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04 Nov 16. Volvo Group intends to initiate a process to divest Governmental Sales. Volvo Group intends to initiate a process in order to divest its Governmental Sales business area.
Volvo Group has conducted a strategic review of the Governmental Sales business area and intends to initiate a process to divest this business.
“Governmental Sales has built a very strong position over the last few years with a positive development and a record order book. There are great opportunities to grow the business even further, however, we believe that a new owner may be better placed to take the business to the next level. Consequently, we intend to start preparations to divest the business,” says Jan Gurander, Deputy CEO and CFO at Volvo Group.
Governmental Sales is a part of Volvo Group’s operations and its sales correspond to approximately1.5% of total sales. The business, which has about 1,300 employees, most of whom are in France, manufactures and sells specially designed vehicles to governments, the defense industry, peacekeeping forces and aid organizations.
The initiation of a divestment process is subject to the finalization of mandatory consultations with staff representative bodies.
02 Nov 16. US Army Gets Serious About Next Tank: Next Generation Combat Vehicle. The US Army wants its Next Generation Combat Vehicle to serve as pack master to a swarm of crawling and flying robots. It wants lighter weapons with heavier firepower, able to aim almost straight up to shoot drones out of the sky and hit rooftop snipers. It wants miniaturized missile defenses to shoot down incoming anti-tank weapons. It wants suspension, underbody, and crew compartments designed from the ground up (literally) to resist landmines and roadside bombs. It wants diesel-electric engines — like a giant Prius — or other advanced motors that can power an array of jammers, sensors, and drone-killing lasers.
Given Russian advances and our own aging hardware, the Army also wants all this, or something close, by 2035. That means research and development must get started now, when budgets are already tight.
“Our enemies have not remained static,” warns Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Army’s charismatic chief futurist. One assessment says that Russia will have surpassed US forces in three of 10 key areas of combat by 2030, reached parity in six, and remain behind in only one. On the US side, the current M1 Abrams heavy tank and M2 Bradley armed transport have been upgraded so many times already that they’re close to “maxed out,” McMaster told an Association of the US Army conference yesterday. But at the same time, he said, “we have tremendous opportunities, associated with technologies at a high level of maturity that can be incorporated into a new generation combat vehicle.”
“I don’t think there’s any one silver bullet,” McMaster told reporters afterwards, “(but) you can see parts of the solution…on combat vehicles today,” such as the German Puma troop carrier, the Israeli Merkava heavy tank, the British Ajax scout, and the Swedish CV90, “a heck of a vehicle.”
But are the potential gains worth the investment? Are they worth the risk of a new design when so many Army programs have failed since the end of the Cold War? Can’t the Army just keep upgrading the Abrams and Bradley?
You can only stick so many new systems on an old design before you reach diminishing returns, said Maj. Gen. Eric Wesley, who commands the infantry and armor center at Fort Benning, Ga. The M1 in particular has grown too heavy to cross many bridges in Eastern Europe, he said, so you can’t just pile on more armor. But Russian-made missiles keep getting more deadly, so you need to get more protection somehow. The Army’s experimenting with off-the-shelf Active Protection Systems (APS), which use radars to detect incomi