Ukrainian T-64BV with MILES

Ukrainian Army tank forces use the MILES (The multiple integrated laser engagement system) on exercise.

Upgraded by the Ukrainian JS CLutch the SPATGM Sturm-S on fire trials (video)

Ukrainian Defense Express Channel release the video of Upgraded by the Ukrainian JS CLutch  the SPATGM Sturm-S on fire trials (The prototype was shown during a visit by the new Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister - Minister for Strategic Industries of Ukraine Oleg Urusky to the state enterprise Kiev Design Bureau "Luch").

The modernized version of the Shturm-S is armed with RK-2V Barrier-V guided missiles developed by the Luch State Design Bureau, with a laser beam guidance system whose range is claimed to reach 6 km, instead of the standard 9M114 ATGM. 9K114 Shturm ( Assault) is a SACLOS radio-guided anti-tank missile system dating back to the Soviet era. Its NATO reporting name is AT-6 Spiral. The missile itself is known as the 9M114 Kokon (Cocoon).

Shturm-S is armed with RK-2V Barrier-V guided missiles

For target detection and missile guidance, an optical-electronic system OPSN-I developed by the State Enterprise Izyum Instrument-Making Plant is installed in the front of the vehicle. The OPSN-I product provides a target detection range of up to 14,5 kilometers. Interestingly, this system is rather intended for aviation, not for land vehicles.the modernized version of the Shturm-S is armed with RK-2V Barrier-V guided missiles developed by the Luch State Design Bureau, with a laser beam guidance system whose range is claimed to reach 6 km, instead of the standard 9M114 ATGM. 9K114 Shturm ( Assault) is a SACLOS radio-guided anti-tank missile system dating back to the Soviet era. Its NATO reporting name is AT-6 Spiral. The missile itself is known as the 9M114 Kokon (Cocoon).

For target detection and missile guidance, an optical-electronic system OPSN-I developed by the State Enterprise Izyum Instrument-Making Plant is installed in the front of the vehicle. The OPSN-I product provides a target detection range of up to 14,5 kilometers. Interestingly, this system is rather intended for aviation, not for land vehicles.

Optical-electronic system OPSN-I

Shturm-S is armed with RK-2V Barrier-V guided missiles

Israel RAFAEL defense will modernised the Georgian Air Defence System

Georgian Ministry of Defence signed an important agreement with RAFAEL defense of Israel, according to which country's air defence systems will be fully modernized.

We have signed an important agreement with @RAFAELdefense of #Israel, according to which our air defence systems will be fully modernized. This agreement demonstrates our strong effort to develop Georgia's air defence capabilities for stronger resilience and deterrence. pic.twitter.com/xQpYpsqZMB

— Irakli Garibashvili (@GharibashviliGe) September 11, 2020

Photos of the Georgian Army's Air Defence System Spyder-SR at the Georgia Independens Day, 26 May of 2017 (Link 26 მაისის ღონისძიებაზე გამოტანილი ებრაული ჰსთ კომპლექსი Spyder-SR და ზცრს LAR-160)

US troops tactical March through the all Georgia

Noble Partner-2020. From sunrise to sunset, U.S. Soldiers, assigned to the 4th Squadron, 2d Cavalry Regiment, (Sabers) complete their tactical road march driving from Senaki Air Base, Georgia, to the Vaziani Military Base, Georgia!

Exercise Noble Partner is designed to enhance regional partnerships and increase U.S. force readiness and interoperability in a realistic, multinational training environment. The exercise allows participants to conduct situational training exercises, live-fire exercises and combined mechanized maneuvers. The 4th Squadron, 2d Cavalry Regiment (Sabers) will lead the exercise for 2d Cavalry Regiment.

(📸 by Sgt. LaShic Patterson).

OTD 55 years ago Bundeswehr receive first Leopard-1 tank

OTD 55 years ago, 9 September of 1965, Bundeswehr receive first Leopard-1 tank

The Leopard 1 MBT was developed to meet the requirements of the Federal German Army and following trials with prototype vehicles was accepted for service in 1963. 

In July 1963, Krauss-Maffei (which in January 1999 became Krauss-Maffei Wegmann with facilities in Munich and Kassel) of Munich was nominated prime contractor for the Leopard 1 MBT and MaK of Kiel was selected as general contractor for production of the armoured recovery vehicle, armoured engineer vehicle and the armoured bridgelayer. MaK also built a small number of Leopard 1 MBTs under subcontract to Krauss-Maffei.

The first production Leopard was handed over to the Federal German Army in September 1965. Production of the Leopard 1 was completed by Krauss-Maffei in 1979 but resumed by both Krauss-Maffei and Krupp-MaK early in 1981 to meet the requirements of Greece and Turkey.

The Leopard 1 was first produced in 1963 by Krauss-Maffei for the German Ministry of Defence and more than 6000 vehicles have been exported to nine NATO countries, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and Turkey and also Australia. 

By early 1999 the Leopard 1 MBT was no longer in front line service with the German Army although it was still used by reserve units.

Hungarian Armed Forces to Receive Delivery of Lynx Infantry Fighting Vehicles.

Hungarian Government confirms Lynx KF41 numbers: 218 vehicles, 172 built locally.

Hungary’s Armed Forces will soon receive delivery of Lynx armoured fighting vehicles, thereby fulfilling its NATO obligations, a government official said on Wednesday.

The office of Gáspár Maróth, the government commissioner for coordinating defence developments, told MTI that the contract for the purchase of Rheinmetall Lynx combat vehicles was signed on Wednesday by Ferenc Korom, Commander of the Hungarian Armed Forces, and Armin Papperger, Chairman of the Board of the German company, in Budapest.

Under a 2 billion euro army modernisation programme, Hungary is taking delivery of 218 Lynx KF41 combat vehicles. Most of them, 172, will be produced in Hungary under a JV to be set up based on a recent agreement between Rheinmetall and the Hungarian state. The first 46 are being manufactured in Germany. The deal also involves the training of Hungarian specialists working at the domestic plant.

LYNX

Developed by Rheinmetall Defence, the LYNX KF41 has a three-man crew with the ability to accommodate up to eight infantrymen and with a net weight of 44 tons, the vehicle can carry a payload of up to 6 tons. The company is also planning other variants such as a recovery, repair, engineer, mortar and ambulance vehicle. The hull of the LYNX has a fully welded structure with internal spall liners, decoupled seats and a double floor to improve protection against mines and IEDs. According to Rheinmetall, ballistic armour also protects the vehicle against anti-tank weapons, medium-calibre ammunition (generally up to 40 mm), artillery fragments and bomblets from above.

The LYNX can be equipped with an active protection system, and other protection systems such as the Rheinmetall Rapid Obscurant System – Land (ROSY) in addition to laser and acoustic sensors. The digital LANCE turret integrates the Mauser 30 mm MK30-2 ABM cannon and a coaxially mounted 7.62 mm machine gun (which is externally powered and has three barrels). When one barrel reaches a critical temperature, the barrel bundle is electrically rotated to use another barrel, a process Rheinmetall claims can be carried out under armour in less than three seconds. In addition, the turret features integrated container installations, from which the SPIKE LR2 anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) or other weapons can be fired.

The vehicle is equipped with a digital vision system, an integrated laser rangefinder and a computerised fire control system. The LYNX is powered by a Liebherr diesel engine (800 kW/1,050 hp) with an automatic transmission of the Renk HSWL 256 series which produces a maximum speed of 70 km/h and a range of about 500 km.

Modernisation of the Hungarian Army

For the modernisation of the army, the Hungarian Ministry of Defence is relying on German defence technology expertise. In December 2018, Hungary signed a contract with Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) for the delivery of 44 newly manufactured LEOPARD 2 A7+ Main Battle Tanks (MBTs) and 24 newly manufactured PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers as well as 12 used LEOPARD 2 A4HU MBTs from KMW’s stocks for training purposes. The first LEOPARD 2 A4HU was handed over at the end of July 2020. Additionally, the procurement of five WiSENT 2 Armoured Recovery Vehicles was contacted with FFG Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft (FFG) mbH in 2019. According to FFG, the overall package for the Hungarian Armed Forces comprises the production and delivery of five WiSENT 2 armoured recovery vehicles, two engineer tank kits in 40-foot containers and one demining kit in a 20-foot container.

The new weapon systems are intended to replace Russian equipment still in use and improve interoperability with European Armed Forces. Furthermore, the Hungarian Armed Forces ordered a total of 20 H145M helicopters from Airbus Helicopters in 2018, with the first examples equipped with HForce and other mission packages delivered in 2019. The mission equipment includes high-resolution visual systems and armament as well as elements such as a fast roping system, ballistic protection and electronic countermeasures. The cabin with a maximum of ten seats can be converted for troop transport as well as for the transport of casualties. The extensive procurements are part of the ten-year ZRINYI 2026 military development programme, which started in 2016.

155mm Artillery Projectile Downs Cruise Missile in 2nd ABMS Test

JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — Sept. 3, troops defended the American homeland against a simulated cruise missile attack using air- and ground-launched missiles as well as a high-velocity bullet.

U.S. Air Force personnel monitor computers in support of the Advanced Battle Management System test on Sept. 2, 2020, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (Senior Airman Daniel Hernandez/U.S. Air Force)

But the success of the experiment ultimately rides on a makeshift control center set up at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, which Defense News and several other media outlets were invited to see on Wednesday. The control center displays a digital picture of the battlefield that seems to give an almost omniscient view of both American and adversarial capabilities.

In the movies, this is how command-and-control systems work: Troops toil on modern computers with stylish-looking graphic interfaces that, with a click of a button, pull up real-time maps of Russian missile sites or live data on the availability of fighter jets at U.S. Air Force bases in Alaska.

In practice, however, the military has been mired in the past, with operators manually watching data feeds, making phone calls to correlate information with other troops watching different data feeds, and producing endless PowerPoint slides to convey information from stovepiped systems to higher ups.

“It takes this huge staff to be able to come up with [a solution]. And if you’ve ever worked in a large organization or huge staff, decisions don’t happen quickly because it takes a long time to get that information together,” a U.S. Northern Command official who helped plan the experiment said on background. NORTHCOM did not authorize the planner to speak on the record.

The whole point of the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System is to speed up that cycle, allowing potentially life-saving decisions to be made more quickly.

The service conducted its first ABMS experiment in December, testing a total of 28 different capabilities, including connecting the SpaceX Starlink constellation to an AC-130 gunship, and testing a mechanism that allows F-35 and F-22 fighter jets to stealthily exchange data.

However, the Sept. 3 experiment was engineered to be more ambitious. The scenario begins with an unnamed peer nation taking hostile actions toward the United States, as American forces prepare to deter the adversary from taking further action. Instead, that adversary launches a series of offensive operations — first through a cyberattack, then assaulting U.S. assets in space and finally launching cruise missiles at the United States homeland.

The cruise missile attack was represented by six BQM-167 target drones at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which simulated the flight characteristics of a cruise missile.

If all went well, a collection of networked sensors — some legacy systems that have been in place for years, some developmental and some never before seen — would be able to see the missile coming, and artificial intelligence embedded into the military’s command-and-control system would precisely identify the missile, track it and almost instantaneously present a menu of options to a commander who will chose how to defeat it.

“I think it’s really important on on-ramps that we have a healthy combination of successes and failures, and today really struck a balance,” Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper told reporters Sept. 3.

Roper declined to say whether all cruise missile threats were defeated, but one major success was the first-ever kill of a surrogate cruise missile threat by a high-velocity projectile fired by an Army M109 Paladin, a 155mm howitzer.

The HVP will use different sized sabots to keep it stable in the barrels of the railgun, five-inch guns, and 155mm howitzers.

“The fact that a very inexpensive, high-density round was able to do that forebodes wonderful things for point defense for the nation’s future base defense and national defense as well,” Roper said.

“But that wasn’t the star of the show. The star of the show was that the data that enabled its kill chain to take effect was enabled by data going into a cloud, being transported over 4G and 5G communications at machine speeds, to culminate in a kill chain that took seconds, not minutes or hours to complete,” he added.

Among the suite of technologies that facilitated the rapid sharing of data were five contenders for what the Air Force calls OmniaONE, which provides a single picture of the battlefield using multiple feeds that are merged through a system called FuseONE. Another technology, SmartONE, is layered over the top of that picture and uses artificial intelligence to cue the user to potentially helpful information, like a major reduction in the number of bombers that can be observed at an adversary’s installation.

But one of the most critical leaps since December was the introduction of CommandONE, developed to send commands over the Link 16 network to tactical users in the field, another of the NORTHCOM planners said on background. NORTHCOM did not authorize this planner to speak on the record either.

Not all systems performed perfectly.

“We did have things go down on the range — different links — as we were connecting all of the different centers that were participating,” Roper said. “There’s a silver lining to that because that forces us to show we can reestablish those points.”

One NORTHCOM planner acknowledged that the system experienced challenges with bandwidth in the days leading up to the exercise.

“What you’re doing is you’re trying to take things that were designed for an unclassified, optimal, cutting-edge technology, and then you’re cutting it in through SIPR [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network] feeds,” he said, using an acronym to describe the military’s network used to send classified information at the secret level.

“SIPR is designed to be optimized for security. Those two things don’t match up very well,” he added. “We were having five minutes of latency in some cases with the feeds that were coming into here.”

Roper also added that the artificial intelligence software, though very promising, needs more work before it is mature enough for fielding. But NORTHCOM head Gen. Glen VanHerck said he is impressed by the AI capability and that it helped provide commanders formulate potential responses to the incoming cruise missile threat.

“With regards to the artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine capabilities, I think it’s important to point out you can be skeptical of those capabilities,” he said. “I’m not a skeptic after watching today.”

“What we saw as it took a look at the threat over and over, it digested more of what that threat capability looked like and gave us a higher percentage of competence,” he added. “And so as a combatant commander, that is very appealing to me to get a system like that — that will learn and provide an additional capability.”

All told, about 1,500 military personnel and 60 industry teams took part in the event, which was led by NORTHCOM and U.S. Space Command. The experiment included platforms from all of the military services — everything from F-16 fighters, MQ-9 Reaper drones, a Navy destroyer and a Coast Guard cutter, as well as experimental technologies like expeditionary 5G towers and robot security dogs made by Ghost Robotics.

Some industry teams embedded software developers with officers operating the control center, and were on call to modify and patch code when users discovered software bugs.

“When we did our dry run, some things weren’t working,” the first NORTHCOM planner said. “They would literally run over, they break open the code. They then repackage it, they push a patch out and then the thing would work. And that would happen over the course of about a minute to be able to do that.”

Anduril Industries offered two technologies used in the experiment. It developed a set of sensor towers used to find and track the cruise missile threats, which will continue to undergo testing by NORTHCOM over the next few months, said Chris Brose, the company’s head of strategy.

Its Lattice software also provided battlefield awareness and AI for the control center. It is one of the technologies that could be a contender for products like OmniaONE, SmartONE and CommandONE.

“You’re taking cognitive burden off of the operator when it comes to understanding the environment, ruling out false positives and finding objects that the user has said that they care about. So in the case of this exercise, it’s cruise missiles,” Brose said of Lattice. “It’s the ability to fuse those [indicators] into objects, classify them as such, and then provide that alert to a human being so that they can make a decision about it.”

“I think, you know, ultimately where we’re going with Lattice is really automating that decision support to the user to say: ‘Considering what’s available, here’s what I would recommend you use, based on an optimal target/weapons pairing.’ And that’s capability that we’re building right now,” he added.

Parsons Corp. also participated in the experiment, said Jay Lennon, its vice president of multidomain solutions, who spoke to Defense News during a Sept. 4 interview. Lennon declined to comment on the exact nature of the technologies offered by Parsons for the event.

The Air Force could be getting close to more broadly fielding some of the capabilities featured in the ABMS experiments, such as the cloud-computing environment — CloudONE — and OmniaONE, Roper said. But it will be up to VanHerck and other combatant commanders to make the call on what is ready and of most use to operators.

“I’m very confident that multiple ... things that we demonstrated today will be transitioned to [combatant commands] in future,” Roper said. “We had five combatant commands sharing the same cloud environments, seeing the same picture, collaborating with the same tools, which is so much better than what we have today.”

Via C4ISRNET

The Turkish Army will receive its Leopard-2A4 MBT tanks with additional T1 armor in October!

The Turkish Army is expected to receive upgraded Leopard 2A4 MBTs with additional T1 armor in October. Research on the T1 auxiliary armor, which combines reactive and passive protection, was carried out by the Roketsan Ballistic Protection Center and has now been applied to German-made Leopard 2A4 tanks in the Turkish Army inventory.

Tanks are to be upgraded

Research into T1 additional armor, which combines reactive and passive protection for vehicles, has been carried out by the Roketsan Ballistic Protection Center for a while.

With the additions to the tank's existing armor system, resistance to anti-tank missiles have been increased.

The technology display tank on which the changes have been applied, was also exhibited at the ceremony.

Although the weight of the tank increased from 55 tons to 62 tons with the added armor, obstacle overcoming and mobility tests in the field were successful. It was proved that despite the increased weight, there were no losses to operational power.

The new armor can protect against all known anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) threats in regions where the TSK is actively in operation. This level of protection was tested in field in Şereflikoçhisar using the demonstration tank and was accepted.

The deliveries of Leopard 2A4 tanks with the upgraded protection level, are planned to kickoff with two tanks in October-November. In the first phase, 40 tanks are expected to be upgraded.