Tag: France

  • Safran plans significant US expansion of defense and space business

    Safran plans significant US expansion of defense and space business

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    French technology company Safran is significantly expanding its defense and space business in the United States, including investments in manufacturing across several states.

    Newly branded Safran Defense & Space Inc. will focus on bringing its high-tech solutions in satellite propulsion and communication, geospatial artificial intelligence and GPS-denied navigation to the U.S. in a more robust way, Joe Bogosian, Safran president and CEO, told Defense News in a recent interview.

    Safran is also well known for its best-selling commercial jet engine it developed in a joint venture with General Electric.

    While the company’s technology has been integrated into many U.S.-based weapon systems, such as the commander’s site on the Army’s new M10 Booker armored fighting vehicle, Bogosian said, the U.S. expansion will enable even better collaboration with the U.S. military and defense industry and foster continued innovation with American engineers and developers.

    “I think it meshes well with kind of a new thinking in the U.S.,” Bogosian said.

    “What is the best available technology or the asymmetric warfare to give our guys an unfair advantage? If that unfair advantage comes with a technology that’s five years ahead of its time compared to anything else in the U.S. and just happens to come from France, we can bring it from France,” he said, “and we can put it here and put further design, further engineering and manufacturing, all in the U.S. and you start to morph that technology into a U.S. variety.”

    The company will soon open its new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Colocated at the headquarters will be the company’s new geospatial artificial intelligence business grown from a recently purchased French AI company with the ability to crunch a massive amount of data very quickly.

    The newly acquired technology surprised everyone in the room during a demonstration for Special Operations Command in Florida meant to show how the technology can rapidly count cars and boats in an area. It suddenly flagged the presence of a Russian MiG fighter jet, according to Bogosian. The system was not mistaken; it turned out there was a MiG on display outside of an aviation museum in Miami.

    Expansions to current Safran facilities include its electro-optics and infrared systems facility in Bedford, New Hampshire, and the Safran Federal Systems facility for Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing in Rochester, New York.

    The company is also setting up its newest facility for small satellite propulsion in Denver, Colorado. Once established, Bogosian sees the potential for expansion beyond producing plasma propulsion systems for satellites to include other capabilities, such as Safran’s Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscope, which has been tested by the U.S. military.

    “We feel the demand for HRG is going to double, and so clearly, it just opens the door for another capability to be brought into the U.S.,” he said.

    Additional investment will be made in testing and telemetry operations in Norcross, Georgia.

    Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

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  • NATO allies ready sea drones for the task of repelling enemy warships

    NATO allies ready sea drones for the task of repelling enemy warships

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    PARIS — A number of NATO countries are pursuing new naval concepts based on sea drones programmed to keep adversaries out of allied waters, a nod to Ukraine’s pursuits with such weapons against Russian ships.

    The alliance nations belong to the so-called Joint Capability Group for Maritime Unmanned Systems, or JCGMUS. The group, created following the 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, comprises more than a dozen nations considered full members, partners or observers.

    Every September, member countries stage one of the largest experimentation exercises with naval unmanned systems – the drill is abbreviated REPMUS – in concert with the Portuguese Navy to help accelerate drone technology testing and interoperability among allies.

    Next year, the emphasis will fall on using unmanned systems to keep adversary forces at a distance, a new tack for the group.

    “The roadmap of REPMUS will focus in 2025 on non-traditional sea denial – that is limiting an adversary’s maritime freedom of action, including through anti-access, area denial and disruptive and dispersible capabilities, based in part on of what we’ve seen in Ukraine,” Craig Sawyer, chair of JCGMUS said during a panel discussion at the Euronaval defense exhibition here on Nov. 5.

    One of the elements that allowed the Ukrainian Navy to create an anti-access perimeter was the deployment of different types of unmanned surface vessels, which in some cases drove straight into Russian vessels at sea or in port to neutralize them.

    The NATO official also added that one of the ambitions for next year’s drill will be to deliver an anti-submarine warfare barrier project demonstrator, an initiative established in 2020 and led by the United Kingdom.

    “The ASW barrier seeks to develop a technical demonstrator comprising both legacy and interoperable maritime uncrewed systems to securely provide a force multiplying anti-submarine warfare capability,” Sawyer said during his presentation.

    The project involves 12 other countries, including Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the U.S., Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Australia.

    The widespread use of drones seen in Ukraine across all domains has spurred greater investments in these technologies, with many countries having launched national tenders to acquire new platforms.

    While procuring more unmanned assets is a necessity for many nations, Sawyer warned of the risk of tackling them alone.

    “The need for standards and interoperability becomes critical when you realize the mass and scale UxS [unmanned systems] represent – we will never be able to manage thousands of assets as individual cases and programs,” he said.

    Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.

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  • France looks to boost export financing to help mid-sized defense firms

    France looks to boost export financing to help mid-sized defense firms

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    PARIS — French public investment bank Bpifrance is seeking to increase the amount of export financing it can provide to small and medium-sized defense firms, as the current limit is insufficient to meet some demands, the bank’s head of export finance said.

    Bpifrance currently provides up to €25 million (US$27 million) of financing for export deals when it’s acting as the single lender and would like to raise that to around €40 million in 2025, Hugues Latourrette, the head of the Bpifrance export-finance department, told Defense News at the Euronaval show outside Paris.

    “We’re pushing in that direction because we feel there’s a need,” Latourrette said. While Bpifrance’s limits on export financing affect only a few companies for now, “due to the dynamics of the industry, it’s something that could evolve rapidly.”

    The public investment bank fills a market gap, as few large commercial banks are interested in providing small and medium-sized exporters with financing for amounts below €40 million, according to Latourrette. He declined to provide details on the companies seeking export financing from Bpifrance, citing reasons of confidentiality.

    Foreign defense markets are “extremely competitive,” and manufacturers from Turkey, South Korea and Israel “can make life difficult for our manufacturers in France,” Latourrette said during a forum discussion at Euronaval. A commercial and technical proposal is not necessarily enough to win an export deal, and often needs to be accompanied by a financial offer, the banker said.

    France was the second-largest arms exporter in the 2019-2023 period after the United States, accounting for 11% of global arms exports, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The country has around 4,000 small and medium-sized defense-industry firms, according to the Armed Forces Ministry.

    Bpifrance helps defense exporters win contracts, including through financing deals on the African continent, and the bank is involved in export negotiations in Europe, Latourrette said. The bank only provides financing in euros, and doesn’t engage in dollar transactions for reasons of extraterritorial action.

    Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.

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  • Europe launches space mission in defense against city-killer asteroids

    Europe launches space mission in defense against city-killer asteroids

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    PARIS — Europe launched its first spacecraft to help develop a defense against city-killer asteroids slamming into Earth.

    The European Space Agency’s Hera mission, to which defense firms Thales and Leonardo contributed technology through their joint venture Thales Alenia Space, took off from Cape Canaveral on Monday riding on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket. The mission will study the results of a NASA experiment that was humankind’s first attempt at deflecting an asteroid.

    About 30,000 asteroids measuring 100 to 300 meters travel the solar system in orbits that bring them relatively close to Earth, with one such space rock hitting the planet every 10,000 years, according to Thales. The impact of such an asteroid would be equivalent to an explosion of around 50 megatons, equal to the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested.

    “We currently know of more than 35 000 asteroids that come close enough to Earth for us to keep an eye on,” ESA wrote in post on X, formerly Twitter. “Hera is part of the international effort to answer the question: Could we do anything if we spotted one on a collision course?”

    The Hera mission will investigate the result of NASA’s asteroid redirection test, in which the U.S. agency rammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022 to test planetary defense capabilities. Hera will reach the binary asteroid system that includes Dimorphos in October 2026, and gathering close-up data may help turn NASA’s kinetic impact experiment into a potentially repeatable planetary defense technique, Thales said.

    Mid-sized asteroids are the ones to worry about, as their impact would be devastating for a populated area, capable of destroying an entire city or create a tsunami, according to Thales. Binary systems, a term describing pairs of two orbiting each other, account for around 15% of all known asteroids, but none have ever been studied in detail, ESA says.

    “Hera will provide valuable data for future asteroid deflection missions and science to help humanity’s understanding of asteroid geophysics as well as solar system formation and evolutionary processes,” SpaceX said in a post on X.

    Thales Alenia Space provided the communications subsystem for the Hera mission, allowing ESA to track and control the spacecraft from a distance of up to 500 million kilometers away, Thales said. The joint venture also supplied the power unit.

    ESA plans to build on the experience acquired with Hera for its future Ramses mission, which needs to launch in 2028 for a rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis, which will pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth in April 2029.

    “If we did detect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, a reconnaissance mission like Hera or Ramses would likely be launched as soon as possible to precisely determine the object’s trajectory and rule out a false alarm,” ESA said on X.

    Such as mission would also measure the asteroid’s physical properties, which would be essential to determine when and where, and with what power, a deflector mission would need to hit the asteroid to safely divert it away from Earth, according to ESA.

    Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.

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