At next Project Convergence, 7 scenarios will test American tech against adversaries. (Defense News) “By pulling in the joint force, the exercise is slated to grow from about 500-600 participants to roughly 7,000, with more than 900 data collectors, Richardson said… The Army has organized its major live-fire events at Project Convergence into seven “use cases” focused on carrying out missions in the first and second island chains of the Indo-Pacific region.
The first use case focuses on maintaining joint all-domain situational awareness, including tapping space sensors in low Earth orbit.
The second is a joint air-and-missile defense engagement following an enemy missile attack, while the third will be a joint fires operation as the force transitions from crisis to conflict, [AFC’s Col. Andre] Abadie said.
The fourth use case focuses on semiautonomous resupply; a fifth will experiment with an artificial intelligence- and autonomy-enabled reconnaissance mission.
The sixth use case will essentially replay Edge 21 — an Integrated Visual Augmentation System-enabled air assault mission…
The final use case will be a mounted AI-enabled attack.”
Project Convergence: exercise shows value in data weapons check for the digital age. (Breaking Defense) “… when it comes to the implementation of joint all-domain operations, a single network architecture becomes unfeasible from both a defensive and offensive standpoint. Instead, services’ operational architectures need to be resiliently layered with common data exchange standards.”
What Blue Origin’s failure to launch means for Boeing and Lockheed. (Motley Fool) “Three years ago, United Launch Alliance (ULA) made a fateful choice: The spacefaring joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing would design its new Vulcan space rocket around new BE-4 engines being designed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company. In so doing, ULA officially passed on Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine — and hitched its fortunes to Blue Origin instead… neither BE-4 nor AR1 are ready to fly… As a result, ULA customer Astrobotic, which had signed up to be Vulcan’s inaugural launch customer, must wait another year… But here’s the thing: ULA must complete two non-national security missions before the Defense Department will certify it to conduct missions for the Space Force [already awarded for FY22-27]. ”
Northrop Grumman unveils Model 437 loyal wingman concept. (Flight Global) “The Model 437 is based on the Model 401 Sierra, a low-cost manufacturing technology demonstrator aircraft which was developed by Scaled Composites… With funding from the USAF, Northrop is proposing development of an unmanned version of the Model 401 that could be built in about 14 months and then test flown to advance the Model 437 concept… Scaled Composites…has on average developed and flown one new aircraft per year for the past 39 years, including the Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping, and SpaceShipOne, the first privately developed and flown spaceship… Northrop is aiming for a unit price for the Model 437 of $5-6 million. The bulk of that cost would come from a more powerful Williams International FJ44-4A turbofan, which the firm says is priced around $2.4 million.”
Northrop Grumman demonstrates connectivity for long range command and control. (Nothrop Grumman) “… demonstrated a data link for connecting aircraft in highly contested airspace for long-range command and control through an open architecture network… The flight demonstration linked the Scaled Composites Proteus, a High-Altitude, Long-Endurance research aircraft, with a Firebird, an unmanned air vehicle with the capability to be flown manned, through an advanced line-of-sight data link with low probability of intercept/low probability of detection characteristics that includes anti-jam properties.”
F-16 wing production line from 1980s reopened amid new demand. (Aerospace Manufacturing) “An assembly line originally established in the 1980s for F-16 wings for Lockheed Martin has resumed production at Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). The line was recently reopened following increased worldwide demand for the F-16 Block 70/72. The company will produce F-16 wings that will be shipped to final assembly line in Greenville, South Carolina… “Now, IAI is producing outer wing boxes for the advanced F-35 and wings for the F-16 fighters, both having new customers in growing numbers, worldwide.””
Space Force expects $1 billion in contracts in first year of Space Enterprise Consortium reloaded. (Defense News) “From 2017 through about the end of 2020, the consortium issued a total of just $856 million in contracts. For context, the Space Force requested $17.4 billion for the entire service for fiscal 2022… OTAs have been used to develop new ground systems, a Link 16-enabled space vehicle and more… “last count we were just shy of 600 companies that are a part of the Space Enterprise Consortium…” Around 80 percent of the members are nontraditionals, he added, with almost 60 percent of the awards going to those companies.” RFP to award is 40% faster than FAR-based contracts.
Navy arming surface ships with drone repellent system. (USNI News) “The Drone Restricted Access Using Known Electromagnetic Warfare system, or DRAKE, built by Northrop Grumman and originally used on Humvees during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now used across the Navy’s surface fleet… “What this does is it repels drones based on the frequency that they use. So it has pre-programmed frequencies that are common-used frequencies amongst drones and it has the ability to just stop the signal from going,” Mendenhall said. “It won’t necessarily knock them out of the sky, but what it will do – like I said – is as soon as they hit that wall, they can’t go any further.”” [No figure for effective range provided, but sounds short if it is intended to be walked to the front of a ship if a drone is encountered there.]
Small sats at DoD: Let hundreds of programs bloom. (Breaking Defense) “To this end, he advised industry with innovative capabilities to look into the “tried and true” method of moving a development contract into initial operational capability and then into the hands of Combatant Commands rapidly, via a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD)… JCTDs can be granted for research, development, test and evaluation programs that fall below the $525 million (in constant 2020 dollars) threshold for a Major Acquisition Program… Schroeder also urged interested SATCOM and ISR vendors to send in proposals under the new Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) fund launched by DoD Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. DoD, he said, has already collected more than 200 industry proposals from the services and the Combatant Commands.”
DoD a challenging customer for fast-moving satellite broadband industry. (Space News) “A bright spot in DoD’s adoption of low Earth orbit satellite connectivity is the Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet (DEUCSI) program, Browne said… But the industry is moving much faster than DoD’s experiments… DoD has multiple pots of money for experiments and demonstrations of technologies but those can take years to transition to procurement programs…To bridge the gap between OneWeb’s network and government user equipment, the company announced Sept. 7 it has teamed with manufacturer Kymeta to develop an electronically steered flat panel antenna designed to communicate with geostationary satellites using government modems and with OneWeb’s LEO satellites. “
USAF’s F-15E completes first successful maritime JDAM test. (Naval News) ““For any large moving ship, the Air Force’s primary weapon is the 2,000-pound laser guided GBU-24… Not only is this weapon less than ideal, it also reduces our survivability based on how it must be employed. This munition can change all of that.” [GBU-24 standoff range is 10 nautical miles and the JDAM is 15 according to open sources, but the winged version of the JDAM can get to about 40 nautical miles.]
Air Force awards potential $46B digital engineering contract vehicle. (Fed Scoop) [55 companies got the award, which sounds pretty broad:] “The procurement is for digital engineering and model-based systems engineering. Contractors will also provide services to support agile processes, open systems architecture and weapons and enterprise analytics.”
DoD forms new task force to shore up supply chain. (Breaking Defense) “The task force’s work is expected to take two years to complete, according to DoD, although it did not provide details around project scope, milestones, or expected outcomes.”
[Indian] Army orders over 100 Indo-Israeli kamikaze drones amid active LAC and precarious LoC. (The Print) “[India’s] Army has ordered over 100 tactical kamikaze Israeli drones, used in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, to beef up its operational capability along the borders with Pakistan and China. The loitering munition ‘SkyStriker’ will be manufactured in Bengaluru by a joint venture between Israel’s Elbit System and India’s Alpha Design.”
Lockheed, Northrop invest in a startup that wants to refuel satellites in space. (Defense News) “Orbit Fab hopes to build a range of tankers and fuel shuttles in low earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, and cislunar space that can connect with aging satellites and distribute fuel… Orbit Fab brought in more than $10 million total during its latest funding round from vendors including Lockheed and Northrop, bringing total funding for the company to $17 million… Lockheed has also put money toward small satellite providers like Terran Orbital, which has created satellite buses for Lockheed’s LM 50 series of smallsats. In January 2020, Lockheed announced that it had created an experimental mesh networking payload called Pony Express… That demonstration helped to validate technologies that led to Lockheed winning a $188 million contract from the Space Development Agency later that year.. “This is the beauty of the venture space,” he said. “What would have been a paper claim in a [request for proposals] was turned into a real world [demonstration].”
China hypersonic drone program confirmed by military researchers. (Newsweek) “China’s military scientists appeared to confirm the existence of a hypersonic drone program this month after publishing research on the challenges of landing an unmanned aircraft travelling at Mach 5.”
DARPA contracts BAE to progress ‘revolutionary’ aircraft design. (Janes) “The award covers the design of a full-scale demonstrator concept with active flow control (AFC) at its core. “The aircraft’s ability to manoeuvre in flight without conventional flight control surfaces will enable improved performance, maintainability, and survivability,” BAE Systems said.”
Army researchers seek to provide more data to soldiers through two projects. (C4ISRNET) “The first project is working to provide a tool to battle commanders that quantifies uncertainty in data analysis using neural networks [using confidence ratings… Second, the Army] developed a programmable fiber that could be sewn into soldier’s uniforms in the future and provide biometric data that would help monitor soldier health. That fiber, according to the service, can sense, store, analyze and infer activity… According to an ARL post about the breakthrough, the fiber has a neural network of 1,650 connections and successfully collected 270 minutes of surface body temperature data. Using artificial intelligence in the lab, the fiber identified what type of activity the soldier was undertaking with 96 percent accuracy… Eventually, researchers want the fiber to be able to generate and store power to run artificial intelligence analysis or communicate with sensors and communications systems.”
Air Force is fighting in-flight physiological issues but can’t end them, Pentagon watchdog says. (Defense News) “Those incidents — such as hypoxia, hyper- and hypoventilation, decompression sickness, trapped gas disorders, gravity-induced loss of consciousness, spatial disorientation and visual issues, and toxic substance exposure — have rattled the aviation community and spurred nearly 70 research studies of aircraft and airmen’s breathing systems since October 2009… Nearly 600 physiological events occurred across six kinds of Air Force planes between fiscal 2010 and 2020, including the F-15, F-22, F-35A and T-6A fleets.” [T-6A is the major contributor.]
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