Podcast: Defense Highlights At Le Bourget

Hypersonics, missile defense, UAVs and next-generation fighters are in vogue amidst a surge in spending by NATO members. Listen in as our defense editors share what has stood out to them at this year's Paris Air Show.

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Rush Transcript

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GE Aerospace is helping move the world forward, for today and generations to come. Follow GE Aerospace on LinkedIn and Instagram for highlights of their participation at the Paris Air Show. The future of flight starts now.

Joe Anselmo:

Welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Joe Anselmo, editorial director. And pardon the noise, but we are at the Paris Air Show and we're here today to talk about the state of military affairs at the first Paris Show in four years. Joining me our Aviation Week Pentagon Editor Brian Everstine, Tony Osborne, our European Defense Editor, and Defense Editor Steve Trimble. Brian, let's start out with you. What's the mood here at the show?

Brian Everstine:

Well, I think it's really important to kind of look at the broader context of where we are. We're now more than a year, almost a year and a half after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. Really a shock across Europe to really wake up and spend a lot more on defense. But we're about a month away from the NATO summit in Lithuania where we expect to see a significant increase in spending across a lot of the allies, moving from 2% [of GDP] as a goal to 2% as possibly a floor or more. And as we've seen probably across the floor in the static displays, there's a lot of certain mission areas that we see industry really focusing on, particularly air defense. We have now two competing efforts across Europe for a new focus on air defense. And I know Tony, you've been following that real closely.

Tony Osborne:

Yes, that's really one of the more interesting bits of news that have come out of this show, although one of those efforts had already emerged a couple of years ago. So air defense is, as Brian says, a truly significant part of the show. We had President Emmanuel Macron here convene a meeting of European defense leaders talking specifically on that subject. Some critics would say it was possibly inspired by Germany's decision to set up the European Sky Shield initiative a few months ago that France didn't enter and perhaps wanted a piece of. But certainly a few things have come out of that, not least a sort of five nation deal to buy MANPADS [Man-Portable Air Defense Systems]. But I think one of the most interesting things that's come out of the show is that we now have two competing hypersonic interceptor efforts that are funded by Europe. This was initially going to be a single source effort that was called High Def, which emerged a couple of years ago, funded by the European Defense Fund to begin studying a European hypersonic interceptor.

MBDA and a group of companies were not very happy about that decision. And so they went to the European Commission and argued that they should also have an opportunity. And now the European Commission has declared that they will double source this effort and essentially it will now be a parallel competition running through until 2027 to look at developing a hypersonic interceptor. One is called HYDIS2, that's the MBDA effort. And the other one is the Hi Def effort, which is led by a Spanish company, SMS, and Diehl Defense, a German missile company. So that's going to be a really interesting program. And of course we also had an Israeli company, Rafael, announcing their own bids who developed a hypersonic interceptor called Sky Sonic, which Steve, I think you can probably tell us a bit more about.

Steve Trimble:

Well, I mean obviously Rafael on the eve of the show released the first information about that concept and it's a two-stage interceptor with a kill vehicle that's launched by the first stage. There's not a lot of information yet on how they're going to do the tracking, how they're going to do command and control or even really how the kill vehicle works for that. It's a very challenging target set when you're going after these maneuvering hypersonic weapons that stay within the atmosphere. It's hard for traditional sensors to keep them tracked and hard for an interceptor to keep up with them, but also to maneuver fast enough. And so we don't have a lot of details on exactly how the Rafael concept works.

Now, the fact that Rafael is doing this or is showing this concept here is also kind of interesting because that's not where you would go necessarily in Israel for that sort of thing. Now Rafael does Iron Dome with a Tamir rocket for small rockets and cruise missiles and mortars, and they also do David's Sling, which is a pretty impressive but short range air defense system based on the Stunner missile that Rafael worked on with Raytheon. But when you think about very long range and very high speed incoming missiles for Israel, you would think Israel Aerospace Industries and the Aero program. The Aero 2, the Aero 3 is now fielded, and Aero 4 is in development as sort of a replacement for Aero 2. And my guess is that there's probably some other activity in Israel on this. And what we're seeing here at the show is Rafael's either competitor or contender for whatever becomes Israel's solution to this hypersonic defense problem, which of course we've seen Europe now really get involved with.

And the US also has a big initiative with the Missile Defense Agency with their glide phase interceptor and a whole bunch of tracking systems. HBTSS, tracking layer, the Space Systems Command has a medium earth orbit constellation to do tracking now. They're all in development, so it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue as we've seen hypersonic missiles and maneuvering hypersonic weapons start to proliferate around the world. It’s just an interesting trend.

Joe Anselmo:

And Steve, we saw GE Aerospace, which had been pretty mum on hypersonics up until now, actually open up and talk a little bit.

Steve Trimble:

Yeah, and that's actually been something we've been working on for a while. We were aware that GE was doing something in that space, but we couldn't really figure out what. And finally, the head of GE military engines answered my question more fully than they ever have before and confirmed that they are working on a turbine-based combined cycle engine that is really interesting, with a turbine of course. But the turbine will feature a rotating detonation engine combustor, which is a very brand new, very advanced technology. It promises huge fuel efficiency compared to a normal turbine combustor process. And also it you can be packaged in a much shorter system, which reduces the length of something. And when you're talking about a TBCC, length is a big issue because not only do you have that turbine to get it up to a high supersonic speed, it then cuts over to a dual mode ramjet scramjet, which takes it from Mach Three up to Mach Four, and then the scramjet kicks in with supersonic combustion at Mach Five and above.

And so other than knowing that about the program, there's not a whole lot more information. We know that they've got a DARPA demonstrator that's been funded. It's not the Gambit program, which DARPA has talked about with a rotating detonation engine powered cruise missile, but it's some other demonstrator that we're not really sure what the name is. But anyway, that came out of the show. And it is yet another propulsion and technology system that is emerging as the Pentagon tries to make its munitions more survivable and more effective by making them a lot faster than they have before.

Joe Anselmo:

Tony, one of the overhangs at this show has been that several European countries, notably Germany, have pledged massive increases in defense procurement, and have been really slow to follow through on them. Are contractors growing impatient with that?

Tony Osborne:

It's not just Germany, in fact, and I think you may have seen in our interview with [Airbus CEO] Guillaume Faury, there's a lot of contradictions here in Europe about defense spending. There's a lot of big pledges, a lot of money that they want to spend, but there are no actual decisions on procurement, on selections or money really changing hands. And actually that's happening all across Europe, just not Germany, but Germany has become a particular linchpin of that decision that a $100 billion fund it created to spend on defense, only a small proportion of that has actually so far been spent. You do see some frustration about this. There is a worry that nations will not be able to spend this stuff very quickly because their procurement systems have been designed basically to try and trim as much as possible to keep capabilities in service for as long as possible on little money. And they're just not ready for the big sums that the countries really want to spend on defense and renew their equipment.

Joe Anselmo:

And another thing happening here is MALE UAS.

Steve Trimble:

Yes, MALE, not the gender, but the medium altitude long endurance category of unmanned aircraft systems. Always important to clarify when you introduce the topic. And so when you talk about MALE UAS, you think about the United States with Reaper and Predator. You think about Israel with Heron-TP and Hermes, and you think about China with Wing Loong and the Cai Hong Rainbow Series of UAVs. But Europe has always sort of been in the corner and despite clearly having the capability and industrial skill to do something like this, they have not actually done one. The biggest, largest indigenous UAV that I can think of is France's Patroller. And before that, the Sperwer.

Tony Osborne:

There was the Hammerhead that was developed by Piaggio, which often now Piaggo is in sort of...

Steve Trimble:

Suffered an untimely death.

Tony Osborne:

Yes, unfortunately.

Steve Trimble:

Even though it was fully developed and two prototypes were handed over for testing. So into that today exists the Eurodrone program, which is a 7.1 billion euro program that is producing a massive MALE UAS. It's 11 tons, that's almost twice, actually is twice the size of the [General Atomics] MQ 9 Reaper or the Heron-TP from Israel. So it's a very large program. It's got all the big names in Europe. It's got Airbus, it's got Dassault, it's got Liebherr, Safran, Leonardo. And so it's this very large program. And here at this show we've seen some surprise, a small French company named Turgis, I'm not pronouncing it correctly, Turgis et Gaillard, which is basically a company that launched 12 or 13 years ago to kind of be the European version of like DynCorp or Sierra Nevada, where they're operating infrastructure for the military and they're maintaining and modifying special mission type aircraft and that sort of thing, or COCO [contractor owned, contractor operated] type operations.

Well, they went out and on their own nickel, or Euro cent. developed the first prototype of a five ton, so MQ-9 size UAV called the Aarok, A-A-R-O-K, that's how you spell it. And it doesn't mean anything, it's just the name they liked. And it's here at the show and you ask based on the fact that Europe has been so unsuccessful despite so many attempts to develop and field a medium altitude long endurance UAV, not just the Hammerhead, but the Mantis, the Tyrannus, I mean, we just keep going on. But how do you think you can do it? And they said, "Well, that's the reason." They said, "Dassault is a great company and they can do big, very sophisticated aircraft very well. But this is not a big aircraft and it's not very sophisticated. It's a little sophisticated, but we think a small company has a better chance of doing it."

And I mean there's an interesting track record for that both in the US with Abe Karem actually inventing the Predator in his garage, or what became the Predator, in his garage in Southern California. And a company in Turkey that was an automotive components manufacturer, a pretty big one, deciding to get into the UAV business on the sideline. And Turkish Aerospace Industries didn't produce the Bayraktar, it was this company Baykar that did it. And so there is potentially a place for non-traditional suppliers, but again, it's a tough market here to pull off a MALE UAS. There's already plenty of them in the market, so they've got their work cut out for them. But that's here at the show for the first time and it'll fly later this year they say.

Tony Osborne:

It's probably just fair to point out that Baykar's success might also be partially because one of the primary founders and one of the key technology guys behind that is married to the president's daughter. So not saying that there's a connection there, but there might be a connection there.

I just wanted to just come back to another point, and President Macron here has been talking about defense sovereignty quite significantly here. And that's sort of come up in some of the discussions and some of the press conferences that have been at the show. So a few weeks ago, President Macron was in, it was Slovakia. He openly said that buying equipment from outside Europe, basically nations were creating potential problems for themselves. He was very open about this.

And this was another thing that came up in this air defense conference, that countries were rebuilding capability buying things like Patriot, buying and American equipment. These countries were creating a problem for themselves. And then here today at Boeing’s press conference, you had Heidi Grant saying, "We do represent sovereignty. We are relying on European suppliers. Our aircraft are also European sovereign capabilities," which I thought was a really interesting take on that European sovereignty argument that Macron has been going on about.

Steve Trimble:

And Heidi Grant being Boeing's VP for International Business Development and formerly head of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency in the United States.

Brian Everstine:

And it was interesting that even in the lead up to coming here, I'd walk the halls of the Pentagon and ask around like, “Who's going to Paris? Can I set up interviews?” And essentially nobody. There's very, very small US presence on the government side, I don't know, I've only been to one Paris Air Show before, but the military side, the displays seemed a lot smaller. I would expect that the US isn't going to be taking the lead on a lot of these major initiatives.

Joe Anselmo:

Along those lines, guys, we're having the Royal Air Tattoo, a major defense show in the UK in one month. Has that really sapped some of the military interest in Le Bourget?

Brian Everstine:

On the American side? Absolutely.

Tony Osborne:

That's hard to know at the moment. I'm going to get back to you on that one. When we actually have the show, there's going to be an awful lot of air chiefs in London. There's going to be significant military aircraft presence, and then those nations want those aircraft on display as a show of strength. I think the Air Chiefs want to be there as a show of strength, but certainly from what Brian is saying, there'll be a significant American presence there.

Steve Trimble:

Nobody knows the Royal International Air Tattoo as well as Tony. And so wait for next month. And our coverage of that is going to be a lot of fun.

Tony Osborne:

And I just want to have a final thing really. This week we saw Belgium become an observer state, get observer status to the European Future Combat Air System program. And that's really interesting because Belgium, remember, is a nation that is buying the F-35 and yet it's looking to the SCAF program to try and improve its defense industry, defense and technology industry. Is that because it doesn't feel like it's getting that from the F-35 program? Does that sort of prove Macron's point? I'm just putting that out there.

Steve Trimble:

Well, no, and that's interesting, it'll be interesting to see how that develops with obviously Germany being an F-35 customer now, also a founding number of SCAF, and Spain trying to figure out how they continue their maritime fighter presence on a carrier without the F-35B while also being a participant in SCAF. And this became an issue because even Eric Trappier at Dassault just a few months ago, basically called out Belgium for even wanting to be in SCAF because they bought F-35s. There seems to be some lingering animosity on the French side of that over that issue. But it's going to be something this whole continent has to deal with as they ramp up spending, where do they put the money? Where's the capacity right now to deliver the kinds of capabilities they need, or do they try to develop their own capacity? It's going to take a lot longer and you don't know what comes out at the end of it.

Joe Anselmo:

Okay. I suspect we'll be hearing from you guys very soon from the Royal Air Tattoo, but until then, that is a wrap for this Check 6 from Le Bourget. Thanks to our listeners. Special thanks to our podcast editor who's actually here with us in France, Guy Ferneyhough. To our listeners, if you want to read the coverage from Brian, from Steve, or Tony, please download our airshow app, aviationweek.com/app. That's aviationweek.com/app to see all of their stories from here in almost real time. Thanks for your time listeners, and have a wonderful week.

Sponsor Message:

GE Aerospace is helping move the world forward for today and generations to come. Follow GE Aerospace on LinkedIn and Instagram for highlights of their participation at the Paris Air Show. The future of flights starts now.