ABU DHABI — United Arab Emirates defense holding company Tawazun has quoted prices to BAE Systems to potentially provide key structural components for the Eurofighter Typhoon.
AWIN, National Institute For Computer-Assisted Reporting
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The U.S. Navy still has roughly 250 fix-it items left on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1) USS Freedom to prepare it for its scheduled March deployment to Singapore, says a source aware of Freedom operations and maintenance. Most of the items are quarterly required contractor tasks for planned maintenance (PMS) work, the source says, and that work should be finished relatively quickly.
BENGALURU — BAE Systems is busily working to restart the Hawk production line at Warton in the U.K., now that it has firm orders for 22 aircraft for Saudi Arabia and eight for Oman.
The FAA has issued a long-delayed solicitation for proposals to host six unmanned aircraft system (UAS) test sites across the U.S. , along with the agency’s proposed approach to addressing public concerns over privacy. Initially ignored by the FAA, concerns voiced by civil-liberties organizations that UAS operations at the sites could violate individuals’ privacy forced a lengthy delay in responding to the 2012 congressional mandate to establish the test centers.
With Congress preparing for a weeklong Presidents Day recess, lawmakers are predicting that come March 1, across-the-board budget cuts are going to take hold. “I think it’s going to happen,” Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters during a Feb. 15 Defense Writers Group breakfast. “Both sides are locked into positions that they can’t seem to get away from, and so I think we’re going to be forced into it.”
NEW DELHI — The Indian government has initiated actions to scrap its contract for AW101 helicopters with scandal-plagued Finmeccanica subsidiary AgustaWestland. “We have issued a formal show-cause notice to AgustaWestland seeking cancellation of contract and taking other actions as per the terms of the contract and the integrity pact, signed in 2010,” an Indian defense ministry official says.
A three-year operational assessment of a tethered-aerostat cruise-missile detection and tracking system is to begin later this year at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, in part to see how it would fit into the air-defense system around Washington. The operational exercise involving Raytheon’s Joint Land-Attack Cruise-Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) system “could inform a future decision for an enduring operational deployment,” says the Army.
Days after the White House issued a new directive on cybersecurity, House Intelligence Committee leaders are saying their bill to help secure the nation’s computer systems has a chance of passing this year. If so, it would represent a remarkable turnabout from last year, when three efforts to pass cybersecurity legislation through Congress failed. By the end of the year, lawmakers were skeptical about the future prospects of such legislation.
LONDON — Swedish aerospace company Saab and the country’s defense procurement agency, the FMV, have signed agreements to start development of the next-generation Gripen fighter.
The U.K.’s Royal Air Force (RAF) is publicly highlighting its need for a new trainer aircraft while the government continues to delay a decision. At last week’s Aero India airshow, Kevin Marsh, the RAF wing commander for the OC IV squadron, said the RAF’s Shorts Tucano trainer aircraft needs to be replaced because it does not “have a head-up display and mission system.”
India’s state-owned National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) soon will restart the flight test program for Saras, a 14-seat multirole military transport aircraft that has been beset by developmental problems. There will be a test flight in April for Saras test aircraft one (PT1), NAL Technology Director Shyman Chetty tells Aviation Week. The Saras had its first test flight in 2004. There were two test aircraft built, PT1 and PT2. But PT2 crashed in 2009, killing all three people on board. That prompted NAL to make major changes to the aircraft’s design.
BIG DOWNGRADE: Wall Street analysts at Cowen and Co. are not waiting for so-called sequestration to take effect March 1 before telling defense-sector investor clients to move on in their search for profit and growth. In a Feb. 14 note to clients, the analysts say weapons face increased scrutiny from a confluence of the 2011 Budget Control Act’s automatic spending reductions and the likelihood of former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) becoming the next defense secretary. Lockheed Martin is first in line to feel the pain, in their opinion. “As No.
Northrop Grumman’s Long-Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), a 300-ft.-long surveillance airship intended for deployment to Afghanistan to fly unmanned for up to three weeks, has been cancelled by the U.S. Army. The airship flew once in August last year, at Lakehurst, N.J., 10 months behind schedule in what was originally planned as an 18-month development program leading to deployment early in 2012.
The long-delayed solicitation for proposals to host six unmanned aircraft system (UAS) test sites across the U.S. has been issued by the FAA, along with the agency’s proposed approach to addressing public concerns over privacy.
India is developing the sixth in its series of Agni ballistic missiles, this time with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) capability.
Australian defense procurement is in a strongly aviation-centered phase. In the next few years, the government is due to approve acquisitions of around 60 combat aircraft, a fleet of maritime surveillance drones and complementary force of manned patrol aircraft.
With insurgent-hunting missions in Mali underway, the U.K.'s Sentinel radar reconnaissance aircraft might be making friends in high places, but it still remains on the chopping block after 2015. Three weeks into the deployment, the single Sentinel R1 operating out of Dakar, Senegal, has been flying a series of missions that has helped to counter threats from improvised explosive devices and indirect fire from the Al-Qaeda-linked rebels retreating into the desert from the rapidly advancing French and Malian government forces.
Warfare has always been dependent on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Good ISR is a force multiplier; a force with inferior ISR is trusting to luck. Military operations today are even more reliant on ISR and this trend will continue. The reason? Ubiquitous and more precise guided weapons shift more targets from the “easy to find, hard to kill” category (a Soviet tank army crashing through the Fulda Gap was the Cold War exemplar) into the “hard to find, easy to kill” column. Osama bin Laden typifies the last category.
For an idea of where intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance could be headed in the future, a good place to start is the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), which prides itself in looking well beyond even the most far-sighted of its service customers.
