Japan, the U.K. and Italy have taken a major step forward in the tr-nation Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with the inking of a collaboration agreement by the industry partners for the 6th gen fighter’s Integrated Sensing and Non Kinetic Effects & Integrated Communications Systems (ISANKE & ICS). The announcement was made on the opening day of the ongoing show.
Earlier in the day, during his speech at the event, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace spoke about the importance of long-term industry partnerships for the Global Combat Air Programme. “GCAP isn’t going to be a short love affair. It’s going to be a marriage. AUKUS is another project we announced this week – the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom – developing the next generation of nuclear attack submarines. That’s a 20, 30, 40-year programme. And GCAP will also be of a similar length,” Wallace said..
“GCAP – from the United Kingdom’s point of view, we will be investing £2 billion up to 2025 and £10 billion over the next 10 years,” said Wallace. “The overall development programme will be above £25 billion over the next 10 years and they’ll share designs and hopefully get towards development by 2025, and in service to Japan by 2035. It is a key milestone, a milestone that we must all meet and deliver for the Japanese. It’s incredibly important that we don’t let this slip.”
The next milestone this year is the agreement of the system’s requirements. The development phase of GCAP is slated to begin in 2025 with the flying phase to start towards the end of the decade or early 2030.
“The three partners have to keep each other going with forward momentum,” said Wallace. “There’s no changing our mind at the end of the decade or halfway through because to do so is to let each other down. People don’t like letting teams down and nor should they and the industry must also share that overall responsibility. Industry mustn’t look just to itself and its own shareholders. It’s got to look across because as ministers and Chief of Air Staff, our job is to deliver a requirement to defend our nations and that goes above all else. It goes above individual industry self-interest, it will go above shareholder interest and that has to be the overruling principle that must guide this,” Wallace stressed.
With the inking of the collaboration agreement at DSEI, work is accelerating on the development of the advanced avionics needed for GCAP. It will be developed together by Mitsubishi Electric representing Japan, Leonardo UK representing the UK and both Leonardo and Elettronica representing Italy. The three companies are working on a permanent industrial construct that will allow them to forge a closer business relationship and assess appropriate commercial and international operating models.
In Japan, Mitsubishi Electric has already been involved in development work for advanced electronics under the country’s next generation F-X programme. In Italy, Leonardo and Elettronica have been involved in maturing cutting-edge future combat multi-domain technologies including sensors, communications and data/information fusion as part of the Italian Defence Technology Initiative. Leonardo UK is a founding member of the UK’s Tempest project, formed in 2018 to develop 6th generation combat air technologies. Together, the three-nation team will collaborate to form the ISANKE & ICS domain, responsible for the advanced electronics on-board the GCAP platform. This will provide the aircrew with information advantage and advanced self-protection capabilities.
To deliver the capability, the ISANKE & ICS developmental partners recognise that legacy programme structures, infrastructure and performance metrics need to be revaluated in order to set the pace required to meet the transformative programme’s 2035 target. The new agreement includes joint recognition of fundamental principles of a working partnership which will accelerate developmental activities, while meeting customer requirements for equal partnership between the three nations. An important aspect of this is the strong expectation from customer nations, especially Japan, of access to integrated mission support, freedom of action and freedom of modification. This approach will be further actioned upon as the three companies work towards agreeing on a permanent commercial construct to deliver the domain, national requirements for industrial capabilities and principles of shared intellectual property.
The three partners for the defence electronics of GCAP already have extensive experience of working on complex defence programmes. Mitsubishi Electric played a key role in Japan’s F-2 fighter programme, while Leonardo is a partner in the Eurofighter Typhoon programme. The company’s UK and Italian teams worked on the E-scan radar for the aircraft as part of the EuroRADAR consortium, while Leonardo UK and Elettronica already collaborate to deliver the defensive aids sub system for the Typhoon as design authorities in the EuroDASS consortium. These collaborations have developed critical capabilities for the Eurofighter Typhoon throughout the life of the programme and will continue to do so in the years to come. Leonardo UK and Mitsubishi Electric have also been working since 2018 on the UK-Japan JAGUAR radar technology programme.
Speaking at the announcement of the collaboration agreement between the companies, officials from all three companies stated that ISANKE would unlock the potential of sixth generation tactical sensing, transitioning from the traditional combat air model of individual airborne sensors to instead providing a fully integrated sensing, fusion and self-protection capability, that draws on a spider’s web of sensing and effecting nodes across each platform. Importantly, ICS will allow ISANKE to operate as a network across formations of crewed and uncrewed aircraft, especially as part of each nations’ wider, multi-domain system-of-systems. This will ensure that the three GCAP nations can interoperate with allies in joint operations. Integrated across the five domains: air, land, sea, space and cyber, the GCAP core platform will rapidly manage a large amount of data, providing aircrew with the information superiority they will need to succeed in complex and contested battlespaces, as well as contributing valuable intelligence to other operators. When installed on an operational 6th gen fighter, the ISANKE & ICS will be substantially more capable as compared to previous generation operational capabilities.
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