Mechanical fixes kept the SB>1 compound helicopter grounded for weeks this summer, but Sikorsky insists they can catch up.
]]>AUSA: The SB>1 Defiant is back in the air, reaching speeds of 20 knots on its fourth test flight. It should reach the Army-mandated minimum speed of 230 knots by the end of March, “if we have no other significant things we learn along the way,” Boeing program manager Ken Eland said here this morning.
He’s referring to a less-than-pleasant surprise earlier this year when the Sikorsky-Boeing team discovered unexpected “bearing creep” in a test gearbox, leading them to ground the actual aircraft for almost two months to make preventive changes.
That was the second major delay for the Defiant after losing multiple months to unexpected difficulties building the large, ultra-rigid rotor blades required – although that hold-up was in part the fault of the Army, which asked the companies to try out some novel manufacturing techniques.
But the bottom line is that the Defiant has only made four test flights – three in March and April before the gearbox fix, one after on Sept. 24th – for a total of three hours of flight time – a third of that from the most recent flight.
By contrast, rival Bell Flight’s V-280 Valor tiltrotor first flew in December 2017, 15 months before Defiant. Valor surpassed 100 flight hours and 300 knots airspeed in April, just as Defiant was making its first flights. Bell is now doing extra-credit testing like flying the Valor in unmanned mode.
All that extra flight data, and the field-testing performance it describes, gives Bell’s Valor an advantage in the competition to replace the Army UH-60 Black Hawk — and potentially Marine and Special Operations transport aircraft as well. But the Sikorsky-Boeing team can still complete their test program, prove Defiant can meet the Army’s requirements, and get the data to the military in time to affect its decision.
That’s because both Valor and Defiant are demonstrator aircraft, part of the Joint Multi-Role (JMR) program to explore the art of the possible, and are not final designs for the Army’s Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). Both companies turned in their white paper preliminary proposals for FLRAA by the Oct. 1 deadline, but they will have 18 months after that to make refinements and discuss trade-offs with the Army. The final designs aren’t due until fall 2021, and the Army won’t actually decide which aircraft to build until roughly March 2022.
(A technicality: In February next year, Army will award the contracts to develop final designs. But it’ll award two of those contracts, and given that Bell and Sikorsky-Boeing are the only contenders with actual demonstrator aircraft, it’s a safe assumption both will get an award).
While the Sikorsky-Boeing team’s final FLRAA proposal will not be identical to the Defiant – it’ll probably be somewhat larger to meet all the Army’s requirements — it’ll be very similar, Eland and other executives said.
Meanwhile, Sikorsky can take comfort in their strong position on the Army’s other Future Vertical Lift competition, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. (While Boeing is teamed with Sikorsky on FLRAA, they’re competitors on FARA).
So far, Sikorsky’s is the only entry derived from a real aircraft with lots of test flights under its belt. That’s the S-97 Raider, which first flew in 2015, and whose design Sikorsky has now scaled up by 27 percent into its final FARA proposal, the Raider-X. By contrast, Bell is offering the Bell 360 Invictus, which shares its fly-by-wire system with the commercial Bell 525 but is otherwise an all-new design. So on the FARA contract, it’s Sikorsky that’s ahead and Bell that has a lot of prove.
]]>“It was developed for a very specific threat and it does incredible things…we intend to operate it differently — in support of an Army on the move. It’s not just going to be static.”
]]>AUSA: The Army doesn’t want to buy any more Iron Dome air defense systems, but if it may have to buy more of the Israeli-made system if it can’t get its own program up and running by 2023.
The purchase of the Israeli system this summer was meant to fill a gap the Army has in defeating shorter-range missiles, but Congress imposed a 2023 deadline in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act for the American service to develop its own system or it would have to buy more Iron Domes.
The purchase was made, “because we had nothing else out there,” Brig. Gen. Brian Gibson, Air and Missile Defense Cross Functional Team director told reporters today. “We needed some immediate capability above the tactical level.”
The Army rebooted its main air and missile defense program, the Indirect Fire Protection Capability to refocus on higher-end threats like cruise missiles and was left without coverage against the sort of shorter-range missiles such as those fired at Israel’s cities.
Gibson doesn’t want to make buying the Rafael-made Iron Dome a habit, and he’s making plans to use the system differently than Israel does. To do that, he plans to pull it apart and integrate it with his other air defense battle management systems.
Israel parks the mobile system at key locations to protect towns and cities from Hezbollah rockets, but Gibson made clear that the Army’s push to become leaner, and capable of packing up and moving on the fly will extend to the new system.
“It was developed for a very specific threat and it does incredible things,” he said, but “we intend to operate it differently — we intend to operate it in support of an Army on the move. It’s not just going to be static.”
So, the US Army will buy Iron Dome if it has to, but it really doesn’t;t want to. “As a long-term enduring solution, absolutely not,” Gibson said of the Israeli capability. It “would be fundamentally wrong” to keep buying Iron Dome and would go against “everything we’re trying to achieve.”
He stressed that Iron Dome is great at what it does, but the Army wants a system to slot directly into the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS), the network backbone designed to work with every anti-aircraft, counter-drone and missile defense system in the future.
Northrop Grumman announced in May it had delivered the first “production-representative” command post for the IBCS, opening the door for test shots latter this year and the system’s crucial operational test in 2020.
Gibson is willing to look under the Iron Dome’s hood to see what he can keep, however. He said he wants to “see what we can harvest, componentize, and see if we can take a very credible weapons system at a component level and integrate it into our architecture without making significant changes.”
]]>The company has transformed their booth in support of Breast Cancer Awareness and is partnering with Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine.
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]]>The Army may need to delay the rollout of the new technology, scale it down, or both.
]]>AUSA 2019: The Army is scrambling to adjust its ambitious VR training program after both House and Senate appropriators hacked its 2020 funding request. The top three priorities to preserve are the IVAS augmented reality goggles, new simulation software, and tools for creating training scenarios, said Maj. Gen. Maria Gervais, director of the Synthetic Training Environment (STE) Cross Functional Team (CFT).
A fourth priority STE will try to preserve, she said, is the One World Terrain 3D mapping software that will replace the 57 different terrain simulations currently used, with an early version even being used on the battlefield by special operators.
Despite strong support from Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, the go-fast effort to upend how the Army trains both at the individual soldier and unit levels may well face serious tradeoffs due to budget cuts — as both sides of Capitol Hill have taken a whack at the budget request. This includes figuring out whether program will be able to meet its “aggressive schedule” for initial operating capability in September 2021, Gervais told reporters today at the 2019 Association of the US Army (AUSA) conference.
“Right now, we’re working on the marks,” Gervais said. “We working to ensure that we can stay on the glide path for FY2021. But the marks will impact our ability, depending on what comes out of the conference session.”
STE has become a poster child for the Senate Appropriations Committee’s wider displeasure about the massive budgetary reshuffling resulting from the “Night Court” process put into place between 2018 and 2019 by former Army Secretary, now Defense Secretary, Mark Esper.
The Senate’s version of the 2020 Pentagon funding bill lists STE, and its high-priority Integrated Augmented Vision System goggle project, among several other Army CFT efforts that have drawn concern because of multiple re-programmings since 2018. The Senate legislation complains: “Continued, wide-ranging truncation or elimination of programs without notification to the congressional defense committees in advance of the subsequent budget submission leads to inefficiencies and misappropriation of resources in the current budget request being considered.”
To crack down on what it sees as budget bingo, the Senate cut a whopping $79.64 million from the STE prototyping request of $136.76 million, to $57.12 million. The House, by contrast, only cut some $25 million from the request, down to $111.78 million. The Senate also zeroed out the Army’s request for an additional $20 million for “restoring acquisition accountability” in the program.
“The Army senior leadership, on the secretary’s side and on the Army side, they know the value of this,” said Brig. Gen. Mike Sloane, program executive officer for simulation, training and instrumentation. “They are fully engaged, as are General Gervais and myself. We’re fully engaged with senior leaders, congressmen and congresswomen on the Hill to make sure they understand the impacts.”
Sloane said that the Initial Operational Capability date might not be the only thing that might have to be traded away, depending on the size of any cuts. Instead of delaying the IOC, the Army might stick to the schedule but scale down the effort. “Does that mean it’s one installation less against the initial operational capability? Where is the trade space there?” he mused aloud. However, he warned, “at some point in time, when you trade things away, you do not have a capability.”
]]>“We’re moving towards a talent management system where we will manage people by 25 variables instead of two,” Gen. McConville said. It will be “a system that recognizes and capitalizes on our people’s knowledge, their skills, their behaviors and even their preferences.”
]]>AUSA: “I know it’s almost blasphemous to think the Army would actually consider someone’s preferences,” the new Army chief of staff said this afternoon. “But if we know where they want to go and what they want to do, we believe we’ll get the right person, in the right job at the right time, and we will have a better Army and more committed soldiers and families.”
People have been trying to reform Army’s notoriously bureaucratic personnel system for years. If Gen. James McConville can actually put it off, that’s a potential revolution affecting more than a million regular and Reserve Component soldiers in the largest of the armed services.
“People don’t want to be treated like interchangeable parts in an industrial age process,” Gen. McConville told the Association of the US Army annual conference this afternoon, in his first address to AUSA as Army Chief of Staff. “They want to be recognized for their unique talents.”
But the current system doesn’t do that — and it arguably gets worse the higher you go in the ranks, since it has no way of accounting for decades of unique experiences. “Right now, we spend more time and more money on selecting a private to be in the Ranger Regiment than we do on something I would argue is one of the most consequential leadership positions in the Army, our battalion commanders,” McConville said. One of his first concrete reforms, he said, will be to change this year’s assessments for new battalion commanders, with candidates getting assessed in person instead of only as paper files.
For the big picture fix, “we’re moving towards a talent management system where we will manage people by 25 variables instead of two,” he said. It will be “a system that recognizes and capitalizes on our people’s knowledge, their skills, their behaviors and even their preferences.”
Treating troops like cogs is exactly how the current Army personnel bureaucracy does it — by design. It’s a system that was codified in its current form by the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980, but its foundations were really laid in 1947, the first year Congress passed unified personnel legislation covering all the armed services, and its key principles date back to the Elihu Root reforms of 1903.
The principle behind the current system is to create a large corps of generalists who can take on whatever leadership roles were needed in a massive wartime force of hastily trained conscripts. That’s a very different kind of army than the specialized technical professionals required for complex modern conflicts, from counterinsurgency to long-range missile strikes to cyber warfare.
When matching available personnel to positions that need filling, the current system generally tracks individuals by only two variables, their rank and their branch. For example, he said, “You’re a Captain of Infantry or you’re a Sergeant of Engineers. That’s really it.”
The result is a system that routinely does such things as send Arabic-speaking soldiers to Korea or veteran paratroopers to a tank brigade
A key building block of McConville’s new system will be a new Integrated Personnel and Pay System (IPPS-A) that covers regular active-duty soldiers, reservists, and National Guard troops in a single database rather than in separate and incompatible systems. IPPS-A will also be able track the almost two dozen variables now required.
“We’re also putting in place a comprehensive assessment program that will measure our people’s knowledge, skills, and attributes at key points in their careers to help us manage their talents,” McConville said. “I’m talking about a program where we measure cognitive and non-cognitive abilities through a variety of means to get a better picture of the skills in our force.”
Now, these assessments could create a new kind of personnel nightmare. If implemented badly, you could imagine expert soldiers being denied promotions because they checked the wrong box on a Myers-Briggs personal test.
So there are a lot of details here for the devil to fiddle with. While McConville left many questions unanswered, he promised the service would roll out its first-ever “Army People Strategy” soon, followed by prototyping and testing in the officer corps to get the reforms right before committing to them Army-wide.
Personnel reform was Mark Esper’s top priority for 2019 when he was Army Secretary. But we haven’t heard much about it since he was elevated to Defense Secretary this summer. It looks like McConville has seized that ball and is running with it.
]]>Leonardo DRS and MFoCS II are enabling @USArmy Network modernization, preparing for the ever-changing battlefield.
]]>[Sponsored] Leonardo DRS and MFoCS II are enabling @USArmy Network modernization, preparing for the ever-changing battlefield.
]]>If there’s one thing that Army leadership agrees upon, it’s the need for improved survivability of soldiers and machines against modern anti-tank weapons like the Russian Kornet and Chinese HJ-8 guided missiles, as well as Russia’s tandem warhead RPG-29 rocket propelled grenade that can bore a hole into a tank with a molten jet of… Keep reading →
]]>If there’s one thing that Army leadership agrees upon, it’s the need for improved survivability of soldiers and machines against modern anti-tank weapons like the Russian Kornet and Chinese HJ-8 guided missiles, as well as Russia’s tandem warhead RPG-29 rocket propelled grenade that can bore a hole into a tank with a molten jet of metal. These weapons are readily available, inexpensive, and easy to use, which has led to proliferation in combat zones in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Gaza, and throughout Africa and Asia. As such, they pose serious threats to U.S. armored vehicles.
To counter those weapons, American efforts have evolved beyond passive, steel and ceramic plates that encase armored vehicles—and which are most effective against bullets, artillery fragments, and underbody mines—to active protection systems (APS) that augment passive armor by destroying RPGs and missiles in flight before they strike their target. These initiatives extend from retrofitting existing vehicles like Abrams tanks with APS under urgent need acquisitions, to working APS into formal combat vehicle modernization plans under the Next Generation Ground Vehicle (NGCV) program.
“As threats became more lethal over the years, the answer was to add more and more armor, especially steel armor, to prevent penetration of the vehicle,” said Mike O’Leary, senior director of business development at DRS Land Systems. “We’re now at a tipping point where combat vehicles simply can’t get any heavier or they’ll be unable to maneuver, traverse bridges, or be transported. As we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, the weight of some of these vehicles caused roads to give way leading to rollovers.
“With APS you don’t necessarily have to add more armor plate to an existing vehicle, and when developing a new vehicle you can reduce the amount of armor required depending on the threat. That gives you a lighter, more mobile and nimble vehicle because you’ve offloaded some passive armor in exchange for an active system.”
Israel was the first to experience the increased lethality of modern anti-armor weapons during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War where its armored formations were basically brought to a standstill by just a few anti-tank guided missile teams hidden in the rocks in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley. The country faced advanced anti-armor weapons again during the 2014 Gaza conflict. In response, Leonardo DRS’ partner Rafael Advanced Defense Systems of Israel developed a system called Trophy that is arguably the most battle tested APS in the world with more than 1,500 systems installed on the Merkava MK4 main battle tank and all major Israeli ground combat platforms.
In 2018, the U.S. Army began contracting with Leonardo DRS to provide the same Trophy system for M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks under an urgent needs basis. In 2019, Leonardo DRS was awarded another contract to provide both the Army and Marine Corps with additional TROPHY active protection systems, bringing the total funded value of the program to more than $200 million. And just this month, Leonardo DRS and Rafael delivered on time the first Trophy APS to the Army in a hand over that marks the first of several that will ultimately outfit four brigades of tanks.
For this work, Leonardo DRS, Rafael, and the vehicle manufacturer were charged with making the APS work on vehicles already maxed out in terms of interior space and power. O’Leary didn’t sugar coat the challenge.
“As compelling as Trophy is in terms of enhancing the survivability of a platform in a very lethal environment, the true challenge is actually fitting it on the platform from a size, weight, power, and cooling standpoint. It’s no secret that the Abrams tank and others like the Bradley have been augmented with significant engineering changes many times over the last several decades. They just don’t have the weight or power budget available for another major subsystem.
“Speaking from experience on Abrams, that integration challenge was significant and it took time. Note that the challenge in fielding the capability was not dependent on the maturity of Trophy. The challenge was in integrating it correctly so the crew could still fight the tank, and it could be transported and maintained.”
In parallel, Leonardo DRS and Rafael are maturing a lighter weight Trophy Vehicle Protection System (VPS) that is aimed at smaller, lighter platforms like Stryker. Leveraging material and component upgrades, the VPS system has achieved a 40 percent weight reduction and improved power management while retaining its ability to protect against the full range of direct fire, anti-armor rocket, and missile threats.
Hard Kill vs. Soft Kill
APS typically comes in two flavors, hard kill and soft kill. Trophy is in the first category. A hard-kill active protection system detects, engages, and destroys or neutralizes an incoming threat before it can hit a protected vehicle, actively firing some type of projectile to intercept the threat.
In TROPHY’s case, the system employs actively scanned radar to provide continuous 360-degree protection of the vehicle. Army requirements demand that an APS must be capable of protecting vehicles under all conditions, and the radar is effective in adverse combat conditions like smoke, sand, dust, mud, glare, and explosions.
Once the threat is detected, the onboard computer classifies the threat and, if a hit is probable, the countermeasure launcher slews into position and launches a tight pattern of explosively formed penetrators that neutralize the warhead before impact or detonation. The threat detection, fire control, and processing all take place in milliseconds.
The same sensors that track incoming shots at the vehicle also paint a target on the shooter, allowing an immediate response from the crew. They can return fire, maneuver out of contact, activate slew-to-cue weapons and sensors, or call for fire support. At the same time, Trophy automatically transmits the engagement data to the battle management network, giving friendly forces immediate enemy information.
There’s also a second method for hard kill that competing systems employ. In this case a detector identifies the threat and then launches a proximity fused mortar round at the target. The mortar blast defeats the threat with either an explosion or a blast pressure/blast wave that knocks the threat off course.
Soft kill APS defeats the threat without kinetics. Countermeasures include infrared jammers, laser spot imitators, and radar jammers. They may prevent missile guidance from remaining locked onto the vehicle, causing the missile to miss the vehicle target or prevent it from fusing.
APS and NCGV
Integrating APS will be less of a challenge when it is included in the clean-sheet design of an armored vehicle. That’s the plan of Army Futures Command, which is developing two new tanks, a fighting vehicle, and an armored personnel carrier under the NGCV program (as well as robotic vehicles that may or may not need an APS). Vehicle protection is one of the enabling technologies of the program, along with maneuver robotics and autonomous systems, directed energy weapons, and power generation and management.
The use of open systems architecture with plug and play capabilities is at the heart of Future Command’s efforts to shepherd a successful combat vehicle development program. To that end, it is leveraging the Modular Active Protection System (MAPS) effort, which is actually not an APS, but rather a modular framework and controller to integrate APS subsystems like sensors and hard/soft kill countermeasures. The expectation is that MAPS will help the Army respond to urgent threats by quickly introducing new technologies not tied to any vendor’s proprietary system.
NGCV program risk can also be reduced by melding and evolving proven technologies in areas like active protection and cyber/electronic capabilities with next-generation technologies in robotics, directed energy, and artificial intelligence. The Trophy system fits right into that philosophy.
“Trophy is combat proven, technologically refined, and well-developed,” said O’Leary. “Having said that, there are nuances and areas of modification that are identified in a system over time and that will lead to constant improvements and new capabilities. For future ground vehicle platforms, we are bringing forward improvements that we know will benefit both the system and the overall vehicle platform in a low risk fashion that still builds on the baseline of technical maturity of the Trophy system.”
]]>The SecDef will tell allies in Brussels next week they must take a hard line on Turkey as the body count in Syria continues to rise. The question is, does this emperil Turkey’s NATO membership?
]]>WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Mark Esper will travel to Brussels next week to demand NATO members implement “collective and individual diplomatic and economic measures” on Turkey as punishment for its incursion into Syria, he said today in a statement, setting in motion a process that could lead to historic penalties against a NATO ally.
It’s not clear what exactly those penalties might be, but a number of NATO states have already halted weapons sales and military aid to Ankara, as Congress readies its own punishing round of sanctions on the Turkish military that would effectively cut it off from the West.
The Trump administration today imposed a slew of economic sanctions on Turkey raising steel tariffs by 50 percent and halting negotiations over a $100 billion trade deal with the country. The Treasury Department also levied sanctions on Turkey’s ministries of defense and energy, as well as three senior Turkish officials.
Overseas, the European Union and some NATO countries have already started to move. EU foreign ministers today unanimously condemned Turkey’s bloody incursion, which has already seen its proxy forces film a roadside execution of a Syrian politician, as well as those of a number of Kurdish fighters. The Turkish actions “seriously undermines the stability and the security of the whole region,” the ministers said, but they stopped short of issuing a EU-wide arms embargo against Ankara.
NATO members Germany, France, Norway and the Netherlands have already stopped shipping weapons to Turkey. German media reports the country exported $268 million worth of weapons to Turkey in 2018, about one third of Ankara’s total military imports, and in 2019 Germany was Recep Tayyip Erdagon’s biggest supplier of military hardware. EU members Sweden and Finland have also halted arms shipments.
In Washington, the White House sanctions, meant to stem the blistering criticism President Trump has received from his own party for abandoning the Kurds after several years of relying on them as the blunt instrument to take Raqqa and other areas from the Islamic State, was met with an unenthusiastic response from some top Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, normally a staunch Trump ally, said today “withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria would re-create the very conditions that we have worked hard to destroy and invite the resurgence of ISIS.” Leaving the field in the hands of Russia and the Syrian government, which has a long and bloody history of horrific human rights abuses, “would also create a broader power vacuum in Syria that will be exploited by Iran and Russia, a catastrophic outcome for the United States’ strategic interests.”
The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mike McCaul, was also unimpressed. “We appreciate the Administration’s planned sanctions, but it does not go far enough to punish Turkey for its egregious offenses in Syria,” he said.
The fast-moving response to Turkey’s invasion of northeastern Syria over the weekend, meant to push formerly US-backed Kurdish fighters away from its border, is threatening to further isolate a NATO state that has been bucking the alliance for several years.
Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system severely strained relations with the rest of the alliance, leading to the Trump administration to take the extraordinary step of removing it from the F-35 program earlier this year.
In a statement pulling no punches in criticizing the country with NATO’s second-largest military, Esper said “President Erdogan bears full responsibility for [the invasion’s] consequences, to include a potential ISIS resurgence, possible war crimes, and a growing humanitarian crisis. The bilateral relationship between our two countries has also been damaged.”
Monday evening, a senior administration official confirmed that all US troops, except perhaps those at the southern at Tanf base, are leaving Syria. “US forces are currently executing a deliberate withdrawal from Syria,” the official said, but when pressed, wouldn’t qualify how many, or if Tanf is being abandoned.
Another official pled American impotence in the face of Turkey’s decision to move into Syria with thousands of Free Syrian Army fighters, many of whom have radical Islamist sympathies. “Nothing we did one way or the other was going to deter the Turks from doing what they were going to do,” the official said. “Erdogan was going to act regardless of what we did.”
President Trump today said he’s dispatching Vice President Mike Pence and national security adviser Robert O’Brien to Ankara to begin negotiations, and Pence confirmed Trump spoke with Erdogan earlier in the day.
]]>Whatever their aircraft is like, Boeing’s PR strategy is definitely stealthy. There’s a strategic reason for that.
]]>AUSA: “Please note: Boeing will NOT be revealing any concept images of the Boeing FARA offering at AUSA.” That was the warning to reporters on an invitation to a media roundtable about the Army’s number one aviation priority, the Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft, where two Boeing executives were to “provide some comments about how Boeing is approaching the FARA competition.”
Well, “some” in this case means “hardly any.” Mark Cherry, vice president and general manager of Boeing Phantom Works, and Shane Openshaw, Boeing Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program manager, refused to reveal any details whatsoever about their company’s FARA entry.
“Small, light, fast, agile, lethal, survivable with reach, flexibility in operational capability,” Openshaw said. “Our focus is on meeting those requirements.”
As for how, mum’s the word. “It’s competition sensitive, what our approach is now,” Openshaw said. “We are thrilled to be where we are in the competition.”
The competition consists of Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky, Textron subsidiary Bell, a team pairing AVX Aircraft Co. with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems, and another team whose members are Karem Aircraft, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
For now, where Boeing is in the competition is lying in the weeds and studying what the competition is doing while working on their own design in utmost secrecy. AVX and L-3, Bell and Sikorsky, by contrast, are talking loud and proud about their FARA entries. (UPDATED: We talked to Karem later at the show: Watch the video interview here.)
AVX and L3 unveiled their design last spring at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual conference in Nashville. They are offering a single-engine compound helicopter with coaxial rotors and ducted fans for forward propulsion.
Bell, whose retired OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter is the aircraft FARA is primarily aimed at replacing, recently revealed as its FARA entry the Bell 360 Invictus. The stub-winged single-rotor helicopter with a tail rotor both ducted and canted incorporates some technology from its larger 525 Relentless commercial helicopter but features a low-drag futuristic fuselage.
Sikorsky formally confirmed at AUSA that its entry in FARA is the Raider-X, a derivative of its S-97 Raider that will be larger and more sophisticated but use the same combination of coaxial rotors and a pusher propeller to achieve the speeds the Army seeks.
Cherry and Openshaw wouldn’t comment on whether Boeing’s entry will have a coaxial rotor, a tail rotor, a pusher propeller or wheels. Their lips were sealed, and Cherry said for a good reason. That same strategy helped Boeing Phantom Works, which Cherry has led for about two years, win a competition with both Northrop Grumman (which dropped out) and MQ-1 Predator- and MQ-9 Reaper-maker General Atomics, to build the Navy’s new MQ-25 Stingray unmanned refueling aircraft.
“We strategically revealed [to the public] what we thought was relevant, while fully sharing with our ultimate customer [i.e. the military] exactly where we are,” Cherry said. In the FARA competition, he went on, “there’s no fuzz on the peach in terms of where we are with our ultimate customer.” In other words, the Army knows how far Boeing has gotten with its FARA design.
Cherry said the sealed-lip strategy has another purpose as well.
“You guys aren’t familiar with…competitive intelligence?” he asked the media roundtable. “So there’s people in all these companies that are really, really good at taking a configuration, taking a look at it and basically ascertaining capability.”
“You can ascertain capability based on expectations of drag, propulsion, single versus dual main rotors, whether you have a pusher [propeller] or whether you don’t have a pusher, do you cant your tail rotor, do you not cant, do you have skids, do you have integrated [retractable landing gear],” he went on. “All that translates into an assumed capability and with that assumed capability, you can derive costs. If you can derive costs you can derive, based on the parameters, where you think bids are going to be.”
“So there’s a lot that you can glean from revealing configurations,” Cherry concluded. “There’s a strategic decision made in terms of what you reveal, how you reveal it, and how much you reveal. And obviously some of our competitors have made that choice to go that route [of showing off their designs]. We just haven’t gone that route.”
Read the rest of our series of stories on the five contenders for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft:
]]>By proactively detecting, locating, and neutralizing anti-armor threats, TROPHY™ dramatically increases platform survivability, and creates a new paradigm of networked threat awareness for maneuver forces.
]]>[Sponsored] By proactively detecting, locating, and neutralizing anti-armor threats, TROPHY™ dramatically increases platform survivability, and creates a new paradigm of networked threat awareness for maneuver forces.
]]>Get a grip, the Army Futures Command chief said: It’s way too early to start second-guessing the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program.
]]>AUSA 2019: True, only one competitor, General Dynamics, delivered a prototype by the Oct. 1 deadline for the Army’s program to replace the Reagan-era M2 Bradley troop carrier. But it’s ludicrously too early to talk about the program potentially failing, as a Breaking Defense headline suggested last week, the head of Army Futures Command said this afternoon. The Army has just begun studying GD’s offering, Gen. John “Mike” Murray said, and other companies will have another chance to compete in 2023.
Meanwhile, the other part of the Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicles portfolio – its experiments towards a family of Robotic Combat Vehicles – is actually advancing faster than expected, as NGCV director Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman told Breaking Defense in a recent interview.
Even under a new Army Secretary and Chief of Staff, Gen. Murray told reporters here, “there are zero changes in terms of our priorities.” Those are the Big Six capabilities, ranging from long-range missiles to new assault rifles, of which the Next Generation Combat Vehicle is No. 2.
“NGCV is still focused on Bradley replacement [and] Robotic Combat Vehicles in three classes, light medium and heavy,” Murray continued. “In terms of experimentation with those, we are in the same place with NGCV we were a year and half ago.”
But what about rising concern in Congress, the defense industry, and the Army itself about the surprise disqualification of Rheinmetall for not delivering its OMFV prototype to the Army on time? That seems to leave the Army with only one qualified competitor for the next phase, an Engineering & Manufacturing Development (EMD) contract. Yes, there’ll be another competition in 2023 to actually start building OMFVs – the Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) phase – but with GD the sole recipient of EMD funding and feedback, it will have an intimidating advantage. There’ve been suggestions we need to slow the program down…
“Can I answer the question?” Gen. Murray said. “We are prototyping, so I think this discussion is very premature until we understand what we have.”
“No. 2, Sydney, we have been exceptionally consistent and open with industry for better than a year and a half [about] what it is we need, when bid samples were due, and we had a competitor that did not make that,” he went on. “It really put the Army in a hard place, because we could either delay — and then face possibly a protest — or we could stick with what we’ve been saying for a year and a half.”
(Protests to the GAO from disappointed bidders have become routine, and they’re just as routinely dismissed. But if one competitor meets the deadline and another gets an extension, that’s the kind of inconsistent treatment that GAO takes seriously.)
“I’ve got all the reasons the 1 Oct. deadline wasn’t made, but that deadline has been there for the better part of a year,” Murray said. “[And] as you mentioned, if there’s somebody out there that’s got a viable solution to what we’ve said that we want consistently, it’s opened up again for competition when we get to the LRIP phase.”
]]>The Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) program has ambitious goals that will require development of new technological capability that ranges from autonomous operations to advanced materials.
]]>The Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) program has ambitious goals that will require development of new technological capability that ranges from autonomous operations to advanced materials. Less discussed but equally important will be the need for new capabilities in power generation and management to facilitate active protection systems, directed energy weapons, and tactical networking.
The Army’s NGCV power challenge is four fold:
“The Army is working with industry to plan ahead for upgrades in the design and development of the next generation of combat vehicles,” said Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, director of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team (CFT) in an article published by the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. “We need not only our (vehicles) capable of handling increased weights, but we need electrical upgradability. As technologies advance and we want to put additional systems onto an existing vehicle, we have to have the reserve power onboard to be able to handle multiple electrical requirements from these systems.
“What we really have to decide as an Army is which technology provides the logistics at range and the ready-now capability for our soldiers that we want on the next battlefield,” Coffman added. “For instance, if you went totally electric, it takes time to recharge a battery. It takes about seven minutes to refuel a tank. So if you can’t recharge the battery in under seven minutes, I’m not sure that’s a technology that is going to make us better on the battlefield.”
The CFT is one of two organizations within Army Futures Command, a new four-star command that became operational in July 2018 and now counts about 24,000 personnel. The other organization is the Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC), which is also part of Army Futures Command. Both organizations are located at the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, MI, a suburb of Detroit. The arsenal has been the center of U.S. tank production since 1940, and built everything from the Lee, Sherman, and Pershing tanks of World War II to the present-day M1 Abrams battle tank used in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
A Family of Ground Vehicles
The NGCV is not just a single combat vehicle, but rather a suite of five new platforms that address different needs for different types of ground combat units. They are:
The need for improved power generation and management will apply to all of them. The most urgent need is a replacement for the 1980’s-era Bradley that first saw combat in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm. The platform’s limitations in power generation and management began to make itself known during 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).
“The M2 Bradley is reportedly reaching the technological limits of its capacity to accommodate new electronics, armor, and defense systems,” said a June 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service on the need for a Bradley replacement. “By some accounts, M2 Bradleys during OIF routinely had to turn off certain electronic systems to gain enough power for anti-roadside-bomb jammers. Moreover, current efforts to mount active protection systems on M2 Bradleys to destroy incoming anti-tank rockets and missiles are proving difficult. Given its almost four decades of service, operational limitations, demonstrated combat vulnerabilities, and difficulties in upgrading current models the M2 Bradley is arguably a candidate for replacement.”
The Bradley no longer has overmatch against near-peer vehicles from adversaries in terms of firepower and protective capabilities. The the OMFV will be designed to restore that overmatch by improving size, weight, architecture, power, cooling, and cost forming the acronym commonly known as SWAP-C2.
The OMFV is also being specifically designed for manned-unmanned teaming operations with Robotic Combat Vehicles, and improved power characteristics are crucial for that undertaking. Such a capability was demonstrated at Camp Grayling, MI, this past August when an OMFV prototype known as the Mission Enabling Technologies Demonstrator controlled a pair of RCV Phase 1 surrogates.
Immediate Technologies to Reduce Future Risk
Strategy for OMFV development is to meld and evolve future technologies from already proven and fielded ones, to help reduce NGCV program risk. It is a recognition on the part of Army contracting officers that reliance on immature-and-yet-to-be-fully-proven technologies was partially responsible for dooming earlier Army efforts to modernize its fighting vehicles in the Future Combat System (FCS) and Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) programs. FCS was cancelled by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009 and GCV was ended by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in 2014.
That recognition is evident in the OMFV Request for Proposal released in April 2019. The RFP stated: “Since its inception, the NGCV-OMFV program has represented an innovative approach to Army acquisition by focusing on delivering an essentially new capability to the Armor Brigade Combat Teams while under a significantly reduced timeline, as compared to traditional acquisition efforts. This will be achieved by leveraging existing materiel solutions with proven capabilities coupled with new technologies to meet the requirements.”
This intention is to allow the program to directly enter into Middle Tier Acquisition Rapid Prototyping (MTA-RP) phase, alleviating a 2 to 3 year Technology Maturation & Risk Reduction phase. Production and fielding is to follow after MTA-RP. The vehicles are planned to be soldier maintained with repair parts to be available through regular Army supply.
Such present-day capabilities in power generation and management are already being tested by the Army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC). In mid-June 2019, for example, TARDEC selected Leonardo DRS and Allison Transmission to demonstrate On-Board Vehicle Power technology on Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile battery command and control and launcher vehicles. These system improvements will give air defense operators immediate access to electrical power directly from a vehicle’s power train. The idea is to transform the vehicles themselves into portable, rolling generators.
“Our onboard vehicle power capability is really meant to support the addition of new capabilities to existing platforms,” explained Bill Guyan, Leonardo DRS senior vice president and general manager of land electronics. “We’re able to take any vehicle with an Allison transmission and mount a motor capability to the transmission that can generate from 60 to 120 kilowatts of power that can be used on the vehicle for increased demand mission packages like counter UAS, command post on the move, or high energy laser, for example.
“We can also take that same power and through a micro grid port it off of the platform for export. In a dual-use mission, for example, a National Guard unit that arrives into an area devastated by a hurricane or a flood can connect to a hospital with its vehicle and power that facility until the generator can be replaced or repaired.”
The NGCV program will look to leverage this type of capability on its vehicles to power extended-range threat detection, faster and more complex communication capabilities, active protection systems, sensor fusion, directed energy weapons, and tactical network/cloud computing.
]]>The hard part is no longer the technology to fly at more than Mach 5: It’s putting together all the parts to build hypersonic missiles in bulk.
]]>AUSA: The idea of a weapon that flies faster than five times the speed of sound is still something of a wonder. But one of the top industrial experts in hypersonics, Lockheed’s Eric Scherff, says the biggest test to producing and deploying offensive hypersonic weapons will not be the technology for ultra-high-speed itself, which has been demonstrated and proven, but the supply chain required to build those weapons in quantity.
Industrial base issues have afflicted some of the biggest and most important Pentagon programs, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM), as Breaking D readers know.
Lockheed, which makes both JSF and JASSM, is painfully aware of this point. So it makes sense that hypersonics was a key topic of conversation at its global supply chain meeting on Oct 1, with more than 300 suppliers attending from around the world, as Rita Flaherty, VP for strategy and business development, told reporters here this morning.
Sherff and Flaherty didn’t identify any specific current weaknesses — such as there being only one or two companies able to manufacture a key component — but they made clear Lockheed is doing all it can to ensure a steady flow of materiel and engineers to their hypersonics efforts. Lockheed is working on all three major hypersonics programs: the Army, Navy and Air Force variants, which use various launchers to boost an unpowered “glide vehicle” that then skips in and out of the upper atmosphere. (The Common Glide Body was originally designed by Sandia Labs and now being built by Dynetics).
Lockheed is also involved in the HAWC program (Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept), which is Raytheon and Northrop’s combined effort to build a hypersonic weapon that travels through the air like a cruise missile, under continuous power, rather than relying on a rocket booster to launch a glide vehicle. As Breaking D readers know, Northrop claims to have built a scramjet engine that can be 3D printed and uses ordinary military fuel. The two companies said at the Paris Air Show that their weapon would fly “soon.”
Meanwhile, Scherff made it crystal clear that the House Appropriations Committee’s decision to substantially trim the administration’s hypersonics’ budget request “would be pretty devastating to our schedule.” The Pentagon said Sept. 20 that a Continuing Resolution would also hurt the chances of the Army fielding its Long Range Hypersonics Weapon program by 2023 unless Congress passes a regular defense spending bill. A Continuing Resolution would delay “critical long lead purchases, putting planned delivery at risk, adversely impacting the ability to deter and defeat near-peer adversaries.”
For the Army, hypersonics is part of its broader Long-Range Strategic Fires, the service’s top priority, which covers everything from hypersonic missiles to longer cannon barrels for the venerable 155mm howitzer.
]]>The Ripsaw design is so flexible, the company claims, it can scale up and down for different missions.
]]>AUSA 2019: Textron’s Howe & Howe division unveiled the latest unmanned version of its Ripsaw mini-tank here today, a rugged bot with a 6,000-pound payload competing for the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle – Medium that will enter experimental field tests in 2021. A lighter version of the same robot, with many of the same components, will be Textron’s entry for the RCV-Light, small enough to sling-load under a helicopter and carrying a 1,000 pound payload. (RCV-Heavy, at 20-plus tons, would be too much of a stretch).
That’s the kind of versatility, commonality, and customization that the Army is very interested in for its future family of combat robots. After seeing Textron and other companies show off their bots at Texas A&M and elsewhere this year, the head of armored vehicle modernization, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, is sufficiently impressed that he might accelerate his testing timetable by two years, he told me in a recent interview.
[Click here to read our full interview with Brig. Gen. Coffman on combat robots]
Now, there’s a crucial caveat: These are not Terminators. For the near term, all the robots under consideration are not truly autonomous but rather remote-controlled, much like the Predator drone, with one human driving while another operates the sensors and any weapons that might be installed. Even as artificial intelligence improves, allowing one human to oversee multiple robots at once, the Pentagon has a policy requiring human control of lethal force: So, for example, there’s an Army program called ATLAS to teach an AI to detect targets, classify them, and aim a gun at them, but it requires a person to authorize opening fire.
Brother entrepreneurs Mike and Jeff Howe were leery of revealing too much about their Ripsaw M5’s level of autonomy, but they confirmed it did not require constant remote control: Reading between the lines a bit, it can follow another vehicle or navigate from one pre-planned waypoint to another. It can also plug in a wide variety of different sensors and weapons, or fit combat engineering kit like a heavy-duty mineroller, or even carry a smaller robot and dispatch it to scout out buildings and other narrow places where the mothership can’t fit.
]]>TITAN On-board Vehicle Power (OBVP) solutions provide power to the #USArmy’s vehicles. Anywhere. Anytime. Through harnessed vehicle energy, these vehicles can support a variety of military missions.
]]>[Sponsored] TITAN On-board Vehicle Power (OBVP) solutions provide power to the #USArmy’s vehicles. Anywhere. Anytime. Through harnessed vehicle energy, these vehicles can support a variety of military missions.
]]>The Army seeks a next-generation armed scout helicopter with increased speed, range, survivability and even autonomy – not just a conventional helicopter.
This Breaking Defense E-Brief examines the Army’s groundbreaking Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program, providing a look at the field of competitors and the different technology and capability they bring.
Download this free E-Brief for information on the next generation of Army aviation.
Breaking Defense thanks the AVX Aircraft Company/L3Harris team for supporting this editorial E-Brief.
Sponsorship does not influence the editorial content of the E-Brief.
LeoLabs CEO and co-founder Dan Ceperley says the firm has a mission “to drive a new era of transparency in LEO.”
]]>AUSA 2019: LeoLabs today announced a unique radar for tracking space objects, based in New Zealand to improve monitoring of satellites and debris over the Souther Hemisphere — where even DoD has limited satellite tracking ability.
“It’s got a number of ‘firsts’,” CEO and co-founder Dan Ceperley told Breaking D, including being “the first phased array radar for space in the Southern Hemisphere, where collision prevention isn’t as good, especially over the South Pole.” The radar is based in the Central Otago region (famous for its pinot noir wines) of New Zealand’s South Island.
The “Kiwi Space Radar”, unveiled today at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army, also is the “first commercial radar to be able to detect objects down to 2 centimeters in diameter in Low Earth Orbit,” Ceperley added. That is, about the size of a marble. Most current ground-based space tracking radar can only see objects bigger than 10cm, about the size of a softball, in LEO — including those operated by the US military to provide space situational awareness (SSA).
Phased array radar — unlike classic radar using large dish antennas — can rapidly switch point of view from one side of sky to other, he explained. LeoLabs can track up to 1,000 space objects per hour, and thus serve to cue other radar that can then “zoom in” on objects of interest. “We can help establish what is benign,” Ceperley said, and thus “power defense users” and “provide independent confirmation” of possible collisions or malicious activity.
LeoLabs, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2016, intends to create a network of six radar. The next three will be located near the equator, in the far north and in the far south to ensure global coverage. Ceperley said that the company isn’t ready to announce the exact locations, but explained that they are looking at areas that are geopolitically stable for US company investment, and can provide enough support for radar operations such excellent Internet connectivity.
However, LeoLabs doesn’t sell radars — it sells access to its data and analytical products via subscriptions. The company has four different sets of customers, Ceperley said, including defense organizations, regulators, satellite operators (including NASA) and insurers.
The firm already is working with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Defense Innovation Unit since 2017 under a program called CAMO, (Commercially Augmented Mission Operations). While Ceperley wouldn’t disclose the size of the contract, he explained that LeoLabs is participating in AFRL’s effort to explore how commercial SSA services “can augment and help improve DoD’s understanding of space.”
Back in April, Air Force acquisition head Will Roper told Breaking D that LeoLabs, ExoAnalytic Solutions, Numerica and Rincon all are providing their space data and analytical toolsets to the Air Force as it experiments with how to integrate a wide variety of data sources, and use agile software development, to improve its SSA and battle management systems.
One facet of the effort is called the Unified Data Library (UDL), which Maj. Gen. Kim Crider, the data integration guru at Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), says is “an enterprise data repository for managing access, integration and dissemination of data across multiple levels of security.” In turn, the UDL is used to inject data into AFSPC’s Enterprise Space Battle Management Command and Control (ESBMC2) system that also will ingest information from the Intelligence Community.
But the company has a broader mission, according to Ceperley: “to drive a new era of transparency in LEO.” “There just is not a lot of data about the risks in LEO,” he explained at a time when space activity in the region (from about 100 kilometers to 2,000 kilometers above sea level) is exploding. Ceperley said he’d like to see the data generated by LeoLabs’ radar network help set a goal to “contain the debris problem” to some optimum level, and allow operators to figure out how to adjust their activities to do so.
Further, mindful that many new operators are not rolling in financial capitol or years of expertise, one of LeoLabs’ newest services, called LeoTrack and launched in August, is tailored for operators of one to five satellites, and provides an option to buy off-the-shelf navigation data so the operator doesn’t have to understand how to equip the satellite to do so. According to a LeoLabs’ press release, the LeoTrack offers “satellite operators a full range of monitoring capabilities, including precision tracking of satellites, orbital state vectors, predictive radar availability, scheduled passes, and real-time orbit visualization for constellations as well as individual satellites.” Ceperley said the service costs about $2,500 per satellite per month, which in the scheme of SSA services market is pretty low.
In addition, LeoLabs is working closely with the New Zealand government under its ground-breaking SSA and space traffic management (STM) program that will allow the New Zealand Space Agency to track every satellite launched from its territory, monitor their health, keep an eye out for potential collisions, and ensure that all operators are following licensing rules regarding satellite disposal and debris mitigation. The cloud-based Space Regulatory and Sustainability Platform (SRSP) uses LeoLabs radars, as well as analytical tools such as mapping software and conjunction prediction.
Ceperley sounded almost giddy about the potential of the New Zealand program to safeguard the future space environment and change the way governments regulate the space industry. “They are the first regulators to keep a close eye on activity in orbit,” he said, noting that most government license processes, including in the United States, focus only on pre-launch licensing. Using the SRSP platform, he said, New Zealand will “develop an understanding about what’s normal behavior in space and what not,” and in turn be able to “drive drive the discussion, using actual data, about what’s responsible or not,” and to “lead the response to to next the next big crash.”
Indeed, according to several space analysts, the New Zealand program puts them far ahead of any other country in attempting to solve the STM problem, despite the Trump Administration’s push to lead the rest of the world in setting space norms and best practices.
The administration’s efforts, embodied in Space Policy Directive-2 (SPD-2) on licensing for commercial space and SPD-3 on STM, are stalled due to variety of internal bureaucratic as well as congressional food fights. As we reported a few weeks ago, the interagency task force to update US space debris mitigation rules hit an impasse on Sept 18, putting the dispute on the table for the National Space Council to sort out.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited Notice of Public Rule Making (NPRM) designed by the Commerce Department to streamline licensing for commercial remote sensing operators has stalled amid interagency disagreement and industry pushback. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in August said the rules would be out by the end of October, but source say as of now the rule package remains blocked by interagency squabbling.
Finally, Congress has steadfastly refused to provide authorization or funding to give Commerce the primary role in regulating the commercial space industry, and in becoming the agency to lead a civilian SSA service — taking over the job of helping commercial and foreign operators safely control their satellites and avoid collisions from the newly created Space Command.
]]>These are huge strategic challenges — and Ryan McCarthy is emphasizing them more than any of his predecessors in at least a decade.
]]>UPDATED from Sec. McCarthy & Gen. McConville press conference AUSA 2019: “You can’t skip leg day,” Ryan McCarthy said this morning, less than a month after his confirmation as Army Secretary. “The last 18 years of conflict built muscle memory in counterinsurgency, [but] with this focus came atrophy in other areas. We are now re-engaging these muscle groups.”
“Going forward,” he went on, “we must put equal effort into improving our strategic readiness, which is the Army’s capability to rapidly mobilize and deploy forces anywhere in the world and sustain the Joint Force.”
That’s a subtly but significantly different emphasis from his predecessor, Mark Esper. So is McCarthy’s emphasis on information warfare to sway hearts and minds – and counter Taliban propaganda and Russian trolls.
Now, there is far more continuity than change. McCarthy served as Esper’s undersecretary before Esper moved up to the Defense Secretary job this summer. The two men formed a tight team with then-Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley – now Joint Chiefs Chairman – and then-Vice Chief Gen. James McConville – now Army Chief of Staff. The four worked literally side by side for hours on grueling “night court” reviews that cut or canceled 186 Army programs to fund the service’s Big Six modernization priorities, and the McCarthy and McConville remain ironclad in their commitment to that ambitious and often painful reform.
But no two individuals are the same, and every individual changes as the result of their experiences. McCarthy has led the Army as acting secretary as it ramps up wargames in Europe – leading to the massive Defense 20 exercise next year – and wrestles with the logistical, bureaucratic, and political challenges of embarking heavy equipment on ships, crossing the Atlantic, traversing strictly regulated European borders and transport infrastructure to get to the exercise zone, and connecting US command-and-control networks to often-incompatible European ones.
UPDATE When individual units train at their home base, or even one of the Army’s famed Combat Training Centers (CTCs), “it’s like individual reps,” McCarthy said at a subsequent press conference. But when “you’re deploying at brigade, division-sized element under wartime-like conditions, that’s where you’re really getting those pre-season games…. It takes a lot more effort, a lot more sophistication to have that global projection, and those are … muscles that we hand’t been training on for a long time.”
“Over the last two or three years,” added Gen. McConville, the new Army Chief of Staff, “Gen, Milley, my predecessor did a fantastic job of taking our units and getting them ready for whatever mission… I term that tactical readiness — the brigades, the battalions, they can do their mission and they’re ready “
Now, “we’re looking at strategic readiness… making sure you get that unit to the place it needs to be,” McConville continued. “We want to make sure we can mobilize them, we can deploy them, we have the strategic lift to make that happen, the ports are there to receive them.” UPDATE ENDS
In recent months, McCarthy has also seen the Army increasingly focus on the so-called “competition phase” short of open war, when even great conventional powers like Russia rely on deniable proxies, propaganda, and online subversion. The head of Army Cyber Command has even announced a plan to reorganize and rename his organization into an Information Warfare Command.
UPDATE “We’re looking very hard at that proposal, it makes a lot of sense,” McCarthy said at his press conference. “if you see the way the other services are organized in particular, [it’s] similar to what he’s proposed.” That said, the plan must be reviewed with “rigor and due diligence” because it will change the command’s legal authorities. UPDATE ENDS
McCarthy’s clearly alive to these changing trends, because he took the opportunity of underlining them at his first speech as secretary to the massive Association of the US Army annual conference. Some key excerpts from his remarks:
On Information Warfare & Networks
Recently in Afghanistan, I watched MDO [Multi-Domain Operations] Information Operations in action. I watched our joint and partner forces counter and defeat Taliban’s online operation in an attempt to create chaos. The adversary’s claims of a tactical victory and towns under siege were quickly disproven through timely, truthful and targeted messaging.
The public could see for themselves local officials and partner leaders walking through the village square in real-time, via social media. A swift calm ensued in neighboring towns. The enemy, defeated in both reality and in their online narrative, fell silent again.
The right message, at the right time, to the right people, is the crux of MDO Information Operations and it is yielding results at the street level in Afghanistan like we have not seen in 18 years. If low-tech adversaries are able to execute offensive operations in the virtual domain, imagine what the Great Power Competitors are able to launch against us.
MDO allows commanders to rapidly build Joint formations, that are strategically positioned in order to fight and win across all domains- including space and cyberspace. Big data and network security become the next battlefield. If we do not have a system in place, access to the data becomes our no man’s land….. Seamless access to data in the cloud is the foundation for the entire Army modernization effort.
On Multi-Domain Exercises & Strategic Deployment
A year ago at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, we activated the first Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare, & Space Detachment, known as the I2CEWS, which serves as the core of the Multi-Domain Task Force…. The MDTF participated in Exercise Orient Shield in September with the Japanese Ground Self Defense Force operating in the East China Sea. With its headquarters in Japan, the Task Force elements were distributed south across the Senkaku Islands, serving as an important validation of capabilities as we build the multi-domain formations of the future.
This exercise, known as Pacific Pathways, has evolved to a 2.0 version – adopting a “hub & spoke” model by deploying task forces to single locations for a longer period of time and executing dynamic force employment of task force elements to “spoke” locations. For example, in May, we deployed a company from a hub location in the Philippines to Palau. This was the first time U.S. Army forces had been in Palau in 37 years. We aren’t just training in these areas and departing with lessons learned. We have a presence in the region, strengthened by partnerships and tested through tough, realistic and habitual exercises.
In Europe, this year III Corps and 1st Armored Division conducted a no-notice Emergency Deployment Readiness Exercise (EDRE), demonstrating the Army’s flexible global projection. Less than two weeks’ time passed from the moment a Soldier at Fort Bliss received the phone call, to the moment they placed their weapon on fire alongside our NATO counterparts at the Drawsko Pomorskie training area, Poland.
In FY20, the Army will conduct Defender 2020 to exercise, rehearse and validate how we would respond to a European crisis. This will be the largest exercise in 25 years. These forces will draw prepositioned stocks and establish communications on the continent. Nine C-17s will fill the skies with waves of paratroopers demonstrating Joint Forcible Entry, linking up with Special Operation Forces and conventional host nation ground forces….
To maintain readiness and enable our ambitious modernization agenda in a flat fiscal environment, the Army must ruthlessly prioritize our resources to achieve our modernization goals…..Army leadership will realign $10 Billion across POM 21 in order to finance our ambition and be in position to support National Objectives for years to come…. To Congress, I ask that you continue to support the Army divestment of legacy systems and push for a budget deal.
]]>In this era of new acquisition for ground vehicles, the Army continues to challenge industry to anticipate emerging requirements, develop required technologies, and field combat capabilities more quickly through rapid prototyping.
]]>In this era of new acquisition for ground vehicles, the Army continues to challenge industry to anticipate emerging requirements, develop required technologies, and field combat capabilities more quickly through rapid prototyping. The key to actually putting those technologies and capabilities in the hands of warfighters is successfully integrating them on existing or developmental platforms.
This capability directly supports the Army Futures Command’s new rapid prototyping acquisition strategy. As the Army moves away from long and cumbersome programs, companies are challenged to anticipate future requirements, develop and test mature technologies, and integrate them on platforms to mitigate high-risk gaps in mission capabilities necessary to meet current threats.
“Mature technologies that meet user-requirements remain essential, but it takes an experienced platform integrator to combine these technologies into true combat capabilities for our warfighters,” said Ed House, retired army colonel and business development manager at Leonardo DRS Land Systems (LS).
House noted that the company has been providing useful warfighting capabilities by integrating new and mature technologies in platforms since 1979, when it delivered a fully-integrated M901 Improved TOW Vehicle using the M113 chassis to the DoD. In the 1980s, DRS LS collaborated with the Project Manager Stryker office to develop, integrate, and field more than 450 fully integrated M1200 Armored Knight fire support platforms.
“That program was a classic example of successful platform integration where the government provided technologies and the platform and then worked with DRS LS to complete the platform integration before government testing and ultimately unit fielding,” said House. “This relationship allows the government to easily improve the capability over time through approved engineer change proposals as improvements are made to required technologies.”
DRS LS’ Recent Platform Integration Wins
In more recent years, Leonardo DRS LS has been awarded a variety of significant platform integration contracts for some of the Army’s most important ground vehicles. The following section examines several of them.
In addition to those current programs, Leonardo DRS LS is actively pursuing new platform integration efforts. Earlier this year, the company was one of six industry vendors awarded design integration study contracts for the Army’s Stryker Medium Caliber Weapon System (MCWS) effort to deliver enhanced lethality to Stryker Brigade Combat Teams. The competition came after the Army rapidly fielded an initial capability to one unit in Europe and observed the need for changes to the system, particularly in the area of soldier situational awareness.
This Phase 1 contract requires Leonardo DRS LS to complete the study while simultaneously developing, testing, and delivering a fully-integrated “bid sample” in the summer of 2020. The bid sample is a fully-integrated MCWS capability using a government-provided double V-hull Stryker and XM813 30mm Bushmaster gun. The effort requires Leonardo DRS LS to modify the platform without the vehicle Technical Data Package and integrate Moog’s MCWS RIwP turret for enhanced lethality, smoke grenade launchers, and enhanced situational awareness technologies without detrimentally affecting mobility and survivability of the vehicle.
“Once again, this platform integration effort requires Leonardo DRS LS to work with several industry partners and the government to deliver the capability within an aggressive schedule,” said House. “We look forward to the competitive shoot off starting next summer.
Platform Integration With International Partners
Leonardo DRS LS also works with its international partners to provide “Americanized” versions of non-U.S.-developed technologies to be integrated and tested on U.S. combat platforms. For example, in conjunction with Program Manager Vehicle Protection System (VPS), Leonardo DRS LS recently worked with Israel’s Rafael to successfully test its Trophy Active Protection System (APS) on the M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. After nearly two years of testing, Leonardo DRS LS was awarded a contract to integrate this much-needed technology on tanks for several Armored Brigade Combat Teams.
“We continue to look at opportunities to improve the technology to better meet future requirements for all combat platforms,” said House. “Additionally, we consider this work a great step forward as we pursue a fully integrated VPS that addresses the DoD’s goal of integrating an Active Protection System technology with other emerging technologies as part of initial vehicle design.”
]]>Those polled said that resiliency and cyber protection are the two most valued requirements for future milcom systems. The survey also found that there is widespread agreement that the current acquisition systems in place across the Air Force, Army, Navy and DoD are too creaky.
]]>WASHINGTON: A new survey of more than 300 active military and senior DoD civilians shows widespread dissatisfaction with both the reliability and capabilities of military communications networks, with 98 percent of respondents saying they’ve experienced black outs in connectivity at some point during a critical operation.
The poll, conducted between August and September 2019 by the Government Business Council (the research arm of Government Executive Media Group) found that “warfighters do not have the levels of connectivity they need,” according to the findings released today at the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) annual convention. “The State of Military Communications Technologies” survey was co-sponsored by Viasat, a commercial provider of broadband satellite communications including to the US military. For example, Viasat provides Air Force and Navy aircraft with the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) Multifunctional Information Distribution System (MIDS) radios. Viasat operates four satellites in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO), and plans to launch its fifth, the upgraded ViaSat 3, on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy sometime by 2022.
Viasat President Ken Peterman told reporters on Friday that the survey, which targeted milcom professionals, was designed to raise awareness about the scale and scope of the current problems with out-of-date, and unreliable military communications systems. “Technical leadership is in the private sector now,” he said, and DoD has simply been unable to keep up.
Those polled said that resiliency and cyber protection are the two most valued requirements for future milcom systems. The survey also found that there is widespread agreement that the current acquisition systems in place across the Air Force, Army, Navy and DoD are too creaky to provide the most modern technologies in a timely manner.
Also, Peterman said, the acquisition models used for terminals — that put a premium on ensuring that identical terminals are fielded in massive numbers over several years — is too rigid to allow for the rolling updates used by commercial technology providers.
Viasat was one of the companies heavily involved in the run-up to Gen. Jay Raymond’s initiative at Air Force Space Command to create a new “Vision for Satellite Communications.” The vision document, as Breaking D readers know is now on Raymond’s desk for review, lays out a blueprint for a satcom network that meshes commercial and military satellites into a seamless web, using terminals and receivers that can “hop” multiple satellites and signals just like a cell phone automatically “roams” among connected networks and cell towers.
Viasat — like its contemporaries in the field including Hughes, Intelsat, Inmarsat, SES and Eutelsat — have been pushing DoD to move towards buying so-called “managed services” (kinda like your average mobile phone or cable TV/Internet plan) rather than leasing commercial bandwidth in fits and starts for short periods of time.
There has been interest from DoD in the concept, with some 60 percent of survey respondents agreeing that “increasing the use of commercial solutions would speed up the current pace of defense acquisitions.”
However, up to now, moving in that direction has proven nigh on impossible, leading to frustrations within the commercial satcom community as well as among military user groups. “It’s not where we want it to be,” one senior comsat official told Breaking D.
This is despite the fact that during a recent conference on satellite innovation held in Silicon Valley, Northern Sky Research predicted that investments by commercial industry in LEO constellations could exceed $37 billion over the next 5 to 10 years. “The DoD may be better served leveraging this investment than creating its own constellation,” stated another industry source.
Lucy Bierer, of the Government Business Council, said only 27 percent of respondents believe that DoD’s budget priorities for communications tech allow their organizations to keep up with adversary threats. She aded that some 63 percent said that US communications technologies are either “on par or falling behind” the capabilities of adversaries.
]]>Sikorsky says their Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft design will fly faster, with bigger weapons, than archrival Bell’s. Bell says theirs will be cheaper and more reliable.
]]>AUSA: This morning, just in time for the AUSA 2019 conference, Sikorsky finally unveiled their design for the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. The Raider-X will be a larger and more advanced version of Sikorsky’s current S-97 Raider, which has been flying since 2015. Both aircraft use Sikorsky’s cutting-edge – but not combat-tested – compound helicopter technology to achieve speed and range that tried-and-true conventional helicopters can’t match.
So how does Raider-X, with its two coaxial, counter-rotating rotors on top and pusher propeller in back, compare to its much more traditionally designed rival, the Bell 360 Invictus, which has a single main rotor and small tail rotor for stability? In a Friday interview Friday with me and Aviation Week’s Graham Warwick, one sign of Sikorsky’s confidence was how eagerly its execs invited that comparison, though they spoke in generic terms about single-main-rotor helicopters rather than bashing Bell by name.
(Three other contenders received awards to propose FARA designs – Boeing, Karem, and an AVX/L3 Harris team – but we haven’t covered them as extensively. That’s in part because none of them has released nearly as much information. It’s in part because Sikorsky and Bell clearly see each other as the main competition, being the only two companies that won Joint Multi-Role Demonstrator funding to build cutting-edge prototype aircraft).
The Need For Speed On Future Battlefields
To traverse sprawling future multi-domain battlefields and dash past enemy anti-aircraft defenses, the Army wants FARA to go fast. Even at its cruise speed – the fastest speed an aircraft can sustain long-term without damaging the engine – FARA needs to go at least 180 knots (207 mph), 16 percent faster than the AH-64 Apache gunship. The Army also wants FARA to be able to dash in emergencies at 205 knots, though that’s not mandatory.
Sikorsky’s engineering studies showed that, “[with] the 180 knot threshold requirement for FARA, you could get there with a single main rotor, but you were basically topped out,” said Tim Malia, Sikorsky’s director for Future Vertical Light – Light. That’s because conventional helicopters suffer something called retreating blade stall at high speeds, which leads to exponentially increasing drag that takes exponentially more power to overcome, until it becomes physically impossible to accelerate further. (In brief, the diminishing returns diminish all the way to zero). Sikorsky’s engineering studies showed that, to get a single-main-rotor helicopter to reach the speeds the Army wants, you need to squeeze every drop of power from the engine and streamline the airframe ruthlessly to reduce drag.
Indeed, when Bell briefed reporters about their FARA design two weeks ago, they detailed how they’d applied all their engineering expertise to reducing drag: from the needle nose, to the narrow tandem cockpit with one co-pilot sitting in front of the other, to the deliberately off-center tail rotor. Bell also added small wings – a feature not found on conventional helicopters — to provide more lift at higher speeds, allowing the main rotor to spend less energy providing lift and more on thrust. Even so, to get enough thrust, Bell felt compelled to include a “supplemental power unit” to boost the main engine (a GE T901 Improved Turbine Engine).
All that effort is to get the Bell 360 to sustain 180 knots. What about the 205 knots bursts of speed that the Army wants? That’s not a mandatory requirement, Bell exec Keith Flail said over and over again.
By contrast, Sikorsky is confident their Raider-X can beat 205 knots – using the same GE T901 engine as the Bell 360, but with no supplemental power system. Raider doesn’t need wings, either. The ultra-rigid rotors provide all the lift required at high speeds, relying on the pusher propeller to provide thrust. And, while streamlined, Raider-X’s fuselage is actually fairly wide: The co-pilots are seated side-by-side – making it easier for them to see each others’ displays and point things out to each other – with a cabin behind them large enough for passengers or a capacious weapons bay.
“We weren’t trying to get every last bit of drag out to hit a speed requirement. We didn’t need to,” Malia said. “We are not doing anything cute or tricky by trying to add additional engines. We are using the power that’s available from the T901, and we’ve got a really solid design built around it.”
Sikorsky’s smaller and less powerful S-97, which has the same side-by-side cockpit design, has already done 207 knots in tests, beating the Army’s dash-speed requirement. The grandfather of the Sikorsky compound-helicopter family, the Collier Trophy-winning X2 tech demonstrator, managed 250. Considering this history, and reading between the lines of what Malia and other execs have said, it seems Sikorsky is actually deemphasizing speed with each new generation of compound helicopter so they can focus on optimizing other features.
Agility, Reliability, Cost, and History
It’s those other features besides speed where Bell says it has the advantage: low-speed agility, mechanical reliability and ease of maintenance, and low cost.
Sikorsky counters they’ve put the S-97 through extensive agility testing, meeting Army standards. They say their expertise in building digital fly-by-wire controls — on such production aircraft as the Marine Corps CH-53K or the Canadian CH-148 — is more than equal to Bell’s. And they say their ultra-rigid rotor blades are more responsive in tight maneuvers than the relatively wobbly rotors that conventional helicopters require.
What’s more, because the rigid rotors don’t need to flex as much as traditional ones, the rotor hub on which they’re mounted requires far fewer moving parts – all told, half as many on the Raider-X as on the UH-60 Black Hawk — which should reduce breakdowns and maintenance.
What about Raider-X’s pusher propeller, a complex piece of machinery that compound helicopters have, but conventional ones don’t? Well, that replaces the traditional tail rotor and its drive shaft, which are also mechanically complex. The difference, Sikorsky says, is that a single-main-rotor helicopter whose tail rotor breaks down – or is destroyed in combat – needs to make an emergency landing immediately or crash. A compound helicopter whose pusher propeller breaks or is destroyed won’t be able to reach its top speeds, but it’s still capable of flying home.
All that said, Bell does have a point. Single-main-rotor helicopters like their Bell 360 have been flying by the tens of thousands since the first workable helicopter – designed and piloted, ironically in this context, by Igor Sikorsky – first took off in 1939. Dual-main-rotor designs like the Boeing CH-47 Chinook – which first saw service in Vietnam — have, likewise, been flying in large numbers for decades.
By contrast, compound helicopters, which combine dual main rotors with new ultra-rigid blades and a pusher propeller, are a much newer technology – and Sikorsky has only built four of them.
Now, the Raider-X shouldn’t have the same problems of scale: At 14,000 pounds, it’s only 27 percent bigger than the 11,000-pound S-97, whereas the 30,000-lb Defiant is almost three times as large. But it’s still a new technology, and – assuming the Army likes the Raider-X design well enough to pay Sikorsky to build a prototype – it will be only the fifth compound helicopter Sikorsky has ever made.
To Sikorsky, the newness of the technology is a selling point. Whereas traditional single-main-rotor technology has reached the limits of its performance, Sikorsky argues, compound helicopters have decades of growth ahead. When GE next upgrades its T901 engine, for example, Raider-X could easily translate more power into more speed and payload, Malia argued, while a single-main-rotor helicopter like the Bell 360 has already reached the point of diminishing returns where increases in power probably won’t translate into greater speed.
For Raider-X, he said, “the technology itself is at the beginning of its growth curve.”
But new technology comes with greater risk of schedule slips and cost overruns. Today’s Army is willing to abruptly disqualify competitors for a modest delay – as it proved on the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program – and it’s increasingly anxious about cost. One of the requirements for the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, alongside speed, is an average cost per aircraft equal to the Apache, about $30 million.
Can Sikorsky compete under that cap?
“We have done a complete affordability analysis,” Malia said. “We’re extraordinarily confident we will come in under the Army’s cost goal.”
]]>More collective defense cooperation will be on display at the massive AUSA 2019 conference, attended by 92 different nations, including the chief generals of 13 armies.
]]>WASHINGTON: Next spring, the Army will deploy 20,000 US-based soldiers to Europe to operate alongside 17,000 allied troops in the massive Defender-Europe 20 exercise. It will be the US Army’s largest troop movement in 25 years, spreading its forces across Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Georgia in a test, not only of Army logistics, but the ability of US forces to link up with allies.
Defender 20 is just the latest in a series of massive, multinational exercises in Europe over the past year that emphasize how — despite international anxiety over President Trump’s mercurial policy shifts — the Pentagon is doubling down on its traditional alliances. This week in Washington, more collective defense cooperation will be on display at the massive AUSA 2019 conference, attended not only by US soldiers from four-star to private but by companies, officials, and troops from 92 different nations, including the chief generals of 13 armies.
The two-month Defender 20 war game will test the Army’s ability to fight using its emerging concept for future conflict, multi-domain operations, and “rapidly project forces across the globe while operating alongside our allies and partners in multiple contested domains,” Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for operations said in a statement. (The five doctrinally recognized domains are land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace; multi-domain ops envisions a relentless, coordinated effort over all five).
“Readiness is not only about having the right forces and capabilities in place throughout the theater, it’s about exercising our ability to quickly receive and integrate forces with our own and those of our allies and partners,” Lt. Gen Christopher Cavoli, US Army Europe commanding general, said in a statement.
The exercise follows on last September’s Trident Juncture exercises up in Norway, which marked the alliance’s largest and most ambitious undertaking in decades, featuring 40,000 ground troops from all 29 NATO members, 70 ships, 150 aircraft, and 10,000 ground vehicles, all under the command of the US Navy’s Adm. James Foggo, head of the Joint Forces Command Naples.
That exercise tested the ability of the various forces to work — and communicate — as one, something that remains a work in progress as NATO allies continue to hack through their tangled web of communications and classification systems. But tighter coordination remains a key goal for the alliance as it faces an unpredictable Russia busily chipping away that the edges, using disinformation, cyber attacks, and proxies to expand its influence while weakening democratic and social institutions in the West.
“The U.S. military does not fight alone,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said recently. “Just like the other warfighting domains our cyber capabilities are enhanced by a strong network of allies and partners. Our ability to share information and operate on common communications networks serves as a force multiplier — but it also comes with increased risk.”
The risk, specifically, is electronic warfare — the triangulation, jamming, or spoofing of radio and radar signals — or cyber warfare using corrupted software or hardware on systems used by the US or its allies. “Our adversaries see cyberwar as a way to take on the U.S. and impose costs without confronting our traditional strengths,” Esper said.
The ambitions for Defender go beyond testing out the MDO concept. Army Undersecretary Ryan McCarthy told reporters recently Defender would serve as a smaller version of the massive Cold War REFORGER exercises — Return of Forces to Germany — that rehearsed rapid deployment to Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion.
One element of the closer coordination that NATO has spoken so much about is a new acquisition effort being undertaken within the alliance to pool resources to buy more munitions, signaling a new push to project power across the alliance and allow smaller members to punch harder.
Late last year, Belgium, Denmark, and non-NATO ally Austria pooled resources to take delivery of $20 million worth of air-to-ground precision guided munitions with an aim to share them on an need-to-have basis. The plan is to continue restocking NATO while making an end-run around decades of slow-moving and regulation-heavy procurement, which has made it hard to share munitions that most NATO members used without mounds of red tape.
The plan is still in its early stages, but the pooling effort, along with stepped-up exercises focused on new operating concepts and sharing battlefield information more quickly, could result in a more nimble, more coordinated, more effective NATO. But only if everyone keeps up their end of the bargain.
]]>Industry’s prototype Robotic Combat Vehicles are proving more capable than the Army expected, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman told me: “It is really exciting.”
]]>WASHINGTON: One of the Army’s most ambitious weapons programs, remote-controlled Robotic Combat Vehicles, is actually ahead of schedule, the Army’s chief of armored vehicle modernization says. A lot of that robotic technology will be on display at the massive AUSA 2019 trade show here.
“There’s a lot of excitement in industry, in the Army, and we’ve seen industry ahead of our timeline a little bit,” Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, director of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, told me Friday. “We are adjusting our expectations.”
Specifically, Coffman said, he was impressed by the levels of autonomy – much of it derived from civilian work on self-driving cars – and of modularity – that is, the ability to swap different sensors, weapons, and other systems to tailor the robots for different Army missions. Overall, the robots are about two years more sophisticated than expected, he said. Capabilities the service expected in 2023 are now potentially achievable in 2021.
Now, this is not the kind of news you expect to hear when a high-tech military program moves from the idea stage to checking out proto-prototype equipment. The Army in particular blew nearly $20 billion on the Future Combat Systems, a complex assembly of manned vehicles, ground robots, drones, and more that was cancelled in 2009 because the technology just wasn’t ready.
In contrast, the Army has already field-tested software and tactics using modified M113s – an obsolete armored transport – and checked out eight new robots for the Robotic Combat Vehicle from six private-sector teams during a week of demonstrations at Texas A&M’s RELLIS research campus in May. Coming up, the service plans three years of increasingly complex field experiments, with real soldiers controlling real robots, to test RCV concepts and technology before deciding whether to commit to a full-scale acquisition program.
“Everything is on the table. We are learning, we are prototyping, and we’ve established decision points for Army senior leaders,” Coffman said. “Those decision points are going to allow Army senior leaders to make decisions on what we field, and when, and with what capabilities.”
Four Years, Three Phases, Three Weight Classes
“It’s ’20, ’21, and ’23,” Coffman explained:
Originally, Coffman told me, the Army expected the industry-built robots in the 2021 experiment would be modified models of whatever companies had “on the shelf.” Robots purpose-built for the RCV missions would take until 2023 – or so the Army thought. Based on what he’s seen so far, Coffman now expects those purpose-built robots to be ready in ’21.
Even the unmanned M113s are surprisingly capable, Coffman said. At Camp Grayling, Michigan, he said, “I witnessed four robots execute a maneuver, establish a screen line, call for [artillery] fire, and then attack, with direct fire, an opposing force – all while the control vehicles were under defilade and undetectable by the enemy.”
There are intriguing tactical possibilities when you can send expendable robots ahead into harm’s way while their human masters stay under cover. The bots could act as expendable decoys to draw enemy fire, for example, or emit smoke to cover the manned forces’ advance. Even relatively primitive remote-controlled machines can scout ahead for danger – whether enemy tanks or nuclear, biological, and chemical contamination (NBC) – or plow minefields and breach roadblocks.
“I think we can do NBC reconnaissance today,” Coffman told me. “I think we can do aspects of a combined arms breach, as they just demonstrated a few months ago out at Yakima. And I think we can deliver sensors, both day and night sensors, to detect enemy forces. We could execute a lethality option” – that is, robots armed with weapons that they may be able to aim autonomously, but which only fire on human command.
“All of those capabilities are available today,” he told me. “It’s at what range and at what cognitive burden to the controllers.”
From Remote Control To True Autonomy
Commercial research into self-driving cars is spinning off lots of useful advances in software and sensors that the military can use, Coffman said, but it’s all optimized for travel on smooth, paved surfaces with clear curbs, stoplights, and traffic signs. By contrast, “off-road autonomy is really, really hard,” he told me. “There’s just a lot of perception and quick decisions that need to be made as you’re traversing broken terrain, and the machine is not there yet.”
“It takes about nine years to train a staff sergeant to maneuver a combat vehicle correctly over terrain, so he or she doesn’t show the underbelly of their vehicle to the enemy, doesn’t drive over the top of the ridge line, and uses the terrain to conceal the vehicle,” said Coffman, a veteran tanker himself. “If you see an M1 tanker maneuver that tank properly over the desert or a wooded area, it’s a thing of beauty … flowing like water over the battlefield.”
“These are things that we want the robots to be able to eventually do,” Coffman said. “I don’t think we’re going to get there — to where a machine is going to be as good as a human — probably till 2035 or beyond.”
For now, ground robots must be remote-controlled by skilled humans, like an early model Predator drone. What’s more, that control link must function even more reliably than is required for unmanned flight.
“If I’ve got an airborne asset flying at 10,000 feet, and I lose connectivity for a half a second, it’s still flying at 10,000 feet, and I’ve cleared that airspace, and I’m okay,” Coffman said. “On the ground, we need more constant feedback because obstacles are constant.”
Because it’s so much harder to navigate over rough terrain than through the empty air, ground robots today are where aerial drones were roughly 20 years ago. Just as the Predator requires two humans for remote control, one to fly and the other to operate sensors and weapons, each proto-prototype Robotic Combat Vehicle requires a driver and a gunner/sensor operator.
“I would like to get one controller to 12 robots,” Coffman said, “and we are a long way off from that – again, 2035 or beyond.”
For now, the need for an uninterrupted high-bandwidth connection is a vulnerability – since enemies could detect, jam, or hack it – and a limiting factor on how far ahead the robots can go.
“It’s a physics problem. We are working through it,” he told me. “We found some techniques — that I’m not going to tell you — that can extend our ranges further than our enemies’.”
“Let’s say we can only go four kilometers. That’s a long way,” Coffman said, enough to keep the human controls out of range of enemy tanks engaging the robots. “Two kilometers is a long way.”
“Anywhere that a soldier is at the highest risk on the battlefield, and we can replace him or her with a robot, that’s what we want to do,” Coffman said.
]]>The Army wants its Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) program to provide a transformational leap in battlefield capability.
]]>The Army wants its Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) program to provide a transformational leap in battlefield capability, including the ability for armored vehicles to operate autonomously and in manned/unmanned teaming arrangements. A centerpiece to this modernization effort is the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV), the Army’s top ground vehicle modernization program.
OMFV is a replacement for the 1980s-era M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, and one of five new ground vehicles that Army Futures Command is developing under the NGCV program. The design for OMFV and each of the other vehicles–which includes two tanks, a personnel carrier, and three robots–will incorporate an open-architecture, plug-and-play capability to mitigate developmental technology risk and keep the NGCV platforms relevant fighting machines over the coming decades.
Successful development of the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle depends on lessons learning on technology overreach from earlier vehicle development programs that were cancelled, such as Future Combat System that was cancelled in 2009 and Ground Combat Vehicle that was halted in 2014. To reduce program risk, the Army plans to meld and evolve proven technologies in areas like networks, situational awareness, and cyber/electronic capabilities with next-generation technologies in robotics, directed energy, and artificial intelligence.
That strategy is evident in the OMFV Request for Proposal released earlier this year. The RFP stated: “Since its inception, the OMFV program has represented an innovative approach to Army acquisition by focusing on delivering an essentially new capability to the Armor Brigade Combat Teams while under a significantly reduced timeline, as compared to traditional acquisition efforts. This will be achieved by leveraging existing materiel solutions with proven capabilities coupled with new technologies to meet the requirements.”
A key developmental methodology the Army is using for NGCV is Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA). It relies upon an open architecture that can evolve, with a focus on standards, interoperability, portability, and modularity. MOSA provides the Army a highly cohesive and loosely coupled software capability that can be reused across programs, providing benefits in cost, schedule, competition, and innovation.
“One of the things that we’ve seen with Army modernization efforts is that the cross functional teams, program managers, and service leadership are all looking for opportunities to be disruptive and embrace urgent out-of-the-box thinking and strategies,” said Bill Guyan, Leonardo DRS senior vice president and general manager of land electronics. “At the same time, they’re working to figure out how to adopt, adapt, and field rapidly changing commercial technologies in computing and other disciplines by making them resilient and robust for use in combat vehicles, while keeping them relevant and up to date throughout the next two decades of computing evolution.
“I think everybody is looking at the rapid evolution in the telecom industry, for example, and how they’ll keep pace with the change? We see changes that are just as rapid and just as varied in the computing environment.”
Guyan points to the Mounted Family of Computer Systems (MFoCS), a program of record that is the core component of the Army’s Mounted Computing Environment, as the type of program that can provide a trusted base and performance growth for future NGCV platforms such as OMFV. MFoCS offers a suite of mission command capabilities that drive command and control and situational awareness through Joint Capabilities Release (the latest version of Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below, better known as Blue Force Tracker). MFoCS provides soldiers with a fast satellite network and map updates, secure data encryption, and joint force support.
Through numerous recompetes of the program, Leonardo DRS remained the sole provider of these systems to the Army and the Marine Corps, delivering more than 250,000 of these systems to U.S. forces. The latest contract came in mid-2018 for a $841 million, five year (plus five option years) award to produce the next-generation MFoCS II. It’s a family of systems that will support the continued fielding and upgrades of the Army’s Joint Battle Command–Platform (JBC-P), plus room to grow to support future NGCV development.
MFoCS II improvements include memory and storage media upgrades with solid state hard drives on all devices. The processor unit was upgraded from an Intel Core i7 to the Intel Xeon quad core, which has double the cache capability for faster data display.
Cybersecurity, a critical element in an information-driven battlespace, is also improved through the adherence to the latest international standard for secure cryptoprocessors, which is known as the Trusted Platform Module 2.0. Guyan calls that “edge-assure computing.”
Hardware includes a tactical server that manages internal and external communications, sensor inputs, embedded diagnostics, and software applications on a single display. It also includes a dismountable tablet, an expandable rugged platform computer and 12-in, 15-inch, and 17-inch sunlight-readable rugged displays. All the display surfaces were upgraded from single touchscreen to multi touchscreen functionality, which permits the screen to recognize one or more touches to the surface.
To maximize the value of installation kits for earlier-generation MFoCS systems already installed on Army and Marine Corps vehicles, MFoCS II was designed to be backwards compatible to the footprints of the prior hardware systems.
Upgradability for Future Relevance in NGCV Platforms
The Army hopes that by deploying proven technologies that can continue to evolve, it will help prevent failings that doomed previous FCS and GCV programs, which relied upon immature or future-wishful technologies that didn’t develop or perform as expected. MFoCS is an example of a type of immediate-future technologies that can reduce risk and enhance development of NGCV.
“MFOCS provides a cost-effective common set of critical hardware that can act as an enabling capability building block for these new platforms,” said Guyan. “In doing so, it takes much technical challenge, risk, and cost off the table for the vehicle programs because they can adopt the already proven solution and focus on platform-specific challenges. Of course, those challenges are more technical. But it permits the NGCV teams to work on integration, risk reduction, and delivery.
“MFoCS is not a program to be disruptive, but a program to embrace and double down upon as the lessons learned that can be applied to other programs. We’re leaning forward on this program and have already designed in expansion and added functionality to meet emerging requirements. MFoCs has been around for many years, but it has evolved and improved many times and remains highly relevant.”
One of the missions expected of the OMFV is an ability to control two or more robotic combat vehicles (RCVs), whose job it will be to scout ahead of a manned force, identify obstacles, detect chemical agents, put direct fire on an enemy, and then team with humans to determine the next best course of action. The Army is already using present day technology to demonstrate how it would control RCVs in a manned-unmanned teaming arrangement. That occurred this past August at Camp Grayling, MI, when Army Futures Command fielded an OMFV prototype fighting vehicle called the Mission Enabling Technologies Demonstrator (MET-D) that worked successfully with a pair of RCV surrogates.
Providing troops with situational awareness of RCV locations and operations could clearly be a future use for MFoCS II.
“At the end of the day, a remote-control vehicle on the battlefield is absolutely going to have to be a blue dot on the common operating picture so that friendly forces know where it is and can track it,” explained Guyan. “Additionally, the sensor data that is delivered by the remotely controlled vehicle, whether it’s related to an IED or an enemy force, has to make its way from the RCV back to a platform where it gets populated onto the Common Operating Environment so that information can be shared with other vehicles.
“Imagine plotting the route of an RCV on the mission command screen and sending it to the RCV almost like an order, giving it route direction and guidance. So, the display surface at the commander’s disposal and the vehicle computer that is connected to the network will eventually play a critical role in enabling the tactics, techniques, and procedures for RCV implementation.”
This is how contemporary technologies like MFoCS that can make themselves useful on future platforms. As an element of the Army’s Mounted Computing Environment, MFoCS will be part of what the Army installs on any platform, whether it’s a Bradley, Humvee, or the OMFV. What remains to be determined is whether that equipment is used solely as a mission command platform or whether the additional processing capabilities in the system are leveraged to do other things, like improving platform networking of sensors.
So in addition to being a single box running a single application, the additional processing power inherent in the system can create a platform network hub that integrates communications, sensors, platform vetronics, and mission command, decluttering all the varied systems that otherwise would be delivered kind of in a stovepipe way onto the platform, according to Guyan.
“That’s a capability of MFoCS II that’s being provided but is not being fully utilized,” he said. “While we are primarily a system providing a capability to Joint Battle Command – Platform, we’ve embedding a great deal of additional functionality into the system that enables the Army’s NGCV vision without the need for cost and risk of developing a new program. The system that we deliver is a computer, a server, and a router. It can do radio crossbanding. It can do video, data, and voice management. It can do radio controls, vehicle intercom, and sensor integration and distribution, as well as tying into the vehicle diagnostic system through a CAN bus interface.”
The Army is not taking advantage of all those capabilities today, but for a program like the OMFV it could provide a step function increase in capability without spending new money.
But building a global 3D terrain database will require wrangling huge amounts of data, Maj. Gen. Maria Gervais told us.
]]>WASHINGTON: The Army’s One World Terrain software was intended to build 3D battle maps for training simulations. But an early version has already proven so useful that special operators are using it to plan actual missions, the head of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment task force told us.
“We have many SOF elements —Naval Special Warfare and also Army SOF—that are using it,” Maj. Gen. Maria Gervais told me. Some regular Army divisions and Marine Corps battalions are also using it for advance planning and map exercises before they deploy to wargames such as Pacific Pathways, she said, but “the priority goes to the operational team, to our deployed forces.”
The operators use a tablet and special software to designate an area of interest, dispatch a drone to scan it, and then – in a matter of hours – automatically compile the sensor readings into a 3D map so detailed you can even distinguish different species of trees.
The 3D software lets operators plan potential routes of advance to avoid detection or match munitions with targets to limit collateral damage, Gervais said. “They’re actually using an application that allows them to say, ‘okay, here I am, here’s the route I’m going to take. Let me drop the [estimated position of the] enemy in. Can the enemy see me? Can they not see me? What is the best route?’ They can do line-of-sight analysis, they can do route analysis. They can also do, for example, battle damage [assessment]. If I’m going to deploy this ordinance on, let’s just say a building, it can tell them where the minimal safe distance is.”
“The soldiers on the ground are finding a way to say, ‘this is value added,’” she told me. “So we’re continuously collecting the data and saying, ‘okay, what else could 3D terrain be used for?’”
The ultimate goal for One World Terrain, Gervais said, is to provide detailed 3D maps of anywhere the US military might need to train, deploy, or fight. It would be a single database for use by all future Army training systems, in contrast to the 57 inconsistently compatible terrain formats used today. In one particularly glitchy simulation, helicopter pilots thought they were hiding behind cover, but the terrain they were hiding behind didn’t show up on the screens of the other side’s anti-aircraft gunners, who shot the choppers down.
The foundational layer for One World Terrain will come from existing detailed and carefully verified databases compiled by organizations like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Army Geospatial Center. To underline the collaboration, officials from both NGA and AGC will appear alongside Gervais on a panel Tuesday at the AUSA 2019 conference.
“We’re trying to capitalize on stuff that is already out there because we don’t want to reinvent it,” Gervais said. “That basic information kind of already exists, so we would bring it in and put our layers on top of it,” she said — turning the 2D maps into 3D terrain complete with trees, buildings with mapped interiors, and underground areas like subway tunnels.
But if a location a unit needed to study wasn’t already mapped in adequate detail, or if the area had been altered by new construction, natural disaster, or battle damage, a satellite or drone could be tasked to take a closer look and update the database. For example, she said, “we’ve already seen technology that can actually go and scan the inside of a building very quickly and put it into our mission control platform.”
There’s no endpoint to this effort, Gervais said. It’s a continuous process of collecting and processing ever more data from intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance (ISR) assets around the world.
That is a staggering amount of data, Gervais warned. It will take years of work to develop artificial intelligence powerful enough to process it and a wireless network robust enough to distribute it to units at bases and forward outposts around the world.
Really Big Data
The task goes far beyond the Synthetic Training Environment team. “The future really is going to be about the ability to collect the data, process the data, use AI/machine learning as quickly as possible to help decision makers, and distribute it,” Gervais said. “There’s a Department [of Defense]-wide effort to take a look at data management. We’re part of that effort.”
Within the Army itself, Gervais’s Synthetic Training Environment Cross Functional Team has to work with four other CFTs developing new long-range artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft, missile defense systems, and soldier equipment. That’s because STE will provide training simulations for all of them, even running as an augmented-reality overlay on individual soldier’s IVAS goggles.
She needs to work with the CFT developing Assured Precision Navigation & Timing alternatives to GPS – which can be hacked, jammed, or spoofed – to ensure everyone is located correctly on the digital maps at all times.
And, above all, she must collaborate closely with the CFT developing the new Army command, control, and communications network, over which her map data must flow. As one sign of that closeness, the Network CFT chief, Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, will also appear alongside Gervais at the STE panel during AUSA.
Together, Gervais told me, “one of the most exciting things we just kicked off is Monday, we started what I’m calling our STE-Network Integration pilot.” That’s a test network to send trial loads of STE data between dispersed locations. “We’re actually taking a look at collecting the data, pushing it across this network, and then analyzing that to see how much did it take, how much latency was there,” she said, “so we can better understand what we need to do and what we’re capable of doing.”
It’s up to Gallagher and his team to make the network as robust as possible, able to transmit large quantities of data – from Gervais’s 3D maps to updates on units’ maintenance and ammo needs – even to frontline units whose communications are being jammed. It’s up to Gervais and her team to make her data as compact and efficient as possible so it’s easier for the network to transmit.
“We’re using advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, and also other technologies to automate the processes for collection, storage, distribution, in order to minimize both that data footprint and the impact to our Army network,” Gervais said. “Working with our industry and academia partners, we’re looking at what are the ways that you can manage that data so as you collect it, for example, you’re only sending the data that you need.”
Gervais sees considerable potential in what’s called edge computing: Instead of sensors having to transmit video feeds and other raw data back to central command posts or data centers for processing, exploit Moore’s Law to put ever-more-compact processors on the sensors themselves so they can do much of that processing themselves and only transmit the slimmed-down end product.
Another way to avoid being deluged by data is to limit your appetite for it, depending on the task. “We don’t want perfection to be our enemy,” Gervais told me. “What things do we absolutely have to get right, for what feature, and what reason?”
“If you’re in an aircraft, you don’t necessarily need to see high levels of fidelity” about every obstacle on the ground, she said. A ground vehicle simulator or route-planning software would need considerably higher fidelity, but it wouldn’t need to show you, say, the floor plans inside buildings. For infantry and special operators rehearsing actual combat missions, however, “that’s where the data needs to be as realistic as possible,” she said. “You don’t want to be practicing [in VR] and get there and find out the doorknob is on the opposite side of where you thought it was.”
]]>The American Soldier is evolving from low-tech grunt to high-tech warrior. For decades, the infantry have gotten the least investment in new equipment. Now that’s changing.
The Army is investing in technology for its infantry the way other services have long invested in jet pilots. This Breaking Defense E-Brief provides an in-depth look at the new technologies and advanced capabilities that will power the goals of Soldier Lethality, one of the Army’s “Big 6” modernization priorities. This includes not only fielding next generation individual and squad combat weapons but also improved body armor, thermal imaging and networking systems, sensors, radios and load-bearing exoskeletons
Download the Breaking Defense E-Brief on Soldier Lethality. It’s free, and will give you insight about the next generation in infantry capability.
Breaking Defense thanks Elbit Systems of America for supporting this editorial E-Brief.
Sponsorship does not influence the editorial content of the E-Brief.
“This is not going to be helpful over on the Hill,” one former congressional staffer said of SDA’s $11 billion, five-year draft budget. “In fact, it could put the final nails in SDA’s coffin.”
]]>WASHINGTON: The Space Development Agency (SDA) ambitious $11 billion draft FYDP budget is getting “lots of eye rolls” from Pentagon budget staff and chances for it succeeding are practically nil.
The draft budget request is unlikely to make it out of the internal DoD budget process, sources involved in the debate say, much less past congressional scrutiny. Of course, we don’t think it likely Congress will get around to passing any budget legislation at all over the next year.
“There were lots of eye rolls” from Pentagon budget staff when new SDA Director Derek Tournear briefed them last week, one source said.
The enormous draft budget plan — going from $150 million this fiscal year to $11 billion over the next five years has raised more questions in the minds of those who are highly skeptical of SDA’s value. House defense Democrats have been particularly hard to convince, with appropriators cutting DoD’s $150 million fiscal 2020 request by 45 percent, down to $81.8 million. The House Armed Services Committee denied DoD’s request to reprogram $15 million in fiscal 2019 funds for SDA.
“This is not going to be helpful over on the Hill,” one former congressional staffer said. “In fact, it could put the final nails in SDA’s coffin.”
In particular, SDA’s missile defense related plans detailed in the draft budget, including its intent to launch studies on space-based interceptors (SBI), have hardened the beliefs of some skeptics that SDA’s “real” purpose is to serve as a “toy box” (a term more than one source used) for Mike Griffin, head of Pentagon R&E, to pursue his own long-standing interests. (Griffin was a strong advocate for President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative back in the 1980s, including the push for SBIs.)
“MDA didn’t ask for money to study space-based interceptors in FY20,” one source explained, “and SBI is a bone of contention in Congress between the Democrats and the Republicans.”
Well informed sources say Griffin has little love for the Missile Defense Agency’s current direction, and that he made his August decision to cancel Boeing’s contract for a new ballistic missile interceptor, the Redesigned Kill Vehicle, without even consulting the MDA leadership.
Todd Harrison, head of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and veteran space budget analyst, said that “if this leaked document is indicative of what ends up in the budget request next year, it sounds like they are actually including money to begin real programs for new communications and missile sensing capabilities.” However, he said, “The space sensor layer would seem to overlap with the sensor technology MDA has been developing, and the transport layer would seem to overlap with the satellite communications programs currently managed by SMC [Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center].”
Harrison further said that the budget plan “begs the question of why they are standing it up under OSD in the first place.” At this point, he said, DoD would be better off moving it as soon as possible to the proposed Space Force — in whatever form eventually approved by lawmakers.
The SDA budget plan, according to our colleague Tony Capaccio who broke the story, asks for $259 million for fiscal 2021; $1.1 billion in 2022, $1.9 billion in 2023, $3.67 billion in 2024 and $3.68 billion in 2025. By contrast, most of SDA’s 2020 budget request was for personnel.
According Tony’s story, SDA’s top priority is developing and orbiting by 2025 some 250 data “transport” satellites to link other DoD satellites to each other and the ground, at a cost of $3.5 billion. Tournear told reporters at the Air Force Association’s 2019 annual meeting in mid-September that SDA intends to demonstrate the new satellites in 2021, and launch the first 20 in 2022.
SDA spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea told Breaking D yesterday that the agency would not confirm the draft budget numbers, noting that it is extremely early in the Pentagon budget process so changes are likely. Indeed, few service or DoD agency draft budgets make it past the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office unchallenged. Once all the service/agency five-year Program Objective Memorandums (POMs) are approved, the entire DoD budget request is sent to OMB for approval and transmission by the president to Congress.
On a good year, the budget hits Capitol Hill in February. This isn’t likely to be a good year, given the impeachment process underway in the House. Congress has yet to pass the 2020 federal budget, with the government operating under a Continuing Resolution (CR, that keeps spending to 2019 levels) until Nov. 21. Several Hill watchers say odds are that Congress will fail to agree on DoD’s budget by that date, and yet another CR being passed.
“My fear is a we are looking at a year long CR,” said one former DoD official said. Indeed, as Breaking D readers are well aware, that fear is being echoed up and down the Pentagon’s vast hallways.
]]>“The last few years have been quite good for the association’s annual meeting and for the Army,” the AUSA president told us, but “I’m very, very worried” about the 2020 budget.
]]>WASHINGTON: As more than 30,000 people — soldiers, civil servants, contractors and reporters — converge on downtown DC Monday for the largest Army conference of the year, the 2020 budget remains gridlocked on Capitol Hill. The fiscal impasse threatens the Army’s ambitious modernization drive just as its costs and challenges increase with each program moving from concept to prototype to production.
“Certainly, the last few years have been quite good, I think, for the association’s annual meeting and for the Army,” the president of the Association of the US Army, retired Gen. Carter Ham, told me earlier this week. “We last year had just over 31,000 attendees. We think we’ll be close to that, maybe exceed it this year.”
Attendance at AUSA’s Army’s annual meeting each October is a pretty good proxy for the defense industry’s confidence in the future of its Army customers, and it has been growing steadily since its nadir in 2015, when the military was reeling from Budget Control Act cuts. But amidst high-profile battles over President Trump’s impeachment and his contentious border wall, the 2020 budget may never pass at all. That would leave Pentagon spending on autopilot all year at 2019 levels – under a legislative stopgap called a Continuing Resolution – with no legal authority to start new programs or grow existing ones.
It’s especially important for the Army, which is now starting and growing more programs than it has in years. That’s hard enough even with stable and predictable funding.
Sure, some of the smaller items seem to be moving swiftly into the field, like new night vision goggles with built-in targeting cross-hairs and other virtual reality overlays. But big programs for big hardware are much harder. All told, the Army’s three-star chief of long-term budget planning counts 10 major programs that must move into production between now and 2026, a modernization challenge on a scale the service hasn’t seen since the Reagan buildup more than 30 years ago. Just this month, experts and industry were shocked when the Army disqualified one of only two competitors for its Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, a highly automated replacement for the M2 Bradley troop carrier.
“It is a little bit troubling,” said Ham, who can’t remember a major vendor being disqualified like this before. “I suspect we will learn more [about the decision], perhaps as early as next week,” he said, “[but] it is always healthier to have a competition, and hopefully that’s where we’ll end up.”
OMFV is supposed to award key development contracts early next year. So is the Army’s highest-priority aerial scout program, the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft. None of that can happen under a Continuing Resolution unless a gridlocked Congress can negotiate case-by-case anomalies for each program. The Pentagon is already operating under a short-term CR, since fiscal year 2020 began Oct. 1st, but the real danger of program delays comes if that CR is extended into spring or, worse yet, for the rest of the fiscal year.
But there are things even worse than a 12-month CR, Ham told me. “The worst possible outcome would be a government shutdown,” he said. “This [current] continuing resolution expires on the 21st of November. If the Congress and the president are not able to agree on funding going forward at all and there’s a shutdown, that obviously is the very worst case and would be disastrous, not just for defense but across the government.”
“An extension to the continuing resolution, any extension, is better than a shutdown, but any extension is worse than appropriation and authorization,” Ham said, referring to the two congressional processes required for regular order.
Read on for extended edited excerpts of our conversation with Gen. Ham on these and other subjects.
Q&A with Carter Ham
Sydney Freedberg, Breaking Defense: What’s your sense of how the show has been doing over the last few years?
Gen. (Ret.) Carter Ham, Association of the US Army: The strength of the meeting is a reflection of a couple of things. One, while there is still certainly some budget uncertainty in the current fiscal year, the Congress removed the threat of sequestration and the budget caps, and they decided upon a top line for a defense for the next two years. It’s very reassuring to the Army, very reassuring to the businesses that support the Army — obviously with appropriations to be still determined.
Secondly, this year in particular, with a new secretary, a new chief, a new sergeant-major of the Army, and several new four-stars, the Army congressional leaders, media, and industry are keenly interested in hearing what direction the new cohort of senior leaders will take the Army.
So all of those things combined, I think, built a very strong and very healthy outlook for this year’s annual meeting.
The mid 2000s, with such heavy operational deployments, were a time that understandably drove very high attendance and participation at the association’s annual meeting. But I don’t think that was normal. I am very comfortable and very confident that in this 30,000-ish attendance is a good, strong number. I think it conveys an interest on the part of industry. I think it conveys, certainly, a high level of interest from the Army senior leadership and from our own association membership.
92 different nations will be represented at the annual meeting next week; that’s a bigger number than we have seen in the past. And 13 chiefs of armies are so far registered to attend; that’s a bigger number than we have seen in the past as well. Some of that is certainly attributable to Gen. [James] McConville now being chief of staff of the Army, and his counterparts around the world see this as an opportunity to meet him.
Sydney: You mentioned the budget uncertainty. We now have an impeachment inquiry on top of the usual partisan potential for gridlock. Obviously, we are on a short-term Continuing Resolution now, but how concerned are you about rolling perpetual CRs well into next year?
Gen. Ham: Sydney, I’m very, very worried about that. We are now two weeks into the fiscal year. There is no defense authorization act. There is no defense appropriation. There is a short-term Continuing Resolution through 21 November — and the mere fact that people are even talking about a six-month or even full-year Continuing Resolution is just crazy. A year-long containing resolution would essentially stalemate the significant progress the Army is making in modernization, because as you know very well, it’s no new starts, no new money for new projects. And the Army needs to do that this year.
I’m deeply concerned that the political issues will consume all of the energy of the Congress and of the White House. What I worry about a long-term Continuing Resolution, and particularly a year-long Continuing Resolution, is that then the next authorization and appropriation are for fiscal year 21, which is the presidential election year. If we think things are tense now politically, one can only imagine how much more difficult they may become in a highly contested presidential election season.
The Congress has an obligation, they have a duty, to get this work done and deliver it to the president.
Sydney: And we are moving into a critical phase for Army modernization. This is the hard part, when you actually start procuring things, where things are having to turn from PowerPoint to reality.
Gen. Ham: That’s exactly right. And that’s why adequate, assured funding is so necessary, particularly for the new starts. The Army in these next few years is at a very critical juncture.
There are still improvements necessary in near-term readiness, though significant progress has been made over the past few years. But over the next few years, again depending on appropriations and authorization, we will start to see a shift, from investing in near-term readiness, more and more into future readiness — building that the capabilities that the Army needs for a return to great power competition in a much more lethal, fast paced, multi-domain environment.
I think all the modernization priorities – particularly Long-Range Precision Fires — are a demonstration that the Army leadership understands that the environment in which the Army will be required to operate in the future is different than today, different than any we’ve experienced, that requires vastly different capabilities.
One of the challenges is, what are the capabilities required for weapon systems that have that very long range to strike a target with precision? In cannon artillery, you have a forward observer, either on the ground or in an aircraft: He has eyes on the target and is able to direct fires onto the target. That’s not what we’re talking about here because of the extended ranges. So what is that process?
Sydney: Even if the Army gets the money, it’s still entirely possible for such complex programs to fail, to go over budget, or be canceled outright. We’ve had a long unhappy history in the Army, basically since 1991, of many major programs being canceled without delivering a product. How tough is this specter of the past to shake off?
Gen. Ham: The specter of failed modernization programs is present in the Congress. It is present with defense industry. And clearly, the Army senior leadership is fully aware of that history.
One of the ways to combat it has been the Army’s very concerted effort to establish the highest modernization priorities and stick to them. We have heard that the secretary, both past and present, the chief both past and present, the assistant secretary for acquisition, and the commander of Army Futures Command consistently say the Army is not changing its priorities.
That’s an important message to come from leaders. What’s even more important than their verbal assurances has been to see that prioritization is manifest in the Army budget that had been submitted and hopefully will be approved by the Congress and ultimately by the president. This cohort of senior leadership means what they say, they’re committed to these modernization priorities, they’re putting their reputations and real money against the modernization initiatives.
There is a fair degree of skepticism that says, ‘Okay, we hear you, we see the budget, let’s see the product. Let’s see something in the hands of soldiers fast.’ Everybody’s watching. Can the Army deliver what they say they want and need to deliver? This will not surprise you to learn that I am optimistic that because I know and believe in the leadership of the Army. But Congress has got to do its part also.
]]>Norway suspended new applications for military export licenses to Turkey today. Norway is also reviewing all current licenses for Turkey for military and multi-use military export licenses.
]]>WASHINGTON: A sanctions package punishing Turkey for its push into Syria to attack US Kurdish allies could have a huge impact on the Turkish military and defense industry, possibly pushing Ankara further into Moscow and Beijing’s orbit.
We likely won’t know for weeks if the wide-ranging sanctions package proposed by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democrat Chris Van Hollen will actually pass the Senate and survive a presidential veto, but the message is clear. Congress is willing to inflict economic pain on a longtime, if increasingly wayward, NATO partner.
“I cannot think of a contemporary example of where the US has chosen to exercise these kind of sanctions on an ally,” said Melissa Dalton, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The move could “eventually push Turkey more fully into Russia’s orbit, and have significant impacts on other NATO partners” who buy and sell arms with Turkey, and participate in multinational operations under the NATO banner.
The bill would slap sanctions on any US or foreign person or company who does any business or provide any material support to the Turkish military, along with sanctioning any person or business who helps maintain or support Turkey’s domestic energy programs that supply Turkey’s armed forces.
While Russia and China would suffer some form of sanctions for selling arms to Turkey, Dalton thinks they would be willing to take the hit: “They would be willing to bear that cost because of the geopolitical gain to drive that wedge between Turkey and the US, and Turkey and NATO.”
The sponsoring senators have vowed to push on. “These sanctions will have immediate, far-reaching consequences for Erdogan and his military,” Van Hollen said in a statement yesterday.
Anticipating US sanctions — which Washington has threatened to impose for more than a year after the Turkish purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system — reports emerged this summer the Turkish military has been stockpiling US-made weapons, especially spare parts for its F-16 jets.
Ankara has already felt the sting of its S-400 decision, having been removed from the F-35 program earlier upon delivery of the first anti-aircraft system.
In the face of fierce bipartisan blowback on the Hill and foreign capitals over his pullback of US troops from northern Syria and seeming acquiescence to the Turkish assault, President Trump promised to “obliterate” Turkey’s economy if it did anything “off limits” in Syria, but he has failed to explain what that might mean. The Turks certainly don’t seem to have paid Trump’s warning much heed, sending heavily armed troops into Syria and bombing the region.
In order for a sanctions bill to reach the president’s desk, the bill first must be taken up by two staunch Trump allies, who have blocked bills the White House did not like in the past. At the moment, it’s unclear where those two lawmakers, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, stand on the sanctions.
According to the Senate bill, the sanctions would go into effect unless the Trump administration notified Congress every 90 days that Turkey is not operating unilaterally in the Kurdish pocket east of the Euphrates and west of the Iraqi border, and has withdrawn its troops along with Turkish supported rebels.
The last time the US imposed an arms embargo on Turkey was in 1975 after Turkey’s intervention in Cyprus. Ankara responded by shuttering all US access to Turkish bases for three years, something that would create a massive logistical problem for Washington. The Incirlik air base has not only become a key node for US and NATO operations in the Middle East, but also houses up to 80 B61 nuclear weapons for delivery by US aircraft.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute said that in 1975, Turkey was eager to get back in Washington’s graces as it feared Soviet influence in the region. “I don’t think this would happen this time, as Russia no longer bullies Turkey, but instead courts Turkey,” as an economic and military partner, he said. Deep sanctions could cause Turkish President Erdogan to “pivot further away from the US toward Russia,” and would encourage Turkey to look to other states, like China, with which to make common cause.
Some NATO allies are already moving. On Wednesday, Norway suspended new applications for military product export licenses to Turkey. Norway is also reviewing all current licenses for military and multi-use military export licenses, and is “following the situation with deep concern and reiterate our call for Turkey to end its military operation and respect international law,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide said in a statement.
Over the past several years, the Erdogan regime has made a concerted effort to build up Turkey’s domestic defense industrial capacity, which has led to some very real improvements in capability, and increased exports of Turkish gear.
According to SIPRI, military spending in Turkey increased by 24 percent in 2018 to $19 billion, the sharpest increase among the world’s top 15 military spenders.
In 2018, Turkey imported about $685 million worth of defense equipment from the United States and several European NATO partners, according to figures compiled by SIPRI, with almost $300 million of that coming from the US.
Turkish defense exports have also grown in recent years, though they’re nowhere near the goal of $25 billion in exports by 2023 outlined by the government. Earlier this year, Turkish undersecretary for the defense industry Ismail Demir announced defense exports in 2018 shot up 17 percent over the previous year, hitting a record $2 billion.
Most Turkish exports are big-ticket items like armored 4×4 vehicles sold to client states in Africa and the Middle East, with Pakistan and the UAE being some of Ankara’s biggest clients. “Defence-export contracts signed over the last 12 months, however, reflect the growing capability of the Turkish defence industry,” analysts at IISS wrote earlier this year, which include small frigates, helicopters and drones. “Despite this, significant industrial capability gaps continue in areas such as marine and aircraft propulsion and in radars,” the note said.
]]>The services are collaborating as never before, officials said, as they outsource non-combat networks through new “IT as a service” contracts.
]]>WASHINGTON, DC: “I’ve been 36 years in the government,” the Pentagon’s deputy chief information officer said this morning, and I’ve never seen a team of CIOs work as closely together as this team does over the last 24 months.”
“All the CIOs are working together,” Donald Heckman told the Ignite ’19 cybersecurity conference this morning. “We’re working across the board to share best practices, set common standards, and make sure we don’t have service-unique solutions, that they all kind of roll into an enterprise solution.”
His Army counterpart agreed. “I’ve seen more strategic shifts, in terms of us working together across the department, in the last 24 months than I’ve probably seen in the last 10 years or so,” Army CIO, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford said. “One big thing we’ve got to do [is] resist the temptation to develop service-specific solutions.”
Now, some translation of buzzwords is in order. “Enterprise,” in this context, refers to the Defense Department’s non-combat information technology at military bases, agency offices, and the Pentagon itself — as distinct from the tactical networks that pass targeting data and intelligence reports to combat units. The tactical side, which has to operate in harsh conditions and literally under fire, requires some unique technology and will remain government-run. But the enterprise side of DoD resembles any other major business and can be outsourced, at least in part, to private companies.
Enterprise as a service is the Pentagon’s push to do something a lot of big companies do. Instead of buying your own hardware, software, and networks, and hiring your own techies to keep them running and up to date, you effectively rent everything (the whole enterprise, as it were) from a company that specializes in such things. Instead of going through the federal government’s notoriously slow and cumbersome acquisition system — Crawford estimated it would take 30 years to buy new IT for every one of the Army’s 288 installations — you can use service contracting, which is significantly more flexible.
So when you need to upgrade software or hardware, for example, you don’t have to go through the procurement process: The contractor does the upgrade for you and bills it as a service on the existing contract….
… assuming, of course, you’ve written the contract correctly. There are plenty of ways this can go wrong, and the pioneering prototype of enterprise-as-a-service, the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, ran afoul of several of them. The way the original NMCI contract was written, for example, the Navy and Marine Corps didn’t actually own their data — the contractor did — said former Army CIO, retired Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence.
“It was very painful to get it up and operating,” Lawrence told me before she moderated this morning’s Ignite panel with Heckman and Crawford. But, she said, the four services have learned from NMCI, both in the Navy Department’s revised contract, called Next-Gen, and in the Army and Air Force pilot projects for enterprise-as-a-service now underway. (Lawrence’s employer, Accenture, has a role in many of these projects). All those contracts, for instance, give the military ownership of the data.
The Army was the last of the military branches to embrace enterprise-as-a-service, Crawford acknowledged, and it leaned heavily on the Navy and, especially, the Air Force. “Our involvement in this actually started with the gentlemen to my left and I,” Crawford said, pointing to Air Force deputy CIO William Marion, “on a bus with Mr. Dana Deasy [the Pentagon CIO] in New York City, right about a year ago.”they
Building on that bus ride conversation with Marion, Crawford moved out on an Army enterprise-as-a-service pilot project informed by the Air Force’s experience — and, in at least one case, they actually used the same contract. The same company, SAIC, will migrate hundreds of applications from the existing IT to new cloud-computing systems for both Air Force and Army, Lawrence told me. (That contract is, of course, under a bid protest at the moment).
That said, Lawrence went on, there are some significant differences. The Air Force is doing three parallel pilot projects on different aspects of as-a-service: one for networking, one for processing power (known in the industry as “compute”) and data storage, and one for end-user devices (i.e. the actual computers people use). Her company, Accenture, just finished doing preliminary assessments of six bases, for instance. The Air Force will take stock of these pilots in late 2021 and then issue a long-term contract.
The Army, by contrast, is doing pilot projects with three companies — AT&T (partnered with Accenture), Microsoft and Verizon — at three different bases. Each contractor is providing the whole range of services at its designated location. What’s more, Lawrence told me, once the Army decides which of the competitors is doing the best job, it won’t have to compete or negotiate a new contract for the next phase, which covers another 40 bases. It can just exercise the appropriate clause in the existing contract.
Now, this whole process puts a lot of trust in the corporate vendor providing the whole enterprise enchilada as a service. Where should government draw the line?
“That answer is going to be determined by what is critical to us as a mission,” said Marion, the Air Force deputy CIO. “Sometimes we need to own it. Sometimes we don’t.
“Even in the cybersecurity business, there’s elements we don’t need to run anymore,” Marion went on. Yes, there’s no substitute for the elite hackers of Cyber Command, but the Defense Department can rely on, say, Microsoft’s Office 365 to filter out routine spam.
The whole point of the pilot projects now underway, Marion continued, is to figure out where that line should lie. But whatever the final decision on outsourcing, he said, the Defense Department does need to unburden its technically skilled troops of the routine back-office tasks, so they can focus on the hardcore cyber warfighting that only the military can handle.
“If we keep the old model, if we don’t make the bold move, we don’t have those airmen available,” Marion said.
]]>