Australia earmarks billions for naval infrastructure as BAE wins AUKUS submarine work

On the same subject

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  October 18, 2018 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  Air Force looks for help on new, hard-to-jam, satellite waveform

  By: Adam Stone In the face of a rising near-peer threat to electronic communications, the Air Force is pressing forward with efforts to develop a new, more resilient, harder-to-jam waveform that soldiers could use on the battlefield. The service expects to receive responses from industry soon on a recent request for information around protected satellite communications. The request sought industry guidance on how best to implement a new, more resilient protected tactical waveform (PTW), which enables anti-jamming capabilities within protected tactical SATCOM. “The Air Force is looking to protect our warfighter's satellite communications against adversarial electronic jamming,” the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) said in a written statement to C4ISRNet. The threat comes from “adversarial electronic jammers that are intended to disrupt and interfere with U.S. satellite communications,” leaders at SMC said. Protected tactical SATCOM is envisioned to provide worldwide, anti-jam communications to tactical warfighters in benign and contested environments. The quest to solidify satellite communication links has taken on increasing urgency in recent years. As satellite communications has emerged as an integral component in the military's command and control infrastructure, potential adversaries have stepped up their ability to disrupt such links. “Tactical satellite communications are vital to worldwide military operations,” the agency noted. “Our adversaries know this and desire to disrupt U.S. satellite communications. The Air Force is fielding Protected Tactical SATCOM capabilities to ... ensure warfighters around the globe have access to secure and reliable communications.” Industry is expected to play a key role in the development and deployment of any new waveform. Officials at SMC said that early prototyping efforts will be conducted through the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC), which is managed by Advanced Technology International. SpEC acts as a vehicle to facilitate federally-funded space-related prototype projects with an eye toward increasing flexibility, decreasing cost and shortening the development lifecycle. The organization claims 16 prototype awards to date, with some $26 million in funding awarded. Understanding the protected tactical waveform Government documents describe PTW as the centerpiece of the broader protected tactical SATCOM effort, noting that it provides “cost-effective, protected communications over both military and commercial satellites in multiple frequency bands as well as broader protection, more resiliency, more throughput and more efficient utilization of satellite bandwidth.” A flight test last year at Hansom Air Force Base suggested the emerging tool may soon be ready to deliver on such promises. While SMC leads the PTW effort, Hanscom is working in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MITRE Corp. to conduct ground and airborne terminal work. Researchers from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory flew a Boeing 707 test aircraft for two and a half hours in order to use the waveform in flight. With a commercial satellite, officials gathered data on the PTW's ability to operate under realistic flight conditions. “We know this capability is something that would help our warfighters tremendously, as it will not only provide anti-jam communications, but also a low probability of detection and intercept,” Bill Lyons, Advanced Development program manager and PTW lead at Hanscom, said in an Air Force news release. The test scenario called for the waveform to perform in an aircraft-mounted terminal. Evaluators were looking to see whether its systems and algorithms would function as expected in a highly mobile environment. “Everything worked and we got the objectives accomplished successfully,” Ken Hetling, Advanced Satcom Systems and Operations associate group leader at Lincoln Laboratory, said in an Air Force press release. “The waveform worked.” Asking for industry input should help the service to chart its next steps in the development of more protections. While the request does not specify when or how the Air Force intends to move forward, it is clearly a matter not of whetherthe military will go down this road, but rather when and how. https://www.c4isrnet.com/c2-comms/satellites/2018/10/05/air-force-looks-for-help-on-new-hard-to-jam-satellite-waveform/

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  December 17, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  Space Force must grow to counter China and Russia, lawmaker says

  House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said the service is not sized to meet increasing threats from China and Russia.

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  December 4, 2019 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  The US Air Force wants to network all its weapons together. Will simulators be included?

  By: Valerie Insinna ORLANDO, Fla. — As the U.S. military prepares for the release of its fiscal 2021 budget request, Air Force leaders have made clear that a massive financial hike is needed for multidomain command-and-control efforts to connect weapon systems across the joint force. As part of that initiative, it will also be critical for the military to link together simulators so service members can replicate combat on a massive scale, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Stephen Wilson said during a speech Tuesday at the Interservice/Industry, Training, Simulation and Education Conference. “I know you spent a lot of time yesterday about how to connect and integrate simulators from across our various weapons systems. I can't overstate how important that is,” he said. “Individual weapon system simulators can help our men and women become proficient tacticians, but it's their ability to integrate and connect that will differentiate us against a peer threat. And no one is going to win alone." Wilson said the Air Force plans to spend “a lot of money in this next five-year defense plan” on multidomain command and control, but he did not detail how much funding the service might ask for, or whether that sum will include investments in technology to network together simulators. The service is still in the earliest stages of identifying how to connect its aircraft and space assets with the joint force to fight advanced, near-peer threats like Russia and China. The same goes for its aircraft simulators, which are largely detached from each other. An Air Force program called Simulator Common Architecture Requirements and Standards, or SCARS, will start to transform the simulation enterprise and make it more interconnected, said Col. Phillip Carpenter, the Air Force's senior materiel leader for the simulators program office. “It's an effort to make the entire portfolio more modular, more open-system,” he told Defense News in an exclusive interview. “I'm not going to say [SCARS] is the solution to all of our problems,” but it will “help lay that groundwork so that we become much more interoperable across the board.” Under SCARS, the Air Force wants to create a common, open architecture for its simulators that will impose stricter cybersecurity standards and make it easier for the service to update simulators with new capabilities or threat information. The goal, Carpenter said, is to have a fleet of simulators that can remotely receive software updates, much like a smartphone. The Air Force released a SCARS request for proposals in December 2018 for a 10-year contract worth up to $900 million, according to Bloomberg. The service intends to award a contract for SCARS in 2020 and has received a lot of interest from industry, Carpenter said. Carpenter was clear that SCARS — at least how it is currently conceived — will not enable the Air Force to carry out the type of scenarios Wilson spoke about: large-scale, simulated air operations involving simulators of many different airframes. To achieve that, “we need to work on some of the security pieces so that we can allow multilevel security or some of these other aspects that would allow totality of these systems to participate and fight like they would actually fight in a real world,” Carpenter explained. But Carpenter believes there is potential for other parts of the Air Force — like its space, cyber and intelligence community — or even the other services to adopt SCARS or an architecture that is compatible with it. “I think there is great potential for SCARS to be more than something for just aircraft simulators,” he said. “If somebody is off building a system outside of our portfolio, if it's built to a common standard, I think that would effectively make all the systems, whether they're in our portfolio or not, more interoperable.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/itsec/2019/12/03/the-us-air-force-wants-to-network-all-its-weapons-together-will-simulators-be-included