Happy Birthday US Air Force
Robert McGrail
September 18, 2019
From all of us at Mercury Systems, happy 72nd birthday to the US Air Force. Originally established as the Signal Corps - the first aeronautical force in the US - during the Civil War, its missions focused on providing visional communications via flags and torchlight from aerial balloons. Since then, the military air service has gone through many names and commands including Air Service of the US Army, Air Corps, and Army Air Force. Finally, in 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act establishing the United States Air Force as a separate branch of the military.
It’s focus on pursuing advanced technology and superior airmen established the USAF as the swiftest tactical force ready to deploy anywhere at a moment’s notice. #AirForceBirthday
During his keynote address today, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said,
“Some of our long-held advantages have started to diminish. Great power competition has once again returned to the global stage. If we are to remain the world’s pre-eminent military power, then we must change course away from the past and face the challenges of the future head on.”
Esper said his priorities include giving warfighters more of what they need to deter adversaries, fight and win, including a review of how the US is positioned around the globe. He stressed that the USAF needs to organize, train, and equip airmen to be prepared for a “full spectrum” of threats, both kinetic and non-kinetic, and in realms such as space and cyber in order to “balance the needs of today with the requirements of tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, at Mercury’s booth, visitors had the opportunity to see firsthand how our solutions help solve the military’s toughest challenges including cyber, data security, secure processing, safety, testing, multi-domain, and SWaP.
Our mission computing presentation demonstrated how we support multiple military branches. These highly-secure solutions are built on open architectures and standards with a focus on minimizing SWaP. The ASURRE-Stor® solid state drive, NanoSwitch® network switch, military-grade DDR Memory, and RESmini rackmount server were well received by all visitors.
The avionics podium in our booth featured the ROCK II flight safety-certifiable modular system optimized for C4ISR applications along with a FACE-compliant Ethernet routing device that provides high-speed networking for Apache helicopters. These are great examples of high-TRL products that deliver advanced commercial technologies to the battlefield.
Our electronic warfare display was very popular, which is not surprising given all the interest in EW these days. We showcased the HD-Slim, a mobile high-density server that is used to protect against cyber threats and the RFM3101 digital transceiver that demonstrates how advanced microwave technology can be delivered in an open standard OpenVPX form factor, even for systems pushing the upper end of frequencies for EW applications.
Finally, we demonstrated our Radar solutions pedigree with a new Radar Environment Simulator, the mmW seeker transceiver and the HSD6605 OpenVPX Xeon® server blade which represents the highest-performance embedded compute solution we have ever developed. Mercury is a technology leader when it comes to embedded Radar solutions and we wanted to demonstrate how we can bring commercial innovation, advanced security and artificial intelligence to such a compute-intensive application such as radar.
It was a pleasure and honor to meet so many of our military personnel, to exchange information, and listen to their needs and ideas. We hope you enjoyed reading our reports from the AFA show floor, and we look forward to continuing to drive the competitive edge through innovation that matters.