Antitrust regulators sue to block Lockheed's Aerojet acquisition

On the same subject

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  September 25, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  Spaceflight radiation exposure tested with onboard sensors and mannequins

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  March 5, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  DoD Stands Up New Biotech Manufacturing Center: Griffin

  WASHINGTON: DoD is opening a new manufacturing innovation center dedicated to biotechnology to figure out how to replicate “nature's manufacturing plant” on an industrial scale, Pentagon research and engineering head Mike Griffin says. This is “a key new initiative,” Griffin stressed. The idea, he said at the annual McAleese conference, is “to learn how to do in an industrial way what nature has done for us in so many areas of things that we harvest and mine and use ... now that we are beginning to learn how to manipulate genomes.” Such technology could lead to DoD creating its own fuel using synthetic biology methods, for example. This would be a leap beyond ongoing efforts by DARPA that Sydney has widely reported, designed to protect soldiers against an enemy's biotech weapons. “This is a nascent technical area in the world, and especially in the United States,” Griffin told the audience here. “We want the national security community to be out in front on this.” The new center will be the ninth so-called ManTech center, designed to help overcome the so-called ‘valley of death' between research and commercialization by reducing risks. It will be the second ManTech center with a biotech focus: The first, BioFabUSA in New Hampshire, opened in 2016 to develop next-generation manufacturing techniques for repairing and replacing cells and tissues, which for example could lead to the ability to make new skin for wounded soldiers. Griffin elaborated on several other key areas for his two-year old office. DARPA is investing $459 million in the 2021 budget for AI Next, a “campaign” aimed at automating critical DoD business processes; improving the reliability of Artificial Intelligence systems; and enhancing the security of AI and machine learning tech. Griffin said his office is also “working with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) under the CIO to bring about what we're calling AI Now: what can we do with AI that can get into the field and bring value to the national security community today, and the next day.” On 5G newtorks, he said that his deputy Lisa Porter is in charge of efforts to “figure out how we can use 5G to press our military advantage” and to protect US military networks. DoD launched that effort in 2019, with a $53 million reprogramming, he said. Congress added $200 million in the 2020 appropriations act, he added, and DoD is asking for $484 million in the 2021 budget. A key to future 5G networks and communications will be spectrum sharing, Griffin stressed. “There is no green field spectrum left,” he said, so DoD will have to figure out how to share spectrum to keep up with both its own demand and deal with pressure from commercial industry for it to give up spectrum. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/03/dod-stands-up-new-biotech-manufacturing-center-griffin

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  July 28, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  US Army begins experimenting with new network tools

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army's combat capabilities development team kicked off a monthslong experiment last week to test emerging technologies that could be added into the service's tactical network. The third annual Network Modernization Experiment at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey started July 20 and ends Oct. 2. NetModX provides an opportunity for the Combat Capabilities Development Command's C5ISR Center — or Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Center — to perform field tests with emerging capabilities that have largely been tested in the lab. Field tests with simulated threat environments, as opposed to lab tests, are important because technologies react in unexpected ways due to realities like different types of trees or terrain. This year's theme for NetModX is mission command and command-post survivability, which means participants will focus on technologies that could be fielded in the Army's Integrated Tactical Network Capability Set '23 and Capability Set '25 — future iterations of network tools that the Army plans to deliver to soldiers every two years. In this year's test, the C5ISR Center is testing communications capabilities that allow for distributed mission command systems across the battlefield “and wider area,” said Michael Brownfield, chief of the future capabilities office at the C5ISR Center. “We've learned by watching our enemies fight, and we know that to survive on the battlefield, No. 1, they can't be able to see us,” Brownfield told C4ISRNET in an interview. “And No. 2, we have to distribute our systems across the battlefield to give them multiple targets and multiple dilemmas in order to survive.” NetModX is also testing network resiliency capabilities that could be delivered as part of Capability Set '23. Preliminary design review for the capability set is scheduled for April next year. To test the effectiveness of the resiliency projects the center developed in the lab, the C5ISR Center created a “state-of-the-art red cell” that attacks the network using enemy's tactics, techniques and procedures, according to Brownfield. The goal is to make sure the technology can withstand electronic attacks and allow for continuous operations in contested environments when in the hands of deployed soldiers. “What resiliency means to us is the network bends, it doesn't break,” Brownfield said. “And the commanders have the information they need and the coordination that they need to fight the battle.” A modular radio frequency system of systems is undergoing tests, and Brownfield says it will “revolutionize” the fight on the battlefield. The system automatically switches between primary, alternate, contingency and emergency, or PACE, radios by sensing if radio frequencies are being jammed. The system then responds by automatically switching radio channels to allow for seamless communications in a contested environment. Currently, “it's kind of hard to switch to alternate comms when the person you're talking to is on their primary, not their alternative comms,” Brownfield said. “And the process is very slow. It's human-driven.” Now, the automatic PACE system senses the environment in milliseconds, he said. At last year's experiment, which focused on network transport capabilities to support precision fires for multidomain operations, the center experimented with radios that could flip to new channels on their own, while launching brute force and other more sophisticated attacks against the radios to see how much stress they could handle before passing data became impossible. This year will be a little different. “This year, we're pairing different radios together and see how they can work to actually change the type of modulation schemes that we use to maneuver in cyberspace around for continuous operations while under enemy attack and under contested electronic warfare conditions,” Brownfield said. One of the top priorities for this year's experiment is allowing for projects leaders to bring their technology into to the field, no matter what stage of development they are in, to be tested in an “operationally relevant environment,” Brownfield said. The team then collects data on how the technology performs and puts it into a database where it can be queried to answer specific performance questions. “So we can ... ask the database questions like, ‘What was my latency with these two radios at this point in time,' and start to understand the true metrics of how the systems performed in the field,” Joshua Fischer, acting chief of systems engineering, architecture, modeling and simulation at the C5ISR Center, told C4ISRNET. He added that those involved are also looking at network throughput. https://www.c4isrnet.com/yahoo-syndication/2020/07/24/us-army-begins-experimenting-with-new-network-tools/