US Space Force to establish new acquisitions command in 2021

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  17 novembre 2020 | International, Terrestre

  Hanwha, Kongsberg team up to bolster Australia’s K9 howitzers

  Brian Kim SEOUL — Hanwha Defense Australia has announced a partnership with Kongsberg Defence Australia to integrate command, control, communication and computing technology into the K9 self-propelled howitzer and the K10 ammunition resupply vehicle. The announcement came two months after the Australian branch of Hanwha Defense, a defense company in South Korea, was selected as the preferred supplier for Australia's self-propelled howitzer acquisition project, code-named Land 8116 Phase 1 Under the project, the Australian Army is to acquire 30 155mm, 52-caliber K9 “Huntsman” howitzers and 15 K10 armored ammunition resupply vehicles, both of which are built by Hanwha. “The selection of KONGSBERG as a central part of our Land 8116 Phase 1 industry team will make a very important contribution to Hanwha's capacity to deliver effective capability for the [Australian Defence Force] while fulfilling our extensive Australian Industry Capability commitments,” Richard Cho, managing director of Hanwha's branch Down Under, said in a statement. The partnership has already proven to be successful, he added, citing their recent involvement in Norway's Vidar program for K9 and K10 procurement, and pointing to their delivery of K9s to Finland and Estonia. Under the partnership, Kongsberg is responsible for the integration of tactical communication systems and battle management systems. “Together with Hanwha Defence Australia, KONGSBERG is committed to the establishment of a sovereign industry capability to support the Australian Protected Mobile Fires capability throughout its service life,” said Joh Fry, general manager of Kongsberg Defence Australia. “We'll continue to source as much C4 hardware as possible through Australian and New Zealand-based suppliers.” Developed by South Korea's Agency for Defense Development and Samsung Techwin in 1998, the K9 Thunder is touted as one of the world's most advanced self-propelled howitzers. It's designed to provide effective and deep fire support across theaters. The howitzer is now manufactured by Hanwha Defense, a defense contractor of Hanwha Group that acquired Samsung Techwin in 2017. The main weapon is the 155mm, 52-caliber gun with a burst rate of fire of three rounds per 15 seconds, and a maximum rate of fire of six rounds a minute for three minutes. It has a firing range of 40 kilometers and is capable of “multiple rounds simultaneous impact” firing. On Nov. 13, South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration announced that the completion of deliveries of K9s to the South Korean military. The announcement came about two decades after the first K9 fleet was deployed on the western border islands of Yeonpyeong and Baengnyeong An upgraded variant, the K9A1, is in production with improvements in fire control and power systems. DAPA and Hanwha Defense plan to continue to improve the K9′s capabilities to add automatic loading and unmanned maneuvering functions. The K9 has been exported to several countries, including Turkey, Poland, India, Norway and Estonia. About 1,700 units are in service around the world, according to Hanwha. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2020/11/13/hanwha-kongsberg-team-up-to-bolster-australias-k9-howitzers

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  13 juin 2024 | International, Sécurité

  New Attack Technique 'Sleepy Pickle' Targets Machine Learning Models

  Learn about Sleepy Pickle, a new threat exploiting machine learning models via pickle files. Protect your data now!

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  8 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Opinion: Why The Future Will Not Be Virtual

  Steven Grundman The COVID-19 pandemic has accustomed us to living in the virtual world and hearing speculation about the ways in which our actual lives may never resume as before. Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently said he believes “over 50% of business travel and over 30% of days in the office will go away.” Explaining why the pandemic-induced surge in virtual house calls is likely to endure, Harvard's Dr. Thomas Delbanco concedes: “There are times when doctors, nurses or therapists really need to see you—no question about it. But there are also times when they really don't.” It was against the backdrop of such head-turning New Year's predictions that I spent the holidays reading about the Cold War and forming a nostalgic rebuttal to those prophesies of Zoom. At the start of my professional life, I led a surveillance platoon of the U.S. 1st Armored Division (1st AD), which was deployed to defend the “Frontier of Freedom” in the towns surrounding Nuremberg, West Germany. So it was that after cracking open Fulda Gap: Battlefield of the Cold War Alliances, I quickly thumbed forward to Chapter 7, “A Personal Perspective from Platoon Leader to Army Group” by Gen. (ret.) Crosbie Saint, who had commanded the 1st AD during my service in it. Saint's reflections transported me back to 1984 and the pastoral beauty of the Bavarian Oberpfalz, where we were actively preparing to fight a third world war. Prominent among the preparations Saint recounts was the terrain walk, a compulsory practice of every officer leading a maneuver unit regularly to traverse the ground where his troops would deploy, battle book in hand, mastering the contours of the landscape and envisioning his squads' movements in the General Defense Plan. Saint writes ardently about how “repetitive terrain walks at multiple command levels to analyze and become expert in exploiting the terrain for tactical purposes” gave the U.S. a decisive advantage over the vast armies of the Warsaw Pact. The still-clear memory of then-Lt. Grundman's own terrain walks along the monikered kill zones in my battle book—The Kemnath Bowl, Erbendorf Fire Trap, et al.—prompted me to wonder if the marvels of a virtual reality simulation would leave as indelible a mark. I doubt it. While the adoption of videoconferencing for commodity conversation is no doubt here to stay, the premium work of enterprise leadership must remain incarnate. Just as the experience of looking out from a ridgeline engages all the senses, strategic vision flows from an intuitive integration of time and space that no telemediation can fully activate. Beyond the battlefield lay other terrain walks affirming my conviction. In April 1993, just three weeks on the job as chief executive of an IBM teetering on insolvency, Lou Gerstner launched Operation Bear Hug, which directed each of the company's 250 most senior executives to visit at least five key customers over the following three months to learn why IBM had lost their trust. Years later, Gerstner wrote that Bear Hug made manifest what came to be the motive force of IBM's acclaimed transformation: “[W]e were going to build a company from the outside in and . . . the customer was going to drive everything we did in the company.” Gerstner invested this practice of deep listening to customers with the same strategic importance Saint attributed to a lieutenant's intimacy with the sight lines of his firing positions. Operation Bear Hug was a terrain walk. One of the trade secrets of my career as a business consultant to the aerospace industry is never to pass up an invitation to take a plant tour. No matter how near it is to your next flight's departure, when asked “Wanna see the shop?” the right answer is always “Of course.” When, a decade ago, I toured SpaceX's Hawthorne, California, headquarters and observed Elon Musk sitting at his desk among the busy cubicles of 30-something engineers gutting out their work in T-shirts, I instantly understood how the company's garage-shop culture could revolutionize the staid business of space launch. Years earlier, the clinical attention to workers' safety I saw at the bustling CFM56 jet engine plant in Villaroche, France, told me more about the success of the GE-Safran joint venture than even its impressive financials. So, too, did I need actually to feel the cavernous quietude in an antique defense factory to appreciate the true meaning of the sunk-cost fallacy. The aerospace plant tour is often a terrain walk. To all you leaders who, like me, find the progressively virtual world unsettling (and with apologies to a certain light lager's ad campaign), I say, “Find your terrain walk.” Once we again are free to move about, go physically to the crucible of what creates value for your enterprise and open your senses. Only from that vantage will you see truly into its future. The views expressed are not necessarily those of Aviation Week. https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/manufacturing-supply-chain/opinion-why-future-will-not-be-virtual