprise est domiciliée sur l'aérodrome de Valence-Chabeuil, et spécialisée dans la maintenance, la modernisation d'avions et d'hélicoptères, et la formation des mécaniciens. Sa flotte est composée de neuf MB-339 (Aermacchi), Cessna 337, un CTSW (ULM), deux hélicoptères Merlin (Agusta Westland Leonardo) en location. La nouvelle entreprise sera spécialisée dans l'entraînement aérien opérationnel de type REDAIR ou ADAIR pour Adversary Air Services, la maintenance aéronautique de type MRO/MCO, le développement et la fabrication d'équipements optroniques. ARES affiche ses ambitions dans son communiqué de presse « ARES projette d'investir, en liaison avec le constructeur Dassault-Aviation, le motoriste Safran et l'équipementier Thales, dans la modernisation de sa flotte avec des Mirage 2000, avions de 4e génération, supersoniques équipés de radar, pour répondre et s'adapter avec le plus haut niveau de réalisme aux besoins d'entrainement opérationnel grandissants des Forces armées françaises et européennes ». Lignes de défense, 22 avril
16 mars 2020 | International, Aérospatial

Possible New 'Engine War' Recasts Pratt As Champion Of Competition
By Steve Trimble Pratt & Whitney's F100 (pictured) is designed to be interchangeable with GE Aviation's F110 as the engine for the Boeing F-15 fleet. A jet engine maker is pressuring the U.S. Defense Department to scrap a plan to award a sole-source contract to a rival for a fleet of new fighters and investigate the opportunity for performance and cost improvements yielded by a competitive selection process. If that narrative sounds familiar, it is because it echoes a role GE Aviation played for more than 40 years, which included a successful bid in the 1980s to launch the “Great Engine War” over the F-15 and F-16 fleets and a failed campaign that ended almost a decade ago to establish the F136 as the alternate engine for the F-35. This time, however, the roles are reversed. Pratt & Whitney, which waged fierce lobbying campaigns against competitive engine policies for the F-15, F-16 and F-35, has switched sides in the debate. In response to the U.S. Air Force's decision to field the F-15EX into production powered solely by GE F110 engines, Pratt has filed two protests with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is scheduled to render judgments on both cases by early July. The Air Force sided with GE during the Great Engine War in 1984. Seeking to lower costs and motivate Pratt to resolve stall-stagnation problems with the original F100, the Air Force decided that year to split the engine contract for the F-15 and F-16 between GE's F110 and Pratt's F100. Thirty-six years later, the Air Force now worries about the schedule impact if the GAO sustains either or both of Pratt's protests of the F-15EX engine. Service officials decided to acquire the F-15EX after concluding the F-15C/Ds were too costly to sustain and because it would take too long for the Pratt F135-powered F-35A to replace all of them. Pratt's protests threaten to disrupt that schedule and erode the Air Force's original business case for the F-15EX. “If we have to do an engine competition, it will add time—2-3 years,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 10. Only a decade ago, Pratt welcomed a vote by Congress in 2010 to cancel funding for the F-35 program's alternate engine, along with a decision by GE and Rolls-Royce a year later to abandon a plan to self-fund the certification of the F136. But Pratt now embraces the potential benefits of an engine competition for the F-15EX. “Our government supports competition at all levels, and we're interested in providing the F100 as a competitive alternative,” Pratt Military Engines President Matthew Bromberg told Aviation Week. “If we're not competitive in terms of capability, schedule [and] price, I get it. But after the U.S. government spent all this money creating two engines for the F-15 and F-16 platforms, why would it then not compete a 450-engine program?” Asked if the existing F100 would require additional development to meet the Air Force's requirements for the F-15EX, Bromberg replied that he cannot answer that question in the absence of a competitive process that allows Pratt access to the specifications. He also noted that the F100 exclusively powers the Air Force's existing fleet of F-15Es. The F100 and F110 were designed to fit interchangeably in the F-15, although the heavily modified Saudi Arabian F-15SA and the Qatari F-15QA from which the F-15EX was derived are exclusively powered by GE's engine. The GAO does not release complaints filed by protesters up front, but it does release the full text of decisions. It is not clear why Pratt filed two separate protests on the sole-source decision for the GE engine on the F-15EX, but Bromberg advised not reading too much into it. “I'd like to obviously be able to discuss them, but I can't because it's a legal process,” Bromberg said. “I would really view them as a single protest on a single procurement action, and that is a lack of competition.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/possible-new-engine-war-recasts-pratt-champion-competition
31 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial

Northrop Grumman to Provide Key Electronic Warfare Capabilities for AC/MC-130J Aircraft
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