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Новости ВС и ВПК Европы

Швеция увеличит оборонный бюджет на 2021-2025 годы на 40% из-за роста напряженности в регионе и "российской агрессии".

К 2025 году объем выделяемых на оборону средств достигнет $10,6 млрд, став самым крыпным за последние 70 лет.

Помимо приобретения новых вооружений, планируется увеличение численности ВС страны на 55 тысяч человек.
 
В Европе началась разработка боевых роботов


Франция успешно провела испытания обновленной ядерной ракеты ASMPA


 
US Army mobile howitzer shoot-off participants emerge

UPDATE This story has been updated to include Nexter’s participation in the shoot-off.
WASHINGTON — Participants are emerging for the U.S. Army’s mobile 155mm howitzer shoot-off coming up in early 2021 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.
Elbit Systems of America announced Dec. 17 it had been chosen to bring its Autonomous Truck Mounted Ordnance System (ATMOS) Iron Sabre to the evaluation.
And BAE Systems, Nexter and Serbia’s Yugoimport announced they too had been chosen to bring offerings to the shoot-off.
AM General has also publicly expressed their interest in participating in the shoot-off. Other possible offerings could come from South Korean defense company Hanwha and Japan’s Mitsubishi. Other contenders could be the South African 6x6 Rhino or the Slovakian 8x8 DANA.
The Army is looking for a production-ready system that offers an improvement in range, rate-of-fire and mobility over the artillery systems used within Stryker Brigade Combat Teams now. The service released an announcement in July seeking a more mobile, lethal and survivable replacement for its current towed howitzers and described its plan for a three-month-long shoot-off.


Participants must provide 18 evaluation systems for the event, according to the solicitation. The Army would like the selected company to begin delivering systems in the first quarter of fiscal 2023.
Elbit said in its statement that it was confident its system would perform well in the shoot-off because it’s “ready now.” ATMOS Iron Sabre is “a proven fielded system from a family of howitzers that have supported international customers for more than 30 years.”
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ATMOS Iron Sabre is a 155mm/52 caliber semi-automatic system capable of firing six to seven rounds a minute with a crew of four, Dave Richards, senior director of precision weapon systems ground combat & precision targeting solutions at Elbit Systems of America, said during a media availability.
The Elbit system is C-17-transportable and can traverse the battlefield at roughly 50 miles per hour and has a “shoot-and-scoot” capability of roughly 30 seconds, which means it takes a half minute to stop, set up and shoot and the same amount of time to stop shooting, pack up and move out of the way. This capability is critical against high-end adversaries like Russia, which have displayed its ability — particularly in the fight with Ukraine — to quickly detect firing locations and respond.
While ATMOS will arrive at the evaluation with its own fire control system used by Israeli forces, the system can be customizable and could integrate different fire control systems as customers see fit, Richards said. The Army will be looking at fire control system capability as part of the demonstration.

Should Elbit be chosen to manufacture and field its system for the U.S. Army, the company is looking at a plan to facilitate production capability in the U.S., according to Richards. As it stands today, ATMOS systems are mostly produced in Israel and final production would take place in the U.S. at least initially.
“COVID has demonstrated the importance of domestic supply chain security. We take that very seriously,” Richards said. “We are in a multi-year process of facilitating production of vehicle systems in the United States and obviously this will be contingent upon delivery timing, but we do have a broad plan to actually produce most systems and subsystems within the United States.”
BAE Systems announced earlier this year that it had offered up its Archer howitzer to the Army for the shoot-off.
The company confirmed to Defense News it was selected to participate in the shoot-off.
“We are confident that the Archer, highly mature and in service with the Swedish Army, will demonstrate its superiority at providing rapid, highly effective, and sustained fire support for troops in combat,” the company said in a statement. “The Archer’s automated design, armored cabin, fast shoot and scoot times, and extended range enhance its survivability on the battlefield. Soldiers can operate the vehicle entirely from inside the cabin, under armor, while striking enemy targets at long ranges.”


Archer is typically operated by a crew of three to four soldiers but can be operated by only one, according to BAE. Archer can also fire within 30 seconds after receiving an order to shoot and can scoot within 30 seconds as well. The magazine carries 21 rounds and can unload all of them in less than three minutes, BAE said. Archer can shoot the BONUS anti-armor munition up to 35 kilometers, conventional munitions up to 40 kilometers, and currently fielded precision-guided munitions like Excalibur in excess of 50 km, according to the company.
Global Military Products also announced Dec. 17 that the U.S. Army had chosen its Serbian partner Yugoimport’s NORA B-52 155mm wheeled howitzer for the shoot-off as well.
Serbia's Yugoimport has been chosen to provide the Nora B-52 155mm Howitzer System Firing Desert for the U.S. Army's mobile howitzer shoot-off scheduled to take place in early 2021. (Photo courtesy of Global Military Products)
Serbia's Yugoimport has been chosen to provide the Nora B-52 155mm Howitzer System Firing Desert for the U.S. Army's mobile howitzer shoot-off scheduled to take place in early 2021. (Photo courtesy of Global Military Products)
NORA has a fully automatic autoloader and a “move-shoot-move while under armor” capability, according to the statement. NORA has undergone modernization and upgrades over the past several years “that are sure to get the attention of the U.S. Army” the statement adds.
Nexter told Defense News it had been selected to bring its 155mm self-propelled howitzer CAESAR — which has been in service since 2008 and battle-tested in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali and Iraq — as a strong candidate for the shoot-off. It will be bringing the 6x6 version used by the French Army.

The company has sold more than 300 CAESAR systems to the French, South-East Asian and Middle Eastern armies.
CAESAR can fire 6 shots in less than 1min 40 seconds, according to Nexter, and the system’s 8x8 version can carry 30 rounds. It’s 6x6 variant can carry 18. The gun has an adapted automatic loading system.
AM General has advertised both its Brutus 155mm and Hawkeye 105mm mobile howitzers and is expected to participate in the shoot-off. The company said it would not comment on whether it was selected at this time.
 
New Low-Yield Nuclear Warheads That Biden Calls A "Bad Idea" Have All Been Delivered
Biden has opposed the Trump Administration's deployment of low-yield nuclear warheads on the Navy's Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles.


A new report says that the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration has finished the planned production run of controversial low-yield W76-2 nuclear warheads for the U.S. Navy's Trident D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles and delivered all of them to that service. This revelation comes just weeks before President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office. Biden has said that fielding this weapon, which some experts say worryingly increases the chances of the U.S. government using nuclear weapons in a crisis, is a "bad idea."
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the development and production of nuclear weapons and manages America's nuclear deterrent stockpile, provided the new details about the W76-2 program in its annual Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan for Congress. NNSA released the unclassified version of this report on Dec. 28, 2020.

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YOUTUBE CAPTURE
Personnel at the Pantex plant in Texas load a Mk 4A reentry vehicle containing a W76-1 warhead into a container for transport. The W76-2 warhead fits inside the same reentry vehicle.

"The W76-2 is the nation's response to the low-yield ballistic missile requirement called for in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review," the NNSA report says. "In FY 2020, assembly of the W76-2 was completed, with the full quantity produced and delivered to the Navy."
The 2020 Fiscal Year ended on Sept. 30. We don't know how many W76-2s were completed in total or how many are deployed on Trident D5s loaded on the Navy's Ohio class ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs, at any one time. Reports had emerged in January that the USS Tennessee had become the first boat to head out on a deterrent patrol carrying Tridents armed with these warheads. NNSA had previously announced the completion of the first W76-2 at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, in February 2019.



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How exactly the W76-2 differs from previous W76 warheads is classified, but it is understood to be a derivative of the W76-1 design. NNSA crafted the W76-1 as part of a life-extension program for existing W76s and delivered the last of these overhauled warheads to the Navy in 2019. The latest Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan confirms that some W76-1s were subsequently converted into W76-2s.

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NNSA
The official W76-2 program logo. Mk 4A refers to the reentry vehicle that the warhead sits inside when loaded into the Trident D5 missile.
The W76-1 has an estimated yield of approximately 100 kilotons, while that of the W76-2 is believed to be around just five kilotons. If that latter estimate is accurate, the W76-2 would have only one-third of the yield of the Little Boy bomb that the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.
It's also worth noting that the Navy's Trident D5s can be armed with W88 warheads, which have a reported approximate yield of 475 kilotons, as well. Each one of these missiles is capable of carrying up to 14 warheads, as well, but successive arms control agreements with Russia mean that they typically only have five or six loaded inside at a time. Of course, the stated strategy behind the W76-2 means that it would defeat the purpose of those warheads if there were loaded together with W76-1s or W88s and it's unlikely that more than one or two of them would be fitted to any one missile.
The maps below were created using NUKEMAP, an online tool created by nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein, presently a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. They show the approximate extent of various effects on the Washington, D.C. area from the detonation of, from right to left, a W88, a W76-1, and a W76-2, based on their estimated yields.

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NUKEMAP
The gray outer circles show the maximum extent of light damage, such as broken windows. The yellow circles, clearly visible in the cases of the W88 and W76-1, is the extent of thermal radiation, which can cause third-degree burns. The other colored bands reflect more extensive damage and the spread of radiation, as well as the immediate fireball, the latter of which is outlined in red.
It is notable that NNSA was able to deliver the entire planned production run of W76-2s to the Navy within 17 months. Production and delivery of the W76-1 warheads took more than a decade to complete, though that effort did also involve a larger number of total warheads.
The speed with which the W76-2s were produced would also seem to bolster previous reports that have posited that this warhead is a version of the W76-1 with its second stage removed to dramatically lower its yield. That some W76-1s were directly converted into W76-2s would seem to add further weight to that existing analysis. The W76-1, as well as the original W76, are understood to be two-stage thermonuclear weapons wherein an initial atomic reaction triggers a second, more powerful one.
Beyond the W76-2's design and capabilities, that the Navy now has the full quantity of these warheads in its inventory is significant by itself. President Donald Trump's Administration initiated the development of this weapon following the completion of the last Nuclear Posture Review in 2018.
The ostensible reasoning behind its development was a need for added flexibility to respond to certain contingencies, especially a limited nuclear strike by a hostile adversary. This requirement was driven in no small part by concerns that the Russian government had adopted a so-called "escalate-to-deescalate" policy wherein it might use a small number of low-yield nuclear weapons to effectively force the end of a conflict on terms favorable to Moscow. At least in theory, the idea would be to shock an opponent or opponents, such as the United States and NATO, into seeking some sort of negotiated settlement rather than further escalating the situation.

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USN
The Ohio class ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee. This boat was the first to deploy with Trident D5s armed with W76-2 warheads.
Experts have questioned whether Russia actually has such a policy. Regardless, the Kremlin has stated in no uncertain terms that it would respond to a strike involving lower-yield warheads in the same way it would to any nuclear attack, with massive retaliation. This makes sense since it would impossible for Russian officials to know what kind of warheads an incoming Trident D5 might be carrying until they hit.
With all this in mind, critics have warned that the W76-2 could lower the U.S. government's thresholds for the employment of nuclear weapons, in general. This, in turn, would increase the danger of a crisis escalation into a full-blown nuclear conflict, which could have apocalyptic implications for the entire globe.
The Trump Administration has denied the W76-2 increases the likelihood of a nuclear exchange, but this has only raised more questions about when the U.S. government would then be prepared to use it rather than higher-yield nuclear weapons.
President-elect Biden has himself been critical of the W76-2, calling them a "bad idea" and saying that their existence makes the U.S. government "more inclined to use them" in the past. In 2019, California Senator Kamala Harris, now Vice President-elect, was among those to call for a ban on the deployment of these low-yield nuclear warheads. There have been calls, as recently as this month, for Biden to end production of these weapons, as well as remove any existing ones from service, when he takes office in the new year.

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AP
Then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, at left, and his running mate Kamala Harris, at a campaign event in August 2020.
It remains to be seen now what will happen to the W76-2 stockpile now that it has been revealed that production of these warheads is complete. The Biden Administration could still very well remove them from service. If they are indeed relatively limited conversions of the W76-1 design, it may be possible to return them to their original configuration. Still, converting the W76-2s into W76-1s would take some amount of time and resources.
The incoming Biden Administration already plans to conduct a thorough review of the U.S. government's nuclear modernization efforts, which began under President Barack Obama and were further expanded under President Trump. As The War Zone has pointed out in the past, it is, at best, questionable if it will be possible to sustain the entire overarching effort, which is set to cost more than $1 trillion, in total, over the next 15 years or so. The looming prospect of budget cuts on the horizons will only make this more challenging.
“We have to modernize our deterrent,” a former U.S. government official told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “But we cannot spend the amount of money that is currently being allocated.”
Whatever course of action the Biden Administration pursues with regards to the W76-2, it's a decision that will now have to cover the entire stockpile of those warheads.
 
Соглашение Великобритании, Италии и Швеции о совместном создании перспективного истребителя Tempest

 
 
 
Франция и Италия будут разрабатывать новое поколение системы ПВО SAMP/T NG

 
 
"Федеральный Кабинет министров определился с ключевыми цифрами для бюджетного планирования на ближайшие годы. Предполагается, что оборонный бюджет на следующий год увеличится на пять процентов, но затем снова сократится. Однако следующий бюджет будет окончательно принят только что сформированным парламентом после федеральных выборов. Эти критерии , которые стали известны в начале недели , после увеличения до 49,29 млрд евро за 2022 год , предусматривают общее падение следующих лет:
2022 год: 49,29 миллиарда евро
2023 год: 46,33 миллиарда евро
2024 год: 46,15 миллиарда евро
2025 год: 45,73 миллиарда евро. Однако тактические системы ПВО/ПРО (TLVS) не входят в это планирование". При Байдене можно не лезть к 2% даже понарошку. Как принято, надо во взаимозачётах за серию ПЛ "Дакар", предложить комплексную ПВО/ПРО, на суше, на море, чего им напрягаться :)
 
 
Французская компания Dassault Aviation начинает реализацию контракта на поставку ВВС Египта новой партии многоцелевых истребителей Rafale. Как сообщили в пресс-службе компании, подписанное весной соглашение вступило в силу сегодня, 15 ноября 2021 года.
В рамках контракта, подписанного в начале мая этого года, египетские ВВС получат 30 новых истребителей Rafale в дополнение к уже поставленным 24-м. Как заявили в Dassault Aviation, после реализации контракта Египет будет иметь на вооружении вторую по численности группировку многоцелевых истребителей Rafale, после Франции конечно же.
 
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