Smart Shooter Ltd.
Kibbutz Yagur, Israel
+ 972-72-3202111
www.smart-shooter.com

Smart Shooter's SMASH fire control system adds digital precision to in-service rifles and ammunition. It has been successfully tested by US Special Operations Forces and other military agencies, and it officially entered operational service with the Israel Defence Forces in early 2018. The latest and most advanced variant – SMASH 2000 Plus – has the capability to lock, track and accurately hit conventional targets as well as small, fast and maneuverable tactical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), day and night.

Much debate surrounds the skills shortage burdening the manufacturing sector of aerospace and defense (A&D). Industry 4.0, the Baby Boomer retirement wave, and a lack of properly trained workers underpins this issue, and while it's widely acknowledged, there's no clearly defined way to address it.

It was a normal morning for design physicist Madison Martin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). At 7:45 a.m., she settled into her classified workstation with a cup of tea to check the results of a numerical calculation she ran overnight. If the calculations proved correct, the experiment she was designing on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) would deliver the data her colleagues needed to verify that a refurbished nuclear warhead would perform as expected.

Northrop Grumman Corporation
Falls Church, VA
703-280-2900
www.northropgrumman.com

The Northrop Grumman Corporation-developed Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS) successfully demonstrated its ability to scale up and network across long distances during a recent U.S. Army-led test. The evaluation was conducted by U.S. Army soldiers over a five-week period with air and missile defense assets located at sites in New Mexico, Texas and Alabama.

FLIR Systems, Inc.
Wilsonville, OR
1-800-254-0630
www.flir.com/IBAC2

FLIR Systems, Inc. announced recently that it has received a delivery order for FLIR IBAC™ 2 biological agent detector systems to support the United States (U.S.) Forces Korea (USFK). The delivery order is under a 10-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract in support of the Joint United States Forces Korea Portal and Integrated Threat Recognition (JUPITR) program led by the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD). The order is valued at $4 million with deliveries beginning in July 2018.

Beckwood Press Company
Fenton, MO
636-343-4100
www.beckwood.com

Beckwood Press Company, a company that specializes in the design and manufacturing of custom hydraulic presses, automation systems, and the Triform line of precision forming equipment, was recently awarded a contract by the United States Army—Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center (NSRDEC) to produce a custom 1,000-ton hydraulic press that will be used to consolidate ballistic composites in a compression molding application.

Soldiers on the ground are now capable of rapidly reacting to electronic and cyber data rather than waiting on their higher echelons. Soldiers assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, currently deployed in Poland, are among the first brigades supporting Atlantic Resolve to train on a new system that enables a team to forward deploy and respond to enemy frequencies using new electronic warfare (EW) technology.

DETECTING PLASTIC LANDMINES

Hidden PFM-1 anti-personnel landmines are unexploded ordnance (UXO) devices that pose a difficult challenge to conventional landmine detection methods like metal detecting because the mines are primarily composed of plastic and only weigh 75 g. As a remnant of the Soviet-Afghan War, there are an estimated 10 million such devices scattered throughout Afghanistan. These mines remain in isolated locations, frequently out of reach of de-mining nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and act to thwart local economic and social development. The PFM-1s are infamously referred to as “toy mines,” as children often mistake the mines for toys and set off the 525 kg of cumulative pressure it takes to detonate them.

You can learn a lot from a blast tube when you couple blast experiments with computer modeling. Sandia National Laboratories researchers are using a blast tube configurable to 120 feet to demonstrate how well nuclear weapons could survive the shock wave of a blast from an enemy weapon and to help validate the modeling.

Aircraft corrosion is a multi-faceted issue that requires more than a simple, one-dimensional approach. To enable Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) personnel to arrive at a complete picture and find out how to best protect valuable military assets, a unique solution was required.