With an increasing footprint in the Arctic, the Corps may need a new snow vehicle

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  21 mai 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Pentagon orders $2B worth of jam-resistant radios

  Nathan Strout The Navy has issued two contracts totaling as much as $2 billion for Joint Tactical Radio Systems over the next five years. Viasat and the joint venture Data Link Solutions LLC (comprised of BAE Systems and Collins Aerospace) were each awarded indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts worth as much as $1 billion for the production, retrofitting, development and sustainment of the Multifunctional Information Distribution System Joint Tactical Radio Systems, or MIDS JTRS, terminals. There were two proposals submitted for the contracts. The MIDS JTRS terminal is a software-defined radio that provides secure, line-of-sight voice and data communications for a variety of air, sea and ground platforms. The jam-resistant radio can transmit and receive data over Link 16 and Tactical Air Navigation systems like existing technology. It can also use new communications protocals and advanced networking waveforms, including the multifunction advanced data link and the intra-flight data link. According to the contract announcement, there are three terminal variants covered by this award: the Concurrent Multi-Netting-4, the Tactical Targeting Network Technology and the F-22 variant. The combined contracts will provide terminals for the U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force and NATO nations. The award is a followup to five-year contracts issued to both companies in 2015, which are set to expire May 27. Work under the new contracts is expected to be complete by May 2025. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2020/05/20/dod-ordering-2b-worth-of-jam-resistant-radios/

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  27 octobre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

  China to sanction Boeing, Lockheed and Raytheon over Taiwan arms sales

  Joe McDonald BEIJING — China's government said Monday it will impose sanctions on U.S. military contractors including Boeing's defense unit and Lockheed Martin for supplying weapons to rival Taiwan, stepping up a feud with Washington over security and Beijing's strategic ambitions. Raytheon Technologies Corp. and “relevant American individuals” associated with the sales also will be affected, said Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. He gave no details of what penalties might be imposed or when. The ruling Communist Party claims Taiwan, which split with the mainland in 1949 during a civil war, as part of its territory and has threatened to invade. Washington promised in the 1980s to reduce and eventually end weapons sales to Taiwan but insists its dispute with Beijing must be settled peacefully. “In order to safeguard national interests, China decided to impose sanctions on the American companies that were involved in arms sales to Taiwan,” Zhao said at a regular news briefing. Chinese-U.S. relations have plunged to their lowest level in decades amid disputes about security, technology, the coronavirus pandemic and human rights. Taiwan has long been an irritant in relations. Washington has no formal relations with the island's democratically elected government but is its main ally. U.S. law requires the government to ensure Taiwan can defend itself. Weapons sales to the island have increased in quantity and quality. Last week, Beijing demanded Washington cancel a planned sale of 135 precision land-attack missiles valued at more than $1 billion to improve its defenses. The sale “seriously undermined China's sovereignty and security interests,” Zhao said. China has stepped up military activity around Taiwan in an attempt to force concessions from the pro-independence administration of President Tsai Ing-wen. The Communist Party is using the mainland's growing economic weight to pressure other governments to cut diplomatic and unofficial ties with Taiwan. Beijing regularly pressures American companies, including Boeing, in an effort to influence U.S. policy. China is one of Boeing's biggest markets for commercial aircraft, which might make it vulnerable to a boycott, but Zhao mentioned only Boeing's military arm, Boeing Defense, not its civilian jetliner business. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon also supply radar and other technology for civilian aviation. The two governments have put sanctions on companies and individuals on both sides over complaints about human rights, computer hacking and other issues, though it is unclear whether they have any effect. Washington has imposed travel and financial bans on Chinese officials and companies it says are linked to abuses in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where Muslim minorities have been detained in re-education camps, or Hong Kong after Beijing tried to tighten control by imposing a national security law. Beijing has retaliated by announcing sanctions against some U.S. legislators. Zhao called on Washington to “stop arms sales to Taiwan and stop any military interaction with Taiwan,” adding: “We will continue to take necessary measures to safeguard national sovereignty and security interests.” https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/10/26/china-to-sanction-boeing-lockheed-and-raytheon-over-taiwan-arms-sales/

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  7 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Future Missile War Needs New Kind Of Command: CSIS

  Integrating missile defense – shooting down incoming missiles – with missile offense – destroying the launchers before they fire again – requires major changes in how the military fights. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on July 07, 2020 at 4:00 AM WASHINGTON: Don't try to shoot down each arrow as it comes; shoot the archer. That's a time-honored military principle that US forces would struggle to implement in an actual war with China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran, warns a new report from thinktank CSIS. New technology, like the Army's IBCS command network – now entering a major field test — can be part of the solution, but it's only part, writes Brian Green, a veteran of 30 years in the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and the aerospace industry. Equally important and problematic are the command-and-control arrangements that determine who makes the decision to fire what, at what, and when. Today, the military has completely different units, command systems, doctrines, and legal/regulatory authorities for missile defense – which tries to shoot down threats the enemy has already launched – and for long range offensive strikes – which could keep the enemy from launching in the first place, or at least from getting off a second salvo, by destroying launchers, command posts, and targeting systems. While generals and doctrine-writers have talked about “offense-defense integration” for almost two decades, Green says, the concept remains shallow and incomplete. “A thorough implementation of ODI would touch almost every aspect of the US military, including policy, doctrine, organization, training, materiel, and personnel,” Green writes. “It would require a fundamental rethinking of terms such as ‘offense' and ‘defense' and of how the joint force fights.” Indeed, it easily blurs into the even larger problem of coordinating all the services across all five domains of warfare – land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace – in what's known as Joint All-Domain Operations. The bifurcation between offense and defense runs from the loftiest strategic level down to tactical: At the highest level, US Strategic Command commands both the nation's nuclear deterrent and homeland missile defense. But these functions are split between three different subcommands within STRATCOM, one for Air Force ICBMs and bombers (offense), one for Navy ballistic missile submarines (also offense), and one for Integrated Missile Defense. In forward theaters, the Army provides ground-based missile defense, but those units – Patriot batteries, THAAD, Sentinel radars – belong to separate brigades from the Army's own long-range missile artillery, and they're even less connected to offensive airstrikes from the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. The Navy's AEGIS system arguably does the best job of integrating offense and defense in near-real-time, Green says, but even there, “different capabilities onboard a given ship can come under different commanders,” one with the authority to unleash Standard Missile interceptors against incoming threats and the other with the authority to fire Tomahawk missiles at the enemy launchers. This division of labor might have worked when warfare was slower. But China and Russia have invested massively in their arsenals of long-range, precision-guided missiles, along with the sensors and command networks to direct them to their targets. So, on a lesser scale, have North Korea and Iran. The former deputy secretary of defense, Bob Work, warned of future conflicts in which “salvo exchanges” of hundreds of missiles – hopefully not nuclear ones – might rocket across the war zone within hours. It's been obvious for over a decade that current missile defense systems simply can't cope with the sheer number of incoming threats involved, which led the chiefs of the Army and Navy to sign a famous “eight-star memo” in late 2014 that called, among other things, for stopping enemy missiles “left of launch.” But that approach would require real-time coordination between the offensive weapons, responsible for destroying enemy launchers, command posts, and targeting systems, and the defensive ones, responsible for shooting down whatever missiles made it into the air. While Navy Aegis and Army IBCS show some promise, Green writes, neither is yet capable of moving the data required among all the users who would need it: Indeed, IBCS is still years away from connecting all the Army's defensive systems, while Aegis only recently gained an offensive anti-ship option, a modified SM-6, alongside its defensive missiles. As two Army generals cautioned in a recent interview with Breaking Defense, missile defense and offense have distinctly different technical requirements that limit the potential of using a single system to run both. There are different legal restrictions as well: Even self-defense systems operate under strict limits, lest they accidentally shoot down friendly aircraft or civilian airliners, and offensive strikes can easily escalate a conflict. Green's 35-page paper doesn't solve these problems. But it's useful examination of how complex they can become. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/future-missile-war-needs-new-kind-of-command-csis/