I don’t know from submarines. The industry, technology, and people are all very interesting, but I only cover aero systems. Yet the AUKUS SSN announcement this month has implications and lessons for the aero world. Here are two commentaries, one advertisement, and one caveat.

Commentary: the bigger the weapons deal, the more you’re buying a strategic relationship, and there are big implications for other sales to the region. Deal size isn’t always correlated with politics; Denmark, with its small 28 F-35 buy, also expects that deal to help preserve its standing in NATO, and the US’s commitment to NATO.

Teal Group’s forecasts for Present & Future Soldier Sensor Fusion Programs would make these soldier vision/C4I systems one of the world’s biggest electronics markets – of any kind – over the next decade, worth more than $11.6 billion, with continually increasing capabilities and – likely – funding. Our multiple forecast lines (see Teal Group’s Military Electronics Briefing for full forecasts) are essentially our all-inclusive future soldier vision forecasts. 

NOTE: On 12 October 2021, US Army officials confirmed at the AUSA 2021 Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, DC that the Army has “paused” fielding of Microsoft’s new Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Heads Up Display (HUD) system. Teal Group’s discussion and forecasts below were largely written before the Army’s “pause” – which has not yet been presented in detail – but our forecasts already included delays in testing and fielding, and considerably less funding over the next decade than Microsoft has claimed ($22 billion). Our background and discussion below (especially for the ENVG) explain why Teal Group’s forecasts still stand – and what will likely happen over the next decade. 

During the past few years, there has been a lot of publicity given to SpaceX’s plans to send humans to Mars—sooner rather than later. The idea of eventually colonizing the Red Planet has begun to take hold of the public’s imagination. I think we’re getting used to this previously outlandish notion.

The same can be said of the nascent space tourism industry, especially now after the successful exploits of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin in sending tourists for a bit of weightless microgravity time in sub-orbit this past summer, as well as SpaceX’s three-day Inspiration4 space tourism mission to low Earth orbit.

JSTARS (Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System) is a US Air Force/US Army effort to mount the large Northrop Grumman AN/APY-3 multimode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with ground moving target indication (GMTI) on a Boeing 707, for battlefield surveillance purposes. Development aircraft flew in the first Gulf War, and JSTARS has been extensively used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.