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17 Jan 19. Thales demonstrates the critical role of Artificial Intelligence in decisive moments.
- Since 2014, Thales has invested nearly 7bn euros in digital technologies, particularly in the areas of connectivity, Big Data, cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
- Artificial Intelligence and its opportunities in the aerospace, space, ground transportation, defence and security sectors will be the theme of the second Thales Media Day event in Montreal.
- Professor Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director of MILA (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms), and Patrice Caine, Chairman & CEO of Thales, will speak at this global event, which will be broadcasted live on the Group’s YouTube channel.
Thales invests 20% of its annual revenues in R&D. After the first Thales Media Days dedicated to cybersecurity, which is an essential component of the digital transformation, Thales is now demonstrating specific examples of the impact of Artificial Intelligence in decisive moments. The event is being held in Montreal, Canada and simultaneously in France, the UK, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and the Middle East.
17 Jan 19. US Army looks to leverage AI in acquisition. The Army’s acquisition organization is still working out its IT strategy, but it has laser focus on weaving artificial intelligence into the force. Army acquisition head Bruce Jette told reporters at the Defense Writers Group breakfast Jan. 10 in Washington, D.C., that while the department isn’t where he’d like it to be, embracing new technologies including wireless and cloud will help speed things along.
AI, however, will be a big part of the Army’s future acquisitions, particularly regarding air missile defense and other weapons systems.
Jette said the Army still has to work with the Office of the Secretary of Defense for resourcing considerations, but Army Futures Command’s AI task force is taking up artificial intelligence and robotics requirements and R&D in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The assistant secretary for the Army for acquisitions, logistics, and technology will establish a managerial approach.
“We’re trying to structure an AI architecture that will become enduring and will facilitate our ability to allocate resources and conduct research and implementation of AI capabilities throughout the force,” Jette said.
“That’s not to say we’re not doing AI in various places; there are AI efforts ongoing. It’s just that we need to organize for combat a little bit better.”
Jette said that despite some worry over weapons systems using AI, the technology is necessary.
“If I can’t get AI involved with being able to properly manage weapons systems and firing sequences, then in the long run, I lose the time,” he said, adding that requiring an operator in the loop on every sequence can slow down the reaction process, or the number of shots fired. There needs to be policy in place so that weapons aren’t firing at will, while freeing up manpower for other tasks. (Source: Defense Systems)
17 Jan 19. Britain’s elite equestrian teams will benefit from sensor technologies normally used to manage cockpit conditions for fighter pilots to improve their competitive performance. The project is part of BAE Systems’ ongoing technology partnership with UK Sport and will support the teams transporting horses to major competitive events throughout the season. As with athletes, the performance of horses flying to international competition can be adversely affected by the symptoms of long haul air travel. Engineers at BAE Systems were asked to provide a technical solution to overcome the impact of long haul travel to ensure the animals arrive in a peak state of health and fitness; ready for competition.
The specialist team at BAE Systems produced a unique and bespoke environmental monitoring unit developed, called Equus-Sense, for the British Equestrian Federation (BEF). The technology builds upon advanced sensor systems such as those that monitor cockpit conditions and air quality found in Eurofighter Typhoon combat aircraft for the fighter pilots. Novel integration techniques and additional sensors appropriate to equestrian transport were introduced to provide a complete monitoring unit for the horses. The system covers elements including sound, temperature, vibration, humidity, dust levels and oxygen, allowing trainers and athletes to monitor the environmental conditions for horses travelling to international events. Equus-Sense can be housed in any travelling environment for horses, and will sense and log environmental conditions during transit. It allows trainers to evaluate the individual conditions of horses upon arrival at competitions to make informed decisions on their readiness to compete. In time the technology could be applied to other sporting organisations outside the BEF to monitor transportation and welfare of other horses travelling to competitions worldwide.
“When it comes to elite sport, marginal gains can help leverage a real competitive advantage – and that preparation begins before competitors reach their competition,” said Henry White, UK Sport Partnership Lead at BAE Systems. “We develop aircraft and equipment monitoring technology which helps ensure our fighter pilots are as comfortable as possible to enable them to realise their incredible skills and there is no reason why horses cannot benefit from this. Applying such technology to horse transportation had its challenges but our expert engineers have developed such a system allowing the equestrian competitors to benefit and help gain an advantage”
Director of Equine Sports Science and Medicine for the BEF’s World Class Programme, John McEwen adds; “This has been a valuable project that has improved elite horse transport. This is an area that can have a major performance effect and we are grateful to BAE Systems for their scientific support. Small marginal gains are very important to us, to provide maximal performance, and the travel environment is critical to this. The improvements made will ensure the highest level of welfare for our elite horses and ensure that they travel first class.”
The development of the environmental monitoring unit was co-ordinated by the Performance Innovation team from the English Institute of Sport (EIS), which is the science, medicine and technology arm of UK Sport.
Naomi Stenhouse, Head of Performance Innovation at the EIS explained: “We were approached by the BEF, which was keen to optimise the travel environment for its horses, and through our longstanding partnership with BAE Systems have been able to broker a relationship which deploys technology developed by the company to address a wide range of issues and help ensure the horses arrive at competitions in a peak state of health and fitness. The project is a great example of how our partnership with BAE Systems provides added value by enabling sports and national governing bodies to access third party technology and engineering expertise that can help to deliver performance benefits.”
15 Jan 19. Epsilor’s High Energy 6T Battery Currently Evaluated in Five NATO Countries. The lithium-ion 6T batteries, which offer the highest energy density in the world, will be showcased by Epsilor at the International Armoured Vehicles 2019 trade show and conference in London London, UK, January 14, 2019 – Epsilor, an internationally recognised developer and manufacturer of mobile energy products for defence and aerospace applications, will showcase its lithium-ion 6T NATO-standard battery product line at International Armoured Vehicles (IAV) 2019, which will take place in London January 21–24, 2019. Epsilor’s 6T type batteries, which offer the highest energy density in the market, will be presented at Booth A5. The company will also present its 12V/110Ah (1.45kWh) LiFePO4 battery.
The innovative 6T battery is currently being evaluated and field tested by industrial clients and armed forces in five NATO countries. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recently completed a year-long testing process during which Epsilor’s 6T was evaluated in different climate and field conditions (desert, mountains, rocky areas, etc.).
Epsilor’s lithium-ion vehicular battery family of products is the optimal replacement for traditional lead-acid batteries, offering four times the energy and approximately half the weight of lead-acid batteries of similar size. The advanced batteries serve a wide range of applications in the automotive, military and marine markets – wherever the conditions are challenging, and weight and volume considerations are paramount.
At the conference, Epsilor will present for the first time an improved version of the 6T which meets the requirements of the MIL-PRF-32565A Amendment 1 for rechargeable, sealed, 6T lithium-ion batteries issued by the US Army Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC).
During the event, Ori Kost, Epsilor’s Large Format Battery Program Manager, will give a presentation entitled “Safe high capacity 6T lithium ion battery.”
Epsilor’s 6T has an extremely long operational and cycle life which results in a significantly lower environmental and logistic footprint. The 6T batteries are optimised for next generation armoured vehicles (MBT, tracked and wheeled IFV) and designed as drop-in replacements for traditional lead-acid batteries in legacy vehicle fleets. They are particularly attractive due to their independent charge current regulation feature which Epsilor-Electric Fuel Ltd. 1 Hasolela st. West Industrial Park, Beit-Shemesh 9905415, Israel Tel/fax: +972-2-9906666; ; www.epsilor.com Epsilor-Electric Fuel is a subsidiary of Arotech Corporation (NASDAQ: ARTX) enables these batteries to perform safely and continuously even without communication with the host platform.
“The fact that our 6T product family is being evaluated by many parties is a clear indication of the great interest our solutions draw,” said Epsilor president Ronen Badichi. “At the International Armoured Vehicles trade show and conference, we look forward to meeting with new clients who need a smart drop-in replacement for traditional batteries.”
15 Jan 19. Rohde & Schwarz introduces the R&S ZNA, a new generation of high-end vector network analyzers offering outstanding RF performance and a unique hardware concept that simplifies measurement configuration. Its excellent measurement stability and trace noise enable users to perform demanding measurements on active and passive components and modules. Thanks to its innovative, DUT-centric approach, the world’s first purely touch-operated vector network analyzer reduces configuration times to a minimum. Rohde & Schwarz presents the new R&S ZNA high-end vector network analyzer, a powerful, universal test platform for characterizing active and passive DUTs. The two models R&S ZNA26 (10 MHz to 26.5 GHz) and R&S ZNA43 (10 MHz to 43.5 GHz) offer an outstanding dynamic range of 146 dB (typ.) and a trace noise as low as 0.001 dB at 1 kHz IF bandwidth. These two features are essential for measurements on high-rejection filters. With its unique hardware concept, the R&S ZNA can perform mixer measurements for RF and IF in parallel, delivering measurement speed twice as fast as with the conventional approach. Amplifier characterization becomes easy with a 100 dB power sweep range, a pulse generator and modulator per test port, versatile intermodulation measurement capabilities and spectrum analyzer functionality.
Unique hardware concept with four independent sources and two LOs
The R&S ZNA offers four internal, phase-coherent sources, eight truly parallel receivers and two internal local oscillators (LOs). This simplifies the test setups for characterizing frequency-converting devices, amplifiers and even complex T/R modules, requiring the DUT to be connected only once. Users can perform vector corrected conversion loss, phase and group delay measurements in half of the time required with the conventional approach and without the need for a reference mixer.
DUT-centric approach for best user experience
The R&S ZNA offers a unique approach, focused on the DUT, to simplify measurement configuration. The user first selects the type of DUT (e.g. mixer or amplifier) and is then guided step by step through configuration to the desired test setup. This solution significantly speeds up and facilitates test setups. Alternatively, users can take the conventional approach and configure measurements individually, providing high flexibility to master even the most challenging measurement tasks.
Modern touch interface replaces hardkey panel
The R&S ZNA is the world’s first purely touch-operated vector network analyzer, using a 12.1″ touchscreen as the main display and a 7″ touchscreen instead of a hardkey panel. Together with the DUT-centric approach, the second touchscreen provides a seamless user experience. The new R&S ZNA26 and R&S ZNA43 high-end vector network analyzers are now available from Rohde & Schwarz.
14 Jan 19. How the Air Force’s new software team is proving its worth. In a downtown Boston skyscraper on the last day of 2018, empty boxes and Styrofoam laid across the floor, big screen computers awaited their users and cleaning crews put the finishing touches on a new 30,000-foot workspace that looked every bit like a new tech startup from the TV show “Silicon Valley.”
The office does not include cubicles but instead has long rows of tables, big screen computers, couches, high-top tables in the middle of the floor, and small conference rooms named after planets in the Star Wars universe (Jedah, Mustafar, Scarif, Coruscant). The workspace could be the home of a burgeoning mobile app team, but in this case, the office is for the U.S. military, specifically the Air Force.
The Kessel Run Experimentation Lab, run out of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Battle Management Directorate at Hanscom Air Force Base, moved into its new home here Jan. 2 after outgrowing its old space, also in downtown Boston. Kessel Run hopes to change how the Air Force, and by extension the Department of Defense, develop and deliver software that adopts the best practices from industry.
But one way the Defense Department hopes to accomplish its goals is to further immerse itself in startup culture. C4ISRNET visited the facility, which Air Force leaders believe could bolster recruiting, Dec. 31 prior to its official opening.
“You’re not going to convince somebody who can get a job at Google or Wayfair or somewhere to come work for the government if I tell them they have to work 60 miles away [from a major city] in a bad office that everybody is walking around like zombies,” Adam Furtado, the lab’s director, said. “We’re battling industry, especially in Boston, for top end tech talent … You can’t ask people to hey come and take a $30,000 pay cut also it’s going to be a bad environment and you’re not going to be happy here.”
Furtado said the Air Force is trying to build a culture that starts with the new workspace. They’re already seeing benefits.
Collaboration is easier in an open facility like this, he said, because workers in the same area can solve problems quickly and not rely on emails and phone calls, which is the traditional way the Air Force tackles such problems. Product managers and product designers are right next to software developers working together all day long in the same space. If a software developer needs a clarification, there’s no assumptions, Furtado said. Instead, they can bring the manager over and talk.
Defining success
Proving the success, and worth, of a commercial-emulating software project can be elusive in the DoD. From a software perspective many Defense Department staffers don’t understand that software is continuously iterated and delivered upon every week, Furtado said.
“Software is never done and that’s a concept that’s very different from the way we traditionally do things in the DoD,” he said. “Defining success has been difficult from that perspective.”
The team was extremely lucky, Furtado said, with its first project, Jigsaw, an automated planning tool for tanker refueling. Jigsaw saves $12m a month in fuel costs based on a more efficient process. But this kind of saving is a not a metric that will be apparent in the rest of Kessel Run’s products.
Most of the products surround applications that are built around optimizing for planning, Furtado said. This means trying to get rid of inefficiencies related to manual processes, data entry and applications that don’t communicate well with each other.
One unexpected area of success the team has generated is achieving the first continuous authority to operate on DoD networks. The authority to operate is a process by which entities are granted permission to connect systems to federal networks following a variety of validated security steps. A continuous authority means solutions and software fixes go up on the network immediately without having to jump through the validation hoops each time. As a result, this means solutions get to warfighters faster given they go up to the network immediately rather than waiting through the process.
The continuous ATO came after adopting best practices from industry in which each line of code is tested before it can go to the main code base. This replaces the current process of testing all the code at the end of the project. With the new workflow, the code is being tested automatically, sometimes multiple times a day, a process which leads to overall greater confidence in the project. This also allows the software community to go faster.
“Most of the things we’re doing here are highly logical, it just it has taken us a long time to figure out all of the mechanisms behind it to get there,” Furtado said. He added that many in the commercial industry, generally, adopted these processes about a decade ago.
However, “wins” like this might not be immediately apparent to leaders or appropriators making future viability challenging.
Furtado said there is difficulty navigating how to prove Kessel Run’s budget to Congress, because traditionally organizations argue their budges based on promised deliverables that are needed. It’s difficult to predict how much something is going to cost because the projects Kessel Run is working on evolve each day, Furtado said.
As such, “it’s hard for the people who are approving budgets to just give me a blank check and say let’s see what you come up with,” he added.
Lt. Col. Jeremiah Sanders, materiel leader for the Air Operations Center Program, told C4ISRNET that Kessel Run has been funded by Air Operations Center and Targeting and geospatial intelligence programs. Approximately $140m has been spent since mid-2017 on the shared workspace, hiring personnel, fielding and operating a virtual private cloud-native platform environment for classified operational use, and delivering several operational software capabilities.
Sanders said operational software capabilities have already saved over $13m and 1,100 man-hours per month, adding “given the significant return on investment, Air Force leadership expanded our work portfolio and gave us immediate hiring authority for approximately 50 additional program-funded civilian personnel.”
Now, Furtado wants to take those figures and show them to decision makers.
“We want to get to a point where we’re at a capacity based model where you give me x dollars, that’s x number of product teams where I can deliver this much value and move the needle in this many spaces incrementally forever,” he said. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
14 Jan 19. The future of the US surface fleet: One combat system to rule them all. As the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet moves into 2019, a radical shift is coalescing among its leaders: a move away from a model that has driven the way the service has built its ships for decades. When the Navy built its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, installing the Aegis combat system into the hull meant a large suite of hardware — computers, servers, consoles and displays — designed and set up specifically to run Aegis software. Any significant upgrades to the suite of systems already installed, or to the Aegis system in general, required cutting a hole in the ship and swapping out all the computers and consoles — a massively expensive undertaking.
And what’s more, Aegis isn’t the only combat system in the fleet. Raytheon’s Ship Self-Defense System runs on many of the amphibious ships and the Ford-class carriers. Both classes of littoral combat ship run different combat systems, one designed by Lockheed Martin and the other by General Dynamics. And in regard to the ships themselves, there are multiple, siloed systems that don’t feed into the main combat system.
If Navy leaders get their way, that’s going to change.
What the surface fleet wants is a single combat system that runs on every ship, and runs everything on the ship, and that doesn’t mind what hardware you are running so long as you have the computing power for it.
The goal here is that if a sailor who is trained on a big-deck amphibious ship transfers to a destroyer, no extra training will be necessary to run the equipment on the destroyer.
“That’s an imperative going forward — we have to get to one, integrated combat system,” Rear Adm. Ron Boxall, the chief of naval operations’ director of surface warfare, said in a December interview at the Pentagon with Defense News.
Boxall describes the current situation to an integrated combat system as the difference between a flip phone and an iPhone. When buying a flip phone, most of the hardware and software are already included, leaving you with a limited ability to upgrade the phone. And if you want to run more advanced applications, you need a new phone. Instead, Boxall wants the combat systems to run like the iPhone.
“For us to get faster, we either have to keep going with the model we had where we upgrade our flip phones, or we cross over the mentality to where it says: ‘I don’t care what model of iPhone you have — 7 or X or whatever you have — it will still run Waze or whatever [applications] you are trying to run,” he said.
On a ship, that means that if the Navy adds a new radar, missile or laser, the software that runs the new equipment is developed as an application that interfaces with the single integrated combat system, the way Waze integrates with the iPhone or Android software.
This has the benefit of having everything linked into the central nervous system for operators in the combat information center, sonar control, on the bridge or in the ship’s intelligence-gathering center. It also means that new systems are quickly integrated, skipping the expensive process of ripping out old servers and consoles.
And it means the companies that develop the myriad combat systems in service today — say, Raytheon or Lockheed Martin — won’t have a lock on developing software for Navy ships because the Navy wants the combat system to be developed with interfaces that are accessible by outside application developers.
“We need to continue down the path to be more aggressive and get a lot more competition in the open-architecture space,” Boxall said.
“I wouldn’t call it completely open, but as open as we can be, and then share that with people who can, if they are properly classified and secured, they should be able to come into a common space and apply their expertise to develop products that we may or may not want to buy. That’s where I’d like to get to.”
The vision
The grand vision for this operating system from the deck-plates perspective would be the merging what are, today, disparate functions into one unified system, said Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer skipper and consultant who heads The FerryBridge Group.
One of the areas in which this segmentation creates limitations falls between the combat information center — which collects and displays information gathered by ships’ sensors — and the intelligence hub known as the Ship’s Signals Exploitation Space — which uses top-secret sources to collect data on the theater in which the ship is operating.
“We need to break down the barrier between CIC and SSES, and the barrier is both a physical bulkhead and computing systems and platforms,” McGrath said. “That’s what an integrated combat system is: You have the traditional combat system function, and the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance functions — non-real-time and [top-secret information] functions — merged into one multilevel security-protected computing platform.”
In that scenario, if SSES receives information that three Iranian F-14 jets took off from Bushehr Air Base, a watchstander in the combat information center with the proper security clearance could see what information SSES has on the aircraft and their mission while stripping out top-secret information such as sources and methods that SSES needs to protect.
And once CIC has a radar track associated with that intelligence, all SSES data will get merged into it so decision-makers in combat have the necessary intel at their fingertips. But the logic applies to all the ship’s sensors, not just intelligence collection data. The unified combat system would associate every piece of sensor data with the track being displayed in CIC, McGrath said. Everyone connects to a single system that gives every watchstander all the information they need on every track, both real-time and non-real-time data.
“The integrated combat system includes all mission areas,” he said. “It’s electronic warfare, it’s anti-submarine warfare — we don’t segment out air and missile defense and electronic warfare, they are all just applications within the combat system. The Navy has to stop thinking of SESS, sonar, combat, electronic warfare and the bridge as different and separate elements. They have to be part of the whole.”
Staggering costs
There’s a number of obstacles to getting the surface fleet on a unified system, but one that could be insurmountable: the staggering cost of replacing the fleet’s outdated computer hardware.
The Common Source Library, developed for the Navy by Lockheed, begins moving the Navy down this path of a single, unified combat system. The CSL is essentially the iOS of an iPhone: The Navy can use CSL to program applications that run sensors and weapons systems.
So, if the Navy has a new missile system it wants to run, the software application to run it will be designed to run off of the CSL — and ships with the CSL will be able to rapidly integrate it, just like downloading the latest navigation or gaming software for a smartphone.
But the issue is that CSL requires specific hardware to function, said Tony DeSimone, chief engineer of Lockheed Martin integrated warfare systems and sensors, in a roundtable with reporters late last year.
“One of the challenges the Navy has, the constraints, is the hardware and infrastructure to support a [common integrated combat system],” DiSimone said.
“So while we are marching forward with the capability to be open and take in apps, there is an antiquated architecture out there and there is hardware that doesn’t support it. … You can’t run [integrated operating] systems today on UYK-43s. You’re just not going to be able to do it. So let’s gut them and put some blade servers in, and we’ll work with you.” The UYK-43 was once the Navy’s standard 32-bit computer for surface and submarine platforms.
The issue with replacing a fleet full of ancient computers that run old combat systems is the astronomical cost. For example, when the Navy converted the cruiser Normandy into an Aegis Baseline 9 ship, which includes updated displays and blade servers, it cost the service about $188m and nearly a year offline.
When you stretch that over dozens of surface combatants in need of updated computers, you start eating up billions of dollars and lose decades of operational availability. So while CSL does give the Navy an interface with which developers can create applications to run various systems, it’s all for naught if the service doesn’t have the right equipment.
“Our Common Source Library has made us radar-agnostic,” said Jim Sheridan, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s naval combat and missile defense systems. “We’re also weapons-agnostic. The blocker is that we are not infrastructure-agnostic.”
Furthermore, even if the Navy did back-fit all the surface ships with updated servers, you’d need to get various companies to play nice in the sandbox by sharing proprietary information for the benefit of a unified combat system.
Ultimately, however, the Navy must affect a paradigm shift that decouples the computer suites that run its combat systems from the system itself, Boxall said.
“You can either upgrade the existing ships on that model, which is expensive and you rip the ship apart to do it — cost hundreds of millions of dollars and a year offline — or you design the ship with the idea that you are going upgrade the hardware over its time, and you separate the hardware/software layers,” Boxall said.
“We know Aegis,” he added. “What we don’t know [is how to] upgrade Aegis at the pace I think we need moving forward in the future. We don’t have a structure in place and a process by which we do that upgrades with speed.
“When we buy Aegis, it’s kind of flip-phone technology: You buy the software and the hardware together. And you can upgrade it, it’s just hard to do. If we don’t go to a more adaptable model, we are not going to be able to pace the threat.” (Source: Defense News)
11 Jan 19. Russia upgrades the stealth on Su-57 fighter that’s meant as an F-35, F-22 killer. Russian media announced on Friday that it had significantly improved the stealth on its Su-57 fighter jet by applying a coating to the glass canopy on the cockpit, as well as similar upgrades to its Tu-160 nuclear bomber.
- But Russia’s Su-57 isn’t nearly stealth by US or even Chinese standards, and a coating on the glass won’t save it.
- Instead, the Su-57 appears intended to go after US stealth fighters like the F-22 and F-35.
- But Russia, struggling with sanctions and a weak economy, has yet to order a significant number of the jets.
Russian media announced on Friday that it had significantly improved the stealth on its Su-57 fighter jet by applying a coating to the glass canopy on the cockpit, as well as similar upgrades to its Tu-160 nuclear bomber.
Russia’s state-owned defense corporation Rostec told Russian media the new coating “doubles radar wave absorption and reduces the aircraft cockpit’s radar signature by 30%” and added that Russia’s Su-57, Su-30, Su-34, Su-35, and MiG-29K jets already have the upgrade.
But none of those jets, including the Su-57, which Russia explicitly bills as a stealth fighter, are considered that stealthy by experts contacted by Business Insider.
While Russia’s Sukhoi fighter/bombers have enviable maneuverability and serious dogfighting capability, only the US and China have produced true stealth fighters.
A stealth scientist working on US aircraft previously reviewed pictures of the Su-57 and concluded in an interview with Business Insider that Russia had hardly even tried to make the plane unobservable to radar.
Read more:Close-up photos of Russia’s new ‘stealth’ jet reveal its true purpose — and it’s a big threat to the US
Conspicuous rivets jutting out of the airframe and accentuator humps spoiled any possible stealth in the design, the scientist said.
Radar absorbing materials have been used to disguise fighter planes since World War II and have some utility, but will do little to hide Russian jets which have to carry weapons stores externally.
Other experts told Business Insider the Su-57’s likely mission was to hunt and kill US stealth aircraft like the F-22 or F-35.
TASS, a Russian state-run media outlet, described the Su-57 as a “multirole fighter designed to destroy all types of air targets at long and short ranges and hit enemy ground and naval targets, overcoming its air defense capabilities.”
Read more:New video shows Russia putting its most advanced stealth fighter to the test in war-torn Syria
But Russia has declined to mass-produce the jet despite declaring it “combat proven” after limited engagements against rebel forces in Syria that didn’t have anti-air capabilities.
Russia’s next-generation tank, the T-14, also saw its promised mass production run scaled back as Russia struggles with weak oil prices and heavy sanctions on its economy. (Source: Defense News Early Bird/https://www.businessinsider.com)
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Oxley Group Ltd
Oxley specialises in the design and manufacture of advanced electronic and electro-optic components and systems for air, land and sea applications within the military sector. Established in 1942, Oxley has manufacturing facilities in the UK and USA and enjoys representation worldwide. The company’s products include night vision and LED lighting, data capture systems and electronic components. Oxley has pioneered the development of night vision compatible lighting. It offers a total package incorporating optical filters, equipment modification, cockpit and external lighting along with fleet wide upgrade services including engineering, installation, support, maintenance and training. The company’s long experience of manufacturing night vision lighting and LED indicators, coupled with advances in LED technology, has enabled it to develop LED solutions to replace incandescent and fluorescent lighting in existing applications as well as becoming the lighting option of choice in new applications such as portable military hospitals, UAV control stations and communication shelters.
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