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.
A massive U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan next year will trigger a shift in Pentagon priorities and force structure, but do not expect any major changes for the Air Force's intelligence collection fleet. At least, not for now.
Turning raw information into useful intelligence for commanders and operators is one of the biggest challenges in intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (Istar). The process involves managing the collected data and fusing it into comprehensive products, which has become more complex as better sensors gather more information and new sources are exploited.
The arrest of Finmeccanica's chairman and CEO and the prospect that the company could be barred from doing business in India's lucrative defense market is shaking the foundations of the Italian aerospace and defense giant, which already was struggling to restructure in the wake of high debt and declining government spending in Europe.
Hand-launched, electrically powered small unmanned air vehicles (SUAV) are usually attached to small formations and in special operations units. However, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Ground Forces Command (GFC) has been looking at their use at division level, as sensor performance and networking technology improve.
Shortly after the Obama administration unveiled its so-called pivot to Asia-Pacific in early 2012, top Pentagon leaders began warning everyone that the new defense strategy could not survive further budget cuts. So sure were they that the 2011 Budget Control Act's automatic, across-the-board spending cuts would not be allowed to occur that White House and Pentagon officials had no qualms with pegging the pivot's foundations to the last five-year defense budget plan.
A simple graph explains Australia's declining strategic position. Relative to the two countries that its defense planners must consider most carefully, Australia will by 2017 have just a quarter of the economic clout it enjoyed 25 years before.
NEW DELHI — The Finmeccanica bribery scandal has prompted the Indian government to defer a decision on the much-awaited $1.5 billion purchase of 197 light utility helicopters for its military.
Government offices may remain open if government-wide budget cuts take effect on March 1, but if sequestration is allowed to take effect it will have serious economic consequences, the U.S. government controller told senators Feb. 14. “I do not think it’s prudent at all to think that because the lights do not shut down across government on March 1 that we can cross that precipice and then pull back later,” Daniel Werfel, controller of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the Senate Appropriations Committee.
BEIJING — A South Korean defense ministry think tank is publicly opposing development of the proposed KF-X indigenous fighter. The Korea Institute for Defense Analysis told a public meeting that the country is not technologically equipped to develop the aircraft, that the project is economically unviable and that the KF-X would not be a successful export product.
