Heavy government spending, oil policies and the new balance of power in Congress after the presidential election are among the risks to watch in Brazil over the next year.

In space warfare one man’s refueling or repair capability can look an awful lot like another man’s ability to destroy or cripple your satellite.

When the United States deployed the XSS-11 several years ago, critics claimed the Air Force was trying to test something that could grab another country’s satellite or bump it. It was a small satellite — about 220 pounds — but it brought with it potentially large strategic and policy implications..

The People’s Republic of China has joined an elect group of four countries that have taken men as deep as 3,500 meters below the surface of the ocean. And in keeping with Chinese claims to huge amounts of the ocean surface and its depths, the crew planted a flag on the bottom in the South China Sea, much as Russia recently did in Arctic waters. This should mark substantial improvements in China’s gathering of data for submarine warfare…. Read more

Roughead acknowledged that the Navy hasn’t pressed perhaps as far as it could have in the past, and followed that the relatively benign operational environments encountered today are not going to last.  Roughead would like to see future UAS with an increased ability to self deploy while operating independently of other assets.  He stressed that current and future systems must be compatible with all Navy surface combatants, as the roughly 300 ships are likely to be in services for decades to come. 

With connectivity of increasing importance Roughead indicated a desire for the UAVs themselves to becomeinformation nodes on the network, and that this and other networks were a means by which to support the warfighter by better fusing this information into the enterprise.  In doing so, Roughead would like to see a departure from the platform-centric approach; with a system providing functional information-based solutions not focused on elegance.

Regarding evolving systems, the Navy would like to integrate Vertical-takeoff UAV capability with a minimal impact on maintenance and infrastructure, and it is within this fiscal environment that the Navy cannot tolerate underperforming programs. Integrating new platforms and capapabilities with this paradigm is quite a challenge.  A bottom line for Roughead came in the form of his desire to keep U.S. Naval forces relevant in shaping world outcomes with an eye toward how UAVs will play into these scenarios.

Of particular interest are UCAS/UCAV outcomes and timing.  Roughead said an IOC of 2018 is too late for his liking, and he wants to imbue a sense of urgency in the test, evaluation and competition phases of this program.  Roughead says he understands the challenges of integrating a UCAS/UCAV capability into the EW environment of the Carrier Battle Group as well as the skies these systems will fly into, but his 2020’s vision is one of the F-35 and an operational UCAS/UCAV variant working alongside.

Lockheed Martin has scooped the Army-Marine program for an unmanned cargo helicopter, to be deployed in Afghanistan in support of Centcom and Marine forces. An August 16 FedBizOps announcement from the Army’s Aviation Applied Technology Directorate (AATD) which is running the program, says that it intends to negotiate sole-source with Lockheed Martin for the Autonomous Technologies…Read more

]]> http://g2globalsolutions.com/review/?feed=rss2&p=4596 http://g2globalsolutions.com/review/?p=4591 http://g2globalsolutions.com/review/?p=4591#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:40:41 +0000 G2 Solutions http://g2globalsolutions.com/review/?p=4591 Initial reports suggest that there are 49 survivors from a landing accident, at Yichun in China, involving a Henan Airlines Embraer 190.

China’s civil aviation authority has identified the Embraer 190, confirming the operator as Henan Airlines, formerly Kunpeng Airlines.

A Eurofighter aircraft has crashed at Spain’s Morón air base with one fatality, the Spanish ministry of defence has confirmed.

The combat aircraft, which was on a regular training flight, crashed into the ground “moments after take-off” from the base near Seville, according to the ministry’s statement.

Griffith says in June he took the F-35A to 583 KCAS (exceeding Mach 1.2). “I may be the first to fly this fast in the jet so far,” he muses. “The jet handles well, and she just wants to fly fast. It has a monster engine. It looks like an aircraft that’s built around an engine.”

Washington’s most respected election analyst, Charlie Cook, is now calling the House for the Republicans. And he’s predicting not just a close race, which had been the call of most analysts until now, but is predicting a so-called “wave” election, one where the party in power is swept away.

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Details of the appeal weren’t immediately made public. But U.S. trade spokeswoman Nefeterius McPherson confirmed that Washington had joined Brussels in challenging findings from June’s 1,061-page verdict, which found that Airbus gained an unfair advantage over U.S. competitor Boeing Co. through billions worth of low-interest loans, infrastructure provisions, and research and development grants.