Future Combat Air System (FCAS) - France/Germany
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Green Light for FCMS, Indra and Thales to Start Designing the Sensors That Will Contribute to NGWS/FCAS Superiority
(Source: Indra; issued Nov. 23, 2020)
MADRID --- Germany, Spain and France, the three driving forces of the NGWS/FCAS program, have entrusted FCMS, Indra and Thales with the development of the innovative suite of sensors that will equip the Future European Combat Air System.
The French Armament General Directorate (DGA) on behalf of the three nations, has signed the contract with Indra as leader of the industrial consortium in order to incorporate the Sensors as part of the Phase 1 contractual framework. The Phase 1 A Concept Study for Sensors will last for one year, a period which may be extended by another six months.
The consortium will work on the design of the concepts required to meet the stakes of 2040 and beyond for the next generation combat system, involving a connected and distributed architecture of sensors, the design of future sensors architectures and the maturation of the associated sensors technologies.
This distributed sensor architecture will leverage the capabilities provided by the NGWS/FCAS combat cloud, with improved system situational awareness and increased platforms survivability. The sensors pillar consortium looks forward to working together with the other NGWS/FCAS pillars (Combat Cloud, Next Generation Fighter, Remote Carriers) in order to optimize the design and integration of the Sensors within the System and platforms.
The signing of this initial contract provides evidence of the excellent harmony and spirit of collaboration among FCMS, Indra and Thales. According to Manuel Rodríguez Cerezo, the Director of the NGWS/FCAS program at Indra, “the industrial cooperation and the proactivity demonstrated by the three companies have facilitated the taking of this first step to move ahead with the program”.
The development of the sensor pillar is essential to ensure consistent architectures that are perfectly integrated into the new generation fighters (NGF), unmanned systems and remote operators (RCs) and the combat cloud. The superiority of the NGWS/FCAS will largely depend on the capacity of its network of sensors to compile more and better information than the adversary.
Indra has been appointed by the Spanish Ministry of Defence to coordinate the Spanish participation in the FCAS/NGWS program. It also heads up the Spanish participation in four of the eight pillars into which the program has been divided. It has signed international industrial agreements to lead the two transversal pillars (the studies of the system concept and the inter-pillar consistency) with Dassault and Airbus, heads up the sensors pillar at the European level and participates in the development of the combat cloud as the main partner. Indra's role as coordinator of the NGWS/FCAS program seeks to ensure that Spanish industry achieves the maximum level and quality of participation in the program.
FCMS (Future Combat Mission Systems) is a consortium formed by Hensoldt, Diehl Defence, ESG and Rohde & Schwarz that brings together the capabilities and innovative strengths of over 22,000 employees in the security and defence industry, some 16,000 of whom are located in Germany. Hensoldt is contributing to FCMS with all of its portfolio competences like, radar, electronic warfare, electro-optical systems. Within Hensoldt, the Program Lead lies with Spectrum Dominance & Airborne solutions. Hensoldt technology is key for the performance of the future Sensor Effector network.
Indra is one of the leading global technology and consulting companies and the technological partner for core business operations of its clients world-wide. At the end of fiscal year 2019, Indra achieved revenues of €3.204 billion, with more than 49,000 employees, a local presence in 46 countries and business operations in over 140 countries.
Thales is a global high technology leader investing in digital and “deep tech” innovations –connectivity, big data, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum technology.With 83,000 employees in 68 countries, Thales generated sales of €19 billion in 2019 (on a basis including Gemalto over 12 months).
(Source: Indra; issued Nov. 23, 2020)
MADRID --- Germany, Spain and France, the three driving forces of the NGWS/FCAS program, have entrusted FCMS, Indra and Thales with the development of the innovative suite of sensors that will equip the Future European Combat Air System.
The French Armament General Directorate (DGA) on behalf of the three nations, has signed the contract with Indra as leader of the industrial consortium in order to incorporate the Sensors as part of the Phase 1 contractual framework. The Phase 1 A Concept Study for Sensors will last for one year, a period which may be extended by another six months.
The consortium will work on the design of the concepts required to meet the stakes of 2040 and beyond for the next generation combat system, involving a connected and distributed architecture of sensors, the design of future sensors architectures and the maturation of the associated sensors technologies.
This distributed sensor architecture will leverage the capabilities provided by the NGWS/FCAS combat cloud, with improved system situational awareness and increased platforms survivability. The sensors pillar consortium looks forward to working together with the other NGWS/FCAS pillars (Combat Cloud, Next Generation Fighter, Remote Carriers) in order to optimize the design and integration of the Sensors within the System and platforms.
The signing of this initial contract provides evidence of the excellent harmony and spirit of collaboration among FCMS, Indra and Thales. According to Manuel Rodríguez Cerezo, the Director of the NGWS/FCAS program at Indra, “the industrial cooperation and the proactivity demonstrated by the three companies have facilitated the taking of this first step to move ahead with the program”.
The development of the sensor pillar is essential to ensure consistent architectures that are perfectly integrated into the new generation fighters (NGF), unmanned systems and remote operators (RCs) and the combat cloud. The superiority of the NGWS/FCAS will largely depend on the capacity of its network of sensors to compile more and better information than the adversary.
Indra has been appointed by the Spanish Ministry of Defence to coordinate the Spanish participation in the FCAS/NGWS program. It also heads up the Spanish participation in four of the eight pillars into which the program has been divided. It has signed international industrial agreements to lead the two transversal pillars (the studies of the system concept and the inter-pillar consistency) with Dassault and Airbus, heads up the sensors pillar at the European level and participates in the development of the combat cloud as the main partner. Indra's role as coordinator of the NGWS/FCAS program seeks to ensure that Spanish industry achieves the maximum level and quality of participation in the program.
FCMS (Future Combat Mission Systems) is a consortium formed by Hensoldt, Diehl Defence, ESG and Rohde & Schwarz that brings together the capabilities and innovative strengths of over 22,000 employees in the security and defence industry, some 16,000 of whom are located in Germany. Hensoldt is contributing to FCMS with all of its portfolio competences like, radar, electronic warfare, electro-optical systems. Within Hensoldt, the Program Lead lies with Spectrum Dominance & Airborne solutions. Hensoldt technology is key for the performance of the future Sensor Effector network.
Indra is one of the leading global technology and consulting companies and the technological partner for core business operations of its clients world-wide. At the end of fiscal year 2019, Indra achieved revenues of €3.204 billion, with more than 49,000 employees, a local presence in 46 countries and business operations in over 140 countries.
Thales is a global high technology leader investing in digital and “deep tech” innovations –connectivity, big data, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum technology.With 83,000 employees in 68 countries, Thales generated sales of €19 billion in 2019 (on a basis including Gemalto over 12 months).
Should we signal the end of FCAS now? Or there's still some hope left?
How realistic do you think is the 2040-45 completion date for the project now?
Why Europe’s FCAS projects won’t join formation in 2021
One certainty for 2021 is that Europe's parallel efforts to develop the region's next-generation Future Combat Air System will not see a convergence.
www.flightglobal.com
France's Dassault eyes Plan B if European fighter talks fail
The chief executive of French planemaker Dassault Aviation (AVMD.PA) raised the prospect of an alternative plan on Friday if talks between France, Germany and Spain on a joint fighter plane break down, but said he still believes in the project.
France's Dassault eyes Plan B if European fighter talks fail
The chief executive of French planemaker Dassault Aviation raised the prospect of an alternative plan on Friday if talks between France, Germany and Spain on a joint fighter plane break down, but said he still believes in the project.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron first floated the venture in 2017 but it has become mired in mistrust and differing visions between Berlin and Paris as well as corporate infighting over workshare, people close to the talks have said. Spain’s decision to join the project last year further slowed discussions.
“I don’t believe it’s in mortal danger but I’m not going to tell you that the patient is not in difficulty,” Dassault’s CEO Eric Trappier said of the project formally launched in 2019.
“The head of a company must always have a Plan B in mind. He does everything to ensure Plan A succeeds, everything. But the day Plan A doesn’t work you need a Plan B,” he told a news conference when asked what would happen if the talks failed.
Trappier said Dassault had accepted that European planemaker Airbus would have a larger overall share under an equal three-way split agreed by the partners, since it represents the military aircraft industries of both Germany and Spain.
But that did not mean all parts of the work could be split equally with no clear leadership, he added.
A key stumbling block concerns the control of technologies like flight controls, for which France claims the upper hand since Dassault builds fighter planes and business jets on its own and Airbus has its civil engineering offices in Toulouse.
“If nobody is running flight controls it’s not possible, it won’t work: you have to have someone in charge,” Trappier said.
He played down a separate dispute over access to know-how, saying Dassault and Airbus had a shared industrial understanding of the way intellectual property is protected. That discussion is mainly being conducted at a political level, he added.
Trappier said a merger between FCAS and the BAE Systems-led Tempest project involving Britain, Sweden and Italy was “not on the agenda”. (Reporting by Tim Hepher; editing by Jason Neely and Elaine Hardcastle)
@Picdelamirand-oil @Bon Plan @A Person @BMD @halloweene @Herciv
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On the air defense site in French almost all the participants hope that the project will fail because it seems to us that Dassault will make a better system alone than in cooperation with the Germans and Spanish.
That's been my opinion since the beginning.
The Germans and Spaniards can join the British and Italians to make the Tempest. Security is far too important to be left to the Germans.
It has occurred to me that while France is certainly technically competent to develop relevant technologies that'd go into the 6th G FCAS in house , the financial obligations for which would be onerous which can only be offset thru collaborations or thru sale. If the former is ruled out, the latter can be accomplished in increasingly limited numbers moving ahead.
As we've seen with the 4th G Rafale, it's proving to be an increasingly difficult task to sell not on a/c of it's technology which is state of the art , but defense procurement is rarely simple or decided solely on technological prowess with alliances & influence playing a major role apart from the price tag. That explains the success of the F-35 irrespective of the quality of that platform.
Moreover, future customers for this will be increasingly hard to come by as SK, Japan, India etc have their own programs. Sub regional powers like Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt etc would either have limited requirements or like the other European powers, spoilt for choice or tilt towards the US. The likes of Iran, Pakistan etc are definitely no go areas.
Moving ahead while the French state may well bankroll this particular venture were the DA led consortium to walk out of the JV in pursuit of it's larger aims of strategic autonomy, I wonder how exactly would the French resolve this problem when the 7thG platform is to be built & the decision for that would have to be made by the end of this decade as the way things are progressing the FCAS should mature by the late 2030's by which time the QRs for the 7th G along with it's alliance partners should be frozen if it has to make first flight by the early 2040's.
Eric Trappier, the CEO of French airplane maker Dassault Aviation, was heard today by the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed forces committee of the French Senate, and delivered a strong message on the state of the trilateral Future Combat Air System project. To sum it up bluntly, he said that the demands Germany and Spain are making lead to an unworkable project.
Here is a video of the hearing, in French. A transcript will be published by parliamentary services in the week to come, but for now here are the highlights:
- The Joint Concept Study (JCS), which deals with the operational and technical feasibility of the overall project, will be finalized by summer, with one to two concept proposal to be presented to the three states.
- Meanwhile, the various companies involved are finalizing the studies on the demonstrators (engine, airframe, sensors) to be developed before the actual systems to reduce risk. Phase 1A is underway. A Phase 1B is under negotiation, it would amount to 700M€ and consist in a detailed design of the demonstrators. It would be followed by Phase 2, the actual manufacturing of the demonstrators, for 2 billion euros. Afterwards, the development and manufacturing of the actual production systems would run in the tens of billions of euros.
- Since Spain joined the program in summer 2020, the states have agreed that each would provide one third of the funding, and receive one third of the workshare.
- During negotiations from June to December 2020, Dassault, which previously had more than 50% of workshare on the NGF, the next generation fighter at the heart of FCAS, and was designated as the design authority, has agreed to reduce it workshare to one-third. This puts Airbus Defense & Space , which is the company that both Germany and Spain have designated has their lead on NGF, in a majority position with the remaining two-thirds.
Dassault artist impression of the NGF
- Furthermore, whereas previously sub-system work packages were split between either Airbus or Dassault, with one of these being the design authority on each package, the states have decided to have joint design authorities on half one the packages. Trappier underlines that in such a situation, noone is truly responsible for the design. In addition, on the other 50% of the work packages, Dassault left half of those to Airbus as design authority, which means Dassault is now design lead on only roughly 25% of the work packages. Trappier stated “reflecting back to this situation, I think we have gone too far”
- In the end, Dassault proposed this workshare arrangement to the states, and Germany and Spain refused, because they thought Airbus did not get enough workshare and design authority. Trappier did not budge, because for him increasing the share of Airbus deprives him of the tools he needs to ensure the program meets its specifications and is delivered on time. He cannot do so if he has no leverage towards his subcontractors. So that is where the negotiations blocked. To illustrate his point, he took the example of the flight control system: it is one of Dassault’s main areas of expertise and integral to the performance and safety of the plane, but Germany and Spain are now claiming one third each of the workshare, and want this expertise duplicated in Airbus centers in Manching, Germany and in Spain. He showed the irony of this, since the Airbus team in charge of flight control systems is located in Toulouse, France. Germany is also claiming joint design authority on the cockpit’s man-machine interface, the overall stealth design, and the mission system.
- On the intellectual property issues that recently surfaced in the press, he underlined that there are two types of actual property: foreground, which is what is developed during the project, and background, which is the knowledge and insights acquired by the company throughout its history. He agrees that foreground should be shared among partners, but not the background, which is the property of Dassault and its source of competitive advantage. If he were to share it, meaning that he would explain to all partners the reason behind the choices that are made, then this expertise would be acquired by the other partners, and if the project stopped in two years they would now be able to compete with Dassault. He strongly reminded the senators that he said so since the beginning of the project, and recently reminded the three military procurement agencies of that.
- Speaking the plan B that he mentioned this week while presenting Dassault’s 2020 results, he explained that it is not that France would build the NGF alone, but that rather a different governance structure has to be found, it which Dassault remain the actual design authority, rather that the authority in name only the three-thirds split results in. I take this to means he wants that France funds 50% of the NGF and that he has authority over 50% of the workshare. He used the example of the Neuron stealth UCAV project, in which Dassault had 50% of the workshare, and said it was a good line of thinking.
- On the other components of the FCAS, Airbus has design authority of the remote carrier part. Initially these were thought to be relatively small platforms, but now larger platforms, deserving the loyal wingman or even UCAV designation, are being considered. When he inquired of these would connect to the NGF, he was rebuffed because that is Airbus’s work package.
- He ended by a recommendations to the French political authorities, saying that cooperations should be balanced and win-win. He underlined that Germany has the lead on the Eurodrone project and the Main Ground Combat System future tank project, and is de facto challenging the French leadership on FCAS.
ANALYSIS AND PATH FORWARD
FCAS seems to be in dire straits. To use again of of Trappier’s sayings, “the patient is not in terminal phase but is not doing well”. The main cause of problems seems to be the 33% share of Spain in the project. It removes the French leadership, and consequently makes it impossible to have a main design authority. Furthermore, the Spanish share is unrealistically high and should have been challenged by French political authorities: Spain spent 17B$ (1.2% of GDP) on defense in 2020, to be compared to 50B$ for France (1.9% of GDP) and 49B$ for Germany (1.3% of GDP). As such, it is completely illusory that Spain will order as many FCAS planes and remote carriers as France and Germany, and thus the 30% share will not be able to be maintained in the production phase. However, once a country has done the R&D for a subsystem, switching the production to another country is extremely difficult. Indeed, this has been a common technique in previous European cooperations projects such as A400M: some states (Germany not to name names) announced they would order a large number of aircraft and get a correspondingly large workshare in return, and then, once manufacturing started and the factories could no longer be moved, significantly reduced their orders, keeping the industrial benefits without having to pay the costs.Another way to look at this is by the number of fighters in each Air Force: Spain has 68 Eurofighters and 72 FA-18As, Germany has 60 Tornado (which will be replaced by Eurofighters and FA-18E/F/Gs, not FCAS) and 141 Typhoons (with teething readiness problems due to low maintenance funding) and France 55 renovated Mirage 2000D, 28 Mirage 200-5F, 105 Rafale B&C and 42 Rafale M. Based on these numbers, the fighters to be replaced by FCAS are 140 for Spain, 140 for Germany and 230 for France, ie 510 in total, suggesting a 27.5%/27.5%/45% split.
A 25%/25%50% split would probably be palatable to Germany and Spain regarding industrial return, and even more to France. It would still ensure a clear design authority for the project, making it much more likely to succeed. If such a deal cannot be reached quickly, the German parliamentary elections, followed by the French presidential elections, will put a stop to the project, making it likely that France will go it alone or find other partners to fulfill its real operational need of having a new fighter in 2040.
In short Dassault aviation wants to bank roll their R&D costs on Spain and Germany and then have assured customers while retaining all the IPRs with them. Nice.And so it begins. How are my predictions so far?
Just like Russia Tried to rope in India for PAKFA for Bank roll and have assured customer for it while keeping IPRs to them and make a jackass out of India and India said sorry not interested....
Dassault tried to do a PAKFA on Spain and Germany with same result....
So it's again a Eurofighter 2.0And so it begins. How are my predictions so far?
European defence drama doesn't seem that different from Indian defence nowadays..
It’s good for all parties in long term. Clearly Germans and Spaniards have no interest whatsoever in developing anything that costly and risky such as a 6th gen NGFA.
They just want to put their foot in the door and try to bog down the efforts of Dassault in bureaucratic quagmire the EU brings to the table
The pilot will have to fill out 12 forms and submit them to Parliament just to apply radar lock.
Design architecture of FCAS
Companies with no real experience are trying to take the lead. This won't go anywhere. What is Indra's history with avioncs? What's Airbus's history with stealth? They should make something worthwhile before taking the lead here.
FCAS is definitely gonna be a bigger white elephant than the F-35 if this is how it pans out.
I hope France pulls out. By 2045 there will be a massive new market for fighter jets in the current developing world, France should pin their hopes on exports instead of partnerships.
And there is every possibility that Angela grandma might veto it at the last moment